That said, I find this post-election weekend to be a good one for random distractions, so let’s have some fun by taking inspiration from the discussion of Historical Jesus raised by Sarah at Geeky Humanist on Saturday.
My first and biggest problem with everything Sarah has said is that we don’t have a good definition of Historical Jesus anywhere in her post. To be Historical Jesus, does one need to have been publicly crucified? Because lots of people were publicly crucified.
To be HJ does one need to have preached some stuff? Because lots of people preached some stuff.
To be HJ does one need to have been born in Bethlehem? Because lots of people were born in Bethlehem.
Et a number of ceteras.
If you have a specific number of criteria, you could merely start with the number of people born in Bethlehem over a period of 5 or 10 or 40 years or whatever, depending on exactly what your standards are for when the life of HJ must have been lived. Then you find out what percentage of the population died by crucifixion, what percentage of the population engaged in preaching, what percentage of the population ever traveled as far as Nazareth. You multiply those together to get some small fraction, then you multiply that small fraction by the total number of people born in Bethlehem over your chosen period. If the number is greater than or equal to 0.5 persons, than it’s likely that HJ lived. If the number is less than 0.03 persons, you should feel free to say that the hypothesis has no serious support. If the number is 7 persons, the reasonable interpretation is that HJ is a well established as almost anyone else in history.
But that’s not what we typically get.
Instead we typically get arguments that say, “Well, we have to explain X thing written in the New Testament without Historical Jesus, and if we don’t, then HJ.”
Now, I’ll be the first to say that IANAH, and I’m told that this is indeed pretty close to, or perhaps exactly, the type of argument which professional PhD historians actually use in published work.
I won’t contest how this is used in the work of peer reviewed historians. Perhaps that is even the best method, certainly it must be among the better methods or professional historians wouldn’t use it. However in the work of professional historians, I think they better understand exactly how limited is the claim that HJ existed.
Outside of arguments in journals, however, I think that this argument ill suits these less professional audiences. In large part this is because we often fail to appreciate how little such arguments get us.
Let’s use Sarah’s argument about HJ being born in Bethlehem & raised in Nazareth as an example:
he was actually born in Bethlehem. So… why do they put Nazareth in the story at all? … if they were making up the story from scratch all they had to do was change that point as well, leave Nazareth out of it altogether, and just say that he came from Bethlehem as per the prophecy yadda yadda yadda.
If they were making their stories up from scratch, about a totally mythical person, it’s very hard to see why they’d do that instead of just leaving out Nazareth and saying he came from Bethlehem. However, if they were making up stories about an actual founder of their movement who was known to have come from Nazareth, it makes total sense; they had to leave in the bit about him coming from Nazareth and then explain it away, because they couldn’t just ignore something about him that was that widely known.
Now, for a moment let’s accept this argument as convincing. What does this tell us about HJ? It tells us that HJ was publicly believed to have come from Nazareth, but the authors wanted their audience to believe HJ was born in Bethlehem. Note that even Sarah’s argument doesn’t actually assert that he was born in Bethlehem, just that the authors wanted people to believe he was born in Bethlehem.
So now HJ is satisfied by anyone who was
- either from Nazareth or was publicly thought to be from Nazareth (it’s 40 years after his death, so what people think they know isn’t necessarily the truth), and
- who gained a level of notoriety while preaching sufficient for some people to remember him positively, but insufficient for anyone contemporaneous with him to bother writing up what he was doing while he was doing it, and
- was executed by the Romans, but
- had enough details of his life remembered that he was either used as a model for Paul’s new religion in third decade after the death of HJ or was used by people living in the 5th decade after HJ as a retroactive model for Paul’s new religion
Now, we can’t prove what people had in mind when they wrote the books of the New Testament, so #4 is never going to be well evidenced. But there were lots of preachers. There was even a significant number of preachers from Nazareth, I am told, as the profession was not an uncommon one and Nazareth was a population center.
Now this can be better argued by finding out the proportion of people from Nazareth who died by Roman crucifixion, and the proportion who spent significant time preaching. Multiply the two proportions together & multiply that smaller proportion by the population of Nazareth over the appropriate time frame and if you get more than 0.5 persons you can say there’s good reason to believe in the HJ.
I don’t know those numbers, but I’m told neither preaching nor crucifixion were particularly uncommon, which would mean a value of 0.5 or over would be likely for any population over, I don’t know, a couple thousands? A number in the high hundreds? Somewhere in there? I think Nazareth had more than that over the 60 year period from 100 years before Mark was written to 40 years before Mark was written. So I’m happy to believe in such an HJ, but remember what we get: nothing more than at least one preacher from Nazareth was crucified and as a result could maybe possibly have been the person (or one of several persons) the authors of the NT had in mind when they wrote a few of their descriptions of HJ & his actions.
That. Is. Pitiful.
Worse than that, it’s misleading. When people outside of historians’ academic journals speak of believing in Jesus historicity, they aren’t asserting that at least one preacher from Nazareth was executed by the Romans before Paul wrote his epistles in the 50s. They’re putting a hell of a lot more into their HJ than that.
So when we’re not careful in saying exactly what qualities we’re assigning to HJ, and we’re not arguing within the carefully constrained environment of academic journals, we’re inevitably participating in the creation of a public environment where it’s considered reasonable to assert that divine healing and water walking and matter creation have all been rationally demonstrated.
If you have a belief in a pitifully vague HJ, that’s fine. I guess I believe in the pitifully vague HJ described above. But arguing about the existence of HJ without defining exactly what qualities an HJ would have to have to meet is as counterproductive as arguing whether god exists without first answering the question, “Which god?” After all, if we disprove divine violence as the source of lightning, our debate partner can simply assert, “But I wasn’t arguing for Zeus, I was arguing for some other god.”
Inevitably there exists an HJ that is not disproven because it can be defined as whatever is leftover after any quality that might be disproven is removed.
Please note that this gets even worse when we speak – as too many people do – of Gospel Jesus or NT Jesus being a composite of several HJs.
Is there an historical Spider-Man? I mean, we know that nerdy teens who get bullied in high school exist. We know that masculinely gendered people exist. We know that NY exists. We know that people with red hair exists and that some people have teenage crushes on someone with red hair. We know that people with the first name Peter exist. We know that people with the last name Parker exist. We know photographers exist. We know people who have been bitten by spiders exist. We know science labs exist. We know people sometimes visit science labs. We even know that people who aren’t law enforcement but who intervene to stop a mugging exist. Heck, we know people who engage in vigilantism as an avocation exist.
Wow, that’s a fuck of a lot of Spider-Man that’s actually historical, and if we allow ourselves a composite Historical Spider-Man it’s literally impossible that we don’t have a CHSM that fits all those criteria.
If we have all that, shouldn’t we say that an HSM exists?
I suspect that both of my readers would say that’s an unfair use of the concept of Historical Spider-Man. And I think that should tell us something about how unreasonably the HJ concept is used.
So when people (including my FtB colleagues like Sarah) set out to argue for HJ, I think we should all take a lesson from the Historical J. Jonah Jameson: it’s possible to restrict what we say about someone to only those things that haven’t been proven false, or even those things that haven’t been proven false and sound plausible, but that doesn’t mean we’re giving anything like an accurate representation of what happened or who our heroes are.
That in mind, before we go around saying an HJ exists, I think it is incumbent upon us to rigorously define a list of minimum criteria for an HJ that would be sufficiently restrictive and sufficiently clearly articulated that we do not lend Christianity any unearned credibility through publicly supporting a vague HJ.
I agree with the argument you lay out. I have used very similar arguments as your HSM. I may have to steal this. The historicists response is going to be a simple “but everyone knows spiderman is not real”. They will not even be able to see how that response undercuts their own arguments.
