Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist"

[jpholding]

Carrier strikes back - http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/667/

Uhhh...

Mistake #1: Ehrman says “not even … the most powerful and important figure of his day, Pontius Pilate” is “mentioned in any Roman sources of his day.” False. Philo of Alexandria was a living contemporary of Pilate, and wrote a whole book about him (or rather, against both Sejanus and Pilate, documenting the ways they had persecuted Jews contrary to prior imperial edicts, cf. Schürer and Eusebius, History of the Church 2.5, who had read this book), which we don’t have (it is one of the missing volumes of the Embassy to Gaius), but we do have Philo discussing one event involving Pilate in another book we do have, written in the 40s A.D., probably while Pilate was still alive, in his retirement (Philo, Embassy to Gaius 299-305).

We also have discussions of Pilate in Josephus’ Jewish War, written in 78 A.D., the same distance from Pilate’s life as the earliest Gospels are assumed to be from Jesus. But perhaps Ehrman is being hyper-specific again and only talking about contemporary attestation, although that would be disingenuous, since it is precisely this kind of early secular reference to Pilate that we don’t have for Jesus, and Ehrman is trying to say Pilate is an example of a famous person for whom we don’t have this–but, alas, we do. But even if we assume the disingenuous limiting of relevance to texts composed in “his day” we have Philo. If Ehrman is being hyper-specific as to his use of the word “Roman,” that would be even more disingenuous (as Philo’s cititizenship would hardly matter for this purpose; and at any rate, as a leading scholar and politician in Alexandria and chief embassador to the emperor, Philo was almost certainly a Roman citizen).

When did Philo and Josephus become ROMAN sources? That's not disingenuous at all -- they're widely regarded as Jewish sources.

[Benson Shays]

James McGrath takes down Richard Carrier:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/explori....html#comments

[jpholding]

I got my copy last night and am already 2/3 through...I can see where the mythicist crowd will be taking it to task for not taking them as seriously as they'd want, even though Ehrman's final conclusion is if course correct.

So far Ehrman strikes me as someone so appalled by what he sees that there are times when he's not sure what to say.

[Benson Shays]

I got my copy last night and am already 2/3 through...I can see where the mythicist crowd will be taking it to task for not taking them as seriously as they'd want, even though Ehrman's final conclusion is if course correct.

So far Ehrman strikes me as someone so appalled by what he sees that there are times when he's not sure what to say.

I had a similar thought while reading it. Still, I don't think he wrote the book for them. But his section on the pagan parallels was pretty good, I thought.

[jpholding]

I had a similar thought while reading it. Still, I don't think he wrote the book for them. But his section on the pagan parallels was pretty good, I thought.

The Mithra part wasn't bad. I'll be comparing it to my own treatment, natch.

[Indy]

I'm the author of the "Indy609" comment above; was googling about and happened to spot my likeness. Nice site and discussion.

Just wanted to clear up: a) I'm not claiming in that quote that Doherty is a historian, just that his book is what even made me question the assumptions with which I grew up.

As for the pot shot at Ehrman, whatever his credentials, I have a hard time as a reasonably educated layperson taking an academic who introduces his position with an ad hominem, followed by appeals to popularity and authority, as a serious historian. The blog post, by itself, does not appear up the caliber of his pedigree. He won't win a logical war of ideas by employing fallacies.

That's all; glad I stumbled onto the site and look forward to following other debates.

[Benson Shays]

I'm the author of the "Indy609" comment above; was googling about and happened to spot my likeness. Nice site and discussion.

Just wanted to clear up: a) I'm not claiming in that quote that Doherty is a historian, just that his book is what even made me question the assumptions with which I grew up.

As for the pot shot at Ehrman, whatever his credentials, I have a hard time as a reasonably educated layperson taking an academic who introduces his position with an ad hominem, followed by appeals to popularity and authority, as a serious historian. The blog post, by itself, does not appear up the caliber of his pedigree. He won't win a logical war of ideas by employing fallacies.

