evilsorcerer1
Member
All religions are lies. Everyone was damned to hell before they were even born. There is no heaven. The bible as all religious books is packed full of lies.
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Christians can you be certain your bible is trust worthy?
- Thread starter juiwei2000
- Start date
joelr
Well-Known Member
There is nothing about the gospels that can be confirmed that is of any consequence.
joelr
Well-Known Member
Not true. The "nauseates" thing is speculative and I've read his work and he doesn't hate Christianity at all. He looks at it the same as Thor or Jupiter.
I think Carrier has made his argument and proven Ehrman a liar.
Ehrman on Historicity Recap • Richard Carrier
Judge for yourself.
joelr
Well-Known Member
That's really inaccurate. "Not one reason" ?? Really. Please read the entire Wiki page:
Abiogenesis - Wikipedia
And no scientist believes in it with fervor, it's considered a theory that has many holes that need to be filled with knowledge.
It's an area scientists are working on and we are simply at a certain stage. It obviously needs more study.
It's like your mad at science for trying to piece things together?
What do you want them to do, drop the whole thing and say "oh forget it, it must have been a personal deity god who started life."?
The original point is that science does change and continue to gather information.
If they discovered a personal deity started life then they would begin investigating more about this deity and so forth.
Religion cannot change.
joelr
Well-Known Member
Gnosticism was as high as 50% of Christianity at it's peak. Many Gnostic sects considered the church and it's power hungry bishops heretical.
we know this from the lost gospels.
The Thomas gospel is from 130-250AD.
nPeace
Veteran Member
When you say "that is of any consequence", I don't want to guess, so could you please explain what you mean.
Dell
Asteroid insurance?
Your link doesn't work. I've watched Erhmans lectures and debates for sometime and haven't seen him blatantly lie about anything. If he doesn't know he states it on most occasions. What was he supposed to be lying about?
joelr
Well-Known Member
joelr
Well-Known Member
It works fine?
Here are 3 of 31 points:
try to copy and paste the link
Ehrman on Historicity Recap • Richard Carrier
This is a summary of the current state of the debate after the mini blog war between myself and Bart Ehrman over his latest book, Did Jesus Exist?, which attempted to argue against various scholars (both legitimate and crank) who have concluded, or at least suspect, that Jesus never really existed, but was an invention in myth, like Moses or King Arthur or Ned Ludd. Some of this exchange involved other people, or were tangential to Ehrman’s book. But I will give a state-of-play for everything.
In one case I have concluded I was too harsh. But in every other case my criticisms have stood without valid rebuttal. Most were simply ignored (and thus no rebuttal was even attempted). For others, attempts to rebut them have only generated increasingly ridiculous errors of facts and logic to waggle our head at. Which in the end has only made historicists look just like the hack mythicists they rightly critique. This is not the way to argue for the historicity of Jesus. And as if to confirm this unreasonable bias, Ehrman has refused to even address my peer reviewed, academic press book On the Historicity of Jesus (published at the University of Sheffield)..
This debate began when Ehrman published an article for the Huffington Post that was a travesty of errors and inaccuracies, in an attempt to promote his book. I criticized that article in my first critique. Ehrman attempted a weak response to that, which I then addressed in Round One, but the only substantive response attempted was by James McGrath, which I addressed separately. These rebuttals met with no substantive reply from either of them.
Here is the breakdown of the points I made and their attempt to deal with them:
—
1.
• CARRIER: Ehrman commits the genetic fallacy (mythicists are critics of religion, therefore their conclusions about religion are false).
• EHRMAN: No reply.
• MCGRATH: Repeats the fallacy.
—
2.
• CARRIER: Ehrman commits the no-true-Scotsman fallacy (no one is qualified to talk about this unless they have an extremely hyper-specific degree major and a specific kind of appointment at a university). In fact, myself, Robert Price, and Thomas Thompson are all more than adequately qualified to evaluate the evidence for and against the historicity of Jesus.
