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Richard Carrier, PhD, is a philosopher and historian of antiquity, specializing in contemporary philosophy of naturalism and Greco-Roman philosophy, science, and religion, including the origins of Christianity. He is the author of numerous books, including Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense mehr anzeigen of Metaphysical Naturalism and On the Historicity of Jesus. For more about Dr. Carrier and his work see www.richardcarrier.info. weniger anzeigen
Bildnachweis: Credit: Richard Carrier

Werke von Richard Carrier

Zugehörige Werke

The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (2010) — Mitwirkender — 174 Exemplare
The End of Christianity (2011) — Mitwirkender — 63 Exemplare
The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond The Grave (2005) — Mitwirkender — 55 Exemplare
Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth (2013) — Mitwirkender — 27 Exemplare

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Wissenswertes

Gebräuchlichste Namensform
Carrier, Richard
Rechtmäßiger Name
Carrier, Richard Cevantis
Andere Namen
Carrier, Richard C.
Geburtstag
1969-12-01
Geschlecht
male
Nationalität
USA
Ausbildung
Columbia University (PhD|Ancient History|2008)
University of California, Berkeley
Berufe
historian
author
Organisationen
Internet Infidels
Kurzbiographie
Richard Carrier, Ph. D., historian, philosopher, and author.  Dr. Carrier specializes in the religious and intellectual history of Greece and Rome and the modern philosophy of naturalism and Atheism.[adapted from Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth (2013)]

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A massive detailed scholarly work. You cannot read this and fail to learn scores or hundreds of things about the history-sociology-theology of antiquity. The author’s use of Bayes Theorem did not initially seem problematic to me, and I supposed that the attempt to summarize all of his arguments was worthwhile (when all is said and done, he favors that the odds that an historical Jesus existed is less than 1 in 12,000), but the arbitrariness of the prior probabilities, and the peculiarity of some of his arguments, e.g. comparing the probability that an historical person meets the Rank-Raglan hero type criteria with the probability that a non-historical person does, sometimes made the effort seem like window dressing. The author’s use of Bayes Theorem has been widely attacked, but there are obviously a lot of opponents with strong feelings to any non-religious analytical discussion of Jesus, to say the least, and after reading their objections on the Internet, I’m confident that at least some of them don’t know what they are talking about. (The clearest discussion that I’ve found so far is here: https://irrco.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/a-mathematical-review-of-proving-history-...). Nevertheless, I agree with the author anyway, and I thought that his book was fascinating.
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Additional comment: If you are looking for the probability of event B and it is conditioned on many events A, then all of the events A have to be pairwise disjoint events, i.e. they make up a single probability space altogether. That this is true in Carrier’s book is not clear to me.
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Additional additional comment: You might like this video of the author discussing this book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTllC7TbM8M.
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markm2315 | 5 weitere Rezensionen | Jul 1, 2023 |
This dense and meticulously reasoned argument explains why the author recommends that Bayes’ Theorem be the basic technique for the analysis of hypotheses in history, both for our general education and in preparation for his second volume, On the Historicity of Jesus. I’m no expert, and I mostly used Bayes’ Theorem for demonstrations of medical diagnostic problems about 30 years ago, and then gradually more and more as a replacement of more common frequentist type statistics in everyday work as it became easier to do with computer software and better understood. From my point of view, so distant from Professor Carrier, this method acts as a way to check and compare your data, your assumptions, and your hypotheses, but, frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine thinking this way ab initio. Perhaps it comes with practice. Also, I must admit that regardless of the statistical analysis used, many of the problems that I had or was consulted about in my career mostly benefited in a similar way, i.e. the statistics confirmed why the researchers were correct in their assumptions and hypotheses, either graphically or numerically, but weren’t really necessary for them to know this initially. The great value of these techniques was always in those uncommon cases where the findings could be shown to be counter-intuitive. The classic Bayesian example that most doctors have seen, but probably never really understand, is looking for a rare disease with a sensitive test. The great majority of positive tests are false positives. I think that all of these factors are evident in Carrier’s discussion. I especially liked the flowchart in the appendix that shows the non-numerical use of Bayes’ theorem for the analysis of historical hypotheses.… (mehr)
 
