Very last words should be changed to:
“…they themselves agree that no one has attempted to validate the methods and ended up validating them.”
If you read only books written by those on one side of a debate, while declining to read any books from the other side, you can eventually convince yourself of almost anything. Even moon landing hoaxers would look reasonable if you didn’t ever read any response to what they say. If you want to read professional scholars arguing for the historical reality of Jesus, there’s a plentiful crop of such books in addition to those I’ve already named.
Regarding the particular “tools of textual and historical criticism”, if we wanted to discuss those, I’d need more details about what we’re talking about. Historians of the ancient world must look at texts and make an assessment of what those texts are worth. The “tools of historical and textual criticism” that you refer to are, presumably, the same ones commonly employed in the study of ancient history, when judging the whether or not a particular text points towards authenticity. Do you intend to argue that the entire approach ancient historians take towards judging the authenticity of texts is in error? If so, do you have something to suggest with which to replace it?
Regarding the particular use of “criteria of embarrassment”, multiple attestations, and so forth, I’d agree that some of the more clumsy Christian apologists have been too eager to put them forth as slam dunks in a debate about gospel accuracy. However, the main point is this. Consider the gospels from any one individual perspective might point towards a general judgment of accuracy but would not prove anything. In considering those perspectives in total, though, the four gospels give us what is, by the standards of ancient historical writing, an excellent historical record of the life of Jesus.
In most cases, when today we have a historical biography of an ancient figure written within a century of that person’s life, we just accept the outline of that life as historical. For Spartacus, for instance, only a few paragraphs were written about him during the century after his life, yet I’m unaware of anyone seriously disputing that he existed. With Jesus things are different, not because of anything related to the strength of the evidence, but rather because certainly people such as Dr. Carrier and Earl Doherty have an axe to grind.
Right now I’m reading Ehrman’s book on the subject. When I can, I do hope to read the four last books on the list you provided–but note that they’re replying to Well’s arguments, which I am not talking about. Still, if they give their own positive arguments, that’d be worth reading.
As to works that discuss historical reconstruction of Jesus more generally, I’ve read tons of these books. I’ve been reading them since I was a kid. What I haven’t seen is books which turn a critical eye towards the methods they’re using. (See below for clarification.) I see these methods being assumed valid by everyone in the discussion, and for a long time, they seemed completely unobjectionable to me–until very recently when I’ve read some critiques of these methods which seem worth following up on. And what I don’t see anywhere among any of the NT scholars is any real, critical examination of the methods themselves. It’s very much “this is just how we work, and doesn’t it seem obvious that it would work?” in everything I can recall having read.
Those are the kinds of methods I’m talking about. They seem to be the purview of biblical scholarship particularly, rather than of historical scholarship more generally. For example, I am not finding the criterion of embarrasment being used in any other context. (But all I have access to is what’s easily available on the internet on the friendly side of firewalls so I could well be missing a lot.) It’s exactly these that I see used often in discussing the historical Jesus, and which are starting to seem inadequate to the task of either characterizing the historical Jesus or even establishing any confidence that there was such a person. However, as noted in my reply to Tokyoplayer, I am starting to see this particular line of argument as crucial, and it is not something I’ve yet been able to read and think enough about.
[link corrected in above quote]
Nope. Not scholarly at all. IP Address Whois:
http://whois.net/whois/earlychristianwritings.com
Further search shows this guy owns it:
Here’s what I found about him before hitting that last one:
Atheist Peter Kirby is Now a Catholic
He’s grinding an axe. I don’t know how reliable the stuff on the site ΔΣ linked is. Didn’t take time to look at it. I only checked out the provenance of the site. And I seriously doubt its neutrality or scholarly value, based on what I found.
His point is that is was not ‘formalized’ that late. By the 4th c., the canon was already agreed on to the point that they didn’t even argue about the canon at the Council of Nicaea. It had largely been agreed upon somewhere between 170 and the start of Nicaea. All they did at Nicaea was basically ask “Is everyone on the same page for the Canon? Yes? Yes. Motion passed.” Then went from there. It had been decided one or two hundred years earlier. And there’s no formal ‘decision’ you can point to on that one.
That’s OK, and it is TokyoBayer.
You are seriously overreaching in your OP and claims. It looks like you have accepted Carrier’s claims and want to run with it, but can’t answer detailed questions about them.
ITR both are getting the impression that you aren’t really familiar with the other side. You do say that you are studying more, so that will hopefully change.