Based upon the arguments of the historicists, Sherlock Holmes was a historical character. I could list hundreds of fictional characters that, according to the historicists arguments, should be considered historical. Yet they will not and cannot see that.
This argument always annoys me, because we know for a fact that they didn’t. We know that the writings weren’t all done at the same time. We know that some of them came earlier than others. We know that the earlier ones make statements that the later ones revise or explain, such as the birthplace of Jesus.
As I see it, that’s all we need to explain things. An early version of Christianity didn’t care much about Jesus being the Davidic Messiah. A later version did, but was now stuck with the Nazareth thing. So, they retconned it. Not that mysterious, really.
Actually, it’s exactly the kind of thing we see religions doing all the time. It’s how Christians today explain the varying descriptions of the empty tomb or Peter’s denials. They don’t throw any of the gospels out, they just reinterpret them. Somehow, they’re all true. You just need to squint your eyes right.
But that’s not what we typically get.
Instead we typically get arguments that say, “Well, we have to explain X thing written in the New Testament without Historical Jesus, and if we don’t, then HJ.”
Now, I’ll be the first to say that IANAH, and I’m told that this is indeed pretty close to, or perhaps exactly, the type of argument which professional PhD historians actually use in published work.
That’s what we get in discussions of why the NT reads the way it reads and whether it supports historicity. However, if you are starting from a very basic place that is just “was there a historical Jesus”, there are four sources for it that are better.
1) Paul refers to Jesus with attributes that are reasonably understood as applying to specific men (he has a lineage, he has brothers, etc.).
2) Josephus refers to Jesus twice, once in a passage that just about everyone accepts as authentic, and once in a passage that is mostly (but not entirely) considered partly authentic, confirming Paul’s name for one of Jesus’ brothers.
3) Tacitus refers to some events around Jesus’ death.
4) Suetonius refers to Jesus as well.
My understanding is that there is pretty much agreement among Biblical scholars that there was a whole body of orally transmitted stories about Jesus, and that the Gospels were narratives created by various writers using a selection of those stories, often with a particular audience in mind. E.g., Matthew was clearly written to appeal to a Jewish audience, which is why it contained a geneology purportedly showing that Jesus was a descendent of King David, and maybe even his heir, and lots of references to the prophets (e.g., Isaiah) Storytellers generally are more interested in making a compelling story than in determining the literal accuracy of all the details, so it’s to be expected that the stories grew and morphed in the telling and retelling.
The birth narratives are IMHO clearly pious myth, the sort of stories that grow up around any numinous personage. There was no reason to make sure that the birth narratives in the Gospels agreed with one another, especially since it wasn’t until centuries later that the church hierarchy selected four of these narratives out of the pleothora of gospels at the time and declared them “official” and the rest to be spurious. Note that the myth-making did not stop — think of all the stories about Christmas that go way beyond even the stories in the Gospels. People never let questions of literal truth or consistency stand in the way of a good story.
To me, it seems simpler to assume that there was some charismatic preacher, who we call Jesus (Yeshua) who developed enough of a following that eventually it became a religious movement than to assume that either someone consciously invented it and persuaded everyone to believe it, or that it somehow spontaneously arose. There are enough religious movements that we know started around real people (the later history of the Jews has many of them.) What made Christianity different was that the Roman Empire chose to make it a state religion.
One doesn’t have to assume that everything in the Gospels is “Gospel truth” in order to conclude that Christianity grew out of the preaching of a real person. Actually, one can even be a Christian and not believe in everything in them.
But we’ll never know exactly what happened, because the movement that became Christianity mostly involved unimportant people in the early years, not the sort of people whose lives and acts would have been recorded for posterity.
@Allison
Thanks for your contributions before this quote, but as to this quote I’m going to have to call bullshit/squirrel.
There is literally no one, not one person that I’ve ever met, read, or heard described, that believes that Christianity did not grow out of the preaching of a real person. What’s the alternative? That Christianity grew out of spontaneous watermarks on rocks that happened to look like greek letters spelling out Paul’s epistles?
The question is whether the first person to do such preaching was also the person who got whacked by the Romans, etc.
Christianity is an invention of humans, ergo at the beginning humans preached it. The entire thing we call “the religion of Christianity” then grew out of the preachings of somebody. I mean, take this second quote from your argument (which actually precedes my first quote from you):
But the thing is that even if the origins of Christianity are found in the latter scenario, then the conclusion of the first quote I took from you is justified. Remember, that was:
Even if Christianity was made up out of whole cloth by some random person, they still had to preach the things they made up in order for Christianity to come to be.
Thus I find the argument of that bit I quoted first to be unreasonably vague. Yes, Christianity was preached before it became the worldwide religion it became today. Yes, when I say “preached” I mean preached by an actual person — though I suppose I’m not ruling out an actual lizard person / space alien who is nonetheless sufficiently human like to get called a “person”.
But again, to say that Christianity was preached by an actual person before it became the worldwide religion it is today gives us an HJ that is so vague as to be useless. To say that HJ is just the first person to have preached Christianity means that by definition there must have been an HJ, but also by definition we don’t know anything more than that. Who was the first person to have preached Christianity? What was the name of that person? How tall were they? What was their favorite color? Were they crucified? By Pilate or someone else? What were there last words? And did they actually like matzah?
We simply have no idea. And so again we have a viciously vague HJ, that we could confidently assert exists only to have Christians use our confidence as social/emotional support for the idea that “everyone agrees” walking on water & matter creation are historically well documented to the point that even atheists agree they happened.
Again, I think that if one is gong to assert an HJ existed, in order to be responsible and not let Christians claim unearned credibility for their religion, one absolutely must identify exactly what qualities are attributed to that HJ and make an explicit disavowal that proving those qualities necessarily proves other qualities not listed.
Otherwise people think that the mere existence of a first person to preach Christianity == the existence of a first person to preach Christianity who was also the first person to articulate the English language phrase “Consider the lilies…”.
Christians can and will drop infinite excess garbage on the humble, vague-ass HJ proven to have existed. Why let them?
@One Brow:
The problems with that are:
1) Not one of those authors even claim to have met any HJ.
2) They certainly did not all meet together with an HJ present so that we can know that not only has each met an HJ to which they are referring, but they each know which HJ the others are referencing an all are in agreement that they are intending to reference the same HJ
3) therefore you have, at best, four HJs, each with a paucity of information about that particular HJ
…but most importantly,
4) You still have not defined what are the essential and identifying characteristics of an HJ, nor have you disavowed the idea that proving one quality of HJ implies evidence for (much less proof of) other potential qualities of an HJ
So your own effort suffers from the same fatal flaw I identified in the OP: Paul testifies to a Jesus that had a brother James, but doesn’t simultanteously testify that his Jesus who has a brother James also sat in a synagogue answering questions about god as an adolescent, etc. You create the illusion that we have testimony to the existence of some guy James who had a brother Jesus that we know much more than we do.
If you’d like to embrace the composite HJ theory, with parts of the composite coming from your 4 different authors, then fine. But then Historical Spider-Man exists, and I would expect you to defend HSM at least as firmly as you defend HJ.
If you don’t wish to embrace composite HJ, then all you need to do is to stringently define HJ & then go about proving that Paul, Josephus, Tacitus, & Suetonius all had the exact same person consciously in mind when they were writing and were not in any way confusing one Jesus with another or writing about a Jesus they’d only read or heard about who may or may not be the same person read or heard about by the other 3 of your 4 sources, since we don’t have access to those predicate writings/ sayings.
Therefore if you’re rejecting the composite HJ, I look forward to your presentation of information about the mental states of your four sources.
Can somebody please explain to me why this actually matters? I doubt that anyone except biblical literalists think that every detail in the gospels is a fact: as has already been pointed out, writers at the time would routinely make stuff up to support their narrative. Why does it matter whether the stories were based closely, loosely, or not at all on one particular person?
