Freethought Nation

I enjoyed reading Dr Ehrman's summary, but it really is a tissue of fantasy and insult. Bart has decided what he wants to believe, and then decided to ignore the facts and evidence in order to justify his fantasy. In two pages of polemic, he repeatedly insults the intelligence and integrity of readers who have analysed the questions and who do not accept threadbare arguments from authority. Here is my commentary.

BE: “people still claim the Holocaust did not happen, and … the American president is, in fact, a Muslim … is it any surprise to hear that Jesus never even existed?”
• Rhetorical slur #1: Compare your opponents to cranky idiot NeoNazi conspiracists. Good one Bart. Nice collegial tone. But hey it’s a free country and religious vilification is perfectly legal, especially when directed against mythicists.

BE: “Internet junkies who call themselves mythicists … maintain that Jesus is a myth invented for nefarious (or altruistic) purposes
• Rhetorical slur #2: Imply it is all a nervous addiction, rather like shooting up smack, while magnanimously accepting that some of these vice-ridden fools who doubt the Historical Jesus story accept its inventors were well-meaning.

BE: “Few of these mythicists are actually scholars trained in … any cognate field … two (to my knowledge) actually have Ph.D. credentials in relevant fields of study. … not a single mythicist … teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics at any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world.”
• Rhetorical slur #3: Assert the closed shop has a monopoly on wisdom. Of course no one outside the old craft guild can produce respectable work? Could the meal ticket of guild entry involve a measure of bullying about not challenging conventional views?

BE: “views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.”
• Rhetorical slur #4: Creationism. Even though mythicists (for example Earl Doherty) produce books that focus entirely and rigorously on evidence. Creationism. Just say it again a few times in place of real argument. Warming up to the pulpit here. Just cast them into the outer darkness to wail and gnash their teeth, and see how those mythers like them onions.

BE: “deniers of Jesus are … denouncers of religion”
• Rhetorical slur #5: Ignore the wide range of views about religion among mythicists, and suggest they just have a chip on their shoulder about the church. Some who recognise the absence of evidence for Jesus could even see the recognition of the duplicity and confusion of the early church as a way of restoring some integrity to Christianity, to make it more believable, and to show its continuity with the long sweep of prior culture. Whether Jesus Christ is good is a separate question from whether he is real.

BE: ”what better way to malign the religious views of the vast majority … than to claim that the … founder of their religion was in fact the figment of his followers' imagination?”
• Rhetorical slur #6: When a paradigm shifts, people recognize that many people of good will have accepted false information. It is not maligning their views to say they have no evidence for them, if that is in fact the case. Just because believers are mistaken does not mean their views are necessarily malignant.

BE: “The view, however, founders on its own premises.”
• Rhetorical slur #7: Claim moral high ground by asserting your opponent is guilty of elementary failure of logic – patronize them as mere beginners whose simple mistake can be corrected by the distinguished condescension of the enlightened scholar.

BE: “…You may not trust Rush Limbaugh's views of Sandra Fluke, but he certainly provides evidence that she exists.”
• Rhetorical slur #8: I had not heard of Sandra Fluke until I just googled her. No one mentioned Jesus until a generation after his supposed death. Bart seems not to understand the difference between hearsay and evidence.

BE: “biased sources can be used to yield historically reliable information, once their biased chaff is separated from the historical kernel. And historians have devised ways of doing just that.”
• Rhetorical slur #9: Imply Jesus Believers have solved the riddle of the refiner’s fire, (to introduce another Biblical metaphor), even though the quest for the historical Jesus is among the most unreliable of scholarly traditions, with rampant projection of desire to paper over absence of evidence. Historians have not ‘devised’ ways of yielding any reliable information about Jesus Christ any more than about Sir Galahad.

BE: “With respect to Jesus, we have numerous, independent accounts of his life in the sources lying behind the Gospels (and the writings of Paul)”
• Rhetorical slur #10: Lying is the right word here. There are no contemporary accounts, only propaganda such as Eusebius, Irenaeus, Tertullian and others who display a transparently political agenda in order “that you may believe”. Bart is winding himself up here into propaganda. Numerous? Independent? Really?? Real scholars would invite some of these pariah mythicists who question these claims to publicly debate them instead of hiding in coward’s castle.

BE: “sources like that are is [sic] pretty astounding”
• Rhetorical slur #11: But the astounding sources do does [sic] not exist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Ordinary claims also require evidence. Pity there is none for Jesus.

