Hi, I'm a Christian. Help Me Disprove My Religion!

[TheRocketSurgeon]

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Paul was converted on the road to Damascus - that's what he himself says. He says he received a revelation, but he doesn't say how he received it. It's likely he received his revelation from a Christian (or whatever you want to call the followers of Jesus at that time) in 36AD. Christians use Acts 9 to tell them about it, but it's not contemporary and is written by someone who didn't have first-hand knowledge of any Christian events that early. Acts 22 quotes Paul directly giving testimony that he did have a vision and hear the voice of Jesus on the road to Damascus - and the author is writing about contemporary events they have some first-hand knowledge about at this point, and furthermore the author knew Paul. So Acts 22 is the strongest case that Paul did indeed receive a vision - or at least believed that he had.

However, Paul doesn't mention it as a part of his conversion in any of his letters. So I would agree that it's perfectly disputable about whether he had a vision or not - however we know that's the time and location he was converted because he himself says so.

Carrier doesn't really make ANY interesting insights in that video. He has a few minor valid points, but they're overshadowed by his quackery, and don't contribute anything substantial to showing that his hypothesis should be treated as a theory.

As I said, any decent presenter would have references on their slides - yet he has none at all. That's not academic, and if he's using other people's ideas (as he claims to be doing), or even his own published ideas, then it's plagiarism. So either he's making everything up as he goes along, or he's plagiarising - that doesn't make him very credible at all in my book.

This is one of his slides:



And this is how it should look, either like this:



Or like this:



Or of course you can use other referencing methods such as supertexts: "4. And other evidence forged in its place6" ... and then on your references slide have them ordered by number instead of author. But the fact is he didn't use any at all.

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I didn't know the standards for an historian to speak, with citations, in an on-stage event. It is something biologists sometimes do as well, but to be honest I never was around any of the ones that did, and we mostly did field work and published reports, so I'm out of my element with analyzing what he should have done. I'll defer to your word on it.

I didn't watch the Carrier video you may be referring to; the ones I watched of him, some time ago, were informal small-group gatherings that did not look like conference speeches, though he did use slides that looked like the ones you're showing me, here. I believe what I believe about Paul for the reason you stated: it strikes me as the sort of thing you do not omit when writing to the early church about your experience, and I'm utterly convinced (particularly by Luke/Acts and then John) that they kept embellishing the stories as time progressed.  I just finished listening to Ehrman's interview on The Humanist Hour,  and I am happy to see he is still correcting himself on the fly. It is one of the reasons I rarely listen to evangelical "scholars", no matter what degree of expertise they express-- it is simply fatal to my willingness to listen to you if you show that you cannot change your mind in the face of better evidence. Then you're no better than a tape recorded message being put onto a new tape.

Finally, I don't think I'd go so far as to classify Carrier as "quackery" even though I disagree with most of his conclusions (in areas I know enough to do so), and reached conclusions surprisingly similar to Ehrman's. Based on what I read about Carrier on Ehrman's blog, he doesn't quite seem to consider him a quack, even though Carrier lampooned him pretty badly, just totally wrong and in need of some humility in carefully examining his position before he boasts about it. This is hardly unique in academia (though more common with department heads, to whom no one will say nay), and it might spark young Richard into refining his ideas. With citations