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

[Aractus]

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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.

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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

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It's standard academic practise in any field. And even if it's to a lay audience his slides should be coming from an academic level presentation he's used and therefore would be pre-referenced.

Look the problem with him - and he is a quack make no mistake - is that his arguments are all extreme. "Oh because this part references a supernatural event that means everything in all the Gospels is the work of deliberate inventions". That's simply not the case - there's a huge difference between the four gospels and other works which are purely based in Myth like for example Genesis and Exodus. And historians do the hard work to figure out what parts of the gospels tell you anything of meaning that is based on actual events and what has been embellished.

Let me give you an example. The mythist-naysayers sometimes point out "well we have nothing actually written from when Jesus was alive". Well true, now let's first note that his ministry lasted for about one year and then consider what we do have:

c. 43-58 AD: Epistle of James
c. 50-53 AD: Paul's epistle to the Galatians
c. 50-53 AD: Paul's epistle to the Thessalonians
c. 50-53 AD: Paul's second epistle to the Thessalonians (if genuine)
c. 53-57 AD: Paul's epistle to the Corinthians
c. 55-57AD: Paul's epistle to the Romans
c. 55-70 AD: Gospel of Mark/"proto-Mark"
c. 57-58 AD: Paul's second epistle to the Corinthians
c. 60-62 AD: Paul's epistle to the Colossians
c. 60-62 AD: Paul's epistle to the Philemon
c. 60-85 AD: The Gospel of Luke
c. 60-85 AD: The Gospel of Matthew
c. 61-85 AD: Acts of the Apostles
c. 64-90 AD: Epistle to the Hebrews
c. 80-95 AD: The Gospel of John

For the moment we'll ignore 1-2 Peter, 1,2,3 John, Revelation, Jude, and the pseudonymous- and pastoral- Pauline epistles. But I will say with the possible exceptions of 2 Peter and 1,2,3, John they all fit in the first century and of course Revelation tells us nothing useful, so in total out of the 27 New Testament books, we have 22 Books that date to the first century. 22 Books that span in composition time from c. 50-95 AD (ignoring James as the outlier). That's 45 years.

Do you see the problem?

We have a total of one Christian writing per two years. Yet Jesus only ministered for one year. And we know that since 50 AD -on many of John's previous disciples were converted to Christianity, and that the gospel had been spreading greatly at that time (Acts 14-15). So we have a much greater number of Christians in the 50's AD on than in the 30's or 40's AD. And still only 1 writing per two years, and only 7 distinct Authors (plus the pseudo-pauline author/authors).

Now let's reconcile this with Carrier's view. We know why there aren't more early writings - firstly there were but they didn't all survive because they weren't all copied as much as the New Testament - but secondly the writings that we have cannot be put into an artificial order that he proposes that has all the gospels and acts being written after all the pauline epistles. You can't do that - it's conjecture. Even among the scholars who think that the gospels were written late (as in after 70AD) they still think there was a proto-Mark that predates the fall of Jerusalem. Everything else that he's looking at - besides the short Epistle of James - is Paul's writings and is reflective of only one author. You can't answer questions about what the first century church believed simply by trying to figure out what one single author was thinking.

The "evidence" that the synoptic gospels are written after 70AD is that they all cite Jesus predicting the fall of Jerusalem. I dispute that theology because I think that if Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher and he mentions the one who is to come "the Son of Man" that he certainly should have and would have been expected to have also talked about the fall of the great Jewish city of Jerusalem. So it's consistent with his character, it wasn't merely a "lucky guess" - he knew that the city had been taken by siege and completely destroyed a few centuries prior, he was simply predicting this would happen again. Once you accept that Jesus in all likeliness make that statement - and that it doesn't require a supernatural explanation - it means that reasons for dating Luke-Acts to after c. 63 AD are diminished. Therefore Luke, Acts, Mark and probably Matthew are all written in the same period that Paul is writing - not afterwards.

How anyone can explain Matthew's gospel written after the fall of Jerusalem with an intended Jewish-Christian audience is beyond me. The entire Jerusalem church was destroyed by 70AD, there would be no one for "Matthew" to write it to. There's not a scrap of evidence that the gentile-orientated Christian church continued proselytising to Jews after that time; and there had to have been time for copies to have been made and circulated so it could survive into the later centuries. This all points to Matthew being written by c. 61AD. Of course we don't know exactly when it was written - but my point is we cannot simply assume to "know" that it's written after Paul's writings, that's nothing but conjecture. Either hypothesis is possible, and you can't mount solid theories on unproven weak-as-fuck hypothetical evidence.