Except that's not the case. We do have extensive records from the Romans, and we also know enough about the period to form some opinions about Paul. For example, odds are, (at least according to Bart Ehrman's book "Forged") that Paul would have been an unlettered peasant, who might have been able to dictate letters, but certainly could never have written any. This doesn't mean that there wasn't a person named Paul, but it certainly means that the odds of us finding anything actually written by him are nil. Anything which we could find would have been dictated by him. If it originated with such an individual as Paul at all. Scholars do say that some of the writings attributed to Paul are actually written by the same person, but that doesn't mean that they were dictated by the person we think of as Paul. In his book "Forged," Bart Ehrman goes to great lengths (really, too much, IMHO) to talk about how certain elements in the writings of Paul were put there by forgers in order to give the appearance that they were written by Paul (discussions about him making his mark on the document or asking for someone to return his cloak, for example). Yet, in this interview with Seth Andrews, when asked about how we can know that Jesus was a real person, Ehrman cites references in Paul's writings to Paul meeting Peter and James. Yet Ehrman gives no reason why we should find those references any more credible than Paul's discussion of his "mark" or asking for someone to return his cloak. I also feel the need to mention that Ehrman mentions Josephus' mention of Christianity in his writings as proof that Jesus existed. Now, maybe it sounds different in the original, but in the translation, I read of those writings, the part about Christianity stuck out at me as being out of place as would a reference to a President Trump would in the original Star Wars in 1977. And Josephus is not a reliable narrator. His story about how he survived a Roman siege of his city is not credible. The man clearly sold his city out to the Romans and contrived a story to cover up the fact. And here we get to a broader issue: If someone is taking Nixey to task over such a mundane issue as the use of the word "flaying," is it necessarily credible that when they attack her over a larger issue? Seriously, let's shift this to the modern sphere: Do you take someone who attacks Obama over wearing a tan suit with the same vitriol as they do his policy on Iran as being credible? If Nixey's writings on Christianity as a whole are so awful, why mention her use of "flaying"? Nixey gives extensive footnotes and citations for her references on every page. Now, perhaps she is like dinner, in that she does this in complete ignorance of what those sources actually say. Or perhaps she is like Col. John S. Mosby of the Confederacy, in that she gives a unique, if flawed, perspective of events that happened. I haven't read enough of the works she cites to know for sure, but I have read enough about that period to know that common perceptions of it are wrong.
Fuck me, you just opened yourself up for trouble from Mr Genius O’Neill. Watch as he skilfully reminds you what ignorant filth you are.
Care to elaborate further? I have read the arguments that Paul didn't write the letters that bear his name (any of them, not even the five accepted as such) based mainly on textual evidence. But if you disregard those and presumably Acts as well, what is there left to go on to make such a surmise? Literacy was not exactly uncommon.
I will simply refer you to Ehrman's book. Ehrman makes the claim that if Paul was able to read (not a given), he wouldn't necessarily be able to write (Ehrman's argument is that today we are taught to do both, but that this wasn't always the case). Is Ehrman wrong? Maybe. I don't know. But plenty of people (like Mike Pence) are willing to bet the survival of our species upon a particular interpretation of such things. That ought to have you shitting your pants.
Or "he" (i.e. me) cares enough about history to, occasionally, interact with people on the internet to share 35+ years of reading and research on a period that has been recently misrepresented in a popular but badly skewed book. Yes, try that. So I'm somehow responsible for ... your ignorance? It's somehow naughty of me to write at length on things you know nothing much about because you can't determine if I'm right? Pardon? And blogs can also contain true info and accepted consensus ideas. Especially ones that have been publically endorsed by leading historians and best-selling history writers. Like, you know, mine. So why are you commenting at all? And "trolling for blog hits"? Do you really think I'm getting a lot of blog hits from this board? Could it possibly be that my real motivation is (brace yourself!) I actually care about the accurate representation of history? *chuckle* Oh, okay.
Wow. Ummm, no it's not "semantics" - you might want to look up what that word means. I have no idea what search engine my The Wordpress blog platform uses to track hits, but it is not "semantics" to say *I* didn't use Google to come across this board. It's fact. Your pathetic argument above, on the other hand, is some of the most inarticulate and childishly pedantic waffle I've seen in years.
Don't get annoyed with me because you have one trick and you are done. Some of us can pontificate on more than one area of useless trivia Mr one trick.
