Rex Invictus
March 15, 2012 at 7:44 am
Go back to reading PZ’s blog looser.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 15, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Ha ha With a name like Rex Invictus you must get mistaken a lot for Jesus. Do you mean I should read PZ’s blog more loosely? Or were you looking for “Loser”?
Hunt
April 2, 2012 at 7:33 am
Uh, no, Joe, I think he was talking to me.
Ned
March 15, 2012 at 11:47 am
+1
Reply
jonjermey
March 15, 2012 at 3:55 am
Careful, Hunt — Hoffman has a habit of removing comments that don’t reflect well on his awesomeness. That might be why he has a grand total of eight, as compared with dozens over at, say, Why Evolution is True.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 15, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Habit? Go to moderation; read a little.
Reply
Dan Gillson
March 16, 2012 at 3:55 pm
It must be more cathartic to leave petty ad hominems than to respond to the blog itself. Would you recommend I try it over at choiceindying.com?
Reply
US: Non-New Atheist takes ball, goes home | Religious Atrocities says:
March 15, 2012 at 5:20 am
[...] The New Oxonian [...]
Reply
Rex Invictus
March 16, 2012 at 7:11 am
I was actually referring to Hunt Mr. Hoffman.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 19, 2012 at 3:49 pm
Forgive me Rex, I lost the thread–maybe even the trousers–on this one! Yeah, he should read EZ PZ.
Reply
Hunt
April 2, 2012 at 7:39 am
Bingo.
scotteus
March 16, 2012 at 8:16 am
Hoffmann,
Me thinks thou art a Heretic amongst heretics. “Heretics are the only (bitter)remedy against the entropy of human thought.”
Reply
trudom22
March 28, 2012 at 7:54 pm
Reblogged this on who is the God of heaven.
Reply
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Salvation
by rjosephhoffmann
There isn’t a God
The atheist said.
I believe that some clod
Made him up in his head.
It started with campfires
In long distant times
When all men were liars
And stories were rhymes
They told of a father
In bright skies above
Whose edicts were rather
Deficient in love.
He made earth and heaven
By sternest decree
And continents seven
And then you and me.
He bade us walk upright
And couple and frolic.
Gave us language for spite
And drinks alcoholic.
At first we amused him
At least for a spell–
But then we confused him
And so he made hell.
Don’t smite us, we said:
Give us law, give us letter
Though you wish we were dead
We can try to do better.
He sent flood, he sent drought and
The whole divine arsenal–
When we did what we oughtn’t
He began to get personal:
I’ve had it, he said
With your insolent ways
Though I wish you were dead
I still need your praise
For I cannot be Phallic
Without all the homage,
I’d sooner be Gallic
And call Swiss cheese frommage.
So partly to tease us
(And partly for pleasure)
He sent his son Jesus
To even the measure
That Satan had botched
When he tricked gentle Eve
(Proving once again God
Had some tricks up his sleeve.)
I’ll make you a deal
You won’t want to refuse,
Let you out on appeal
“Buy you back”—you can’t lose!
And here is the bonus:
I’m paying your way!
I’ll carry the onus
Until Judgment Day.
No strings and no hassles
I’m God after all
I’ve got lots of castles…
I’m a thousand miles tall.
Besides, it’s my pleasure–
It shows my largesse
My noblesse oblige-sure
My omnipotence.
We’ll just lay it on Jesus
Your scarlet red sins
You’ll say, “How he frees us
To be good again!”
But you won’t,–I’m not stupid–
I’m God after all–
Not Isis or Cupid
And you’re very small.
You’ll sin and you’ll stumble
Like Adam and Eve did
With no snake to mumble
“Just take it and eat it.”
But this time the crime
Is forgiven full stop:
For I change over time
And I’m God, not a cop
Jesus died for your sins
Both the old ones and new
And salvation begins
When you think this is true.
It started with campfires
In long distant times
When all men were liars
And stories were rhymes
It is clear there’s no God,
The atheist said–
It is sure that some clod
Made him up in his head.
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Published: March 16, 2012
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6 Responses to “Salvation”
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Franklin Percival
March 16, 2012 at 4:26 pm
A pleasure to read you, as always!
