3 thoughts on “Jesus and Mo Wednesday

  1. steve oberski

    I attended the Richard Carrier talk (Proving History – Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus) hosted by CFI Toronto last night and Mr. Carrier explained exactly why one should ignore historical theories put forth by crackpots.

    He explicitly addressed this theory and had much to say about the misuse of the historian Flavius Josephus over the ages.

    He claims (in a probabilistic sense) that like Islam and Mormonism, christianity is yet another in a series of mystery cults that were especially popular in the Mediterranean area during that period.

    Reply
    1. Tim Underwood

      I’m aware of Carrier’s objections to this ‘Gospel’ parallelism to ‘War of the Jews’. I can follow along with the parallelisms that obviously do exist. I can’t follow along with Carrier’s insistence that they don’t exist.

      In the realm of Humanism debates, historical or poetic, the rancour is surprisingly vicious at times.

      It seems that Carrier, and those aligned with him, have this unshakeable idea that marketplace supported religions dominated in these early times. I think it is much more probable that religions at this time were strictly controlled by authority.

      As for statistics and probability calculations, that old British wartime leader famously said, “there are lies, damned lies and even worse, there are statistics”. He was probably in a tight spot at the time.

      Reply

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