All of this reminds me of the arguments about whether Shakespeare or the Earl of Oxford or somebody else wrote the plays. In fact, that might be a good model on how to approach these types of arguments, since no supernatural claims are lurking in the wings.
1) Barring the unlikely discovery of a trove of ancient documents, none of these claims will ever be proven to the satisfaction of those on the other side, and
2) Neither of these arguments matter in any real sense. We have a set of plays; we have a set of philosophical and moral teachings. Both sets of writings should be able to stand or fall on their own merits; the biographical details of their creators don’t have any influence on their literary quality or moral value.
Crip Dyke… @ # 4: … the first person to do such preaching …
The purported lessons (“preaching”) of Jesus derive from an amalgam of Jewish, Greek, and other sources, and the same applies to his brief biography, a localized but archetypal version of what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey”. Judea, geopolitically insignificant in itself except as territory-to-cross-to-invade Egypt/Sumeria/wherever, picked up a lot of cultural influences over the millennia, from the Babylonian mythology underlying Hebrew lore to the Cynics (whose ideas had approximately zip to do with what the word means today) and Stoics whose precepts peek out between the lines of the “New Testament” everywhere you look.
Even the name “Jesus” (“Joshua”/”Yeshua”/”savior”/”one who rescues”) fits into ancient storylines applicable to many legends in many cultures.
It’s highly possible that one individual fit into the role described by the overlap of all these yarns and philosophies, but it’s equally unnecessary for that to have happened to yield the results we see today.
“I think it is incumbent upon us … that we do not lend Christianity any unearned credibility through publicly supporting a vague HJ.”
The crux of the issue, as the “what does it matter” crowd say: Is it important for us to not lend xtianity unearned credibility? How effective are fact-based arguments against xtianity? I don’t know. They’re surely completely useless against xtians with a less literal interpretation of the bible. For literalists, they raise a defensiveness that shuts down reason. I think arguing the factual basis of xtianity probably has some utility, but not sure how much or how important it is.
–
For those who believe in an HJ, it seems like a more effective rhetorical strategy to grant their premises, then argue over the large holes in the story _as written_, rather than quibble over how much of what was written centuries after the event was based on garbled oral tradition of actual events and how much was made up out of whole cloth.
Eg. if you grant an HJ, you can say “Matthew himself said (28:11-15) that it was commonly believed after Jesus’ death that a group of his disciples took the body. It also says that all his followers fell apart after the crucifixion. Isn’t it a more plausible hypothesis that one splinter group stole the body and didn’t let the main group know, than all of this rising from the dead business?”
Nice argument Crip Dyke. I too have struggled with the various arguments for and against HJ. Dammit, I have a whole section of my bookshelf dedicated to it.
We have plausible mechanisms for explaining the growth of the religion once started, and even the convergence on an accepted canon and the suppression of deviant narratives. It is even clear that for a suitably restricted definition of HJ there must have been one of more persons matching that template. However, as Dan Dennett argued about free will “even a room thermometer has free will, but does it have a free will worth having?”
holy crap, I just realized what the blogger of Reprobate Spreadsheet’s initials mean
This discussion reminds me of a certain former FtB blogger who shall remain forever nameless. Coincidentally, I was also reminded of the nameless one by today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bayesian
Comment by Dr Sarah—30 November 2018—per “Jesus mythicism vs. Jesus historicity: a reply to R. G. Price”. Geeky Humanist. 25 November 2018.
Cf. “Did Jesus Exist 1. Terms of debate”. YouTube. Fishers of Evidence. 15 February 2016.
PZ Myers cogently opines that the meaning of “historical Jesus” is problematic, writing:
[SARCASM]
So it really is a tough choice just to pick one “historical Jesus”, especially with so many to choose from. Since numerous NT scholars have nominated their preferred reconstruction of Jesus as a candidate for “the” real historical Jesus. With no indication for which reconstruction (if any) is correct.
[/SARCASM]
As David M. Litwa writes:
And I concur with Philip R. Davies, who asks:
I think we could avoid the “historical PZ Myers” issue with something like:
* Named Yeshua, from Galilee, lived in the later 2nd Temple period under the Roman hegemony, etc.
* Preached.
* Major influence on the acts attributed in Mark, and on the sayings and/or teachings attributed in Mark, Q, and possibly Thomas.
* Executed by the Romans.
* If we could get into the 1st Christians’ heads, I’d like to be able to require that whatever they interpreted as resurrection experiences, those who knew Yeshua beforehand interpreted them as the same person. But the closest we can get is in Paul’s letters and he didn’t.
If it’s relevant, I used to be a Christian, and am not an atheist. Either a historical Iesus or a mythic one set in the same context would give context to a lot of the sayings and teachings. A historical Iesus means that objections to cults of personality apply to Christianity. A mythic one avoids that. As for the heroes’ journey objection, well, the gospels are a model for Christian authors writing heroes’ journeys.
Historical Jesus is a squirrel? I fucking knew it.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden,
Therefore if you’re rejecting the composite HJ, I look forward to your presentation of information about the mental states of your four sources.
This was so odd I moved it to the beginning. I mean, we know who these people are because of what their overall writings were and what they said in them, but I’m not even sure a person can accurately describe their own mental state, much less that of a different person who lived 2000 years ago.
As for what they were doing in their writings, Paul was trying to communicate about the person he saw as the founder of the religion that he was in, while Josephus and Tacitus were acting as historians discussing that same religion. In particular, Josephus would have known a few witnesses from Jerusalem in the 30s. I’m not sure about Suetonius.
1) Not one of those authors even claim to have met any HJ.
This would be an exceedingly rare situation if they had.
2) They certainly did not all meet together with an HJ present so that we can know that not only has each met an HJ to which they are referring, but they each know which HJ the others are referencing an all are in agreement that they are intending to reference the same HJ
They are all referring to the founder of group of believers. If your contention is that this group of believers was founded by more than one person, then at some point you’ll need to produce some sort of evidence for that, unless you’re just trying to throw up smoke instead of establish a coherent position. Not that I am opposed to throwing up smoke, but that points to a different purpose.
3) therefore you have, at best, four HJs, each with a paucity of information about that particular HJ
We have different people talking about the same founder of the same religion. So no, we don’t have four different Joshuas/Jesuses, and no real reason to think that we do.
…but most importantly,
4) You still have not defined what are the essential and identifying characteristics of an HJ, nor have you disavowed the idea that proving one quality of HJ implies evidence for (much less proof of) other potential qualities of an HJ
The human who preached for a short while in the early 30s BC, whose followers went on to create the religion we know as Christianity.
So your own effort suffers from the same fatal flaw I identified in the OP: Paul testifies to a Jesus that had a brother James, but doesn’t simultanteously testify that his Jesus who has a brother James also sat in a synagogue answering questions about god as an adolescent, etc. You create the illusion that we have testimony to the existence of some guy James who had a brother Jesus that we know much more than we do.
I see no reason to think a Historical Jesus sat in a temple answering questions about God as an adolescent.
If you’d like to embrace the composite HJ theory, with parts of the composite coming from your 4 different authors, then fine. But then Historical Spider-Man exists, and I would expect you to defend HSM at least as firmly as you defend HJ.
Let’s start by looking at what the historians say about historical Spider-Man.
If you don’t wish to embrace composite HJ, then all you need to do is to stringently define HJ & then go about proving that Paul, Josephus, Tacitus, & Suetonius all had the exact same person consciously in mind when they were writing and were not in any way confusing one Jesus with another or writing about a Jesus they’d only read or heard about who may or may not be the same person read or heard about by the other 3 of your 4 sources, since we don’t have access to those predicate writings/ sayings.
