Initial reactions to the debate between Richard Carrier and J.P. Holding are coming in. See
here. Note that you can click to see later pages at the bottom of the screen. What I've linked above just takes you to one page in the thread, at least for me. It may work differently for other people, depending on your settings.
Cameron English writes, "Throughout his presentation Carrier focused on the period 50-120 A.D." Christians should focus there as well, but they frequently don't, or they do it inadequately. Citing manuscripts from the second century and later isn’t enough. You need to go into detail about the implications of those manuscripts for the pre-manuscript era, in addition to addressing other evidence relevant to that pre-manuscript timeframe. I did so in a three-part series a couple of years ago. You can find links to that series, as well as other material we've written on the New Testament text, here.
ReplyDeleteJason, if you do a search on my blog for "Richard Carrier" or "JP Holding" you should find all of the relevant posts, and there are two so far.
ReplyDeleteJason,
ReplyDeleteYes, I noticed that apologists seem to focus on the wrong era. For instance (as I recall), Chris Price from Christian CADRE, in responding to Robert Price on the 1 Corinthian 15 interpolation hypothesis seemed to make arguments along the lines that a textual "conspiracy" of that kind was implausible and yet at the same time Chris cited a scholar who argued for other interpolations without manuscript evidence as though that scholar were credible and the "conspiracy" apparently logistically possible after all at an earlier era. So, yeah, I don't really understand what's going on there.