Reply
Steersman
March 17, 2012 at 3:28 am
Interesting poem.
But metaphor or literal truth? If literal truth then what of all of the other religions of the world – past and present – for which salvation wasn’t as central or took very different forms? Without some gold standard – tangible evidence – to adjudicate between those different claims then it seems that all must be rejected as figments of the imagination – even if some, more than others, may have some utility for their representation of underlying metaphorical and psychological truth, for a more faithful correspondence to what lies behind the shadows in Plato’s cave.
Reply
steph
March 17, 2012 at 3:22 pm
This is a great “epic poem in Doggerel”, very entertaining and comical. Simply atheism summed up in a nutshell. Who receives poetry or verse for literal truth? I suppose if you do, you can leap to all sorts of convoluted assumptions about an intended meaning. However as history has taught us, literal interpretations tend to lead one into trouble and make one fall out of humour.
Reply
Robert Hagedorn
March 17, 2012 at 6:57 pm
Metaphor and literal truth can be combined, as they are in the story of Adam and Eve. Google First Scandal.
Reply
decourse
March 19, 2012 at 1:23 am
Mythology has always been the way that humanity has worked through its philosophical thought experiments. Long may it remain so!
Incidentally, I love the phrase “when all men were liars”. All poets, indeed all artists, are liars. It’s an underrated tool.
Reply
steph
March 20, 2012 at 9:25 am
This is a great “epic poem in Doggerel”, very entertaining and comical. Not completely in Doggerel perhaps.. You’ve summed up believing in no gods in a nutshell. Who receives poetry or verse for literal truth? I suppose if you do, you can leap to all sorts of convoluted assumptions about an intended meaning. However as history has taught us, literal interpretations tend to lead one into trouble and make one fall out of humour.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Remembering the New Atheism
by rjosephhoffmann
Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011)
by ADMIN posted on JANUARY 1, 2012 at rjosephhoffmann.com
UPDATE: Apologies are due to Greta Christina who was in fact ranked by an atheist website as one of the top ten popular atheist bloggers. rjh
Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
The Missouri boy in Connecticut
HO remembers their Huckleberry Finn? In chapter 19, Huck, Tom and Jim, afloat on the Mississippi River, meet up with two grifters, the Duke and the Dauphin, who claim to be exiled European royalty.
Their scam is going from town to town performing makeshift “scenes” from Shakespeare’s plays, then escaping with their lives when the rube public hear declamations like this:
To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature’s second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
After spending a few hours with the scoundrels, Huck reflects,
It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it’s the best way; then you don’t have no quarrels, and don’t get into no trouble.
But (in one of the great mysteries of the book) Huck continues to aid and abet, pastes their playbills on buildings in towns along the river, enjoys swapping tales with them on the raft, and even saves their skin when they have a close shave.
The Duke and the Dauphin are Mark Twain’s contribution to a a literary stereotype that goes back to plays like Our American Cousin (an English drama of 1858) that pit a pampered and brainless British aristocracy against the dull, stammering but basically honest Yankee (Lord Dundreary and Asa Trenchard, respectively, in the play): Americans are naive, optimistic, uncultured, energetic and gullible; the British are cunning, cynical, indolent and intellectually dissipated. America is a good place to make a buck by selling wares that His Majesty’s subjects either can’t afford or simply don’t have much use for.
EDWARD SOTHERN AS LORD DUNDREARY
Things like atheism. I recently cited the statistics for religion in Britain. If you are the Archbishop of Canterbury, it is not an encouraging thing to note that only about 36% of Britons claim to be religious and a higher number claim not to believe in God.
Compare these to statistics for atheism in America. The most recent ARIS report, released March 9, 2009, found that 34.2 million Americans (15.0%) claim no religion (“nones”), of which only 1.6% explicitly describes itself as atheist (0.7%) or agnostic (0.9%). If you are an atheist-front organization, also not an encouraging picture, no matter how you fiddle the stats to make “No religious preference” or “Sorry, really in a hurry” survey-takers into atheists. Nones further have to be adjusted for mothers whose safety clasp just failed on their child-seat doing a drive-by after school pickup, and shoppers standing in line at the exchange counter on December 26th.