There are a number of great resources for free on the web. I’m listening to podcasts by Phil Hartland and in some of the earlier series he covers the debate from the historians’ perspective.
I’m not particularly interested in “debates” which consist of just shouting at each other. I much prefer looking at evidence and seeing what sort of things we agree and what we don’t. This is why I wrote out your arguments to see if you can defend them.
When you say that you can’t debate until you’re established if Carrier’s claims are true, then the OP needs to be changed from a question of the historicity of Jesus to specifically concerning the claims. I don’t know how many people are familiar with his work, so you would need to provide much more information.
I said you are overreaching, because in order to make a case for your conclusion, then you need to be able to demonstrate these points, and you are not. You have presented these 17ish claims, but when they are spelled out, then you seem to be declining to defend them, but still wish to leave them on the table.
Can you see how it’s impossible to respond?
From the first line
(my emphasis) it quickly becomes obvious that Carrier is not attempting a critical review but adding his voice to the same side. He writes in such as why that appears like he is being objective, but is not. His appendix of the problems is a case in point. It is not particularly strong and if Carrier were truly objective then it should be much more detailed.
Then there are things such as this:
This is why it appears that Carrier has an axe to grind. Other biblical historian, even atheists, are careful to avoid throwing out garbage like this. I’m an atheist and am no friend to a lot of Christian practices and beliefs, but if one is going to argue on the historicity of Jesus then diatribes have no place.
This is not a balanced, critical review. The majority of scholars date Mark to about 70 CE.
There were too many of these issues and I cannot see Carrier as unbiased. That is not to say that his work is completely without the possibility of merit, but like anyone else’s, it needs to be carefully examined.
My point was perhaps a bit overly simplified, but this demonstrates the futility of a discussion when we are miles apart on Paul’s view of Jesus as well as the basic question of the nature of the gospels, and when you are not engaging in a discussion.
If you are attempting to show that Paul holds Christ to be mythical, then yes, he has very high Christology, but you are not making that case.
What about Mark? Are you saying that also has high Christology? Shouldn’tt your theory rest on Mark having much higher? Why is John so obviously so?
From what I’m studying, conservative scholars claim that we can only be reasonably certain that there was a historical Jesus, that he was crucified by the Romans and was most likely baptized by John the Baptizer. The various theories are interesting to read, though.
If you throw out the idea of “criterion of embarrassment” and just look at the history of the groups of early Jesus followers, it points to there being something which started the movement around the given time frame. If not Jesus, then who or what? What evidence points to your claims?
Your claim here appears to be overreaching to me. Can you tell me what detailed question about Carrier’s claim you have evidence that I “can’t answer”? What is that evidence? Can you explain to me, as well, what you mean by “run with” in the abovequoted, because to my knowledge, I have relayed some conclusions (not, strictly speaking, mere “claims” btw) from Carrier (and others), but have not drawn any further conclusions from them. To me, to “run with” a claim means to take it as given and draw conclusions from it. Is this not what it means to you to “run with” a claim?
I replied to you in a measured way, explaining to you that I thought you were right about something very central, and telling you that it is something I need to think more about. And you reply with faintly insulting language. (Not strictly insulting, but words like “overreach,” “want to run with,” “can’t answer,” were never designed to make anyone feel good.) This seems really inexplicable to me. Both the content of what your saying, and the mildly insulting tone, are uncalled for. Because what you said was factually incorrect, and how you said it was rhetorically unproductive.
I was trying to reply to you in a kind of friendship, giving a lot of ground, admitting where my view is weak. And you took that chance to, I guess, rub it in or something? I don’t know. Whatever.
I’ll post more as I learn more.
These are not “Carrier’s claims.” The criticisms I’m talking about, of the methods used by NT scholars, are discussed (and endorsed) by Carrier but come not only from him but from other scholars. In this post you said the “OP needs to be changed.” In a previous post, you said this point about the arguments against NT scholar’s methods should be a whole different thread. I can totally get on board with the latter suggestion. Why you’ve chosen to change the idea to travelling back in time and changing an OP from more than a week ago, I do not know.
This is incredible.
Read carefully.
I have come to think that most of the other stuff should be put on hold now until I know what to think about the methods used by NT scholars.
What is unclear about this? I told you this in my last post. How do you not understand this? I “decline to defend” the other claims because I’m stepping back from them until I get this more central issue decided. How can you friggin’ attack me over this? I’m doing nothing but being careful in exactly the way I would expect you want me to be careful. You guys won’t even let me agree with you.
