Ehrman on Historicity Recap (by 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. By Dr. Richard Carrier 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. Link Summary My relevant articles in this series to date are (in chronological order): Ehrman Trashtalks Mythicism (21 March 2012) McGrath on the Amazing Infallible Ehrman (25 March 2012) Ehrman on Jesus: A Failure of Facts and Logic (19 April 2012) Ehrman’s Dubious Replies (Round One) (27 April 2012) Ehrman’s Dubious Replies (Round Two) (29 April 2012) -:- Pre-Book Debate 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...