If I were an atheist strategy specialist there is at least one biblical story I would need to believe was literally true: the saga of David and Goliath. I’d want to know how a very little movement can bring down a cultural behemoth like American religion by throwing a few stones.
THE PART NOBODY REMEMBERS
This led me to reflect on how the new atheism arrived in America and who is in charge of pasting the playbills on the storefronts.
OT to deny the contribution of several authors to the “movement”–Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens–I think it’s safe to say that the style of the new atheism extrudes from the work of Richard Dawkins. The paradigmatic shift from detente to full scale assault against religion as an undifferentiated mass of human error and superstitious thinking belongs to him: Why should we live with ideas that we find absurd and repugnant, or indulge people who fantasize the truth of their beliefs into norms that other people ought to follow? Gloves off, me hearties: Error should be resisted, countered, argued against, corrected, defeated–not coddled.
And what is the truth? Science is the truth.
The God Delusion (2006) and the wave of comment it created is now yesterday’s news. To remind myself of how I felt in 2006 while reading it, I talked myself (under the influence of several spirituous incentives) into re-reading it, and, much to my surprise, I liked it better the second time around–as a book rather than a best selling icon. It was a better book than Daniel Dennett’s really very sloppy Breaking the Spell, which I reviewed soon after it appeared in 2007. But then I forced myself to re-read a few of the reviews I had archived over the past several years, and this one by Murrough O’Brien from The Independent flagged itself. Just after pointing out Dawkins’s abuse of Bertrand Russell’s famous “Teapot Argument,” O’Brien notes.
Some of [Dawkins's] arguments are old atheistic chestnuts, and how merrily they crack in the roasting pan. The palm for outrageous question-begging goes to the Who Made God “argument”. Dawkins squirts this sachet of puerile pap (most of us had outgrown it before hitting double figures) over the whole book, to inadvertently comic effect. He writes: “The designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.” The short response to that is a simple “Why?” The long one goes something like this: the question “Who made God?”only makes sense if one assumes that the Divine nature is subject to a kind of inverted evolutionary process by which the complex is preceded by the still more complex, but why on earth should we assume this? Why should God be subject to any version of a biological theorem? Why not the laws of physics, or of chemistry?
But then the real punch, trilitorally speaking, of The God Delusion was panache. Dawkins was an extrovert and spellbinder compared to Dennett, with his Darwinesque looks, and the singularly incoherent Harris, whose work Scott Atran, a serious researcher and cognitivist,called playacting at science and politically pernicious while also getting basic anthropological theories backwards, like his famous wowser concerning the work of Franz Boas.
DENNETT
The real success story of the new atheism is that it was bought and sold after being intellectually panned by almost all the cognoscenti who weren’t atheist activists. In fact, as the circle closed around a tightly knit cadre of God-opposers, opposing God became virtually the sole criterion for what, in their parochial view, counted for anthropology, archaeology, sociology and the study of religion–about which all of the four (check the footnotes) were blissfully ignorant.
And I mean that in the most damning sense. Virtually all of the credible reviews alleged it of Dawkins, and the others didn’t fare much better outside the atheist camp. The reflexive answer was to accuse anyone who opposed the unscientific, malformed, and totally ignorant premises of these books of being “faitheists” and to say that dispute would be treated as treason against the higher purposes for which the books had been written.
If that didn’t stick, sane voices were denounced as jealous voices, as though reputable scholars wished they had written historical and philosophical travesty under their own names.
The repetitive accusation against Dawkins–that he was attacking a straw man, a sort of tertia res religiosa that did not exist–became the new framing device for every critique of new atheist tactics: its critics (despite manifold evidence to the contrary) were attacking a form ofatheism that did not exist. Sensible, if complex views like those of John Gray on the origin of humanitarian impulses, were conveniently set aside in favour of a new recipe for a scientific-evolutionary morality that floats above historical causality: Wrote Atran,
There is an irony of history that completely escapes Harris and other new atheists in their evangelical quest for a global morality rooted in scientific truth. As philosopher John Gray of the London School of Economics convincingly argues, it is universal forms of monotheism, such as Christianity and Islam, that merged Hebrew tribal belief in one God with Greek faith in universal laws applicable to the whole of creation that originated the inclusive concept of Humanity in the first place….Harris’s own messianic moral absolutism, based on devotion to “truth,” leads to some rather nutty proposals that defy common sense and are justified by made-up history that is patently untrue.