Well shit. Now I’m not sure you know what “critical” means. Goddammit.
As I reply to your post, I can’t presently see exactly what you’re quoting, but I can guess, because I often wince at his axe-grindy language. It seems to come pretty well separated from his more careful language, though. I know how to navigate this. Anyway nothing he or anyone else writes is to be believed or not believed simply by sentiment or whatever. What I’m trying to do is see who’s got the reasoning right. And here I do want to note that in every exchange I see between Carrier and others, even ignoring the question of whose premises are correct, he almost invariably (and seriously, I’m not a fanboy or something here, it’s just that I’m trained in recognizing this) almost invariably is doing a better job at reasoning about those premises and their implications. This could be due to the fact that he and I both have training in Philosophy so I recognize patterns of rhetoric or something or whatever. But there it is–he’s always outreasoning his opponents. This doesn’t make him right of course but… it counts for a lot. In my book, the guy who can reason better generally has a better claim, assuming honesty, and in the absence of independent knowledge concerning the premises.
Where Carrier has said things I knew not to be mainstream, I have also noticed that he notes this very fact. Are you aware of a pattern that indicates otherwise?
You look for people who are unbiased? how do you get anything done, intellectually?
Here.
Replied to this in previous post.
Is this comment something you wanted me to reply to? My reply to this specific comment is that, since a myriad of potential narratives “can be shown to fit within the Greco-Roman period and world,” one narrative’s fit isn’t evidence for much.
In order to think that one hypothesis is implausible, it is not necessary for one to think, of some other hypothesis, that it is more plausible. One could think there are no plausible hypotheses available. Or that several hypotheses are plausible, none more so than others. So from a purely logical standpoint, your point here doesn’t work, if it is supposed to constitute an argument for the historical-Jesus hypothesis.
Having said that, it of course helps to have an alternative hypothesis ready to go. But as of the writing of the OP, I was more taken with how implausible the historical-Jesus hypothesis seemed to be, or well, if not “implausible” exactly, how un-forced by the evidence it seemed to be. I was not so much taken with the idea that there’s some other hypothesis that is more plausible or more forced-by-the-evidence.
Explicitly mythical beings are also born of women. Remember, what I was saying was that the available evidence was surprisingly open to either interpretation at least. In fact it seems in many places quite suggestive of the mythicist hypothesis. But even barring your buying that claim, the weaker claim that the evidence is easily amenable to either reading already renders the historicist hypothesis much less forced-by-evidence than people tend to think it is.
This, as I’ve mentioned many times in the thread, is definitely a weak point for the mythicist hypothesis.
The verse doesn’t say he “had a ministry to the Jews,” it says he “has become a servant to the Jews.” There’s nothing about this phrasing that pushes for a particularly earthly reading. If Paul had in mind a spiritual being, he’d be just as likely to say Jesus had a ministry to the Jews.
Again, it doesn’t say Jesus taught this in an earthly ministry, it simply characterizes this as a teaching “from the Lord” or words to that effect. If Paul were talking about a recent prophetic message, or a revelation he himself had received, he’d be just as likely to use exactly this phrasing.
See point 4 above.
Another sticking point I’ve acknowledged elsewhere in the thread, thought it really seems to me that these passages would be just as likely on the supposition that there was a special set of apostles referred to collectively as “the brothers of the Lord.” Pretty speculative though.
I discussed this with ITR above. For one thing, the wording of this is pretty strange if he’s handing down a tradition–if he’s handing down a tradition, then the tradition is that Jesus taught that Jesus initiated the Lord’s Supper.. What a weird thing to say. You’d think the tradition would just be that Jesus initiated the Lord’s Supper. What alternative reading can there be, though? Well, that Paul is telling us what Jesus told him about what happened in the spiritual realm where he was crucified. On that hypothesis, this wording seems quite likely. On the historicist hypothesis, it seems at least a little odd.
See above.
“Rulers of this age” is a strange phrase to use here. Paul knows there are many earthly rulers extant at the time of his writing, and only a few of them are supposed to have been involved in Jesus’s crucifixion. Not “the rulers of this age” but rather (it’s supposed to be) “The particular rulers in power at that time and place.” Moreover the word “age” while it can literally mean “time period” also connotes mysteries and cosmic realities. “Rulers of this age,” then, seems to refer to demonic powers. Many scholars think this, though they generally think what’s being said here is that the demonic “rulers of this age” put the Roman and/or Jewish leadership up to it.
