What on earth is that? It’s a cool event I’m going to be speaking at (along with Chris Johnson of The Atheist Book fame), near the end of September in Austin, Texas. Summary of links here.
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Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.
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Just got your book. I noticed the Shepherd of Hermas seems unmentioned in the contents or index. Do you date it late? Or otherwise irrelevant? Do you think it’s idea of the Son more likely under mythicism or historicism? Or neither?
Too late to be of any use (and far too obviously fictional as well). I do not consider anything after 125 AD to be relevant (as I explain in ch. 7). (I would, though, if any such thing could be shown to be independent of the Gospels and have relevant pre-125 sources, but nothing does, as I show in Chapter 8 for Papias and Hegesippus, and the Talmud, the only late works I consider. Those late sources can have other significances, as I explain in chs. 7 and 8. But Hermas has none such.)
Well, for what it’s worth, Geoffrey Mark Hahneman makes an interesting case for an earlier than 125 AD dating of Hermas in The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon.
What is his argument, though? The same fundamentalist axiomatics as Robinson?