So much for Harris’s pop-psychology, or rather MRI-enhanced pop-psychology. Dawkins and Dennett were serious academics working out-of-field but who seem honestly to have believed that the methodologies developed in other disciplines were easily mastered and just as easily dismissed–a cavalier attitude toward critique that bordered on Dominican hubris at best and anti-intellectualism at the deep end.
HITCH
Always guided by the nature of the game, Hitchens, the only true intellectual and by far the best-read of the group, was in it for the ride. All four looked as though they had powered their way through their task by reading the Cliff’s Notes to Thomas Aquinas and David Hume, and in some cases not even those carefully enough.
From any objective reading of the serious reviews, their mission to God’s kingdom was an epic fail in terms of what they brought home from the journey. It was all finished, critically speaking, in 2006 when Terry Eagleton said,
What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace, or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?
Dawkins’s precedence in ignoring the opposition by denying they constituted serious oppositionbecame a trademark of the movement he put into place. But despite the discounted value of the books as credible intellectual proposals, there were plenty of people prepared to spread the mission stateside, where Dawkins’s accent, his unabashed science-thumping and his wares were more valuable than in Blighty, where people had been giving up on God (in droves) for decades without his help.
What hath anti-God wrought: The new atheism, which was really an American phenomenon, like Spam.
One can’t simply blame Richard Dawkins for creating the kind of poster-pasters his leadership had produced in Gotchaland. He didn’t ordain them, exactly. That would be like blaming Jesus for founding the church. Is a rock star guilty of the excesses of his fans? Of course not.
But it is undeniable that new atheism would never have congealed, to the extent it ever congealed, if American neo-Darwinist soldiers and a few strays hadn’t taken on the fight. Dawkins, as Garry Wolff commented in 2006, was very old news in England when he decided to try plowing the fundamentalist pastures of America. And soldiers there were, just waiting for the right fight and marching orders. And a good thing too: Dawkins himself came off relatively unsullied by these battles, while his American promoters didn’t mind a little mud.
Headlights:
COYNE
Jerry Coyne. Coyne is a biology professor at Chicago. His only book, Why Evolution is True (2009), is his contribution to the anti-intelligent design debate and carries endorsements from Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen Pinker and others in the atheist-neo-Darwinist klatch. Dawkins reviewed the book for Atheist News in 2009. Hardly anyone would fault Coyne for his attempts to combat the anti-evolution fever that grips the establishment that is failed American science education. I for one think Jerry Coyne has struck a blow for rationality and common sense by writing this lucid book. It’s a shame therefore that Coyne buys into the Dawkinsincompatibility model that makes religion the sworn enemy of science and science the salvation of the race. It is frankly embarassing, after two hundred years of the scientific study of religion, to hear a scientist saying things like this:
In the end, science is no more compatible with religion than with other superstitions, such as leprechauns. Yet we don’t talk about reconciling science with leprechauns. We worry about religion simply because it’s the most venerable superstition — and the most politically and financially powerful.
Just a flash: While leprauchauns didn’t copy the books that were turned into the books that led to the science Dr Coyne eventually studied, monks and rabbis did. Why does the perfectly reasonable opposition to religious craziness have to descend to this caricaturing of the history of religion? And some information: the University of Chicago Divinity School, one of the most venerable in the nation–after which the Chicago School of Religionswissenschaft got its name (and turned Europeans green with envy at its methods)–one notably lacking in Irish elves–is located at 1025 E. 58th Street. Any number of evolution-accepting scholars–including Martin Riesebrodt would be happy to have a chat and set you straight. Of course, if you really believe that a degree in biology trumps every other discipline, then why bother?