And this is where you reveal yourself as a joke. Every post you have signed off with has the pompous pretention that you’re just here to talk about the subject matter. But all @Tererun had to do was question your approach and you posted a massive defence while ignoring those engaging your subject matter. This may surprise you, but most on this forum are either educated or professional people. Yes, we don’t perhaps know as much as you on the subjects Nixey or other commentators covered, but that doesn’t grant you the right to act like an egomaniac and treat us like plebs.
This is why you are inferior to Nixey. You may be more factually correct, but I dare you to point to one internet source where she is as vindictive and nasty as you. Provide the links, because right now you’re reinforcing what I said above. You’re a very insecure person who probably can’t even handle being question over his choice of sandwich filling:
That's because Ehrman knows a few things you don't - hardly surprising, given that he is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one of the world's leading experts on critical textual analysis of the NT who literally wrote the textbook on the subject, whereas you are a guy on the internet who gets very confused about things. What Ehrman is talking about in Forged is pseudepigraphica - the phenomenon in ancient literature whereby later anonymous authors give their work credibility by pretending it is actually by an earlier esteemed authority. So he is talking about how we know some of the works that claim to be or were later claimed to be by Paul, actually are not. But this only makes sense if there already was a corpus of actual works by Paul in circulation - otherwise there would be no established authority from those works for the later pseudepigraphical writers to draw on to lend credence to their texts. And pretty much all scholars agree that at least seven of the canonical epistles in the NT attributed to Paul almost certainly are by him - namely First Thessalonians, Philippians, Philemon, First Corinthians, Galatians, Second Corinthians and Romans. So if you then look at the Pauline material that Ehrman refers to to substantiate the idea that Jesus most likely existed, both in that interview and elsewhere, you'll find it all comes from one of those seven texts. So you may not understand how those texts differ from the ones he was talking about in Forged, but the Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill does. As does anyone else who actually has a solid grasp of this subject. Because, again, the leading expert you're referring to knows things that you don't. For example, he's well aware of the 150+ years of scholarly debate over the first reference to Jesus in Josephus in Antiquities XVIII.63-64 and the scholarly consensus of current Josephan scholars that, while it contains some later Christian scribal additions (e.g. "He was the Messiah"), it also contains distinctive elements which are found elsewhere in Josephus' writing but yet are not found in early Christian mentions of Jesus. This is why the majority view is that the passage is partially authentic. It's only the Christian additions that make this passage distinctive - remove them and it reads precisely like what we would expect from Josephus for a fairly minor figure like Jesus. Then, of course, there is the second reference to Jesus in Josephus, which is found in Antiquities XX.200 and which basically all Josephan scholars accept as authentic. That may make Josephus unreliable about himself and particularly about his motives and actions in the Jewish War, but it's pretty absurd to say this somehow therefore makes him unreliable about everything. No historians who uses Josephus says anything so silly. This again? I mentioned her perpetuation of Gibbon's erroneous interpretation that Hypatia was flayed alive as one of several examples of how Nixey's biases mean she always uses the interpretation that is the most lurid and exaggerated. It is an example used to support a broader argument not the argument itself, and it's one of several. To just pick on her for that would indeed be petty. Just as you isolating that example and pretending it's a major point on its own in my arguments is petty. Please stop doing that - it doesn't do you any favours. Yes, she does. And those of us who know the works she cites or who bother to follow them up know that this is part of the problem. Over and over again her endnotes don't actually support what she is claiming in her main text. I've already given you the example of her citation of Frend on the number of Christians killed in the third century persecutions, where her footnote was to Frend talking about something else entirely. She also repeatedly cites historians (Dzielska, Watts and others) who actually believe the opposite of what she is saying. But, of course, most people don't know the works she's referring to and few would bother to follow up her references. I do know most of these works and I do check things. Neither - see above. Or she gives citations for things which are not controversial and then draws unlikely or flat out erroneous conclusions from them. Or she cites legitimately, but doesn't mention counter examples that outweigh the ones she's carefully cherry picked because they suit her argument whereas the others don't. I have read almost all of the works she cites, which is why I can see her fancy footwork. And I don't care at all about "common perceptions" of this period - it's the expert opinions that run counter to Nixey's lurid neo-Gibbonian polemic.