That's all; glad I stumbled onto the site and look forward to following other debates.

You would have a case if Ehrman's "ad hominem" wasn't attached to a 350-page book.

[Indy]

That's odd, the way I learned things, an ad hominem is an ad hominem, no matter how many pages of book to which it I attached. The same for appeals to popularity and authority.

I stated my comments in response to his blog post only, and states as much. But the quality of the summary does not inspire me to go and buy the book... Poor logic in one does not lead me to expect sound arguments in the other. Nor do terrible additional arguments such as the Limbaugh/Fluke analogy. (Sure, if Limbaugh speaks of Sandra Fluke, that is evidence for her existence. However, if he is the founder of a Flukology religion, and he claims she performed miraculous feats, we would by all means demand to know more about her from other sources; and if the other sources came up lacking or questionable, we would rightly wonder if she were nothing more than a figment of his imagination.)

Enjoyed your critique.

[jpholding]

Just wanted to clear up: a) I'm not claiming in that quote that Doherty is a historian, just that his book is what even made me question the assumptions with which I grew up.

Any chance you'll question Doherty's assumptions any time soon? Or do you plan to stop for a while the same way you did with your earlier fundamentalism?

The blog post, by itself, does not appear up the caliber of his pedigree

I just finished it and will be posting my review tomorrow. It's definitely subpar, that much is true. But anyway, if you don't want to buy it, I'll let you have my copy for just the price of postage.

[Indy]

Greetings, JP.

Why would you assume that I questioned none of Earl Doherty's assumptions?

Seems to me the topic of his thread is Ehrman's work, not Doherty's. Even if we were to point out tons of flaws in Doherty's proposition, that doesn't make Ehrman's arguments any stronger. Correct?

[jpholding]

Why would you assume that I questioned none of Earl Doherty's assumptions?

I didn't say you questioned "none". However it is clear you do accept some.

Seems to me the topic of his thread is Ehrman's work, not Doherty's.

No, the title of this thread includes Ehrman's work. The topic is free to range about as it will within what is discussed in that work, including those whom Ehrman criticizes; and as starter of the thread, I have the discretion to direct the thread as well. TWeb is like that.

Even if we were to point out tons of flaws in Doherty's proposition, that doesn't make Ehrman's arguments any stronger. Correct?

I'm not sure why there's any connection between the two. But I do have tons of flaws in Doherty's proposition, and don't think all of Ehrman's arguments are particularly strong, and do think none is particularly thorough compared to my own treatment of the same subjects.

[Indy]

All fair and reasonable, JP. In the wake of all this banter I most likely will order Ehrman's book and try to give it a fair shot.

Where Doherty is concerned, I don't want to go critiquing something I read six years ago, I'll just say I wasnt sold on his unjustifiably firm conclusion, either. Perhaps if he'd introduced his book on a non-scholarly blog, with a similar absolutism and a portrayal of peers who disagree as a gang of fruitcakes, I'd have posted similar comments. Doherty at least got me interested in learning more about the topic, as an average non-theologian.

Thanks for indulging the conversation.

[jpholding]

http://tektonticker.blogspot.com/201...sus-exist.html

Here's my review...

I'll start with what would be the most obvious point from me: No, Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? (DJE) has no prospect of displacing my own edited volume, Shattering the Christ Myth (STCM), as the most thorough volume on the subject of the existence of Jesus. Far from it. Though Ehrman does cover exactly the same range of subject matter within that question -- everything from "pagan copycat" charges to the "silence of the epistles" canard to the existence of Nazareth -- he does so overall with such breezy incompleteness that we may easily predict that the mythicist crowd will immediately claim he didn't come anywhere close to doing the job.