Tacitus and Suetonius were very explicitly writing about the same religion that Paul was a part of. Had there been two (or more) different Jesus’, we would expect to see both of them referenced in Josephus, because that is exactly the type of people he was researching and writing about.
Of course, perhaps the most important part is this:
Worse than that, it’s misleading. When people outside of historians’ academic journals speak of believing in Jesus historicity, they aren’t asserting that at least one preacher from Nazareth was executed by the Romans before Paul wrote his epistles in the 50s. They’re putting a hell of a lot more into their HJ than that.
Yes, people continue to misrepresent and re-interpret scholarly work to perform the unsupportable. So, if you are taking the position “You can’t even prove there was only one apocalyptic preacher called Joshua” because your primary interest is in showing that Christians do not have proof of their claims, I agree. That’s a different goal, and therefore a different standard, from discussing whether Christianity actually goes back to a single preacher.
According to some sources (‘The Jesus Interviews’: https://amzn.to/31VFZBs. ISBN: 978-1-78830-790-1) Jesus is a (Very Bad) Talk Show Star!
I’m afraid this alone shows that on this issue, you simply don’t know what you are talking about. No historian interested in the “histrorical Jesus question” other than evangelical Christians supposes Jesus to have been born in Bethlehem, because the incompatible birth narratives in gMatthew and gLuke are obvious retcons. The “minimal historical Jesus” is something like: a guy named Yeshua, born and raised in Galilee around the start of the Christian era, went around preaching and faith-healing, was baptised by John the Baptist, gathered some followers, came to Jerusalem, caused some sort of disturbance, was arrested by the Roman authorities and crucified for sedition while Pontius Pilate was the local.bigwig.
Really, please don’t say any more about this issue at least until you’ve read the posts here. It’s so fucking embarrassing how many atheists trot out mythicist garbage. Intellectually, it’s little better than creationism and climate change denial.
KG says
Intellectually, it’s little better than creationism and climate change denial.
While I accept that the weight of the evidence is for the existence of a single, founding preacher, I don’t think the evidence is anywhere near as conclusive as we have for common ancestry or anthropogenic climate change.
If someone wants to tell me that there was a real, live, breathing-and-walking-around Jewish person who…
…was born in the Middle East about 2,000 years ago…
…was the son of a carpenter…
…grew up to be a rabbi…
…became a bit of a social reformer…
…attracted hostile attention from he Roman powers-that-were…
…and eventually got his rabble-rousing ass crucified…
…I don’t have any problems at all with any of that story. I just don’t see any good reason to think that that kid is the Historical Jesus. And I certainly don’t think there’s any good reason to think that that kid was the Son of God, with a laundry list of supernatural powers and yada yada yada.
KG @21 said: “Really, please don’t say any more about this issue at least until you’ve read the posts here.”
LOL, KG really does want people to stick their nose right up that horse’s ass!
Well, for those not so inclined, here is a fresh specimen of a road apple from the source.
• “The Problems With Jesus Mythicism – Tim O’Neill”. YouTube. MythVision Podcast. 8 November 2020.
[00:11:50] I seriously do not care if Jesus existed or not because when I’m talking about Jesus. I am not talking about the magic guy who walked on water and who’s the figure of Christianity.
[00:14:00] I am not saying mythicists are anything like holocaust deniers but in both cases though they are similar . . . In both cases it seems to be that there is a strong ideological and therefore emotional bias turning people towards—what i would argue is—in both cases a bad historical thesis and many of those people in both those cases are very sincere. Not all holocaust deniers are evil Nazis—though many of them are—but many of them think (I sincerely think that) they have discovered a great truth about history and get quite passionate about it and it’s the same with mythicism.
[00:15:50] Historical analysis is about working out which of the various many potential valid possible ideas is most likely. So it is possible—I would never argue that it is impossible—that there was no historical Jesus I just don’t think it’s very likely.
[00:20:00] I have noticed—and this is a generalization, but not a misrepresentation—there is a lot of overlap [in mythicism] between those very fervent fundamentalist Christians . . . I think that mythicism (in that sort of that more dogmatic script extreme view) is very comforting to people who have come from the opposite extreme, so people who have come from it’s all true Jesus is lord; everything in the bible is literally true; everything in the gospels actually happened.
[00:21:40] For many people—and this again is a generalization—there’s a degree of laziness: if you just say Jesus didn’t exist; none of it is true then; you can just dismiss it and move on . . . with other stuff like saying Christians are stupid or creationism is wrong . . . so there’s a lot of different things being loaded into this.
[00:67:50] We know that there was a tradition in the the prophetic tradition of Judaism of preaching against the temple which sounds weird but the idea was that the temple represented a corrupt form of of Judaism and it and therefore it had to be cleansed the other thing is we know that the temple was previously been destroyed once because this was the second temple the one that Jesus would have been preaching outside so the idea that Jesus would have been saying something against the temple, it does actually make some sense, it’s part of the apocalyptic tradition that as part of the cleansing of the earth that’s going to come when the apocalypse happens and Jesus is depicted as saying it’s going to happen any day now guys that that the temple would be would be swept away and would be renewed so that that saying kind of makes sense in that in that apocalyptic tradition yeah and then there’s there’s we’ve got other references to prophets around at this time so there’s another guy uh who is preaching about the temple being destroyed referenced in Josephus not long before it was destroyed so this this makes absolute absolute sense.
[00:80:21] You’re starting to realize that not everything in the gospels can be true and you go looking for an explanation as to how Christianity arose if Jesus wasn’t God. . . you’re going to find a whole lot of videos; a whole lot of blogs; a whole lot of stuff on online about mythicism. What you won’t find is good scholarly analysis of Jesus in the context of second temple Judaism and and Jewish apocalyptic thought. To get that—you won’t find that on YouTube—you have to look pretty hard to get that. You have to read books and some of them are quite dense books with lots and lots and lots of footnotes and that assume a lot of knowledge including assuming that you read Greek so one of the things i am trying to do is to make that kind of stuff more accessible to people so they don’t go off down what i would argue is the rabbit hole of mythicism and they stick with mainstream non-christian critical scholarship because Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet as I’m sure you’ve come to understand is pretty much the mainstream non-christian view.
@21 KG
I can buy the rest of what you say, but the John the Baptist bits of the Gospels also stink of retcon just as much as the Bethlehem bits.
“Man, I was out preaching about Yeshua today, and I ran into one of those damn Johnites. Those guys are so annoying, and they’re preaching the same martyrdom story that we are — we’re competing for the same converts! Hey Mark, you’re writing the Official Story — could you put something in there about how their guy totally recognized our guy as numero uno? All the Johnites will want to read it because it tells their story, and then they’ll be easy pickings for us so we can merge cults.”
@25 brucegee1962
Doudna et al. may have busted the Markan author copying Josephus’s John the Baptist story. It may burn down the barn for historicity apologetics!
Per Gregory Doudna:
Cf. Doudna, Gregory L. (2019). “Is Josephus’s John the Baptist Passage a Chronologically Dislocated Story of the Death of Hyrcanus II?”. In Pfoh, Emanuel; Niesiolowski-Spanò, Lukasz. Biblical narratives, archaeology, and historicity : essays in honour of Thomas L. Thompson. London, UK: Bloomsbury–T&T Clark. pp. 119–137. ISBN 9780567686572. (Available Online).
@26 db
• Epic cut and paste fail! So read it online.
cubist,
If someone wants to tell me that there was a real, live, breathing-and-walking-around Jewish person who…I don’t have any problems at all with any of that story.
Do you have any trouble with the notion that his followers refused to accept that he died for nothing, and so created over time an increasing complex theology to explain it? With the notion that a later member of the sect might write about meeting this guy’s brothers, or that he might be mentioned by a Jewish historian who focused on that part of the world?
