The First Century Void

[Minimalist]

Yeah, RoadRunner79, thinks that during hundreds years of Christian reign were also times of liberal exchange of ideas where anyone could have questioned teachings of the church as well as dogma and also write books conflicting their teachings and politics.

Not to mention the fact that hundreds of ancient documents were essentially left to rot. Because they didn't conform to the churches teachings. Including catalogues worth of scientific texts from the Romans and Greeks. And libraries didn't even need to be purposely time has done an awesome job of that. But as I said it a non issue weather it's the 18th or 56 century the evidence is the evidence.

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And as Richard Carrier points out

There certainly was, as there always was.
Even in Paul’s day we see seething schisms and attacks from within and all around, as the sect had already fragmented into several, calling each other anathema and servants of demons and false Christs. That would have been even more the case a lifetime later. The Gospels, written in the gap period, exhibit different competing theologies and perspectives. They are in fact arguments against each other (as I show in OHJ, Ch. 10). But they effect that through allegory and fake history (Acts is another classic example: see OHJ, Ch. 9). So we have to infer what the real arguments were, and often can’t tell. No one tells us directly.
So there was a lot going on and being said in that lifetime, that we don’t get to hear. Whether anyone recorded it (wrote it down) is a different question; but no one even talks about it in the second century. And they show no sign of knowing what was really happening in that period (e.g. Papias relates a history of the writing of the Gospels that is impossible and thus not even remotely true; so they either didn’t even know what happened in that previous lifetime, or they decided to delete it and replace it with myths).
So it could have all been deleted by time, and not deliberate erasure. Deleted all the same. We don’t get to hear it all the same. But proposing no one wrote anything, no letters in a whole human lifetime of the church, is very unlikely: it makes no sense that we would have rampant letter writing in Paul’s lifetime (much more than was preserved, as Paul himself references letters we don’t have), and none whatsoever the next lifetime, when the sect was larger and even more diverse and thus even more at each other’s throats, and even more butting heads in competition across three continents and two empires.
And this is why we don’t know what the reaction was to the publication of the first Gospels. Neither approval nor censure, verification or falsification, we don’t get to hear, and thus don’t get to know, what anyone’s reaction was. We therefore cannot claim to know it was uniformly positive. Though we know it can’t have been. Because we have evidence in the second century that gives us clues of mythicist Christians the century before (e.g. The Ascension of Isaiah; 2 Peter). And the Gospels not only deliberately contradict each other on fundamental things (which no one could have simply been fine with or ever questioned or challenged: the very fact that each Gospel rewrote the ones before to say different things is evidence of disapproval of the original things said), they say wildly false things anyone could have refuted had they regarded them as making any true claims at all (e.g. that a horde of zombies descended on Jerusalem; that Jesus was famous across the entire province of Syria; that the sun went out for three hours). If anyone noticed who knew the truth, we don’t get to hear what they said. And if no one who knew the truth noticed, we can’t claim to know what they would have said. Except the obvious: that those things didn’t happen.
More on what evidence there must have been, even in Paul’s lifetime, much more so the next, see my sections on exactly that in OHJ, Ch. 8

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But min there had to lots of other copies of the TF because there had to be.

He doesn't seem to understand that Eusebius inherited Origen's library.  Not only was Eusebius writing this shit he was using the very same books that Origen used.  The ones where Origen declared that Josephus did not know Christ.  Whoops.  Must be a little doctrinal fuck-up there!

More to the point with Carrier, his conclusion to Historicity says:   Note how he discusses morons like RR right up front!

I know many devout Christian scholars will balk and claim to find all
manner of bogus or irrelevant or insignificant holes or flaws in my arguments,
but they would do that anyway. Witness what many Christian scholars
come up with just to reject evolution, or to defend the literal miraculous
resurrection of Jesus (which they claim they can do even with the terrible
and paltry evidence we have). Consequently, I don't care anymore what
Christian apologists think. They are not rational people. I only want to know
what rational scholars think. I want to see a helpful critique of this book by
objective, qualified experts who could live with the conclusion that Jesus
didn't exist, but just don't think the case can be made, or made well enough
to credit. And what I want from my critics is not useless hole punching but
an alternative proposal: if my method is invalid, then what method is the
correct one for resolving questions of historicity? And if you know of none,
how can you justify any claim to historicity for any person, if you don't
even know how such a claim can be justified or falsified at all? Also correct
any facts I get wrong, point out what I missed, and if my method then
produces a different conclusion when those emendations are included, we
wi ll have progressY Even if the conclusion is the same, it will nevertheless
have been improved.

But it is the method I want my fellow historians to correct, replace or
perfect above all else. We can't simply rely on intuition or gut instinct when
deciding what really did happen or who really did exist, since that simply
leans on unexamined assumptions and relies on impressions and instincts
that are often not reliable guides to the truth. We need to make explicit why
we believe what we do rather than something else, and we need this as much
in history as in any other field. And by the method I have deployed here, I
have confirmed our intuitions in the study of Jesus are wrong. He did not
exist. I have made my case. To all objective and qualified scholars, I appeal
to you all as a community: the ball is now in your court.

Let the xhristards shit bricks over the italicized line.  They'd rather do that than read the book anyway.