Flann wrote:But this genre is entirely fictional whereas Acts has Paul a real person traveling to and founding real churches.
Nothing at all real happens in a fictional novel.It can not be the same genre
Fictional novels can and do talk about real places as well as real people. That they are fictional means that portions of the story are fabricated, not necessarily every single part.
Flann wrote:The hallucinations thesis is very hard to sustain based on what can be known medically.If Jesus didn't actually exist and was not crucified under Pilate why would anyone hallucinate a resurrection of someone who neither existed was crucified died or was buried? Why would so many diverse people at different places and times hallucinate such a thing?
That's not hard at all to sustain. You don't need "many" people having the hallucination. All you need is a single David Koresh, and everyone else will claim they saw the same thing. This is not a stretch. It is how things happen in real life. It is an acceptable, plausible scenario that has real instances as examples.
As far as hallucinations are concerned, how do you explain the five hundred foot talking carrot that some people hallucinate? Are you saying their hallucinations are "hard to sustain medically" because no instance of a five hundred foot tall talking carrot is known? Of course not. People can and do hallucinate fictional entities of all shapes and sizes, in all venues, with all sorts of variations. This meshes with modern medical understanding.
As a disclaimer, I'm not agreeing with Carrier here. I don't know if he's right or not. What I'm saying is that you haven't shown his ideas to be wrong. They could be wrong, but you haven't shown that. You're appealing to the wrong things, and forming non-sequiturs.
Flann wrote:Besides, for all his touted academic ability he is forced to explain away Tacitus and others, and concoct an implausible explanation of Josephus' reference to James the brother of Jesus as being not a physical but spiritual brother.
Are you saying that because Josephus and Tacitus mentioned James and Jesus, that they were therefore referring to real people? If you simply accept this as the case, referring to this or that as support, you're ignoring the vast number of incidents where noteworthy scholars refer to false things, and quite often. Carrier's position is not at all implausible, but is accepted by many scholars.
As far as Josephus is concerned, I thought his works had been transcribed? If the oldest document we have isn't the true original manuscript, from his hand, then you cannot trust it. There is no way around this point, it is set in concrete. You cannot triangulate to any point of greater truth unless you have the original. The words of Josephus will always and forever be suspect because of this, and it has nothing to do with the motive of anti-theist anti-jesus scholarship.
Even then, more doubt is cast on Josephus' writings when you consider that he could be merely repeating what he'd heard through the grapevine, and the grapevine would be ringing with news of Jesus from the Koreshian followers who claim to have seen him, but really didn't.
This isn't preposterous stuff Flann. This is how people behave; they fabricate stuff, they hallucinate, they write down word of mouth as if it's factual, they follow delusional visionaries. These things are not only real, they are an inseparable part of humanity. We do these things, have done them all across history, and will continue to do them. Of course there were people having visions in that time. Of course there were people following delusional visionaries. Of course there were people having hallucinations. These things are commonplace, and to say they didn't happen is the preposterous stance.
ant wrote:We are emotionally committed to our worldviews
Not all hope is lost! I've been emotionally committed to many things in the past, and have been brutally torn away from them. The cure is proper method. When you use proper method, the wheat is separated from the chaff in spite of what you desire to be true. You both should try it. It's depressing and frustrating, but reliable.