P Z Myers. Winner of the 2009 “Humanist of the Year Award,” a lapse of judgement for which the American Humanist Association will burn like cotton floss in a non-existent hell for their abuse of the word humanist,
MYERS
P Z Myers is cut from the same neo-Darwinist fabric as Dr Coyne, but without the credentials. That means he is anti-intelligent design, pro-evolution, and happy to be known as the Don Rickles of the Dawkins theatre troupe. He’s the purveyor of the award-winning science blogPharyngula where he specializes in calling people who don’t agree with him stupid and moronic.
To his credit, Myers has published no book of popular or scientific merit though if his rep holds up as the sun goes down on new atheism he does have a collection of his favourite anecdotes and outrages coming out in 2012. But this does not stop him from being the voice to which most of the young neo-atheists pay heed. I was reminded last year, after being told by P Z that I needed to be more respectful to the cause, that he deserves to be called Dr Myers. I hadasked why someone who teaches in a university could not distinguish between free speech and inciteful behaviour–like that associated with Koran-burning Florida yahoo Terry Jones.
Myers, who describes himself as a moral nihilist, writes like this:
There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion. Webster Cook smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn’t eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it. This isn’t the stupid part yet. He walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church fought with him to get it back. …. It is just a cracker! So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls.
So, God love him, P Z Myers got the chance to kick the pope in the balls by spearing a consecrated host (eucharist is the name of the sacrament you fucking ex-Lutheran moron–whoops, just resorting to idiom) and a few other factotums. For this he is famous. And humanist of the year.
But let me just say this about the evolutionary, neo-Darwinist, religion sucks, anti-intelligent design phalanx of new atheism: If ever atheism got dumber and less impressive, it is in the work of this dissolute insult- monger. If there were ever an occasion for a serious scholar like Dawkins to say, this is over the top, P Z Myers is that opportunity. So far–nothing. The clowns are now the whole circus.
GRETA CHRISTINA
Greta Christina. I’m not sure whether Greta is a headlight, because there can only be two and she will see any reference to three as some sort of weird sexual joke. That’s the problem. She sees everything as a weird sexual joke. Ranked as one of the Top Ten most popular atheist bloggers, Christina exemplifies in her work the increasing influence of LGBTQ trend toward identifying atheism and humanism with victimization and social marginalization. She can be amusing, but needs to take on some serious issues, such as why radical feminism and lesbianism are often perceived to be anti science when new atheism is purely devoted to an evolutionary model that, frankly, is not friendly to special pleading for biological exceptionalism based on sex. Didn’t understand that sentence? You need to.
Sidelights.
Mark Twain just needed Huck and Tom to paste the handbills to the walls. Dawkins has a small retinue of Americans who will do him favours and not ask for money.
Ophelia Benson, host of Butterflies and Wheels, has turned her once-interesting website (I used to contribute regularly) into a chat room for neo-atheist spleen. I still regard her as a fair-broker who needs to rise above the temptation to turn the whole kit and kaboodle over to the grousers who loiter around her kitchen table. I mean campfire.
The ex-Revd Eric MacDonald touts his website as being devoted to death with dignity. I’m for it; a close colleague and collaborator of mine, Gerald Larue, was one of the founders of theHemlock Society. Unfortunately MacDonald has become just another horn in the bagpipe blown by Coyne and Myers. His constant theme is that theology is not worth the trouble. That’s an odd enough thesis for an atheist. More troubling is the fact that MacDonald doesn’t seem to know bloody anything about the academic study of religion and pretends that there is no difference between what he read as a young priest (mainly liberal post-Tillichian pap) and what’s being taught to PhD candidates in Religion at Harvard. It’s all ignorant bravado, but unfortunately some people read him, people like…
Jason Rosenhouse, a mathematician qua neo-Darwinian atheist who teaches at James Madison University in Virginia. Rosenhouse [sic] essentially does book reviews of things that cross his path and passes judgment on what he doesn’t like, usually anything that rises an inch beyond cultural Judaism. Of Rabbi Alan Lurie’s recent HuffPo piece on religion, Rosenhouse opined,
We’re really not on the same page here. I agree with him about the art, and I’m not sure what he means by ‘the histories,’ but I find nothing to admire in the remaining items on his list. I am not only unimpressed by the world’s various alleged holy texts, but I frankly dislike the whole idea of a holy text. Most religious rituals and practices leave me beyond cold, I think the world’s ‘mystical teachings’ should be discarded in toto, and I think better uses could be found for sacred spaces.