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markm2315 | 1 weitere Rezension | Jul 1, 2023 |
I am a huge fan of Richard Carrier and of this book, but I have a different, albeit amateur, take on the trickiest evidence mythicists have to negotiate, viz. "James, the Lord's brother" (Gal. 1:19), "born/made of woman, born/made under the law" (Gal. 4:4), and "from the seed of David" (Rom. 1:3). Instead of relying on difficult interpretations of these phrases, I would suggest interpolation. I know it is easy to call interpolation on any phrase one doesn't like, and Carrier himself does not like to do it without excellent evidence because it lowers the probability of his theory (relying as it does on unproven tampering with the text). However, I am confident enough in the correctness of mythicism on other grounds that these phrases stand out from Paul's letters as obvious candidates for forgery.

For the following specific textual grounds for arguing interpolation I rely on Peter Kirby's work here: http://peterkirby.com/marcions-shorter-readings-of-paul.html

"James, the Lord's brother" is contained in a passage in Galatians about Paul's supposed first visit to Jerusalem which is suspect in its entirety: it was not in Marcion's text, nor I suspect in Irenaeus'. Of course Catholics accused Marcion of deleting them, but it is no less likely that they added them in. If this line were absent, the figure of James, the human brother of a human Jesus of Nazareth, could still have been invented through a process of imaginative textual reconciliation: in Acts (as Carrier discusses) there is a problem where one James is killed and then another James carries on as the leader of the Church: combine this unidentified James with the brother James named in Mark's Gospel and Paul's remark at 1 Cor 9:5 about "the Lord's brothers", and (voila!) one has engineered a James, human brother of Jesus, who is a Church leader, then written into Gal. 1. Giving Jesus a human brother would also be an anti-Marcionite statement, to interpolate, since Marcion argued Jesus had no human birth (he descended in adult form). This interpolation solution would allow brother to hold its meaning of human siblinghood, while still not bolstering the case for the historical Jesus. This would also explain why, if this is a brother in the human sense, the sentence does not distinguish this kind of brother from the spiritual kind that Paul wrote about much more often: it wasn't Paul writing.

The phrase "born/made of woman, born/made under the law" was not in Marcion's text of Galatians. Marcion did not believe either of these things about Jesus, but they make sense as something Catholics might have interpolated to use against Marcionites.

Nor was "from the seed of David" in Marcion's text of Romans. Marcion believed Jesus had no human birth so dismissing this phrase would spare us having to follow Carrier's argument about sperm implantation.

I know Carrier will not make this argument, and there will be some who are loath to accept or to rely on interpolation arguments. Personally, from my reading I have very little confidence in the faithful transmission of the texts: Catholics were clearly willing to forge documents to bolster their theological positions - hence why several letters attributed to Paul are now regarded as forgeries. I have no problem believing they would have inserted anti-Marcionite interpolations. We cannot prove them interpolations, but readers who baulk at Carrier's most difficult arguments might like to consider this alternative way around his most problematic evidence.

Edit: it should also be noted that these 3 verses are not in DeBuhn's reconstructions of Marcion's texts: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1633263891

Edit: the blog Vridar mentions that neither Justin Martyr nor Tertullian seems to be aware of a James, brother of Jesus, who is a leader of the Christians.

Thanks for reading.
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fji65hj7 | 5 weitere Rezensionen | May 14, 2023 |
Richard Carrier attempts to do a lot with this book, which is namely to describe and defend his entire worldview: metaphysical naturalism. As such, he succeeds at the former and fails somewhat in the latter. Do to the sheer amount of subjects he covers, there were bound to be mistakes and his last two essays, natural beauty and natural politics, more rooted in opinion than science, are definitely his weakest points. Instead of painting a bibliography at the end of the book, he puts each reference at the end of its pertinent section, at times even listing opposing voices to his own. As such, this is also a good starting point to begin an investigation into many subjects.… (mehr)
 
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illmunkeys | 1 weitere Rezension | Apr 22, 2021 |

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