It has been questioned how agnostoc Pfoh intended his words to be taken. So without a more explicit statement, I err for caution and include him in the plausibility camp (which cannot be disputed given what he said).

Thanks.

Thank you. I’ve added that news to the body of the post as well.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Not-Carpenter-Historicity-International/dp/1844657299/

http://astore.amazon.com/richardcarrier-20/detail/1844657299

My only thoughts about that are that his case is implausible. And if he thought in terms of realistic Bayesian probabilities, he might notice that. There are a lot of possibiliter fallacies in his argument, for example (for a discussion of that fallacy in general: Proving History, pp. 26-29). At best he can only get a “maybe” it was written then, not a “probably” it was.

He uses demonstrably false premises, too. As just one example: that Torah observant Christianity didn’t exist after the Jewish war. That’s not true. It continued even into the fifth century (Epiphanius attests to it), but is well-enough evidenced at the end of the first century (the book of Revelation was unmistakably written during the reign of Domitian, yet was written in defense of Torah-observant Christianity; likewise the book of Matthew). See Sim’s The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and Social Setting of the Matthean Community.

Indeed, Crossley’s case not only ignores evidence, it’s circular: Mark’s Gospel itself is evidence of polemic against Torah-observant Christianity (to which Matthew was the response of Torah-observant Christians). To say there was no post-war evidence of that requires presuming Mark (and Matthew!) was written before the war, yet that is precisely the conclusion he is trying to reach.

For comparison, an equally good case can be made that Mark was written after the Bar Kokhba revolt, and thus in the late 130’s. Using much the same fallacies and approaches to the evidence, in each case based on inferences and assumptions no less probable than his.

Crossley is just giving us more of the same flawed methodology plaguing the whole field that I and others take all Jesus historians to task for (as I document in chapter one of Proving History).

They really need to start learning about logical fallacies and how to detect and thus purge them from their own arguments, and how to think of all their inferences and assumptions in terms of relative probabilities and likelihoods instead of leaping from assumption to conclusion at every step.

On the other hand, Crossley seems to have an unorthodox opinion about the date of Mark’s Gospel, saying it is probably contemporary or even antecedent to Paul’s letters.
Any thoughts about that?

http://www.amazon.com/Date-Marks-Gospel-Christianity-Testament/dp/0567081958/ref=la_B001HCXZ1G_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1357780059&sr=1-5

If they actually use it in that sense (although that is still terribly misleading to laymen, and inaccurate historically). But the examples I have adduced do not use it in that obscure sense: they actually use it in the sense of only mention (as I show from the context). Possibly this is telephone gaming: historians who use it not in that sense, are mistaken by other scholars as meaning it in that sense, and so we get silly statements like these, where we’re told the only evidence of someone’s historicity is a Roman writer. Even by people who know the truth, but forget about it until they are called out on their saying silly things like that.

No, abrogation is right.