To which I say…Go on. Suggest already. KFCs, meth clinics, museums, failing public libraries, Starbuck’s. You choose. America, as we know, is awash in sacred spaces so the fewer of these antiquities the better. Let’s use the real estate for what we really hold sacred. I sometimes wonder why people whose only contribution to blogdom consists of sentences like “Most religious rituals leave me beyond cold,” find themselves titillating? Can’t he do this onFacebook and get a thousand likes to boot?
0 many other poster-pasters, but time is up and I hope my case is made.
The new atheism was as American as apple pie, which was invented in fourteenth century England. Just try finding apple pie in twenty-first century England.
HERE is a final question. Why does this matter? Why, more specifically, does it matter to me–why does someone who considers himself an unbeliever care about this subject at all? –So what if the ranters are ranters, that they pay no attention to serious religious studies scholarship, ignore the realities of two hundred years of academic inquiry into the foundations of religious thought and dismiss tons of modern scientific investigation into the nature of religious belief as worthless?
Jason Rosenhouse says, presumably with a straight face and clear conscience, he doesn’t know what “scientism” is. Naturally his question, in the ringaround-the-rosey style of this support group, is enthusiastically echoed by Coyne.
Let me offer my assistance. Scientism is a form of nominalism (q.v.) that collapses important methodological differences and qualities into a single term (“science”) as though the term had an existence apart from the methods that comprise it. Scientism is the belief that “science” is a supervening mode of knowing that can be imposed willy nilly on other disciplines whose methods have had a different organic evolution, yet methods normally just as true to their subject matter as biology or physics, for example, have been to their own. Most of the concrete results in historical studies biblical studies, the history of religion, textual studies (paleography), linguistics and assorted disciplines have been based on methods specific to their objects.
To deny the authority and validity of specific methods without knowing them is just as heinous an offense against reason as a fundamentalist’s rejection of a theory–like evolution–that he doesn’t fully understand. That is what scientism is and what it means and why it must be rejected. As Wittgenstein was finally forced to conclude, the belief that science is the final arbiter of what constitutes truth (or true propositions) is as “glaringly metaphysical” as the premises of traditional philosophy.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The willful ignorance of the new atheists matters because it makes almost impossible the work of serious religion scholars who have no commitment to belief, but who happen to feel that the study of religion belongs to and is inestimably important to the study of history and culture.
In the long run, real science acknowledges failed experiments and the humbling contribution of being wrong as a way of moving toward the right answers. It can’t rest like a medieval pope on its teaching authority. The “scientism” of the new atheists consists in a failed experiment in the misapplication of method. Richard Dawkins has been fond of saying that religion is the trivialization of complexities, a default position favoured by “dims” who just don’t get science. The scientistic worldview favoured by his promoters has relied heavily on the trivialization of appropriate methods for understanding religion. Given the starting point of his argument, there can be no other outcome.
The way forward in any useful critique of religion does not depend on activism disguised as judgement, opinion hiding behind tangential scholarly pursuits, or defenses of science and reason that are inherently unreasonable in themselves.
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Published: March 17, 2012
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7 Responses to “Remembering the New Atheism”
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Dwight Jones
March 17, 2012 at 4:39 pm
Atheist status would be fine if it was collateral with a continuing, and more profound examination of what it means to be alive. The phenomenon of Life trumps all, including religion, yet we dodge discussion of its evanescence the way fish dodge the study of water. Some day it may at last be discovered, and interest our species.
