= new reply since forum marked as read
The mythecists make such a to-do about inconsistency, after all.
I'm a happy evildoer!
The mythicists' hypothesis doesn't disturb me: if studied in detail, with careful attention to historical context, that hypothesis might lead to useful insights into the culture that produced the Jesus stories, the ways in which the stories were transmitted, and the reasons for the popularity or unpopularity of the stories in different social subclasses -- regardless of their historical accuracy
Instead, Carrier simply wants to prove the stories untrue. But this seems a sophomoric agenda (whether or not one thinks the stories are "true"
because from their very beginning the stories have been a scandal against social norms and therefore automatically unappealing to many people
A homeless peasant, born into poverty and executed as a criminal, is the long-awaited Jewish messiah and even the Son of the one true G-d? Really? Now there's a narrative almost guaranteed to win friends among neither Jewish traditionalists or Roman sympathizers of the time!
And, by the way, he rose from the dead after being buried! Most people immediately recognize this story does not immediately commend itself as obviously true
The teachings, taken seriously, don't sound like winners either: love your neighbors enough to sell everything you have for the benefit of the poor, and then you can be persecuted and perhaps martyred as well! This lacks the obvious appeal (say) of sacrificing to Aphrodite in hopes of getting laid. And what about praying, Forgive us as we forgive others? That's actually a rather frightening prayer, if prayed sincerely
I didn't find the Bishop blog, to which Carrier responded, very interesting either -- in part because we have long known that the possibilities, for unveiling "Jesus" by purely historical methods, are very limited. Bishop's claim that each Gospel is an independent account seems false, since Matthew and Luke both appear to borrow some material from Mark. But Carrier's claim every Gospel is just an embellished redaction of Mark isn't really accurate itself: in both Matthew and Luke, there is some common part of the material not borrowed from Mark, sometimes so similar that a credible case can be made that both Matthew and Luke borrowed from another (now lost) source, traditionally called Q
A major weakness of Carrier's approach is that he knows what conclusion he wants to reach ("Jesus never existed" and confines himself to fairly tendentious argument solely to prove this unprovable point. One rather wishes he would instead ask himself some more interesting scholarly question and set out to research it in detail, in order to say something of use to more than the handful of ideologues crowd-funding his current "research"