Well to be fair he knows his subject so I give him that (or so we think he knows ir). But he’s fallen into the trap of assuming we’re all plebs. In fact, I challenge @TimONeill to debate the merits of the case I won in the House of Lords/Supreme Court, along with the multiple cases I’ve had in the Court of Appeal since. See, we can all be Billy Big Bollocks, but chief Timothy here denigrates the likes of Carl Sagan. Richard Dawkins and Neil DeGrass Tyson and calls them average. Whether there is merit in that claim or not, this clown can’t publish a book or get himself heard. Hmm, why do you suppose that might me?
I'm not sure what this "one trick" you keep referring to is. Knowing what the hell I'm talking about, perhaps? The only "one trick ponies" I see here are you, El Chup and a couple of other members of a rather dim-witted peanut gallery whose only response to anything they can't actually tackle is to go "TL/DR" or make drive-by blurts about "you're pompous and rude and we're real smart, so there". I think I'll ignore you from now on unless you actually have anything of substance to say about history. Feel free to make your childish "hur hur - what an egghead" comments to each other though, if that makes you feel good.
Did you not link here to your Reddit posts under the name “smileman” or similar and claim in those posts that these people were worthless but for their actual research? Also, you claimed you don’t cherry pick. Why did you avoid the challenge to debate some of my cases with me and cherry pick bits of my post?
Why it's rather.....shallow and pedantic of him, isn't it? I knew we'd get to the irony portion of the "'look at me, I'm a troll!' show", in short order.
(i) I am not /u/smileyman - I post on Reddit as /u/TimONeill and post pretty much everywhere under my own name and avoid pseudonyms. (ii) No-one on that Reddit thread called Sagan, Dawkins or Tyson "average", which was your claim. (iii) I have never and would never call any of those men "average", but you said I did. So, again, quote me quote me calling them "average". Or admit you were wrong. I said I don't cherry pick the sources and scholars I use in my historical articles. And I have no idea what "challenge" you're talking about or what "cases" you're referring to.
I'll settle for being a peanut gallery, but it really gets my rocks off when a smart-troll singles me out to be "a non-entity".
Two words: Gish gallop. You know, in pre-Trump America that might have been seen as a viable argument, but not today. Where were you when Dan Brown started spewing his nuttery? (Not to mention the authors of the books which inspired him.) Yet, you're the only one of her critics who've bothered to show up here. Why is that? So, who are the others who fall into that category? And again, why did you pick this particular armpit of the web to respond to? And you know, I can't help but notice that Nixey was interviewed by the BBC. Granted, not the perfect source of information, but certainly far better than this particular armpit of the web. Of course you don't. Which leads me to wonder why you even bothered to mention her "misuse" of the term "flaying" to begin with. Surely, if your premise is correct, such an error is so minor as to be ignored. Yet you don't. Why is that? Is it because you hope that by nibbling away at minor points you hope to undermine her larger arguments? If her larger arguments are so wrong, then why devote any attention to the word at all? That's sort of like saying Trump has no business being President because he has small hands, rather than talking about any of a nearly infinite number of reasons why he shouldn't be President. And yet, you have no response to it. Other than to claim it is confused. Meanwhile, your fellow Aussie, @Bailey, has provided a response to it. Curious that. Stop right there. You're saying that "she makes very few outright errors of fact." Okay, how am I supposed to interpret this statement? Because on the surface, it seems to me that you're saying she is largely correct. If this is the case, then why object to any mistakes that she does make? You don't know dick about me, but I have done some very deep dives on specific parts of American history. I know what it is like to scour vast amounts of works in hopes of finding just a few words which clarify an important point. I also know what it's like to not be able to find those words. They don't exist because the people in a given period of time didn't think that they were worth putting down. After all, there is much that all of us do on a daily basis which seems unimportant, yet to someone living hundreds, if not thousands of years, from now, would consider to be vitally interesting. Your breakfast, for example, would probably not be of note to you, but to someone in the future, knowing what the average Aussie had for breakfast on any given day might be more interesting than your thoughts on a particular political issue of the moment. Holy shitballs, man! That sounds