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Oli Lea
April 24, 2012 at 9:46 am
P Z Myers – “There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion”
Richard Dawkins – “do we know of any comparable examples, where stupid ideas have been known to spread like an epidemic? Yes, by God! Religion. Religious beliefs are irrational. Religious beliefs are dumb and dumber: super dumb.” (http://web.archive.org/web/20080331051321/http://richarddawkins.net/article,20,Atheists-for-Jesus,Richard-Dawkins)
Perhaps Myers’ vitriolic lampooning of religion was not without precedent from his mothership.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 24, 2012 at 11:07 am
Naturally the world would be perfect without religion: look at North Korea.
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Andrew
April 24, 2012 at 10:04 pm
Despite its superficiality, the new atheism has helped a lot of people at least free themselves from mentally abusive fundamentalist situations, and others feel less ostracized in America’s highly religious environments. Can you at least give it that? Plus, you don’t seem to give any consideration to the possibility that some people who start with Dawkins and Harris will eventually ‘graduate’ to deeper understanding of atheism, philosophy, science, and yes, even religion and theology. (I probably wouldn’t be reading Bultmann right now if it wasn’t for the new atheism.)
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rjosephhoffmann
April 25, 2012 at 1:51 am
If Dawkins led you to Bultmann, good for Dawkins but I think Dawkins would regret being abused in that way considering his views on reading any sort of theology.
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Oli Lea
April 26, 2012 at 7:10 am
Lots of movements have led people in unexpected directions and to conclusions which are much more meritorious than those of the movement itself. I used to be an evangelical Christian, and it was upon throwing myself into a conversion to the Catholicism that I eventually became an agnostic! Not sure I’d credit the Catholic Church with my final destination though.
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speakeasy
November 19, 2012 at 5:54 am
The problem with Dawkins saying “theology isn’t even a subject” is that in the next breath he MAKES theological arguments! He can’t have it both ways. He should either leave them alone or man up and do his homework.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Religion and the Human Prospect
by rjosephhoffmann
God Using Geometry (Blake)
“The gods must die so that humanity might live.” (The Buddha)
Paul Kurtz has written that a modern ethical system cannot begin with the acceptance of the rule ethics of the ancient religious systems of the world. Not only people who regard themselves as “secular” accept this principle. Many people who regard themselves as religious believe it as well. The laws and commandments of the world’s religions, and especially the monotheistic traditions, are of immense historical importance in helping us to understand the slow progression of ethical thought from simple assent to critical examination over the greater part of three millennia, corresponding to the transition between relatively simple ancient societies to complex ones.
The same period witnessed the growth of philosophy, literacy, new forms of self-expression, changing attitudes toward prosperity and government, and above all, in the last two hundred years, the rapid growth of science and technology as a new paradigm for understanding the world and our place in it. To assume that the rules that held together ancient desert and agricultural groups are adequate to address the dilemmas and problems of the last two millennia is an assumption that critical examination does not support.
Yet, we are in history as a fish is in water. The early search of homo quaerens—man the seeker—for meaning was largely a religious quest. The sources or ground of value was projected to be beyond the individual, beyond the village and social unit, often beyond rational discussion. Belief in the gods or god was an efficient way of answering questions for which our ancestors had no ready answers nor the means to develop any. Today however, because we know much more about how values evolved over a long period of time, we realize that the ultimate source and responsibility for the creation of values is not a hierarchy of priests and kings, or myths shrouded with the authority of a distant past, but us—homo fabricans, man the maker and inventor. We are the ones who create the sources of strength and the basis for understanding our world. As many scholars have said, the gods are not simply symbols of fear and superstition, but projections of our strength and power, and our promethean effort to understand.
There is no good reason to study the past, including the religious past of our species, simply for the purpose of ridicule. The closest analogy would be to replace the heirloom photographs in our family album with cartoons of our grandparents and scorn for their customs and attitudes—or blaming the stars and planets in the night sky for not having developed more innovative orbits over the 14 billion years of their history.
Unfortunately this is the narrow view often assumed by people who believe religion has nothing to teach us–when of course what they may be saying is that the dogmatic acceptance of outdated belief systems has nothing to offer us by way of critical reflection on who we are and how our values are created. The scientific study of religion is an essential component in tracing the development of our social and moral intelligence; it can help us to chart the way forward by reminding us of where we have been.