• EHRMAN: Ehrman doubles down and not only doesn’t concede the point but falsely impugns my credentials and makes absurd claims about how professional historians operate. As I observed of his response:
[He then] repeats his misrepresentation of my credentials, suggesting I don’t know the period in question, or the languages, or the documents or the literature on early Christianity. Which is all false. I am adequately trained in all of these. And it is disingenuous of Ehrman to assume Thompson is not, simply because he has a different specialty than Ehrman.
Ehrman then quote mines my review to argue I said something I didn’t (about Thomas Thompson’s credentials), and then attacks the thing I didn’t say, and ignores entirely the point I actually made. And then he makes completely ridiculous (and easily-refuted) claims about the publishing practices of modern historians in general.
• CARRIER: I then demonstrate he did all this.
• EHRMAN: No reply.
• CARRIER: This should never have been an issue. It’s just a fallacious attempt to dismiss arguments and evidence with a lame deflection tactic. He just assumes expert historians and biblical scholars can’t have familiarized themselves with the ancient languages and documents pertaining to Christianity, and that scholars who lack university appointments can’t be experts. Neither is true, and it is shameful that he keeps using those arguments.
And yet…
• EHRMAN: Complains that I (yes, I) am making this into a debate about professional competence.
• CARRIER: To which I wrote:
He also…alleg[es] I am making this into a pointless contest over who is the better scholar. Yet he is the one who made it about that. As we saw in his article about the Thompson affair (and as I showed regarding his HuffPo piece), he attacked my credentials and argued that he is qualified to discuss this issue and I am not (likewise Thompson and others). For him to now say he is not interested in this comparison is massively disingenuous. It’s his comparison, which he has pressed several times, and it was that that forced me to respond by pointing out that the facts seem to point to the reverse. For him to claim I am the one who brought this comparison up is simply absurd. All I did was take his own argument and defend it properly: instead of making fallacious and irrelevant points about the hyper-specifics of what degrees we have (as he did), I tested the comparison he himself started by actually looking at the quality of our work on this subject. A comparison in which he came out very badly.
I do not see this as a competition between us as to who is the better scholar, but as simply a matter of who to trust: someone who presents carefully researched, carefully worded, carefully reasoned work on this subject, with a minimum of mistakes (because as I’ve said, I make them, too), or someone who doesn’t.
And Ehrman simply doesn’t. Not in his article. Not in his book. Not in any of his replies.
• EHRMAN: No reply. Instead, he keeps repeating this false claim (again and again). And that is starting to look like lying.
—
3.
• CARRIER: Ehrman commits a veiled ad baculum fallacy (his fellow colleagues had better not entertain the same ideas or people like him will make sure they will never be employed or taken seriously again).
• EHRMAN: No reply.
• MCGRATH: Repeats the fallacy.[1][2]
—
joelr
Well-Known Member
4-6 of 31
4.
• CARRIER: Ehrman commits a fallacy of false analogy. Whether by bad wording or bad memory (it doesn’t matter, since the misinforming effect on readers is the same), Ehrman makes the factually false claim that Pontius Pilate is like Jesus in being a famous person having no contemporary references to him, yet we believe he exists.
Ehrman does not rest on this argument (that would be another fallacy), he merely uses it to deflect one weak argument for mythicism (the argument from silence), and he is correct in his conclusion (absence of evidence does not entail evidence of absence; and whether a valid argument from silence can be made against a mundanely historical Jesus is indeed debatable), but not his premise, which is factually false: we do have contemporary references to Pilate. In fact, very good ones: an inscription commissioned by Pilate himself, and a discussion of him by a living contemporary, Philo of Alexandria. Would that we had such things for Jesus. The debate would be over!