Very controversial passage–many think it’s an interpolation, on evidence independent of the present dispute. But yeah, if this is actual Paul, it would be very difficult to explain on the myth hypothesis to say the least.
So on the myth hypothesis, of course, all of this phrasing in Paul’s letters is very unsurprising, since the “myth” is supposed to include all these elements.
You seem to have been cut off here.
It would also fit very easily within the context of a group whose chief source of inspiration is a set of unverifiable visions.
The only things I’m aware of that don’t suggest the spirit-Christ reading “plainly” is the stuff about David’s seed, and the stuff about the Brother of the Lord. That’s just a couple of things. Everything else (that’s universally agreed not to be an interpolation) reads just as nicely on either hypothesis, and in some cases more nicely on the myth hypothesis.
I still like this idea but as I said above, I’m not prepared to defend it right now.
Well, I’ve discussed it upthread. If you want to talk to me about it, reply to those posts I guess?
See below on the height of Paul’s Christology.
This is an argument agains the mythicist hypothesis, which is fair of course, but note that my overall point isn’t “mythicism is correct” but rather “mythicism is at least as plausible as historicism.” With that in mind, I do think I can argue that each element in the myth described by the mythers is in line with known elements in the air at the time. What elements are you saying are an exception?
I think you already said this above?
Not sure what this means.
Somewhere you said something about how high Paul’s Christology is. What do you mean by a “high Christology”? I see Paul in Philippians saying that even before Christ took on the form of a man, he was in the very form of God. That looks like about the highest kind of Christology you can get. Is that not what you mean by a high Christology?
Jesus doesn’t care so why should you?
I am still amazed so many people take what is written after so many translations and interpretations to be the word knowing full well that even going from one language to another it translates not so well sometimes.
The bible is not literal, it is not a historical document, it is not there to prove anything and to use it as such for anything else but a book that will tell you about morality is debasing it to personal use.
Above, where I said
, the last bit was supposed to say
Above, where I said
, the last bit was supposed to say
I believe that you’re misinterpreting what MacDonald is saying. (In this interests of full disclosure, I haven’t read The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, only reviews of it.) He argues that between Mark and the works of Homer, we have a case of mimesis (imitation). There are other examples in the ancient world, where an author would use words and phrases or plot structures from a well-known work. Herodotus, for instance, deliberately imitated certain elements from Homer in his work. The presence of mimesis does not prove that an entire work is fiction, nor even that the particular passages which contain the mimesis are fiction. As far as I know, MacDonald does not make the argument that they do.
Regarding the Mark-as-fiction hypothesis, counterarguments run as follows:
-
First, MacDonald argues that Mark intended the parallels to the Homeric epics to be obvious to his audience. Yet nobody ever noticed any such parallels, as far as we know, until MacDonald wrote his book 2,000 years later. If the parallels are intended to be clear and stand out, how did all intelligent readers from ancient to modern times fail to spot them?
-
The alleged parallels between Mark and Greek mythology are extremely weak, and MacDonald has to stretch quite a bit to justify them. One of his primary examples is the supposed similarity between the disciples of Jesus in Mark and Odysseus’ crew in The Odyssey. Both groups are supposedly portrayed favorably at the start and then failed to endure along with their master at the end. However, in Mark the portrayal of the disciples is more neutral at the start than favorable. Moreover, the eventual fate of the two groups s vastly different. Odysseus’ crew all end up dead because of their stupidity and lack of self-control. Given that, it’s easy to see why no one ever noted this supposed parallel before MacDonald created his thesis and became determined to ram everything into it.
-
In terms of genre, Mark is clearly presented as a historical biography and we have zero evidence that any person in antiquity ever read it any other way. There was a large genre of historical biography at the time, which all the gospels fit into very well, in terms of structure, length, language, and biographical approach. If the claim is that Mark is fiction, what genre does it fit into? Fiction certainly existed in 1st century Rome, and a few scattershot attempts have been made that the gospels fit into tragedy, comedy, allegory, and so forth. None of these are the least bit convincing, though, so the vast majority of scholarly work treats the gospels as biography.
Are there any 1st century Roman examples in which someone wrote fiction about a person living a short time before, interacting with real and well-know community members and famous individuals, in a realistically depicted setting? If not, are we being asked to believe that Mark invented an entirely new genre of fiction and that almost immediately afterwards everyone interpreted it as non-fiction, leaving behind not the slightest trace of the fact that it was intended as fiction? That seems impossibly far-fetched.