BE: “…Paul, who acquired his information within a couple of years of Jesus' life and who actually knew, first hand, Jesus' closest disciple Peter and his own brother James. If Jesus did not exist, you would think his brother would know it. ”
• Rhetorical slur #12: Dismissal of the debate around the unclarity of the phrase “brother of the Lord” with reference to James. Even the great early Church Father Origen of Alexandria said at Contra Celsus, Chapter 47, “Paul … regarded this James as a brother of the Lord, not … by blood … as because of his virtue and doctrine.” Such a flimsy reed to hang the entire existence of Christ upon.

BE: “Moreover, the claim that Jesus was simply made up falters on every ground. The alleged parallels between Jesus and the "pagan" savior-gods in most instances reside in the modern imagination: We do not have accounts of others who were born to virgin mothers and who died as an atonement for sin and then were raised from the dead (despite what the sensationalists claim ad nauseum in their propagandized versions). ”
• Rhetorical slur #13: The continuity between the mythic archetype of Jesus Christ and earlier dying and rising saviors is not simple, and cannot be simply dismissed like this. The fertility cult of the annual celebration of victory of life over death at spring fed into numerous ritual myths, of Osiris, Horus, Attis, Dionysus, Krishna, etc. The death of the old year each winter and the birth of the new year each spring is not imaginary, it is real and pervasive. But Christians, with their alienated anti-naturalism, have lost touch with this natural root of religion in the actual cycles of the earth.

BE: “... The messiah was to be a figure of grandeur and power who overthrew the enemy. Anyone who wanted to make up a messiah would make him like that. ”
• Rhetorical slur #14: Insulting our intelligence. The Gospels aimed to be persuasive. They had to tell a story that was believable. While it was possible to convince people that Jesus walked on water and rose from the dead, it was not possible to convince them that Jesus was victorious over Rome. People actually knew this could not be because Rome beat Israel. The post hoc requirement was to revise the grand triumphant hope into an explanation of defeat, by seeing the hidden victory within defeat, in the ability of the story of the crucified god to destroy the moral legitimacy of empire.

BE: “The Christians did not invent Jesus. They invented the idea that the messiah had to be crucified. ”
• Rhetorical slur #15: Well, maybe more a mistake than a slur. What about all the Isaiah texts in Handel’s Messiah – he was wounded for our transgressions, despised and rejected, surely he has borne our grief? The idea that prophets are ignored is a persistent mytheme in the Old Testament, and the cross is an updating of this idea for the Roman context.

BE: “…virtually every sane historian on the planet … has come to conclude based on a range of compelling historical evidence... Jesus certainly existed. ”
• Rhetorical slur #16: Critics are insane. Scientifically, evidence can be plausible, persuasive or compelling. We have compelling evidence for abundantly corroborated scientific facts that match to theory with high predictive status. We only say something is compelling when we know it to be true without doubt. The traditional story of Jesus, far from being compelling, is farcical, involving numerous made up miracles that are not historically possible. But Saint Bart can sort the chaff from the kernels to tell us which bits are “compelling”, which are merely persuasive, which are plausible, which are dubious, and which are obviously invented and untrue. His supersonic sonar radar of faith delivers absolute certainty, ‘confidence in things not seen’, as the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it. The far more compelling framework is to see the whole story as myth, meeting deeply felt political needs in the context of Roman conquest, emerging from the syncretism of the defeated myths of Israel, Egypt and Greece, gradually elaborated into a religious conviction that was able to smash all doubt and construct a fallacious fantasy of faith that has dominated much or most of our planet for these last two millennia.  Mythicism is about deconstructing the fantasy, applying scientific method, and coming to a plausible explanation of the origins of Christianity. Sticking to the tired old nostrums of faith may play to the gallery of vested interests, but it does not do anything to convince anyone who wants to rely on evidence and reason.

Dear Robert,

Very well done, and thank you!

Sadhu! Sadhu!

So does Ehrman think the Docetists were anti-religious?

Does he think they were conspiracy theorists?

If the evidence we have for a historical Jesus TODAY is so allegedly overwhelming and indisputable, then how much MORE evidence would there have been available to those who lived at the time of the apostles?
And yet, the first generation of docetists were contemporaries with the apostles, and are even mentioned in the New Testament, and they still did not believe in a historical flesh & blood human Jesus.

