(May 4, 2013 at 4:14 am)Undeceived Wrote: It's nice that you've come up with a "just-so" story how this all happened. Now how about some positive evidence, as opposed to negative assertions that all our current Biblical evidence isn't sufficient and therefore "the Jews and Romans don't react to an alleged factual resurrection"? How can you logically leap from "there's not the overwhelming evidence I expect" to "it's all a lie"? Please explain.
Let me try to be more clear. The Jews and Romans portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew (as distinct from the real historical people of that time) react to a story ("let's ignore this and hush it up") rather than responding realistically to terrifying supernatural events ("THE SUN JUST DIED AND EARTHQUAKES AND ZOMBIES! WE'RE ALL DOOMED!"). This indicates that the author of gMatthew is concerned with spiritual stories and doctrines and the situation of his religious community, rather than writing a literal, accurate account of recent history. Dr. Carrier provides plentiful examples of evidence for this in the Gospel narratives, such as their carefully-constructed chiasmic structure, the rich symbolism they employ, and so on.
In other words, the portrayed reaction of the Jewish leaders and the Romans in gMatthew fits with the situation of the author and his community decades after the story's setting, not with the setting and events of the story itself. I cited "positive evidence"--the characters all somehow just know that Jesus' mission does not involve marching on Jerusalem with his undead army and magical powers to punish them for torturing and killing him. This is an anachronism. Like if a script-writer for M*A*S*H* (set in the Korean War) wrote in a reference to the Tet Offensive (the Vietnam War). If you were a future archaeologist reading a M*A*S*H* script from the ancient American Empire and encountered that anachronism, it would tell you that the author of M*A*S*H* was writing during the Vietnam War era or some time later, with that era's concerns foremost in mind, not taking flawless dictation of events at a military hospital during the Korean War.
(May 4, 2013 at 4:14 am)Undeceived Wrote: Provide an example in which early AD fiction-writers produced a work with depth and meaning comparable to the Gospels, which they did not intend to be taken as fact. One example.
Every religious text ever written has/had "depth and meaning comparable to the Gospels" for the people who believe(d) in it. You think every religious text ever written--except for the ones you believe in--is fiction. I should also point out that I do not think the Gospel writers were consciously writing fiction the way, say, J.K. Rowling was when she wrote the Harry Potter books. I think they were writing allegorical stories (or parables, if you prefer that term) that they believed contained profound spiritual truth. And, as the video in the OP shows, they did so quite brilliantly, with multiple levels of ingenuity in the construction and arrangement of their stories. The Gospels are literary masterpieces of mystical literature. Trying to force them into the mold of newspaper reports is like searching for the racetrack where the Tortoise and the Hare held their famous race, because the story's obviously worthless if it didn't actually happen in some physical location on Earth.
