James Holding has posted a reply to my critique at
http://www.tektonics.org/tekton_01_03_01.html#resp1
The relevant part is included below, and my rebuttal will be posted
as a reply to this article.

---------------------  by James Holding  --------------------------

The section above recently (10/2001) was the subject of a response issued
by a skeptic. As we will see the response consists mainly of vague
generalization and "hurling the elephant" (a process whereby the critic
throws summary arguments concerning complex issues, merely assuming the
large complex of ideas behind their argument to be true without
consideration of contrary data, usually because they have merely accepted
the arguments uncritically from favored sources). Let's have a look at
their responses:

I said: "If one takes oneself to be messiah, and/or divine, then eventually
one must ACT like a messiah..." The critic replied:

     Yes, and Jesus did. He preached, prophesied imminent apocalypse,
     attracted devoted followers, performed faith healings and
     exorcisms, and even had a vision of the devil after fasting 40
     days in the desert. All of these actions are consistent with
     Jesus being neither liar nor lunatic, but rather a preacher,
     faith-healer, and apocalyptic prophet who in the months leading
     up to his anticipated execution came to the deluded belief that
     he was the Jewish Messiah and even the divine savior of mankind.

The response here is superfluous, since my point is not developed here, but
later on. However, I rather wonder about the equation of "faith healings"
-- the healings described in the Gospels are of conditions that, for the
most part, were quite visible and obvious -- we are not talking about AIDS
being "cured" or legs being "lengthened" out of pant legs that are too
long; we are talking about withered arms, men born blind, lepers, and so
on. These "faith healings" would all to obviously have been able to be
recognized as failures, which is more or less the point I am making.
However, I go on to say, "If one fails in said attempts, then eventually
the rug is pulled out from underneath." The critic replies:

     Right -- about a year into his ministry, Jesus was executed.

The term of Jesus' ministry was three years, not one -- the critic is here
"hurling an elephant," the uncritically accepted argument that the
Synoptics report the whole of Jesus' ministry within a year's time frame,
when in fact they give no chronological markers at all to justify this
conclusion. John's gospel gives markers that suggest a ministry of at least
three years -- and the critic will need to deal with these arguments before
he can just hum-drumly accept them for his purposes here. That said -- if
we want to speak of rugs in this context, I would reply, after the same
"sound bite" fashion: "Right indeed! And three days after the execution,
Jesus was resurrected and his divine status vindicated." But indeed, as I
say, "if Jesus went about doing the things that He did, He would have been
VERY lucky to get as far as the Crucifixion..." The critic replies with
this undocumented sound bite:

     The gospels say that Jesus tended to consciously avoid dangerous
     places to preach because it wasn't "his time". When it *was* "his
     time", his "luck" didn't take last very long at all.

Note well: The critic provides no citations here -- this is typical
skeptical scholarship at work -- but is clearly only vaguely familiar with
the NT text and that at some point Jesus did have a "time". But the
documentation isn't on their side. I find only one reference to Jesus
hiding himself (John 8:59) and passages that refer to "the time was come
that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to
Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51). No connection is made indicating that Jesus was
hiding out until it was "his time"! The critic needs to actually do some
work and document his arguments before spitting them out.

I say: "The character and nature of the claims of Jesus are such that proof
of being mistaken would all too easily come to pass!" The critic replies:

     And indeed it did when he was executed, and his predictions [Mt
     16:28, Lk 9:27, Mk 13:30, Lk 21:32, Mt 24:34] of an imminent
     Second Coming failed.

Hear that trumpeting sound? It isn't the Second Coming; it's the sound of
an elephant flying by ater being hurled. The critic is clearly still in the
Dark Ages of critical analysis -- the passages referred to were fulfilled
in 70 AD with the destruction of Jerusalem. Let them now follow my
elephant! (We'll be doing a larger article on this subject very soon.)

Here's the most amusing portion. I wrote: "I have seen no indication that
ANY Messianic pretender of the time made the same type of claims." The
critic answers:

     Richard Carrier writes in "Why I Don't Buy The Resurrection
     Story" 4b: "we know for a fact that many individuals were
     claiming to be, or were proclaimed to be, messiahs of one form or
     another in Jesus' day (Josephus recounts several), and everyone
     in Judaea was looking for just this sort of thing: God made
     manifest to liberate Israel--physically or spiritually. The
     Danielic prophecy was likely on everyone's mind, and Josephus and
     Seuetonius report that the Jews were expecting a messiah to
     appear in these very decades."