Which of course, he did not, and yet for good reason. In DJE I detected something in Ehrman's tone that I didn't find in his other books: A sort of hapless, "why me," "what the %&$#@ am I doing this for" exasperation which, if I drew Ehrman as a cartoon to represent it, would have him lying on the floor with his tongue hanging out. Not that he wasn't right to be this way, which represents the paradox of dealing with the mythicists. Their clear objective is to confuse and overwhelm readers with so much information -- so much of it bad information -- that it would take, as Ehrman rightly says, three times as much effort to refute them point by point.

Years ago, when G. A. Wells made the mistake of writing a response to my evaluation of him, I noted that Wells was rather typical of those whose chief tactic is to "hurl the elephant" -- throw out a huge complex of ideas and arguments all at once in order to make their ideas seem more formidable. It was for this reason that I determined that STCM would be as comprehensive as it was -- the way to reply to a hurled elephant is to have a blue whale at your disposal to hurl back. Under such pressure, Wells and other mythcisists like Doherty, Price, Humphreys, and even Murdock collapse like a house of cards.

DJE, as noted, doesn't succeed in this respect; it serves as warthog rather than elephant. Even then much of it seems to be padding, especially the last chapters where Ehrman goes on about Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. And yet Ehrman can hardly be blamed for this. Even as lacking in honesty as I consider him to be, I believe he doesn't deserve to waste time on issues like this one. It takes a lot of time, patience, and fortitude -- and a good deal of personal masochism -- to deal in detail with such inanity as the Christ myth theory.

As expected, and even as Ehrman predicted, the process of fundy atheists throwing him under the bus has already begun. It's sort of fascinating and amusing to watch, and we might comment on it here again in the future. For now, I'd like to spend this Ticker entry discussing the contents of DJE which struck me.

18 -- One new bit of information DJE offered to me: Robert Price has released a new book titled The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems. Naturally, it's not with a credible academic publisher; American Atheist Press is doing the job. It's available by Kindle and I've already picked it up. (A word search shows that neither I nor STCM are mentioned – and that Tacitus is dismissed as merely repeating hearsay. Nice of know Price is continuing his personal tradition of violently ignoring or dismissing anything that would cause his insane theories any difficulties.)

49 -- One of Ehrman's more frequent themes has to do with the paucity of information about ancient persons as a whole as a retort to the alleged problem of lack of information about Jesus. On this page, for example, he notes that although there are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus (he of course dispenses, we think wrongly, with the relevant Gospels), there are also none of Pontius Pilate. He rightly notes that low literacy is part of the reason for this, as well as the simple lack of survival of source material.

54 -- Naturally, I was interested in comparing Ehrman's treatments of certain subjects in DJE with my own in STCM. One I'll compare with is Tacitus. Ehrman spends barely three pages on Tacitus, half of which is descriptive. Then he spends a paragraph on the notion that Annals 15.44 is an interpolation, rightly noting that this is not believed by any classicist or historian, and suggesting that mythicists just don't want the passage to be there. That's likely true, but it doesn't do much for an argument.

From there, Ehrman goes off the deep end: Whereas STCM spends pages establishing Tacitus' reliability and professionalism as a historian, Ehrman simply decides that Tacitus based his information on hearsay, and even -- incredibly -- accepts as valid the argument that Tacitus wrongly identifies Pilate as a procurator (the alleged significance of this as assigned by mythicists is debunked in detail in STCM). In this at least Ehrman plays himself right into the mythicists' hands.

66 -- Ehrman also notes that the argument that Jesus' miraculous powers ought to have drawn the attention of historians, and he answers with the expected response from him that the historical Jesus actually had none. Our own answer is quite different, which is that a snob like Tacitus would immediately discount such notions as false and not dignify them with a report, even if they were true. Even so, since mythicists share Ehrman's disbelief in the miraculous, this is an argument they are compelled to modify or reckon with. Indeed it reflects a hidden inconsistency in their own epistemology!

