so what advice would you give to someone who's perhaps they're listening to richard carrier
because that's the thing is i've looked into his content he casts disparaging remarks upon all of
scholarship or whichever scholars he disagrees with he often says that scholars really agree
with him on certain issues that it seems like you're saying they don't at least on some issues
and um but if you don't know scholarship and you don't know this history stuff but he's your filter
like if richard carries your filter for history then you think that all the stuff he's saying
is accurate like what advice would you give to someone who's been influenced by him to kind of
come out of that shadow of richard carrier well if you like richard carrier then read some other
skeptics read bart ehrman read gert ludemann read morris casey read what they have to say
about about jesus now you're seeing some serious scholarship who are trained not in the classics
but in historical jesus scholarship uh and there is a difference when i wrote my most recent book
why are there differences in the gospels that came out two and a half years ago
i dealt with the like plutarch quite a bit and some of the others and i have to admit my learning
curve was very steep and i would have made some egregious errors if not for two classicists
who three classicists who reviewed my material on plutarch and one in particular who has become
a very good friend of mine in the meantime he he corrected me on a bunch of things and steered me
through the minefield i would have made some terrible errors i just thought you know this is
ancient literature it's around the same time of jesus i'm gonna you know be able to get through
this pretty well because i know what i'm doing with jesus and no it's different and classicists
are gonna make the same kind of mistake if they think they're coming to the biblical literature
and they're just going to know it and know how to navigate through it without any kind
of real study in the area so carrier makes some egregious errors when it comes to these things
so what i would say to uh mythicist who really like richard carrier look if you want to be a
skeptic read some other skeptics read some that are you know have some great academic credentials
and reputation um like bart ehrman like garrett lewderman like mars casey and and others and see
what they're saying um and then i would also say look when i i don't know how many bona
fide scholars there are now in the relevant fields of new testament studies and history
classicists who would say that jesus did not exist i don't know how many there are
now i know just a few years ago richard was saying there were seven including himself
um that's not a lot and none of those seven were widely regarded within their discipline
they weren't really respected within their own discipline so when you observe that and when you
observe that virtually everyone who is forwarding the position that jesus never existed are internet
bloggers then i would be stepping back and saying you know i think i see some red flags here maybe
i ought to think about this a little bit more and maybe they'll just say well come on you know
if it even if it turns out that jesus did exist after all it's no big deal for me right now to
think that he didn't i mean what harm well the harm is is not to anyone but yourself
because it would show that you're gullible when i mean scholars really look at jesus deniers as
mythicists to be on the on the same level as conspiracy theorists who think that we never
walked on the moon that the holocaust didn't occur um and these kinds of things so it would mean if
jesus actually existed and and you're falling for this then that means you're gullible and
that could also mean that you have a tendency to go for these kind of conspiracy theories
it doesn't mean you're not intelligent uh 22 years ago there was the church of venus
cults led by marshall applewhite and um there were some i think 39 of his followers uh you
know some of them were very intelligent they were engineers but they were gullible and they
paid a price for it they paid with their life so just be careful um that's what i would say to him
you