We also have secure, detailed references to Pilate within forty years of his life in a secular historian (Josephus), something we also do not have for Jesus (even if we accept the two dubious references to Jesus in that same author, neither of them is in his early work but one written decades later, after the Gospels were published, and neither of those two references is secure or detailed, but rather brief and mysterious). In short, we have better evidence for Pilate than we have for Jesus. By a lot. And indeed, the silence of Philo on both Jesus and Christianity entails the insignificance of both to leading Jews of the time, which entails the Gospels hugely exaggerate (read: mythologize) the story of Jesus even if he existed–two conclusions even historicists must accept.
• EHRMAN: Gets the facts right in the book. But still commits the fallacy of false analogy with them. And never responds to my critique on either point, nor issues a correction.
So on this point his article was just sloppily worded (since he clearly knew the truth, in detail), and thus he will have misled tens of thousands of readers, who will in turn repeat that misinformation to hundreds of thousands or millions more. But even in the book Ehrman still uses this as a bad example of the point he wants to make, which is that plenty of historical persons have evidence comparable to what we can claim to have for Jesus. That conclusion requires examples of historical persons who actually meet that condition, producing a valid analogy. Pilate simply doesn’t. And Ehrman has still never produced a valid analogous case. He has therefore rested his case on a fallacy of false analogy, even though there is no reason to (since he should be able to find genuinely analogous persons). This I chalk up to his being lazy.
[I won’t attribute to Ehrman the sad legacy of McGrath’s attempts to defend his man, but McGrath’s attempt at a rebuttal here went like this:
• MCGRATH: Claims only government officials erected inscriptions.
• CARRIER: Calls bull****.
• MCGRATH: Wisely pretends he never said that.
• MCGRATH: Claims Ehrman was only talking about native Latin-speaking Italians.
• CARRIER: Explains why that’s stupid.
• MCGRATH: Wisely pretends he never said that, either.
…and that was it, apart from various other stupid claims that don’t deserve further mention.]
Update:
• EHRMAN: Now tries to use that last embarrassingly bad argument after all (which I’ve already refuted as ridiculous), and asks that I retract my critique of this mistake in his HuffPo article because he got the facts right in his book, even though I have already said that he did, and even in my critique of this mistake in his HuffPo article I had already explicitly said that that might be so.
• CARRIER: I point out the hypocrisy of that. As well as how disgraceful it is of him to still not have responded to any of the serious errors (and two lies) I’ve called him out on, but instead he just comments on the most trivial of them, like this, and even then misleads his readers about what I actually said, and still doesn’t come up with a plausible excuse for his mistake in the article. Nor does he call for it to be corrected at the Huffington Post. So it will go on miseducating readers. Forever.
• EHRMAN: No reply.
—
5.
• CARRIER: Ehrman commits a fallacy of equivocation (trading on the tenuously variable meanings of the word “have”). Ehrman falsely claims “we have numerous, independent accounts” of Jesus, and that all these sources are “in Jesus’ native tongue Aramaic,” and “dated to within just a year or two of his life”; and he concludes, “historical sources like that are pretty astounding for an ancient figure of any kind.”
The last statement is indeed true: that would be pretty astounding. It’s just that the first statements are not true. We have no such sources. Ehrman knows this. So he is deliberately misleading the public with his choice of words. He is misrepresenting merely possible, and purely hypothetical sources (whose exact and complete content is unknown to us), as if they were sources we have, and as if we know those hypothetical sources were “numerous” and “independent” and “date within a few years of his life” (we do not know that at all). I then summarized several of the problems with relying on these “hypothetical” sources to prove Jesus really existed. Such evidence is simply not “astounding.” It is in fact deeply problematic. And it grossly misleads the public to say otherwise.
• OPHELIA BENSON: Confirms that Ehrman is almost as misleading about this in his book (What Ehrman Actually Says). He is there somewhat clearer (if you try hard and pay attention) that these sources he says we “have” don’t actually exist, and thus we don’t actually “have” them (see her further analysis in The Unseen and A Small Town Guy). But as she notes, the way he writes it, and given the way he leans on these non-existent sources, even in the book a reader can easily mistake him for saying they exist. He likewise maintains they date to within a few years of Jesus (because like any crank mythicist, Ehrman has magical knowledge about things like that), and that they are numerous and independent and written and in Aramaic–all claims that are not known to be true, however much scholars conjecture them. And again, we don’t have those sources. So we don’t actually know what was in them (even if they existed–and many respected scholars do doubt it).