- Lastly, as noted, Mark and all the gospels are rich in details. Real places and buildings carefully named, real individuals encountered and carefully named, abundant physical detail about life in the villages and cities of Palestine, direct quotes in the original Aramaic, and so forth. To scholars, all of this points towards historical biography, since there’s no ancient world fiction that’s so rich in this sort of historical detail.
I’m not saying MacDonald thinks it’s fiction. I’m saying if its mimetic all the way through, this naturally casts doubt on its historicity. This isn’t just about MacDonald’s thesis. (He doesn’t really say much about the work prior to its chapter 8 anyway.) It’s also apparently true that many scholars think much, most or all (I’ve seen indications in all three directions) of Mark is a mimesis of various passages from the OT as well.
I’ve indicated several times that this is one of the thigns I’m least confident about. I still like the idea, it has a basic plausibility to me (both the mimesis thesis and the inference to fictionality) but none of this is evidence for ahistoricity. At best it goes the other way–if ahistoricity is true, it’d make sense if Mark turned out to be intentional fiction.
Again: I am not strongly committed to this claim. But to say something about your other points
We don’t know that all intelligent readers from ancient to modern times failed to spot them. We know very little about what any intelligent readers thought. And fwiw elsewhere Macdonald has argued (contrary to what he says in this book) that Luke may in fact have known what was up, since there’s at least one Lucan pericope that imitates a Homeric passage. Of course, to be fair, even if the Lucan passage in question is Homeric mimesis, this doesn’t mean he did it because Mark did it. He may have done it on his own.
I have only read passages from the book, as well as reviews of it. What I gather is that in each case he outlines several direct parallels along with a single reverse parallel.
All of this seems to assume that every ancient work has a form determined completely by genre, and that authors did not do anything creative in this respect. While I do know from past studies that form (determined by genre) is thought of as extremely important by ancient authors, I don’t know that authors showed no creativity in this respect. I have the opposite impression. But it’s just that, an impression. This’d have to be something to follow up on. (But obviously forms evolved and genres were created so things can’t be as set in stone as all that, as almost a purely logical point.)
True enough.
It’s never gone through any translations, except for ‘Matthew’, which was (probably) originally written in Aramaic, then translated to Koine Greek. It was all (other than Matthew) originally written in Koine, and we have good copies, going back to about the 3rd or 4th c. for the entire NT canon in that language. The only real questions come from comparing those early copies, deciding what was added by the people transcribing them, and what was the original that they were transcribing. And you can buy a pretty good reproduction (as far as modern bible scholars are able to determine) of the originals, for under 20 bucks. You can probably google up a copy on the web, if you’re so inclined. Then all you have to do is learn to read the damn language, and you (yes, you too) can read it in the original. The sentence I quoted from you post is utter, ignorant bullshit.
Trolol, Jesus likely spoke Aramaic, and as you pointed out the NT was written in Greek. Thus, translation occurred from the onset.
F-F-F-Fail.
I think Cheshire Human is assuming (and I’ve assumed this as well) that MaltLiquor is claiming the text of the NT, as a whole, has gone through multiple translations since it was first put down on paper. That claim is straightforwardly false.
I finished Ehrman’s book Did Jesus Exist last night. Now I’m going to go back through and post about the points he makes, one point per post. (Not all at once–over the next few days.) Not every single little point from the book, but the big important ones, both convincing and not convincing.
After this, I hope to read Van Voorst’s Jesus Outside the New Testament as people on both sides of the debate seem to acknowledge it as a must-read for this topic.
First point I’ll write about is fairly minor but it gets to an important point about the logic of the discussion.
Ehrman remarks that
He quotes Robert Price as an example of this: “The burden of proof would seem to belong with those who believe there was a historical man named Jesus.”
Ehrman objects to the idea that ahistoricism is the default position:
Burden of proof is determined by context. I incur a burden of proof whenever I want to convince somebody of something. If I claim that there is a sun, and someone asks me to prove it, then if I don’t care to convince them, then I indeed don’t have a burden to prove it. But if I do care to convince them, then I do have a burden to prove it. The question of whether historicists have the burden of proof can’t be answered just by pointing out that most people think historicism is obvious. Does Ehrman want to convince anyone that Jesus exists? Then he has a burden to prove that Jesus exists. (That is—if anyone’s actually questioning the claim. But of course, he is speaking to an audience that does question the claim.)