Ha ha! There's someone else quoting Carrier to not answer again! Carrier
doesn't show that anyone made the same sort of claims that Jesus did. We
don't "know for a fact" at all that anyone came up saying, "I am the
Messiah" or "I am the Son of Man" or any of that. None of the people
recorded by Josephus are recorded as saying any of this. We have people who
took some putative military action against Rome, and failed miserably, but
no claimants or claims at all -- one suggests that they might well have
made a claim had their little schemes succeeded, but it remains that
Carrier's response offers no response at all. When one must appeal to what
was "likely on everyone's mind" rather than to specifics that are
documented, one is engaging a counsel of despair indeed!

I say:" How could one be mistaken about being God incarnate? [..] A normal,
healthy human psyche cannot sincerely hold the sincere conviction of its
own Godhood!" The critic replies with a few more elephants:

     Since Jesus left no known writings, we only have the second-hand
     word of evangelical Christian authors that Jesus fully held this
     conviction. Note that in the earliest gospel (Mark), Jesus never
     calls himself Christ/Messiah, is reluctant for his special nature
     to be known, and (as he does in Matthew) despairs on the cross.
     It is possible that Jesus held a growing delusion of his own
     importance that became a belief in his divinity only after (or
     shortly before) the time of his (well-anticipated) execution.

It's easy enough to throw the implication of fabrication around, of course;
actually proving it out is something I think is quite beyond this critic's
capability. The average skeptical reader, already convinced that
malfeasance is afoot, certainly wouldn't argue and would find such
hand-waving adequate; but there are many issues to be resolved before this
can be accepted: What proof is there that these second-hand claims are not
accurate? (Merely, "bceause I don't think they are" is not adequate.) What
is it about their "second-handedness" that makes them suspect, and how does
this apply to secular works of history consistently (since they offer so
much "second hand" info themselves)? What proof indeed is there that
Matthew and John at least are not "first hand" (the critic merely assumes
the standard lines anout Gospel authorship)? If these claims were invented,
why would they be invented, and what about the historical and social
repreecussions of such invention, which are not at all in evidence?
Scholarship by sound bite may sound brilliant to the agreeable, but for
those who critically think through and sift the arguments, they are
woefully inadequate.

In terms of Mark's Gospel, there are quite a few little elephants running
around here. The idea that Mark is earliest is itself an elephant of some
assumption; see here for our growing response, which I doubt of the critic
has the ability to deal with, since it involves legwork rather than sound
bites. The idea that "Jesus never calls himself Christ/Messiah" flounders
on a few considerations: there are plenty of places where Jesus takes a
prerogative indicating such a position, even prior to the triumphal entry,
which is clearly a messianic act -- claming to forgive sins (2:5); enacting
the role of divine Wisdom by eating with sinners (2:15), claiming to be the
Son of Man (2:28, 8:31, 9:9, etc.), walking on water, which the OT says
that only God can do (4:35ff; cf. Job 9:8, Ps. 77:19); implicitly
acknowldging Peter's identification by not rebuking it (8:29ff), saying
that one's soul is dependent on one's reaction to him (8:35) and that God
us his Father, and that he will come with God's angels (8:38), a
self-reference to the Messiah (9:41), again saying belief in him is
paramount to eternal life (9:42). Even in Mark's "action" gospel wher Jesus
says comparatively little about anything, let alone about himself, there
are ample indications that he knew and proclaimed his own position. As for
"is reluctant for his special nature to be known," the critic forgets, even
as Price did, that in spite of this, the special nature did get known, and
also isn't cognizant of the social reasons for circumspection in such
claims. The critic is simply wrong about despair on the cross.

I said: "They had only a few hundred followers, at most; Christianity
gained thousands in just a few months!" Our critic replies with the same
reasoning about "Christian sources" as above and plays the bigot about
"gaining a few thousand followers in an age of superstition and ignorance"
-- playing on the pride of skeptics who think they have the intellectual
goods on the rest of the world as it is, is certainly an effective debate
tactic, but it's hard to keep that pride from being swallowed when someone
like our critic has shown this much ignorance of the background data and
has spewed forth little more than uncritically-accepted sound bites!