I [Richard Carrier] still find many of his [Robert Price's] claims under-documented and his arguments often weaker than they need to be, his methods are often a cipher, and he is bad at clarifying (e.g. he will defend many different mutually-contradictory theories without explaining what we are supposed to conclude from the fact that he does that, such as whether he thinks they are all equally likely or whether he thinks some are more likely than others but that all are more likely than historicity, or if he even thinks they are more likely than historicity rather than only just as likely or unlikely but likely enough to be uncertain of historicity, etc.; and that’s not the only confusion Price will lead you into, it’s just the one that I often notice the most). He also never thoroughly defends a single coherent theory of Christian origins, making him a moving target for critics (contrast with Doherty, who does a generally good job at this, and is the best mythicist to read, although he still stubbornly falls short of dissertation quality argumentation and just complains when I say that rather than trying to work out how to formulate and document arguments in a way that would pass a fair peer review–such as learning to stop crowding strong arguments with weak arguments, and instead drop the weak arguments and just shore up the strong arguments).
Remember, this is the same Carrier who worked with John Loftus to get Price to write chapters for multiple books, and helped prepare those chapters for publication, after which he commended Price's material. For some examples of how horrible that material is, see pages 125-144 of The End Of Infidelity.
Remember, this is the same Carrier who worked with John Loftus to get Price to write chapters for multiple books, and helped prepare those chapters for publication, after which he commended Price's material. For some examples of how horrible that material is, see pages 125-144 of The End Of Infidelity.
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