• EHRMAN: No reply. (On his treatment of this same subject in his book, see below.)
• MCGRATH: Claims Ehrman’s poor wording doesn’t matter because experts will know what he meant and agree with it.
• CARRIER: Explains why that does matter: most of Ehrman’s readers aren’t experts (and will be grossly mislead); and experts don’t all agree that what he said is true (in fact there is significant and pervasive disagreement on whether the Gospels used sources at all, whether any of those sources were written, whether they were ever in Aramaic, whether they were composed in the 30s, or what they originally said).
—
6.
• CARRIER: Ehrman commits a straw man fallacy (or a red herring fallacy, depending on what you think he was trying to argue). He correctly declares the non-existence of a single mythic god narrative (before Christianity no one deity was born to a virgin mother and died as an atonement for sin and was raised from the dead) and thereby implies none of its elements existed in any pre-Christian mythic god narratives. That is false. Each of those elements exists in the narrative of one pre-Christian god or another (or something relevantly similar to each element did), and some are shared by several gods. That all three are not shared by any single god narrative is irrelevant.
Ehrman is thus either making a straw man argument (“mythicists who claim Jesus is a copy of a previous god narrative with all three elements are wrong, therefore all mythicists are wrong”) or a red herring argument (“the Jesus narrative is not a copy of a previous god narrative with all three elements, therefore it was not influenced by any other previous god narratives with similar elements”). In fact, when we look at the peculiar features of god and hero narratives surrounding pre-Christian Judaism and the parallel features within Judaism itself, and combine them, what we end up with is a demigod so much like that of Jesus that this cannot be a coincidence. As I wrote in my critique:
He is implausibly implying that it’s “just a coincidence” that in the midst of a fashion for dying-and-rising salvation gods with sin-cleansing baptisms, the Jews just happened to come up with the same exact idea without any influence at all from this going on all around them. That they “just happened” to come up with the idea of a virgin born son of god, when surrounded by virgin born sons of god, as if by total coincidence.
That’s simply not plausible. And it misinforms the public to conceal this fact from them.
• EHRMAN: No reply.
• CARRIER: Possibly by punting to Hoffmann, Ehrman thought he’d responded. Against which I argued that a reasonable person should conclude Hoffmann is an unreliable loony. You decide.
joelr
Well-Known Member
Carrier exposes many outright lies in the book, again you'll need to use the link:
The main problem with the book itself was the sheer number of errors, fallacies, and misleading statements that fill it. It is important to emphasize this: a handful of errors or fallacies would not condemn any book, as every book has a few, and a good book can more than compensate for that by being consistently useful, informative, and on-point in every other respect. But Ehrman’s book was so full of gaffes it is simply unsalvageable, and as I said, it resembles in this respect some of the worst Jesus myth literature, which I can’t recommend to people either, as it will misinform them far more than inform them. (Scholars can also correct their errors. If they are inclined to. Ehrman, so far, does not seem at all inclined to.)
I could not list all the errors, fallacies, and misleading statements I marked up in my copy of his book. There were hundreds of them, averaging at least one a page. This shocked me, because all his previous works were not like this. They are superb, and I still recommend them, especially Jesus Interrupted and Forged. Their errors are few, and well drowned out by their consistent utility and overall accuracy in conveying the mainstream consensus on the issues they address (Interrupted is an excellent primer to get anyone up to speed on where the field of New Testament Studies now stands, and Forged is an excellent summary of why that mainstream consensus accepts that many of the documents in the New Testament are forgeries, and why that was known to be deceitful even back then, despite attempts to claim the contrary).