I just don’t see any good reason to think that that kid is the Historical Jesus.
Based on where you stopped, I agree.
And I certainly don’t think there’s any good reason to think that that kid was the Son of God, with a laundry list of supernatural powers and yada yada yada.
I completely agree.
db
Doudna et al. may have busted the Markan author copying Josephus’s John the Baptist story. It may burn down the barn for historicity apologetics!
Why do mythicists constantly claim Josephus was incompetent? Well, besides the obvious.
@KG, #21:
Quote one place where I argue for mythicism. Just one.
I’ll wait.
@One Brow:
I specifically excluded scholarly work from my critique. I’m talking about the lay discussion of HJ. In other words, I think any random person who talks about HJ on the internet ALSO runs the same risk of having their work misinterpreted. But while I expect that misinterpretations of scholarly works are generally unfair misinterpretations because I expect actual scholars writing actually scholarly work to be precise in their language & methodology, when randos on the internet (yes, including you, and also yes, including me) debate HJ, people don’t have to unfairly or ungenerously misinterpret that work because they typically don’t even bother with a rigorous definition of what they’re trying to prove, much less with thoughtful and careful word choice throughout.
The problem isn’t the scholars. The problem is you.
My goodness, did you even read the original post? Why not try that again.
You’re missing the point. Let me quote another bit from you late in the same comment:
I agree. But the problem is that we don’t know their sources. As years passed the information coming to Tacitus might have come from a source who misattributed stories about another cult’s founder to the founder of Paul’s cult. Tacitus & Suetonius would then think that they are talking about the same person, but they wouldn’t be. The only way to cure that potential source of error is to know that Tacitus & Suetonius both met each other, both met HJ, and either all 3 met together or later Tacitus & Suetonius conferred sufficiently to have some certainty that they were talking bout the same individual.
Now, that’s not an insurmountable hurdle to believing that it’s more likely than not that some HJ existed. It’s not even an insurmountable hurdle to believing Tacitus & Suetonius were talking about the same person. But it’s a source of error that sits there, unresolved.
If one adopts a Composite HJ hypothesis, this is not a problem. We’re not interested in knowing the characteristics of a single person. Instead we’re interested in knowing the characteristics that early Christians attributed to their founder in order to better understand those early Christians.
However, if one adopts a singular HJ hypothesis, then separate sources cannot be assumed to have gotten their information from the same font, and thus cannot be assumed to be talking about the exact same person (for reasons identified above). Indeed if the sources are independent, then without having some confirmation that they are talking about the exact same person (rather than just talking about the same religion or just wanting to talk about the exact same person), the source of uncertainty remains. If they are not independent, then the two sources collapse to one, resulting in fewer independent attributions to the existence of a single person credited with founding Christianity.
Again, this doesn’t rule out anything or prove anything. I’m merely saying that when we write about such source here, outside of academic journals, proper appreciation of all such complication is typically absent. When we speak without such proper appreciation for sources of error or uncertainty, we by definition speak sloppily. I argue neither for HJ nor against HJ, but I sure as hell argue against being sloppy.
As far as I can tell, no one outside of rarefied academic air is going to prove or disprove anything significant about any given HJ.
Thus, as I said, for anyone reading this blog, Historical Jesus is a squirrel.
@31 Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden said: “if one adopts a singular HJ hypothesis, then separate sources cannot be assumed to have gotten their information from the same font, and thus cannot be assumed to be talking about the exact same person…”
• Historicity scholars often promote the pissant (insignificant) Jesus viewpoint.
@31 Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden said: “if one adopts a singular HJ hypothesis, then separate sources cannot be assumed to have gotten their information from the same font, and thus cannot be assumed to be talking about the exact same person…”
• Historicity scholars often promote the pissant (insignificant) Jesus viewpoint.
Raphael Lataster writes:
Cf. Lataster (2015). “Questioning the Plausibility of Jesus Ahistoricity Theories – A Brief Pseudo-Bayesian Metacritique of the Sources”. Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies. 6 (1): 63–96. ISSN 2155-1723.
Raphael Lataster writes:
Cf. Lataster (2015). “Questioning the Plausibility of Jesus Ahistoricity Theories – A Brief Pseudo-Bayesian Metacritique of the Sources”. Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies. 6 (1): 63–96. ISSN 2155-1723.
• Per Hermann Detering (1995):
• Per R. M. Price:
Next: the historical King Arthur.
@John Morales
Indeed.
In distant future, religious scholars will argue on whether the mythical portrayal of Donald Trump was based on a real person, or a character in a popular satirical play series distributed through TV machines.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden,
I am confused by your last comment. When I wrote “Yes, people continue to misrepresent and re-interpret scholarly work to perform the unsupportable”, I felt like I was explicitly referring to what lay people do, yet your response seems to indicate you thought I was talking about what scholars do.
Then, despite you saying that you do want to discuss what historians do, you say, “But the problem is that we don’t know their sources. As years passed the information coming to Tacitus might have come from a source who misattributed stories about another cult’s founder to the founder of Paul’s cult. Tacitus & Suetonius would then think that they are talking about the same person, but they wouldn’t be.”, which seems to me to be precisely the type of things professional historians discuss and research, while lay people never think about.
So, I don’t know if this is what you consider on topic, or not, but I will offer this anyhow. Josephus made a point of cataloguing the various preachers and prophets that gathered together followings that of a significant size. You’ll notice that Dr. Sarah mentions a few others in her post. If there were more than one such person named Joshua/Jesus, with a brother named James/Jacob, Josephus would have noted them separately and gone to the effort to distinguish them, just as he did for many other similarly named people.
Tacitus was also a historian, and from what we can tell, when he was writing hearsay or lightly-evidenced accounts, he explicitly said so.
As I said in the other post, I agree that we lay people need to be clear that saying Jesus existed does not mean we accept any supernatural legends around him. I disagree with on the notion of multiple Jesuses, because if there were multiple Jesuses of sufficient significance that Tacitus and Suetonius could be talking about different men, then there would be evidence of this in Josephus, and there is not.
@One Brow:
No, you were talking about what lay people do to scholars. I got that. But I’m talking about lay people misinterpreting lay people. Although I’m not someone who reads many journal articles from actual historians, I’m confident the peer review process will generally force people to make clear their arguments, premises & terms. If lay people misinterpret them, and I’m sure they do, I’m not going to harangue the actual historians about it.
Instead this has been about statements like, “I believe HJ likely existed because X”. Now, one could just say, “I believe X is true,” but on FtB and in many other atheist spaces, “HJ (likely) existed because X” is actually a common formulation. The problem is that if you don’t define what HJ means to you, because so many different people out there use the phrase “Historical Jesus” and because so few do the methodologically responsible thing and define HJ on the same web page where they make such statements, someone with a preexisting idea of the qualities of the HJ can read the statement “HJ exists” as supporting their own version of HJ, which might be wildly different from that of the speaker.
In this case, the misreading isn’t unreasonable. It’s a natural result of having so many different ideas of HJ out in the wild combined with the frustratingly frequent imprecision of lay discussions – an imprecision that is either not present in the work of actual historians or, when present, isn’t my place to correct.
This shit, however, happens on FtB, so i feel it is my place to correct.
So to sum up, Yes, I’m talking about lay people doing the misinterpreting, but I’m worried how they misinterpret the writings of other lay people, not how they misinterpret the writings of historians who have their own peer review process to weed out harmful or careless imprecision in their ranks.
First, are you a professional historian? Because you brought up these sources on a non-historians blog. As far as I know, there are no professional historians involved in this conversation. Therefore, your assertion that lay people NEVER think of this is refuted.