134 -- A critical argument of many mythicists -- particularly Wells and Doherty -- relates to epistalory silence about life details and other aspects of Jesus. Ehrman rightly notes that such things mean little even on the surface: There is no reason for Paul to mention certain sayings; the epistles were written to people who had long been Christians and knew about these things; and Paul is also silent about a lot of his own personal information. Here Ehrman did a fairly good job, even if a summary one, but there is no mention of the NT world as a high context society -- a coup de grace to mythicist arguments in this regard.

167 -- Interestingly, Ehrman takes on some of Richard Carrier's claims in his Not the Impossible Faith (NIF) concerning the idea of a humiliated messiah. In this Ehrman is on the same side as I am where I responded to NIF in its online version. What makes it interesting moreso if that if he is aware of NIF, he must also be substantially aware of what and who Carrier was responding to -- yet there's no hint or explanation of it whatsoever. Hmmm...

193 -- Rene Salm's Nazareth-myth is also briefly treated but here as well Ehrman does a fairly good, even if summary, job of it.

199 -- Ehrman also makes much the same response I do (borrowed from Albert Lord originally) to those who claim the story of Jesus was ripped off from the OT: It would be easy, he says, to tell the story of Richard Nixon using the template of a Shakespearian tragedy -- especially of one is allowed to select freely from the bard's vast works.

212 -- Alleged correspondences between Jesus and Mithra are another of my fave projects. Ehrman spends only 2 1/2 pages on this, much of it descriptive, but he does well to make the point succinctly that there are no Mithraic texts that show Mithras was born of a virgin on 12/25, died to atone for sin, and was raised. I'd have liked to have seen more detail, but at least the footnote refers readers to the works of Mithraic scholars (Beck and Ulansey).

244 -- On the downside, Ehrman responds to one of Wells' theories that Jesus was based on the figure of Wisdom in Jewish literature, and this section offers some amazing howlers, and also resorts to dodgy answers such as Col. 1:15-20 not being applicable because Paul didn't write Colossians, and dismisses the direct designation of Jesus as Wisdom in 1 Cor. 2:6-8 as meaning only that Jesus' acts embodied God's wisdom -- the same excuse made by some Unitarians, which fails to respect Paul's direct language of equivalence. Ehrman also does not grasp that meaning of Paul designating Jesus as God's "power" in context (it's also an indication of hypostatic identity), and doesn't even touch the consistent equivalence of Jesus with the Proverbs 8 figure (and that of intertestamental Jewish works) throughout the NT.

252 -- Some detailed attention is offered to Doherty's thesis of a "spiritual realm" in which Jesus was thought to be crucified. My own treatment of Doherty's other arguments made it unnecessary for me to discuss it in STCM (some of my guest writers do), but Ehrman does well to point out that Doherty's thesis in this regard is simply created out of whole cloth. Unfortunately it's not all complete: He dismisses Doherty's suggestion of 1 Thess. 2:14-16 as an interpolation by merely saying it is a explanation of convenience for Doherty.

332 -- Ehrman recounts a personal story in which he received an award from the American Humanist Association and was surprised by two things. The first was how "religious" many of the atheists and agnostics there were -- and I find it significant that Ehrman fails to recognize the same symptoms in himself, even as mild as his "fundy atheism" is. The second surprise he has was how many of them were mythicists -- and how many of them were surprised that he wasn't one.

That's what struck me most from DJE; I'd say that most readers won't want to order it, but it might be worth a look in your local library, which is sure to carry it. I'll be keeping an eye on it and what the atheists out there say about it -- it's sure to make for an interesting time.

[Benson Shays]

In DJE I detected something in Ehrman's tone that I didn't find in his other books: A sort of hapless, "why me," "what the %&$#@ am I doing this for" exasperation which, if I drew Ehrman as a cartoon to represent it, would have him lying on the floor with his tongue hanging out.

What do you think happened? He thought it'd be a good idea to write the book and then started writing, only to realize he'd made a mistake. I could see that as a tekton vid, actually.

[Hamster]

Got some footage from the Reason Rally here. Its some mythers confronting a real historian and his girlfriend who wandered into the rally