But Did Jesus Exist? was a travesty. In my review I chose a representative selection of the worst mistakes, in order to illustrate the problem. Some readers took that as a complete list, and suggested those weren’t enough errors to condemn the book. Although they certainly are (not all of them, but many of them are damning and render the book useless at its one stated purpose), they are not a complete list, but just the tip of the iceberg, and that is the bigger problem. Those errors are examples of consistent trends throughout the book, of careless thinking, careless writing, and often careless research. Which means there are probably many more errors than I saw, because for much of the book I’m trusting him to tell me correctly what he found from careful research, but the rest of the book illustrates that I can’t trust him to correctly convey information or to have done careful research.
And that was the gist of my review. So when, here, I check the state-of-play of the specific criticisms I made, keep in mind that these were only representative examples of hundreds of other errors in the book.
I think I have an idea what happened, if reports are true that Ehrman has said he takes only two or three weeks to write a book: with the exception of Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (and a few related works), which summarizes many years of his own dedicated research (and thus is an excellent piece of scholarship, not aimed at laymen), all his books have been just summaries of “what he knows” from being a trained New Testament scholar (plus occasionally a small foray into specific independent research, as when he investigated the nature of forgery in the ancient world for Forged, which could have been completed in a couple of long days at a library). He is thus relying on field-established background knowledge. Which is fine when that’s what you are reporting on (as he usually does). But when you are going outside your field, you do need to do a bit more, and you do risk being wrong a bit more often (which is why it’s a good idea to field ideas in other venues before committing them to print: it gives you an opportunity to be corrected by experts first).
I had said it was his “incompetence in classics (e.g. knowledge of ancient culture and literature) and ancient history (e.g. understanding the methodology of the field and the background facts of the period) that trips him up several times,” and that now makes sense: he is fully competent to make up for not being a classicist or specialist in ancient history, by getting up to speed in what he needed (which for this task might have taken a year or more), but instead he just relied on “what he knows,” which was all just what he was told or has read in New Testament studies. Which isn’t enough. Disaster resulted.
With those general points understood, let’s look at the problems I specifically selected to discuss:
what follows are 21 mis-quotes and lies
nPeace
Veteran Member
I don't agree,but hey... we have our opinions.
Muffled
Jesus in me
I believe there is too much meatball and not enough meat in that statement. What is an FSM?
Muffled
Jesus in me
I believe RC in your case must stand for ridiculous culturism. (Just joking) The reason God can claim superiority is because He is. THat isn't absurd since it plays out n reality. The Egyptian gods up against Yahweh just couldn't get their mojo working.
joelr
Well-Known Member
Right everyone has opinions, that's why I mentioned faith.
But scholarship is in agreement, it's not historical.
All evidence biblical and other is covered here by scholars in different fields.
I could have the opinion Thor is real based on seeing him in Marvel comics. But I wouldn't say it's a historical fact.
joelr
Well-Known Member
Where does it say that in the Egyptain text, that Yahweh wins out over any Egyptain god?
Of course the OT will say that , what else would they say? "Yahweh is good but that Egyptian god, he can't be messed with"?
Every religion says their god is superior. To soapbox that fact is pointless?
nPeace
Veteran Member
...and scholarship don't have opinions?
exchemist
Veteran Member
Good joke, eh, Christian?
And what an insightful response. I'd never thought of that. The other religions have got that quite wrong, clearly.
joelr
Well-Known Member
History is usually judged by probabilities. Evidence, likelyhood of events, things like that.
It is the opinion of scholarship that Thor, Hercules, Jesus and other god-men are myths. At least the version of these beings portrayed in ancient scripture.
But now you are sneaking around the original argument that the gospels are not historical.
If the probability of a history being false is high enough we generally say it's not historical.
Romulus isn't historical, despite all of the scripture. Mithras was the god worshiped by the entire Roman army before 395 when Christianity was made the religion everyone had to follow by law.
Constantine united Rome and ended the civil war. He happened to be raised by a Christian and there were already many Christian churches in place and generating money and he needed something to keep Rome unified.
Technically it's just an opinion that Mithras isn't real. But he's not real.