So were they being obstinate to this vast amount of evidence? And if there was so much evidence available, one has to wonder why the author of the epistles of John so conspicuously declined to cite any of it when trying to refute them.

The Savior of the World

In Ehrman's ebook Did Jesus Exist?, he mentions me several times and attempts to dismiss my research through ridicule and smears. Of course, Ehrman made no effort to contact me at all - I am easily found and answer questions all the time.

I'm sure I will respond to everything he spews against me, but right now, let me just address the following smear and falsehood on his part, which he makes in connection with the image in my book The Christ Conspiracy of a bronze statue of a cock with a phallus for a nose, styled "Savior of the World." Quoting me first, he says:


In the first place, Erhman's writing is rudimentary, and he includes a typo: The word should be "treasury." Secondly, he apparently couldn't even be bothered to check the reference I included there for the image, which I assuredly did not draw myself. (The comments in the (parentheses) and [brackets] above are Ehrman's, although one wonders why he uses both.) A smear, no doubt, to go along with his conclusion that books like mine "love to make things up." This statement itself is simply puerile. My book doesn't "love" anything, and I have carefully cited almost everything in it. Unlike Ehrman, I don't have any editors, so there are typos in my book. He should not have any excuses, however, for his sloppiness. Apparently, his editors and legal department don't have a problem with libeling someone as "laughable" as me.

The image in question is referenced to "Walker, WDSSO." If you go to the Bibliography - that's something one would think "real scholars" (Ehrman continually plays the credentialism card to make me appear unintelligent and unqualified) could do without any assistance - you will find a citation of Barbara G. Walker's The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. If Ehrman had bothered to follow up in his exhaustive "research," he would have discovered the Peter-cock image in Walker's book, on p. 397:


Again, so much for Ehrman's "scholarship" in which he cannot even trace a citation and read for himself but instead implies I just made it all up.

Frankly, Walker's writing sounds far more scholarly and intelligent than does Ehrman's. Moreover, Walker cites the image as "Knight, pl. 2." Following up in a scholarly fashion, we look at the bibliography by Walker, to discovery the book in question:

Knight, Richard Payne. A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. New York: University Books, 1974.

Consulting an earlier edition of Knight's book, we find on p. 32 a discussion of the object in question:


Here Knight references the image as "Plate II. Fig. 3." Turning to the back of the book, around p. 263, we find the image, which is hand-drawn because of its age, printed when photography was still not entirely feasible for publishers.



On page 35, Knight mentions the "celebrated bronze" again:


Another source, Gordon Williams in A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery (258), comments about this artifact:


Doing our scholarly due diligence, we find the pertinent figure in Fuchs on p. 133.

Hot on the trail, we find more information in Peter Lang's Privatisierung der Triebe? (1994:203) about the "small bust known as the Albani bronze, still housed in the Vatican's secret collection..." There, we read further: "Its plinth is inscribed 'Saviour of the World' in Greek, and it is possibly of Gnostic import."

In another mention of the "notorious Albani bronze said to be held in the Vatican Museum," we learn that such Rome phallic representations are called priapi gallinacei. (Jones, Malcolm, The Secret Middle Ages, 75) As we can see, this bronze image is "celebrated" and "notorious," which means many scholars have written about it.

Even though I obviously did not make up the image, which I cited and which is obviously known in scholarly circles - nor was I erroneous in reporting that the figure is housed in the Vatican - Ehrman continues his smear by remarking:


Again, not only did I not make anything up, but everything is carefully cited for the most part (not as much as my later books, but certainly my research is better even in CC than is Erhman's in the book in question, as we can see from his shoddy "scholarship" here).

Instead of resorting to erroneous contentions and unprofessional ridicule, one would think that a "real scholar" would be curious about this artifact and actually do the due diligence, rather than simply dismissing it with libelous remarks.

_________________
Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

Here are some more articles/press releases to chew on:

Author Bart Ehrman's Latest Work 'Did Jesus Exist?' Makes a Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth


"Vigorously defends," with fallacies, calumny and falsehoods!

Here's the rest of this press release:



Here's another one:


He "thinks evidence matters," yet he just couldn't follow my citation on the Albani bronze before he maliciously smeared me with accusations of fabrication.

_________________
Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

Good stuff Robert. Thank you!

