the Logs in both Carrier's and Hurtado's eyes

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MrMacSon
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the Logs in both Carrier's and Hurtado's eyes

Post by MrMacSon »

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Larry 'butt-Hurt-ado' has, as many of us are now aware, been embroiled in a flame-war with Neil 'God-free' and now Richard 'the Carrier of barbed and taloned pigeons' since butt-Hurt-ado published a blog-post on Dec 2 titled "Why the “Mythical Jesus” Claim Has No Traction with Scholars".

tl;dr Fallacies of appeal to authority; appeal to tradition; poisoning the well; and strawman (misrepresent & attack the misrepresentation).

Go to the white box for my point about a Carrier weakness...



Hurtado appealed to authority and numbers
"The overwhelming body of scholars, in New Testament, Christian Origins, Ancient History, Ancient Judaism, Roman-era Religion, Archaeology/History of Roman Judea, and a good many related fields as well ...
and says std doctrine in his second paragraph -
...that very quickly after Jesus’ execution there arose among Jesus’ followers the strong conviction that God (the Jewish deity) had raised Jesus from death (based on claims that some of them had seen the risen Jesus). These followers also claimed that God had exalted Jesus to heavenly glory as the validated Messiah ...
then, at the very start of his 3rd paragraph, launched into
The “mythical Jesus” view doesn’t have any traction among 'the overwhelming number of scholars working in these fields', whether they be declared Christians, Jewish, atheists, or undeclared as to their personal stance ...

The reasons are that advocates of the “mythical Jesus” have failed to demonstrate expertise in the relevant data, and sufficient acquaintance with the methods ... have failed to show that the dominant scholarly view (that Jesus of Nazareth was a real first-century figure) is incompatible with 'the data' or less secure than the “mythical Jesus” claim [ <- that seems confused] ...

You don’t have to read the 700+ pages of Carrier’s book, however, to see if it’s persuasive. To cite an ancient saying, you don’t have to drink the whole of the ocean to judge that it’s salty. Let’s take Carrier’s own summary of his key claims as illustrative of the recent “mythical Jesus” view. I cite from one of his blog-postings in which he states concisely his claims:
  • “that Christianity may have been started by a revealed [i.e., “mythical”] Jesus rather than a historical Jesus is corroborated by at least three things: the sequence of evidence shows precisely that development (from celestial, revealed Jesus in the Epistles, to a historical ministry in the Gospels decades later); all similar savior cults from the period have the same backstory (a cosmic savior, later historicized); and the original Christian Jesus (in the Epistles of Paul) sounds exactly like the Jewish archangel Jesus, who certainly did not exist. So when it comes to a historical Jesus, maybe we no longer need that hypothesis.”
Carrier’s three claims actually illustrate his lack of expertise in the relevant field, and show why his “mythical Jesus” doesn’t get much traction among scholars ...
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Hurtado didn't cite or outline Carrier's arguments properly: - ie. he misrepresented them, so didn't address them properly.

He did a strawman-fallacy
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perseusomega9 wrote: Fri Dec 08, 2017 4:29 am
... Hurtado makes the mistake of projecting later, developed Christianity backwards in a vain attempt to show no connection to Philo here, so as not to have to admit to a fairly straight forward path of Philonic concepts informing Christianity.
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Yep.

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I'm not sure Carrier makes the point of Philonic concepts informing Christianity that well, either. I think Carrier is fixed on Philo being a contemporary of Paul (and vice versa, of course), so Carrier is trying to (or seeming to) assert a simple, or straight-forward, or direct, relationship of Philo to or with 'developed Christianity'.

Carrier has developed and published 'fixed-time' arguments (similar to conventional, traditional arguments) at the same time arguments have been published that open up the possibility that the time or range of possible dates of the development of theologies and their texts are more fluid than we have been led to believe; or that relationships between texts or theologies were more fluid. Such 'more fluid' arguments include the BeDuhn, Vinzent, Klinghardt (2013-15) trilogy of books that have posited that Luke and/or the other two synoptic gospels were written around or after a key Marcion text (I'm not sure if Carrier has ever engaged Joseph B Tyson's 2006 Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle, either); and Lena Einhorn's 2016 A Shift in Time book. Carrier has commented on Einhorn's book and theories but typically in a 'but-I'm-still-the-legend-in-my-own-lunchbox' kind of way. As he is want to do.
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Jason D. BeDuhn (2013) 'The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon' Polebridge Press; Paperback

Vincent M (2014) 'Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels' (Studia patristica supplement 2) Leuven: Peeters

Matthias Klinghardt (2015) 'Das älteste Evangelium und die Entstehung der kanonischen Evangelien' (in German)
  • ["The oldest gospel, & the emergence of the canonical Gospels"] Perfect Paperback. Francke a Verlag, publisher

Several other Marcion book have also been published in recent years -
  • Eric W. Scherbenske (2013) 'Marcionite Paratexts, Pretexts, and Edition of the Corpus Paulinum'
    • in Canonising Paul: Ancient Editorial Practice and the Corpus Paulinum, Oxford University Press
  • Dieter Roth (2015) The Text of Marcion’s Gospel. Leiden: Brill.
  • Judith M. Lieu (2015) Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second CenturyCambridge University Press.
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