Second: to the extent that lay people don’t fully appreciate all reasonably identifiable sources of uncertainty (which I admit is a large extent, even if it’s not as universal and absolute as your earlier statement appears to imply), that’s the problem I’m talking about. Historians writing for historians are writing for an audience equipped to evaluate the reliability of historical sources. We lay people are not. We can, then, try to bring up such sources to make good arguments, but the arguments among lay people contain a strong chance of being poorly argued & poorly received even when they superficially resemble the arguments of professional historians because we are not equipped to process those same arguments in the manner of professional historians.
Pliny the Younger knew both Tacitus & Suetonius. He funded the work of both, though I don’t think we know to what extent. (It’s hard to remember, but IIRC he was a significant patron of only one, I think Suetonius, but probably gave some form of support to the other. In any case, how much money was spent, etc. is not something I think has been quantified – certainly it hasn’t in what I’ve read.) The life spans of Tacitus & Suetonius also overlapped. Given that these two are very prominent historians of the Classical period, anyone with a Phd in History and a focus on the Classical Mediterranean would know that it’s at least possible that T & S met and/or shared significant discussions / writings / etc. Even if they did not directly share a particular fact or notion with each other, they both communicated directly with Pliny the Younger about their historical work and thus Pliny could have passed such facts & notions from one to the other.
Therefore, to a professional historian, listing T & S as independent sources means something more than it does to lay people – it means that the person advancing them as independent sources is working on the hypothesis that these particular facts or notions were not shared, either directly or indirectly, through the methods of sharing information that they clearly had available. Is that a reasonable hypothesis? Oh, gods, I don’t know. But an actual historian probably would.
Embedded assumptions that we miss, then, will often be openly acknowledged premises to an historian, even when a quote is lifted verbatim, because we simply don’t have the background knowledge to identify these premises.
Small sources of uncertainty, of course, build up. A professional historian might find gazillions of such uncertainties in something I write, each relatively small, but in sum making an argument that appears compelling to lay folk entirely untenable amongst scholars who know what the fuck they’re talking about.
In short: I think you’re wrong that such things are NEVER talked about in lay circles, but to the extent that you’re correct, that’s a bad thing. That’s another way in which lay discussions are misleading (or can be) and another reason to think that trying to pin down HJ in some blog comment on the internet is just another squirrel.
I’m not sure if you’re talking about the Composite Historical Jesus theory hear, or if you’re talking about when I’ve mentioned that there are multiple Historical Jesuses.
Assuming you’re talking about the latter, I just mean that what one person means when they announce “I believe an HJ existed” might be very different than what another means by the same sentence. One might include a miraculous Jesus as an inseparable part of HJ. Another might include a relatively minimalist HJ, but who preached the words of the Sermon on the Mount verbatim and literally rode an ass into Jerusalem. Yet another might mean KG’s HJ, which includes neither miracles nor donkey riding. And each might believe fiercely that the qualities of their HJ are there for good reasons and cannot be separated from the minimal notion of who HJ is. They might believe, for instance, that a non-miraculous Jesus existed, but that if the symbolic ride into Jerusalem never happened, the religion we call Christianity would never have existed. And, okay, I don’t care, but then if KG or someone following KG announces that they’ve determined the HJ existed, then they can do that without ever proving an ass ride while the 2nd person in this example can then name KG as one person who believes the ass riding anecdote… despite the fact that KG may not believe that at all.
It is in this sense that I say there are multiple HJs and the multiplicity of His is a problem for methodologically careless discussions on the internet.
In sum, I think these discussions are so careless that they’ll never generate any substantial new knowledge while they also distract us by allowing many of us to convince ourselves we know more about the founder of Christianity than we actually do.
In other words, Historical Jesus is a squirrel.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden,
Thank you for taking the time and effort to clarify what you meant for me. I agree with a lot of what you said here, and the parts I don’t agree with are still interesting and thought-provoking.
CD @38:
So, like pretty much every topic.
@Rob:
Fair.
Indeed they do – but not insofar as the baptism took place – because that was something of an embarrassment – only as regards John allegedly acknowledging Jesus as his superior. If you look at modern Christian apologetics, there’s a lot of guff about why Jesus – what with actually being God – needed baptising at all.
In what’s generally regarded as the earliest of the four canonical gospels, gMark, John is recorded as baptising Jesus, this is immediately followed by the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus. In gMatthew, John only baptises Jesus after protesting that it should be the other way round. In gLuke, it’s noted that Jesus gets baptised, but it’s not explicitly stated that it was done by John. Finally in gJohn, considered the latest written, there is no baptism, John just points Jesus out as the one everybody should follow. The best explanation for the shifting stories (there’s a similar progression in stories about Jesus’s burial) is that the actual facts (Jesus was baptised by John just like many others; Jesus, if buried at all, was buried without ceremony by the Jewish religious authorities, simply because it was religiously required to bury dead Jews a.s.a.p.) became increasingly inconvenient as the status attributed to Jesus by his followers became more and more exalted.
Sorry – in my #42 “brucegee25” should be “brucegee 1962@25”.
One Brow@22,
In saying mythicism is little better than creationism and climate change denial intellectually, I’m thinking about its denial of the consensus of relevant experts on ideological grounds, its misrepresentation of that consensus (as Crip Dyke misrepresents historical Jesus scholars in the OP), its failure to produce any coherent alternative to it, and other characteristics of denialism.
db@24,
I notice you don’t actually produce any argument that O’Neill is wrong in anything you quote.
The OP is mythicist garbage – although not, obviously, of the same variety as Carrier. All this guff about how many people were born in Bethlehem (or Nazareth), preached and got crucified is utterly irrelevant , and if you weren’t so ignorant on this issue, you’d know it.
And so are those writing about the issue in historical journals. They are generally assuming, because it’s part of the consensus of relevant experts, that there was a specific individual, who grew up in Galilee, was baptised by J-the-B, preached, did faith-healing and gathered some sort of following there, went to Jerusalem with some of them, caused a disturbance, got crucified for sedition – and some of whose followers became convinced he had been the Jewish Messiah and that they could and should continue to follow him. Paul did not invent Christianity out of whole cloth – there’s clear evidence in his letters (which are the earliest part of the NT) that there was a group of Jesus’s followers in Jerusalem, led by Peter, Jesus’s brother James and others. IOW, what makes this particular guy “the historical Jesus” is the causal role he had (quite unwittingly) in the origins of Christianity. The great majority of relevant experts writing about the historical Jesus are arguing about what his beliefs and intentions were, which bits of the gospels convey actual facts about his life and death, and other live issues – not whether there was such a person. Just as evolutionary biologists are not arguing in their journals about whether evolution happened, and climate scientists are not arguing in theirs about whether global heating is real.
Crip Dyke,
Presumably you’d also say that evolution is a squirrel – because after all, lay people who say they believe or disbelieve in it mean a wide variety of things by the term, few of which correspond at all closely to what the relevant experts – evolutionary biologists – mean by it.
@44 KG said: “I notice you don’t actually produce any argument that O’Neill is wrong in anything you quote.”
OK, here is a new quote:
• Godfrey, Neil (13 November 2020). “Bad History for Atheists (1) — Louis Feldman on Justin’s Trypho and “proving Jesus existed””. Vridar.
@42 KG said: “gMark, John is recorded as baptising Jesus, this is immediately followed by the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus.”
KG is blindly racing forward, and stepping around the first hurdle (hoping no one will notice?):
• Is gMark a “fictional narrative” ?
Clearly it is a “fictional narrative” given “the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus.”
Given that “Allegory, [is] a symbolic fictional narrative that conveys a meaning not explicitly set forth in the narrative . . . encompasses such forms as fable, parable, and apologue” and “may have meaning on two or more levels that the reader can understand only through an interpretive process.” —(Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019).
