Josephus and other contemporaries on Jesus

[I_am_not_mafia]

And here is my detailed reply to that weak hit job by Carrier:

"Richard Carrier is Displeased"

I don't know shit about the historicity of Jesus but one thing is for sure, you seem like an unpleasant person and you don't seem to have experience of academia.

It seems I’ve done something to upset Richard Carrier. Or rather, I’ve done something to get him to turn his nasal snark on me on behalf of his latest fawning minion.  For those who aren’t aware of him, Richard Carrier is a New Atheist blogger who has a post-graduate degree in history from Columbia and who, once upon a time, had a decent chance at an academic career.  Unfortunately he blew it by wasting his time being a dilettante who self-published New Atheist anti-Christian polemic and dabbled in fields well outside his own; which meant he never built up the kind of publishing record essential for securing a recent doctorate graduate a university job.  Now that even he recognises that his academic career crashed and burned before it got off the ground, he styles himself as an “independent scholar”, probably because that sounds a lot better than “perpetually unemployed blogger”.

You do realise that there are far more PhD students than there are post-doctoral positions don't you? This means that most people training to be academics don't actually get a career in academia that they wish for (only about 10% actually make it). There are certainly far fewer positions with tenure. A successful career in academia actually requires a lot of luck as well as the willingness to move around the world for a series of short term poorly paid post-doctoral positions. This means putting your life on hold. Not easy if you already have family or a husband or wife who wants a career themselves. And of course moving every year is very expensive. In my first post-doc I earned the same wage as a bus driver, but bus drivers don't have to move every year so I was much poorer. I remember back in 2007 sometimes having to call in sick because I couldn't afford to drive into work. It was either that or not eat. But that's not what killed my academic career. There just weren't enough opportunities available at the time.

And I'm a computer scientist not a historian. It is far harder to make an economic case for funding research into history compared to research into advanced technologies that can lead to the development of new companies.

I myself am an independent researcher. I continue to do my research in my spare time and I get my research peer reviewed and published. This actually takes a lot of time, effort and dedication without the resources available to my employed peers so it pisses me off when I see people slag off others for doing the same thing.

So basically fuck you cunt.