An Afternoon With Richard Carrier

On December 6th of last year, I had the amazing honor of meeting Dr. Richard Carrier at the Humanist Community of Central Ohio 2014 Winter Solstice Banquet. Dr. Carrier gave a fantastic talk on feminism and its importance in the atheist movement. The transcript of his talk is now available online. Afterwards, Dr. Carrier was kind enough to sign two of his books I brought with me. His talks are great to watch online, but seeing them in person is an enlightening experience. 

Meeting Dr. Carrier for the first time.

Dr. Carrier was kind enough to sign two
of his books I brought with me.

                                      

A Few Cases of Injustice (And What You Can Do To Help)

First, Richard Carrier reports on the tragic case of Michael Brown, and how you can help his family so that they see true justice served.

You can help see justice have its day. You can make a real difference standing up against state corruption and tyranny. You can make a difference toward ending, by exposing and shaming, the wanton and deadly racism so common among the men with guns we ask to police our streets (and it is indeed usually the men). This is how.... Help the Brown family bring the truth to light and have a fair trial of the facts. They have raised so little so far, barely three grand. For a case like this they will need fifty to a hundred grand. I want to see an outpouring of support. Send what you can to the Michael Brown Memorial Fund. Please do this. If not for Brown and his grieving family, do it to show you believe in opposing corruption, abuse and oppression in your own country. Do it to show you are fed up with police getting away with the murder of black men every month. Do it to show this must stop. And the people are now paying attention.

Second, it has been reported that Ma'lik Richmond, one of the Steubenville High School students convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl in 2012, has been placed back on the football team as soon as his sentence was finished. I had already decided to boycott all future Big Red football games in the wake of this event, and now here's confirmation I made the right choice. I feel more and more ashamed to say I ever attended that school. Sign this petition to let the school know that this decision is wrong, and that they have exposed their true colors and where their priorities really are.

'Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus' Now Available on Kindle

This thorough and detailed response to Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist? is finally available at Amazon on Kindle. This anthology of essays includes contributions from:

• Richard Carrier
• Earl Doherty
• David Fitzgerald
• D.M. Murdock
• Rene Salm
• Robert Price
• Frank Zindler

See also: 

80+ MYTHICIST RESPONSES TO B. EHRMAN’S DID JESUS EXIST?

Richard Carrier on the Testimonium Flavianum: "100% Christian fabrication"

Dr. Richard Carrier's peer-reviewed paper “Origen, Eusebius, and the Accidental Interpolation in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200” has just been published in the Journal of Early Christian Studies. The abstract reads:

Analysis of the evidence from the works of Origen, Eusebius, and Hegesippus concludes that the reference to “Christ” in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200 is probably an accidental interpolation or scribal emendation and that the passage was never originally about Christ or Christians. It referred not to James the brother of Jesus Christ, but probably to James the brother of the Jewish high priest Jesus ben Damneus.

Dr. Carrier also notes that:

[T]his article also summarizes a sufficient case to reject the Testimonium Flavianum as well (the other, longer reference to Jesus in Josephus), in that case as a deliberate fabrication (see note 1, pp. 489-90, and discussion of the Arabic quotation on pp. 493-94). And I cite the leading scholarship on both. So it’s really a complete article on both references to Jesus in Josephus.

It's wonderful to see Dr. Carrier produce what I consider to be the definitive smackdown of the Josephus arguments. The "James passage" never spoke of Jesus Christ, and as Dr. Carrier rightly concludes, the Testimonium is "100% Christian fabrication."

 

See also: The Case Against the Josephus Passages

Two Fantastic Debunkings of the "Evidence" for Jesus' Existence

First up, we have Acharya S. who provides an excellent examination of the supposed reference to Jesus in the writings of the Roman historian Suetonius. As she concludes at the end of her article:

The bottom line is that the Suetonian sentence in question apparently used originally the word "Chresto." Combined with the facts that Christ was never related as having been at Rome, that the phrase "Jesus the Good" evidently does not make its appearance until the third or late second century at the earliest, and that the word chrestos was used to describe gods and many other figures in antiquity, doubt is cast upon the value of this passage as providing any evidence that "Jesus of Nazareth" was an actual historical figure. 

Moreover, the fact that Suetonius called Chresto's followers "Judeans" or "Jews," rather than associating them with the "Christians" or, rather, "Chrestians" of his Nero passage, tends to negate the idea that the Roman historian is referring to a historical "Jesus Christ." The evidence points, rather, to another individual or, more likely, their tribal god, Yahweh the Good, as the "Chresto" of Suetonius's Jews.

In summary, the "Chrest" under whose instigation at Rome the Jews were revolting could have been their Lord God, called "the Good" or chrestos in the Old Testament. No "historical Jesus of Nazareth" would be needed, and we may retire this purported Suetonian "proof" from Christian apologetics.

Next up, Richard Carrier reports that blogger Matthew Ferguson has taken on the “42 sources within 150 years of his life argument” used by many Christian apologists (including scholars Mike Licona and Gary Habermas, and Zeitgeist debunkers Elliot Nesch, Keith “Truth” Thompson, and Chris White). Richard Carrier writes:

[Ferguson] ends up showing that in fact the number of references to a historical Jesus in that 150-year window that aren’t just in Christian propaganda is actually 3 or 4, and those all obviously derive their information from Christian propaganda and thus the number of independent references in this category is, well, zero. But more impressive is his demonstration that the number of literary references to Tiberius in that same window is not 10, but a whopping 43 (and thus Habermas and Licona missed a whole 33 literary references to Tiberius–if only we had that for Jesus from non-Christian sources!), and then of course, um, there’s all the other evidence: inscriptions, coins, busts, architecture, papyri. Which is kind of a big reason we are so sure there was a Tiberius.
 

The evidence for Tiberius, in other words, is vastly better, in every conceivable way, than the evidence for Jesus. So the 10/42 apologetic gets a decisive smackdown here. I’m sure we’ll never hear of it again.

The evidence for Jesus’ existence just continues to get smaller and smaller.

Richard Carrier: The Historicity of Jesus

Awsome talk on the historicity of Jesus by Dr. Richard Carrier.