Those who still believe that Jesus existed should watch a relatively recent interview, starting here. The mythicist Richard Carrier exposes the logical fallacies of the historicist Bart Ehrman in a very amusing way: a rarity in audiovisual retorts about the non-historicity of Jesus’ crucifixion. Near the end Carrier cites a quotable quote from Thomas Paine, ‘Time makes more converts than reason’, which evokes what Thomas Kuhn and his readers say about what it takes to change paradigms.
The secret of evolution, both biological in the sense of natural selection, and psychogenic in our psychohistorical sense—paradigm shifts—, is time and death.
Those who are completely unfamiliar with Carrier’s work about the non-existence of Jesus shouldn’t start with that interview but, say, with this lecture.
One reply on “Carrier v. Ehrman”
This interview, even older, shows that Ehrman doesn’t even get what ‘independent source’ really means when it comes to sources outside of the early Christian texts (pompously called the ‘New Testament’ in Western Christian Civilisation).