Atlanta might be my only public talk this year (IRL). But I will also be attending and tabling (not presenting) at the Rocket City Reason Con this October in Huntsville, Alabama (so if you want to meet there and get a book signed, check that out; it’s going to a groovy conference, with great presenters and events).
In Atlanta, Georgia, I will be at Freethought House on September 13 for both the potluck starting at noon and the talk at one. I will be discussing why I think the field of Jesus studies needs a paradigm shift, and how certain trends are effectively already heading in that direction without admitting it. Which will touch on the contents of my new book The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus.
My Atlanta talk will be livestreamed on Zoom. So anyone in the world can virtually attend. Use this link on the day.
For more on that event see the Meetup page or the AFS page of the Atlanta Freethought Society.
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I would love to meet a researcher who shares a similar point of view to mine.
What time will the talk / livestream be? Please try to make a video available after the fact, in case I (and others) can’t make it in real time. Thanks.
Good idea!
Would you say that a disproportionate amount of the people who take mythicism seriously are from outside the US?
I have wondered if the hysteria about mythicism is related to the fact that Christians still have a lot of influence in US academia (and in turn on the ways of thinking of academics trained by Christian) and society generally, whereas in Europe, it’s much less common, most European countries, apart from maybe Poland and Hungary, haven’t been majority Christian for decades.
To me, the biggest pieces of evidence that there needs to be a paradigm shift, is the way Dennis Macdonald’s work has been treated, the way your and Lataster’s work has been treated and the way Brodie was treated. It’s the same kind of dismissiveness and vindictiveness over the idea that the “guild” could actually be wrong.
I think a good illustration is this debate between Goodacre and Ehrman on whether the Gospel of John used the Synoptics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REXnpEy8T_I). Ehrman does a lot of rhetorical tricks, i.e he tries to minimise the evidence from agreement between Mark and the Gospels (he knows perfectly well Goodacre´s case is way stronger than a couple of words here or there).
It also shows very well the dreaded “appeal to oral lore”, Ehrman makes a big fallacy at the start by saying “well, if you have two students that have similar texts in structure, argument and word choice, then it’s clearly a case of copying, but if you have the odd sentence structure here or there but they are substantially different, you wouldn´t conclude there was copying”. It’s not an apt comparison for a few reasons, for starters there are significant similarities, i.e the passion narrative and the other gospels all have it, the fact that there are differences doesn’t rule out influence at all. Secondly, we don’t know that much about the oral lore that may or may not have existed about Jesus, but we certainly do know the Gospels existed and have elements in common, so it’s more probable that John is getting any similarities from the Gospels themselves.
I think academic fields go wrong when they care more about defending assumptions and people’s reputations (wrongly imo, someone like Ehrman would still be considered an important scholar even if mythicism was discovered to be true) above anything else.
Yes, I do concur with all your points here.