Quote:The other thing they contain besides errors and historical detail, is expansions of the stories. So what is recounted above is almost certainly an historical event, but the details have been expanded upon. This FYI is exactly what good scholars look at, to determine where history ends and mythology or expansion on history begins. Your argument that everything found within the gospels is wholly non-historical is so well outside of general scholarly thought, that it's barely even worth consideration. And the one scholar who puts forward a scholarly argument - Richard Carrier - you don't even agree with. Carrier still accepts that Paul is a historical person, his hypothesis relies on the historicity of Paul. As I already said, if you're going to defend Carrier's position at least put forward his position and not your own one that's not supported by a single scholar anywhere.
Again, I accuse you of cherry-picking. Which is real and which is expansion and how can you tell the difference? As above, yes, there was a battle of Alesia and archaeologists have excavated the remains of the Romans siege works. Experimental archaeologists, using re-enactors, have even demonstrated that Caesar's force could indeed have built those fortifications in the time given. But there is no fucking way that a force of a quarter of a million Gallic fighting men could have been raised and transported to Alesia in the time alloted. Nor could such a force have been supplied. They would have starved on the march. This is Roman propaganda and it frightened the shit out of Pompey and the Senate.
So what's a true event in your mind? That a dead jew came back to life because an old book of religious horseshit says so? You'll need a a whole lot of evidence to sustain that one. That some Galilean peasant brought a man back from the dead? "(See prior note above.) How about changing water into wine. That's a fairly minor one. Although Dionysus is credited with similar tricks by the Greeks but of course THOSE are bullshit right?
So tell me. What's real and which is bullshit in your gospels.
More on this in the next section but Carrier in "On the Historicity of Jesus" does not get into the paul story. It does not matter to him if it was one guy or 50 who put those letters together. His mission is the letters themselves BUT he can only deal with the letters which we have now. Even he can't guess what the originals said.
