Quote:And that brings me back to the start of this whole cycle. Carrier's argument is, well, ridiculous. Even other mythicists (such as yourself) cling to their own hypothesis rather than adopt his. The problem with his argument is not that it's impossible - anything is possible. For all we know, Adolf Hitler was a celestial being that came to Earth as a reptilian and tried to bring about an apocalypse so the lizzardpeople could take over the Earth. The problem is it's based on completely different mythologies to Judaism as a starting point.
And what argument do you think that is? Carrier's argument is that "jesus" is a euhemerization of myths which someone - not "paul" decided had really lived. At the end of the book he challenges scholars to come up with a better answer. We're all still waiting.
What I get from Carrier is not what you want. I have been demanding that jesus freaks produce the evidence for their fairy tales. All I ever see if "the gospels this and the gospels that."
Carrier goes through every single bit of evidence from antiquity and at the end of the day comes up with nothing of value to support the absurd claims of xtians. He demolishes epistles, gospels, Tacitus, Suetonius and Josephus quite effectively. Maybe you should read the book instead of listening to what theologians have to say?
I do have a problem with Carrier's use of Bayes Theorem because the values ascribed are arbitrary and he always seems to be bending over backwards to give the jesus freaks the benefit of the doubt. At the end of the book it doesn't matter. No evidence = no evidence and no amount of mathematical gyrations can change that.