“Just look at the sky during the day!” does not absolve me from the burden of proving that the sun exists—rather, it is me taking on that burden and fulfilling it. Similarly, “Just look at what all the experts and ancient texts assume!” doesn’t absolve Ehrman from the burden of proving that Jesus exists. Rather, it is in fact the very act of him taking on that burden and fulfilling it.
This is a small point but it is part of a pattern in which it seems to me that Ehrman is either not careful in his wording, or else is downright confused, about the logic of the discussion over ahistoricism. I point this out not as an intended crushing insight, but rather, because there is a significant degree to which a pattern of behavior like that legitimately invites the reader to have less and less confidence in the writer’s claims. If Ehrman is this sloppy or confused about much else, then even when I find myself confronted by claims I can’t otherwise evaluate (due to his expertise and my lack of it, for example), I have less of a reason to accept his claim than I might have otherwise.
Another reason I point it out is to say something about the exact claim I’ve been trying to defend and its place in the logic of the discussion. My claim isn’t “Jesus didn’t exist.” My claim is “The hypothesis that Jesus didn’t exist is at least as plausible as the hypothesis that Jesus did exist.” If that claim is correct, then the most rational thing to do is simply to withhold judgment and realize we simply don’t know whether Jesus existed or not. (That is what it means to “start to stop thinking Jesus existed” per the title of the OP. It is not to think that Jesus didn’t exist, it’s just to lack a belief that Jesus did exist.)
So how does this interact with questions of burden of proof? Well, if my claim is that plausibility[hypothesis A] >= plausibility[hypothesis B], and if my audience thinks that plausibility[hypothesis B] is pretty high, then there are a few things that I predict would happen in the subsequent rational discussion. I would try to show (if anyone asks and I care to convince them) that hypothesis A has plausibility of degree X for some X. And then, someone else would try to show that a hypothesis B has plausibility of degree Y, where Y > X. And then, if I care to convince them of my own claim about the plausibility of the hypotheses, I will now have a burden of proof to show that their argument that plausibility[hypothesis B]=Y fails. (And fails in a way that shows that plausibility[hypothesis B] turns out to be less than Y.)
So then, I have two burdens, on this way of framing it: To give a degree of plausibility to the hypothesis that Jesus didn’t exist (or some hypothesis that implies this), and to show that arguments for the plausibility of Jesus’s existence fail in some way.
Meanwhile, Ehrman (or any other interlocutor) would have a similar pair of burdens on this way of framing the discussion: to give a degree of plausibility to the hypothesis that Jesus existed, and to show that arguments for the plausibility of Jesus’s non-existence fail in some way.
Everybody’s got a burden, the way I see it, because everybody’s got a claim or two they’re trying to convince others of. And the claims I see people having a burden to prove are as given just above.
Of course there’s also this possibility: That it turns out that the plausibility of the claim that Jesus existed is, in itself, very low. In such a case, my version of the historicist claim (that nonexistence is as plausible as existence) “wins”—since if existence is implausible, nonexistence is automatically at least as plausible!
So then, it should be remembered that if Ehrman’s (or anyone else’s) arguments for Jesus’s existence turn out not to be such as to rationally give credence to the hypothesis that Jesus existed, then no further positive argument for any competing hypothesis needs to be made. The historicists have failed to give a reason to believe “Jesus existed,” and if I don’t have a good reason to believe “Jesus existed” then, for all I know, Jesus didn’t exist. (Indeed, we may as well say he didn’t exist. If all of our evidence that X occurred turns out to have been caused by something other than X, then we no longer have good evidence that X occurred, and while this doesn’t mean X didn’t occur, it does mean that even if X did occur this has no relevance to any information we’re currently in possession of. We may as well say it didn’t occur, for all practical purposes.)
I should note that Ehrman does go on to qualify what he said above, as follows:
Well, yeah. That is indeed the point, basically. But Ehrman is confused if he thinks, as he seems to be saying here, that he’s in some way generously interpreting Price’s claim about burden of proof and condescending to go ahead and play Price’s game. It’s no significant act of “generosity” to simply do what is logically required! It’s not so awesome that Ehrman is at least a little confused about this.
Given that an overwhelming number of people believe that Jesus existed, why should he wish to prove a point?
I don’t find your effort to turn the position on its head persuasive.
(And before some poster decides to challenge me to “prove” my position, I will note that I have no interest in persuading anyone that Jesus existed. If someone wishes to persuade me of the contrary, let him show me his evidence.)