Decided to go all in with this.
Here is Carrier's conclusion on the gospels...after a long dissection of them.
And
Here is Carrier's conclusion on the gospels...after a long dissection of them.
Quote:The Gospels generally afford us no evidence whatever for discerning a
historical Jesus. Because of their extensive use of fabrication and literary
invention and their placing of other goals far ahead of what we regard as
'historical truth', we cannot know if anything in them has any historical
basis-except what we can verify externally, which for Jesus is next to
nothing. They are simply myths about Jesus and the gospel. They are not
seriously researched biographies or h istorical accounts-and are certainly
not eyewitness testimonies or even collected hearsay. Their literary art and
structure are simply too sophisticated for that.
And
Quote:The consequence of this to the present query is simple: from the survey
in this chapter it's clear that if we went from pericope to pericope assessing
the likelihood of it being true (rather than invented to communicate a
desired point or to fit a pre-planned narrative structure), each time updating
our prior probability that anything in the Gospels can be considered rel iable
evidence for a historical Jesus, then that probability would consistently
go down (or level off somewhere low), but never rise. 243 In fact I have not
found a single pericope in these Gospels that is more likely true than false.
These Gospels are therefore no different than the dozens of other Gospels
that weren't selected for the canon (as discussed in Element 44). They are
all just made-up stories.