just like people who accept the Bible as fact while dismissing all kinds of scientific evidence! So you say. Here's my problem with this: I'm old enough to remember when credible scholarship was that Moses was inspired by a real person. Today, of course, we know that it's all bullshit. You forgot the most important point: Ain't nobody willing to kill somebody over their interpretation over Nixey's book. Can't say the same about the Bible. Please, elaborate. It could be because he failed to make a convincing argument (you know, like how you view Nixey), or it could be because of what's known as the Backfire effect. Yet he does. Again, in the interview he gave on Reasonable Doubts, he assumed that Jesus was taken down from the cross and buried in a tomb, with only the events in the NT involving Jesus after the crucifixion as being fabricated, only to discover that, no, in fact, if you were crucified by the Romans, it was utterly impossible for you to be buried. Roman law dictated that anyone who was crucified was to have their body remain on the cross until it rotted away. Actually, it does. You make the claim, you're required to provide evidence to back it up. You want to claim that Jesus was real because people wrote books about him? Okay, then I'd like to claim that James Bond was real, because there's been lots of books written about him. (And yes, I do know that Ian Fleming picked the name for his particular character from the author of a book about birds. I also know that Fleming based his books on some of the things he did in his life. None of that means that there was a person who existed by the name of James Bond, as described by popular culture.) Of course you don't, because it's easier to say that than to address the issues I've raised. Really, if you're willing to go after Nixey for her use of "flayed," then nothing I've said should be beneath your efforts. So, how do you feel about King Arthur? You think he was real? Or that maybe it's all bullshit? Or, perhaps, you think that there was, kinda sorta, a king who inspired the legends of Arthur, but if anyone were to point to a particular king from many centuries ago as the sole inspiration for Arthur they'd be full of shit? Let me tell you a bit of a story. When I was a depressed kid, I discovered The Adventures of Ulysses by Bernard Evslin. What an eye-opening book that was. Suddenly, the whole world made sense to me. Any time I felt suicidal (which was a lot), I went back to that book, and I instantly felt better. As I got older, I sought out the writings of Homer, to better understand Odysseus. Now I know that while the Trojan War may have happened, that doesn't mean that Odysseus was a real person. It doesn't matter to me, the myths about him give me great comfort in my darkest hours. Why? Because he was so supremely clever. Maybe he was real. Certainly, we know there was a city where legend tells us Troy existed, but that doesn't mean any of the folks in Homer's works actually lived. Do we? I mean there's lots of superhero comic books which talk about 9/11, so are we to assume that because we know 9/11 happened that superheroes are also real? (We both know the answer to this, so let's just agree that it isn't a good argument on your part.) I will refer you to TW Doane's work Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions. Doane, I should point out, believes that there actually was a historical figure we can point to known as Jesus. See my earlier comments on him. I mean seriously, if you're going to believe him when he says that he was going to raise an army against the Romans from cities which were known to have been completely sacked by the Romans, you're smoking some serious crack. Please, point to me where I said that Antigonus founded a sect. If I did so, I was in error. I believe that I said that many of the elements of his life more closely resembled that of the Jesus than anyone else. I could well be wrong on this. I am basing this one what Robert M. Price says about it, along with some of the things that Bart Ehrman says. I mean, while Price thinks that there wasn't any particular person one could point to as Jesus, both he and Bart Ehrman agree that the leader who founded the sect at Qumran (you know, the people who left the writings popularly known as the Nag Hammadi library) was a shadowy figure largely unknown to us today. Is this wrong?
IIRC Nag Hammadi is in Egypt and the findings there date much later to those at Qumran. They're from different groups.
Don't insult my intelligence by demanding the literal word. You comments are clear. Now, are you going to have the bollocks to debate my field of specialism or not? EDIT. For the record, my best achievement is this case. I expect not just you, but those defending you like @k and @RickDeckard , to tell me you should be able to discussing the landmark impact on refugee law this case had. You know, explain it to me with reference to academic and legal censuses and the practical impact.