It's all about the eight glasses of water a day. Sounds great until you think a bit and realize it's a bloody myth that even doctors promote. Meme's happen.

As far as consensus, I'm glad Copernicus and Bruno weren't interested in consensus but the truth. People say Acharya has a big ego. Ain't no big ego, but like with Bruno and Copernicus, it's called cojones!

And has anybody noticed that Bart's last three books are basically the same book with often the same exact working. It's getting to be the Bourne Messiah!

Miguel

Guess who else is unimpressed with Ehrman's latest work- http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/667

I found this little bit most interesting...

That is interesting.

But aside from that, Carrier pretty much roasted Erhman. It's going to be funny when all of the book reviews start pouring in. In a way I think that Ehrman is just so green when it comes to mythicism that he really had no idea of what the backlash would be to his assertions. Ehrman says himself that it was just a few years ago (post ZG I assume) that he started getting questions about Jesus' historicity and he was taken back by it all. That immediately paints a picture of ignorance on his part.

Has he debated Doherty on the topic of mythicism before? I don't recall. He ought to though. It would be very educational for Ehrman...



This book release is such a joke so far.

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The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

Be sure to read my new blog post - and feel free to pass it around. There will be more to come addressing the rest of Ehrman's calumny, sloppy "scholarship" and shallow "research."

The phallic 'Savior of the World' hidden in the Vatican

Someone might owe me an apology for the libelous accusation of fabrication.

_________________
Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

That was a great blog, Acharya. It exposes Bart Ehrman's egregious and sloppy "scholarship." It figures that Ehrman would bring a pea shooter to a cock fight. He surely plucked that one out just to embarrass you with but, it backfired and he embarrassed himself instead. I'm glad you addressed so quickly in your blog.

Ehrman didn't read Christ Conspiracy, he just gathered whatever dirt he could to smear you with. Much of it has little to nothing to do with your case for mythicism anyway - that image of the cock thing is a perfect example. He makes no real mention of astrotheology ... he uses the word but, never addresses the thesis in any meaningful way. He merely plucks out a list of straw man arguments to knock down.

Many other freethinkers are very disappointed with Ehrman's new book as well:


Bart Ehrman : Did Jesus Exist?
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=310772

Bart Ehrman's new book - did my prophecy come true?
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=312749

From where I stand, Bart Ehrman has just ruined his credibility with his new book attacking mythicists and mythicism. He will pay for it in your 2nd edition to Christ Conspiracy.

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2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

LOL!

Christian Lindtner actually posted a comment PuffHo saying that Ehrman's "underlying sources of the Gospels" are not in Aramaic but Sanskrit. Some dingbat, not knowing whom he was addressing - a 30+-year Sanskrit scholar! - makes a dumb comment afterwards. Now Christian knows what I go through!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Li ... 86300.html


Here's the dingbat, trying to paint Lindtner as a "evangelical author" who is "misinterpreting Sanskrit!"


Stay tuned for my lengthy review/summary/commentary on Lockwood's Buddhism's Relation to Christianity, which contains a great deal of Lindtner's work. Ehrman and others will undoubtedly get their knickers in a very bad twist after this one.

In the meantime, I re-posted my link to my Washington-Jefferson mythicist article on FB and commented:

If he can take time out from his onslaught of ridicule and calumny against modern mythicists, perhaps Bart Ehrman will go after THESE exalted figures for their apparent questioning of the "historical" Jesus? Of course, not being an expert on mythicism, Ehrman evidently had no idea about THIS fascinating research - and neither would you, if you left it up to the hallowed halls of academia.

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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

Here's what our friend Dr. Robert Price posted in Acharya's blog The phallic 'Savior of the World' hidden in the Vatican:


I have to agree with Dr Price here that Errorman's book, Did Jesus Exist? will ultimately ruin his credibility as I mentioned above.

_________________
2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

I'm going to try to get him on Aeon Byte, perhaps in a debate forum if he will accept. Of course he will be treated very well, like all guests, and his words can further damn him if he comes. Bart was very gracious the first time, squeezing me in between classes and skipping lunch.

Like I say-- Never go against a mythicist when truth is on the line. You will eventually lose and become freed.

Miguel

Miguel, it would be great if you could get Errorman to debate with either Murdock or Doherty.

_________________
The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

That could be a really interesting debate.

_________________
Mriana

Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man. ~ Gandhi

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages. ~ Thomas A. Edison