So even if there was a historical John and Jesus, the historicity of their water antics is not verifiable from the testimony of a work of fiction. Anymore then the fact that Abraham Lincoln hunted vampires, because someone wrote it down.
@44 KG said: “it’s part of the consensus of relevant experts, that there was a specific individual, who grew up in Galilee, was baptised by J-the-B, preached, did faith-healing and gathered some sort of following there, went to Jerusalem with some of them, caused a disturbance, got crucified for sedition…”
Per “the consensus of relevant experts”:
The consensus for the historicity of Jesus—now is by assumption only—and not by peer reviewed rational scholarly argument published in an academic press.
There is no escaping this fact.
And furthermore per @47 db:
• Carrier (22 December 2019). “Tim O’Neill & the Biblical History Skeptics on Mythicism”. Richard Carrier Blogs.
Well, remember that the problem that I describe is not quite what you describe there.
I’m saying that the term’s use by lay persons differs **not only** from what experts mean by HJ, but also from the use by other lay people, making a particular conversation not merely **different from** that of experts, but because of multiple different definitions contained in a single conversation, the entire discussion is incoherent unless and until there is explicit agreement on a specific definition to be used for the purposes of that discussion.
Remember, I don’t object to the discussion as long as definitions are both clear & universally agreed among the participants in the conversation. It’s even fine if some of those participants use a different definition in a different conversation, so long as that other definition is made clear and gets universal consent for its use in that other conversation.
But when you argue for HJ (or for evolution, yes) and different people in the same conversation are using different definitions without ever making clear what each of those definitions might be, then the people conversing are merely chasing squirrels.
If the same thing happens in a conversation about evolution, then yes, evolution would absolutely be a squirrel in that context.
However, squirrel chasing isn’t bad in and of itself. If your hobby is chasing squirrels, knock yourself out. In the case of “proving” HJ, however, articulating support for an HJ without specifying which HJ you mean gives support to the Christians who believe water walking is historical.
If you voice support for evolution in a thread devoted to “proving” evolution, you don’t actually run the risk of providing support to the Christians who believe in a literal Genesis (which IMO would be the appropriate parallel to a historical, water-walking Jesus in this case).
So, sure. It’s still chasing squirrels if you don’t agree on definitions at the beginning of the conversation (and if, as a result, different people are using the term differently in the same conversation), but your poor argumentation and less rigorous communication doesn’t carry the same risks.
But also note, we don’t set out to prove evolution on FtB. The reality of evolution is a premise here, one that we believe is established in evidence and experiment. So we don’t even have conversations attempting to establish that evolution happened the way we have conversations attempting to establish an HJ.
As a gotcha, then, it’s not much of one. If we both acted the same **and** ran the same risks discussing evolution, then sure, I’d write the same type of OP criticizing those discussions of evolution. But we don’t.
So… do you concede that lay people have conversations about establishing the past existence of an HJ before even defining what qualities are necessarily present in a minimal HJ?
You should. It happened in this thread.
And do you concede this happens on FtB, where we have reason to worry about it (other people can worry about what happens on other websites)? You should, since this thread is taking place on FtB.
So what, exactly, is your issue, if any, with the OP, now that you presumably understand it?
…except, OOPS. You don’t really understand it do you? Because you also said:
in response to my question of where I have argued for mythicism.
Again, quote one single place where I argued for mythicism or retract your bullshit and spend some time thinking about what I actually said before you post again.
I note that you also say I misrepresented scholarly historians who work on the subject of HJ, yet I don’t see how that’s possible since I never presented a single scholars work. How can I represent something falsely if I don’t represent it at all?
You’re lost here, KG. Truly lost. I hope you can find your way back.
Tim O’Neill and KG are trolls whose primary goal is to denounce mythicism as “incompetent and not worth reading” and to continue this tactic forever.
• Godfrey, Neil (15 November 2020). “Bad History for Atheists (3) — Proof-texting, Circularity, Fake Facts, Insults”. Vridar.
db, your certitude is flawed. KG is just someone who expresses their opinion and with whose comments I’ve been familiar for years; whether that’s trollish (in which case, you are too) or not is a matter of definition.
“There are several kinds of name-calling”… heh. Indeed.
PS: “The advice to the novice in biblical studies is never engage in any serious way in a discussion with non-conservative scholars. You should just denounce them as incompetent and not worth reading and continue this tactic until people believe you.”
A perfect example of argumentum ad hominem, right there.
John Morales, what is your viewoint on:
• the Historicity of the Mosaic authorship of the Torah
• the Historicity of the resurrection of Jesus
• prev sp–> viewpoint
db, both are myths. Obviously.
It’s notable you don’t dispute either your hasty judgement about KG nor the status of the presumptive incompetence of “non-conservative scholars”.
—
As to the historicity of Jesus, who cares?
We know the historicity of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sathya_Sai_Baba — just as much a godman. So?
—
And I can’t resist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Go_to_Golgotha!
@56 John Morales said: “As to the historicity of Jesus, who cares?”
The entire history of Christianity, its origins, and the origins and original meaning of its scriptures, entirely depends on the question of historicity.
• That is beyond trivial.
@56 John Morales said: “both are myths…”
If possible can you state either a: they both are true; or b: they both are false ?
db:
A bold suggestion, but unsupportable. A simple matter of ontological dependence: Christians believe in his historicity because they believe the myth, rather than believing the myth because of his historicity.
FWIW, Christianity is basically Paulism. Someone else’s creation, IOW.
Ironically, Jesus himself is recorded as being a Jew. Most certainly not a Christian!
(cf. Matthew 5:17)
They’re myths, thus their truthfulness is irrelevant to their significance.
Still. Since you ask so nicely:
I’m an atheist, so obviously I think any claim that a god dictated anything is ridiculous, and since I’m also not into woo, I think the resurrection of corpses is equally silly.
So, both false. Obviously.
• the Historicity of the Mosaic authorship of the Torah is FALSE
• the Historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is FALSE
And for those who wish to lawyer up. We note that TRUE/FALSE is cast in the realm of “Moral Certainty” (Wikipedia) as is the norm for questions of history.
So surely among the consensus of Biblical Scholars on these two issues, this is made clear, and clearly stated?
Therefore I can add (with the highest level of academic citations) the following in the corresponding Wikipedia articles:
• The consensus of Biblical Scholars is that the Historicity of the Mosaic authorship of the Torah is FALSE.
• The consensus of Biblical Scholars is that the Historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is FALSE.
But no one appears accept this. There is something rotten in Denmark about this whole “consensus of Biblical Scholars” thing?
db:
Same thing exactly.
Analogically, were the consensus of Biblical Scholars that the Historicity of Jesus is FALSE, the very same would apply. Both believers and purported believers would still believe and purportedly believe.
Notably, this contradicts your earlier claim that Christianity somehow depends on the veridical nature of its historicity. What it depends on is tradition and belief, and both are independent of scholarly consensus.
(Well, that and the rod. Less-so these days, but back in the day it generally didn’t pay to be other than publicly pious, there being consequences otherwise)
John Morales do you concur that believers and purported believers always form the overwhelming majority of any “consensus of Biblical Scholars”?
And therefore any appeal to the “consensus of Biblical Scholars” per Historicity of X is “Prima Facie” apologetical and must be resolved without said appeal to the “consensus of Biblical Scholars”.
db, I don’t, because I don’t know enough, and what I do know contraindicates that belief.
If pressed, I’d say most being believers, probably — but most being Christians, probably not. I’d say a good proportion are Jewish or non-theistic.
Anyway, even if it were the case that they constituted the overwhelming majority, it doesn’t follow that it would be expected to be apologetic.