What? You claimed my review was "shallow". I asked how a extensive, detailed, carefully referenced critique that covers all of her key arguments, has been praised and endorsed by leading historians and even made required reading on a university course could be "shallow". So how on earth are your "two words" a response to that question? Try again - how exactly is my critique "shallow"? This also makes no sense as a response to what I said. I was writing this website debunking both in detail. Why are you asking me to explain the thing I just explained to you? Jesus Mythicists. Scientists who think they understand the history of science simply because they are scientists and yet who perpetuate nineteenth century myths. Anti-religion atheists whose grasp of history didn't progress past high school level. Believe me, I'm beginning to ask myself the same question. As I have explained to you above: "I mentioned her perpetuation of Gibbon's erroneous interpretation that Hypatia was flayed alive as one of several examples of how Nixey's biases mean she always uses the interpretation that is the most lurid and exaggerated. It is an example used to support a broader argument not the argument itself, and it's one of several. To just pick on her for that would indeed be petty. Just as you isolating that example and pretending it's a major point on its own in my arguments is petty." If you bothered to read what I said next, you would know why. The problem is not that she makes outright errors of fact. The problem is that she skews her interpretation of the facts she selects by only presenting the facts that fit her agenda. That's what "cherry picking" means. This is why my very next sentence reads : "The problem is that she presents a distorted interpretation of those facts by cherry picking examples, projecting exceptional events as normal, uncritically accepting sources when they suit her agenda while being hypercritical of them when they don't and neglecting to tell her readers about alternative interpretations (let alone addressing them), contrary examples or relevant contexts when it suits her." Try actually reading what I say before responding to disjointed bits of it, taken out of context. Yes, it does. I suggest you go yell at one of them. So leading historians of the period say as well. Yes. And? Just because something may someday be overturned by later scholarship means we can therefore ignore current consensus and believe whatever the hell we like? How does that make any sense? What the hell has that got to do with me or anything I said? Elaborate on what, exactly? I just explained how your attempt to conflate Nixey's book with the gospels was totally incoherent. Accepting that an element in the gospels is likely to have been historical and then later changing his mind and deciding it probably wasn't is pretty much the complete opposite of "taking the gospels at face value". I just did. His brother is solidly attested as a historical person by two contemporaries, one of whom met him. Non-existent people don't have existent, directly attested historical brothers. No. You don't seem to be understanding a thing I'm saying. A historical Arthur may have existed, but we can't claim he probably did because the sources referring to him are so scanty and so removed from the time in which he is supposed to have lived. The earliest reference to him dates to over 300 years later. By contrast we have references to Jesus that date to just c. 20 years after his execution and a reference by someone who met his brother and knew at least two of his followers. That's why we can't say much about the existence of Arthur other than it's a "maybe", while the overwhelming consensus is that a historical Jesus most likely existed. Probably because Doane understands that, as I said, people tell the same kinds of mythic-style stories about significant figures whether those figures are historical or not and so finding parallels in those stories tells us pretty much nothing about whether the figures in question were historical. Again, no scholar of Josephus rejects everything he says because there is evidence his accounts of his own military career are self-serving. That's completely ridiculous. It was rather hard to parse this sentence: "I'd have to go with Antigonus II Mattathias and they enigmatic founder of the sect at Nag Hammadi." So I read it as you saying Antigonus founded some sect. Perhaps you meant Jesus was an amalgam of Antigonus and this other sect founder, though there is still no such thing as some pre-Christian Jewish "Nag Hammadi sect". Which is nonsense. Apart from the fact that he may have been crucified (but was more likely beheaded), he bears no resemblance to anything reported about Jesus at all. Oh dear. No, it's just irrelevant. The "Teacher of Righteousness" referred to in the Qumran material also bears very little resemblance to Jesus. You keep repeating this blunder. The Dead Sea Scrolls/Qumran texts have nothing to do with the Nag Hammadi library. The former are Jewish texts found in Israel and date from the second century BC to the first century AD. The latter are Christian and Gnostic texts found in Egypt and date to the fourth century AD. They have no connection at all. The fact that you keep making this kind of basic blunder tells us that you really don't have a solid grasp of this stuff.
No, you've just decided to read something into my comments that is not there. I actually go out of my way to talk about my admiration for Sagan as a scientist and a science educator, to say that he revolutionised the popular presentation of science and mentioned how influential he was on me as a teenager. It's just that he was not much of a historian and got things badly wrong. That does not mean he was in any way "average". I can say exactly the same about Dawkins and Tyson who I admire for their work in their fields and for their contribution to science education. But they bungle history as well. Why would I want to? Why would I need to? Did I claim to be an expert or even have any kind of interest in that field? Where did I do this? I'm beginning to think you post while drunk.
Remember when Carl Sagan would troll obscure message boards to make his dick feel bigger? Some of his best work. You can keep "Cosmos", and "Demon Haunted World", it's the trolling I'll always remember.