For one thing, there’s the literary, anthropological, historical and mythological aspects of that field of study in addition to the theological aspects, and for another, note that you yourself claimed that the consensus of said scholars is that the core miracle of Christianity (the Resurrection) is “FALSE”, which is contrary to your supposition that it would be an apologetic stance.
@62 John Morales said: “I don’t, because I don’t know enough…”
I can not add (with the highest level of academic citations) the following in the corresponding Wikipedia articles:
• The consensus of Biblical Scholars is that the Historicity of the Mosaic authorship of the Torah is FALSE.
• The consensus of Biblical Scholars is that the Historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is FALSE.
Ipso facto: I do know apologetics constitute the overwhelming majority of any consensus of Biblical Scholars. It is irrational to say otherwise.
John Morales do you concur that any appeal to the “consensus of Biblical Scholars” per Historicity of X is a logical fallacy: argumentum ab auctoritate; argumentum ad populum; etc..
And therefore any question at hand must be resolved without said appeal to the “consensus of Biblical Scholars”.
db, a couple of points.
First, clearly the proposed historicity of Jesus is best handled by historians rather than Biblical Scholars, just happens in this case that there is not insignificant overlap.
Second, the appeal to authority is an informal fallacy only if there is a way to determine the applicable facts independent of said authorities and the proposition at hand can be precisely determined. In this case, short of a time machine (and a visit to Golgotha!), all we can go by is historical accounts, mostly fragmentary and many of dubious provenance. And guess who the experts on that sort of stuff are?
So, no — relying on historians and scholars to determine the degree of likelihood of that particular proposition is not fallacious. All it means is that they cannot be demonstrably definitive, not that they can’t best weigh the available evidence.
(Would you dispute that AGW is real because it’s been determined by scientific consensus of climate scientists and thus must be fallacious? That’s a matter of much greater importance than whether the mythical Jesus was based on some actual person)
@64 John Morales said: “the proposed historicity of Jesus is best handled by historians rather than Biblical Scholars”
So who are the contemporary secular scholars that have published (in a an academic press) a peer reviewed defense of the proposed historicity of Jesus while honestly engaging with the peer reviewed (and published in a an academic press) challenges to said proposed historicity of Jesus.
db, you are the one who is interested, not me. So why are you asking me?
In passing, you sure have a bee in your bonnet about this purported necessity for such scholars to be secular, which given you also consider that accepting the consensus of experts (whether secular or not) is fallacious is rather amusing.
@66 John Morales said: “So why are you asking me?”
I wish to ascertain your comprehension of how ridiculous the scholarship is for the proposed historicity of Jesus.
In fact there are ZERO : “contemporary secular scholars that have published (in a an academic press) a peer reviewed defense of the proposed historicity of Jesus while honestly engaging with the peer reviewed (and published in a an academic press) challenges to said proposed historicity of Jesus.”
I concede to strike the secular scholar requirement from the query. But do replace it with the requirement that each scholar has an on the record declaration that:
• the Historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is FALSE
db, I quote from your #59:
“• The consensus of Biblical Scholars is that the Historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is FALSE.”
It follows that, since the set of scholars whose consensus is that the mythic Jesus was based upon a historical figure is the same set who you accept has the consensus that “the Historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is FALSE”, your condition has been already been met.
And it’s clearly not the empty set. 😉
@68 John Morales, you misunderstand.
My @59 is a proof by contradiction using the formulation: “The consensus of Biblical Scholars is that the Historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is FALSE.” However it can not be demonstrated in the real world (i.e. Wikipedia).
i. The consensus of Biblical Scholars is valid if holds that the Historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is FALSE.
ii. The consensus of Biblical Scholars is NOT valid if does NOT hold that the Historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is FALSE.
• The current point at hand is:
The consensus for the historicity of Jesus—now is by assumption only—and not by peer reviewed rational scholarly argument published in an academic press.
There is no escaping this fact.
db, hm.
Seems to me you’ve put yourself into this bind where you respect the opinion of experts when it matches your own, but also think it fallacious or apologetical if it doesn’t. Thing is, you can’t have it both ways — either you respect scholarly consensus, or you don’t.
Also, I get the feeling you think that the historicity of Jesus is important because, if the myth is actually based on some real personage, it somehow has more weight. Thing is, all it’s claiming is that the myth was based upon a person who actually existed, rather than claiming this person was actually somehow magical. It’s quite a mundane claim.
@70 said: “either you respect scholarly consensus, or you don’t.”
Biblical Scholars have broken it. And It can not be fixed. You just have to move on to manually evaluating the peer reviewed works for a position and the peer reviewed works that challenge a position.
@70 said: “that the myth was based upon a person who actually existed, rather than claiming this person was actually somehow magical. It’s quite a mundane claim.”
So there should be no issue with examining the best case for both sides. And see which side has the sounder premises and logic, when everything is added up, nothing straw-manned, nothing swept under the rug. When all fallacies and falsehoods removed, from both sides, what remains?
db, you are amusing.
Who do you imagine constitute the peer reviewers for Biblical scholarship, if not other Biblical scholars? And do you not realise that “passing” peer review entails scholarly consensus that what has been reviewed is scholarly meritorious?
There isn’t.
That you can’t bring yourself to accept the result is on you, not on the process.
@72 John Morales said: “you are amusing”
• Likewise
I now subordinate my position to Carrier’s position. Which now supersedes my position.
• Carrier (17 October 2017). “How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed (or Anything Else in the World)”. Richard Carrier Blogs.
• Carrier (8 May 2014). “On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus”. Richard Carrier Blogs.
db:
I have that effect on people. It was evident early on you’re out of your depth.
Since anyone citing Richard Carrier as authority for anything proves themselves a fool, I shan’t bother with db’s babblings any further, except to say that of course, Moses did not write the Torah (indeed, there probably was no such person, since there’s no evidence for the Jewish captivity in Egypt, and the Torah dates from centuries after Moses’s supposed lifetime), and of course Jesus was not resurrected. The first of these is indeed the consensus among relevant experts, while most (not all) historical Jesus scholars who are also believers in the resurrection would nonetheless concede that it cannot be established by historical methods. Oh, and contemporary texts assert that the Emperor Vespasian performed miracles. Therefore by db’s arguments, these tests are works of fiction, and can provide no evidence concerning the “historical Vespasian”. But that’s not how historians work, or could work, if they are studying anything other than quite recent history – and not always then. They are well used to assessing texts, discounting what is impossible or implausible, and making use of what’s left – they don’t just say “work of fiction” and throw the whole thing away, as db would know if they weren’t so abysmally ignorant.
Crip Dyke,
I’ve already said why I consider the OP mythicist garbage. But I’ll try to make it clearer. Here’s a key passage:
Actually, the first part of 4 is very well evidenced – that is precisely the consensus of relevant experts, except for the implication that Paul made up his new religion out of whole cloth. As I said, there is clear evidence in his letters that before his hallucination of Jesus, there was already a group of Jesus’s followers established in Jerusalem, whom he later visited, and argued with. The stuff about the proportion of people from Nazareth who died by crucifixion is just stupid tosh, as utterly irrelevant to study of the historical Jesus as: “If people evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” is to evolutionary biology.
@75 KG said: “most (not all) historical Jesus scholars who are also believers in the resurrection…”
@70 John Morales said: “either you respect scholarly consensus, or you don’t.”
WOW!
@75 KG said: “how historians work . . . They are well used to assessing texts, discounting what is impossible or implausible, and making use of what’s left – they don’t just say “work of fiction” and throw the whole thing away, as db would know if they weren’t so abysmally ignorant.”
• Carrier (30 September 2019). “Did Jesus Exist? Craig Evans’ Post-Debate Analysis”. Richard Carrier Blogs.
@47 db
@49 db
@77 db
Are all on the same topic.