Religion is a primary index in the development of our moral intelligence. It is difficult to imagine any journey worth making that does not involve a backward glance—first because we are not infinite; we are steps in a very long process, always in danger of losing our bearings and always tempted—just like our ancestors—by presentism: the belief that things will be in the future as they are now. But history tells us how wrong that attitude is, and that challenges ahead may require us to find better answers to questions we thought we had answered long ago. Second, because the answers to the moral challenges of our time, to be authentic, require the touchstones of history. Our human ancestors were not asking significantly different questions, but they were answering them in a significantly different way—attributing them to unseen authority, other wills, or to the certainty of “tradition.” A part of our enlightenment as a species has been the discovery that the simple repetition of a traditional answer is often the repetition of error. Yet that is what religion once required of us.
For these reasons the human prospect will eschew ancestor worship, supernatural thinking and dogmatism as dangers en route. But it will build a future with the souvenirs of the religious past as part of our moral intelligence. The poet and critic, who is best known for his work in fantasy, C.S. Lewis reached into Buddhism when he wrote, “The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination.” (Allegory of Love, p. 82). The formulation in Buddhism is more severe: “The gods must die so that humanity might live.” That is where we are, and the moral consequences of this awakening are human, ponderous, and global.
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Published: March 18, 2012
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15 Responses to “Religion and the Human Prospect”
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Dwight Jones
March 18, 2012 at 4:20 pm
Ethics is a nebulous construct at best, relatively modern I suspect. The word crudelis (cruel) apparently did not exist with that meaning at the time of Christ, e.g.
Historically, ethics was most often rooted in expediency a la Machiavelli, or justified via a larger good (Mill) or, when claimed via religion, took the form of idiotic forays such as WWI&II by mutually ‘Christian’ counterparts. Ergo the God Is Dead movement of the 20's onward.
You don’t see much mention of a transition yet, but look for ethics to answer more to practicality and the needs of the planet, our species and lives in future.
Greed will still be greed, perfidy will still be lies, but they will be seen as damaging and outre to our collective prospects, more than “wrong”. Such actions will become “inadvisable” and “hooliganism” with an appeal to our intellect instead, akin to common sense Confucianism.
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Steersman
March 18, 2012 at 6:36 pm
Excellent article with which I very much or largely agree, notably this:
As many scholars have said, the gods are not simply symbols of fear and superstition, but projections of our strength and power, and our promethean effort to understand.
While Richard Dawkins in his The God Delusion argues that the Bible “includes passages of outstanding literary merit in its own right [and it] needs to be part of our education [because it] is a major source book for literary culture” – at least suggesting some genuflection towards that “promethean effort”, I would say that the stance of the new atheists is – at best – less an issue of “anti-religion and God-bashing” simply for its own sake and more along the line, as you suggested, of saying to religion – with more than “Catonic pertinacity, Delenda est”, that “the dogmatic acceptance of outdated belief systems has nothing to offer us by way of critical reflection on who we are and how our values are created.” And if ridicule is the weapon of choice in that battle, a figurative two-by-four up alongside the ears – just to get the attention of the religious, of course, particularly since razing their cities and plowing their lands with salt is, generally speaking, no longer considered civilized, then I hardly think that that detracts at all from the still useful benefits to be derived from either a scientific or historical study of religion itself or at all hinders their acquisition. As you said:
The scientific study of religion is an essential component in tracing the development of our social and moral intelligence; it can help us to chart the way forward by reminding us of where we have been.
Or as the historian Barbara Tuchman said, or quoted, “To study history is to be blind in one eye. But not to is to be blind in both.” Although I tend to think that historical studies of the Bible and the Quran have an additional impediment or hurdle to deal with that may be virtually insurmountable – short of having a time-machine. While historical revisionism is, apparently, a common facet of political objectives and motivations, when it is “immortal souls” that are hanging in the balance there seems to be more of an incentive to tailor history to dogma. And faced with that type of Gordian Knot of lies holding humanity in bondage it seems that the most effective method of cutting through them – particularly with dogmatic literalists – is not to quibble with “Erigugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace, or Moltman on hope”, but to point out with some asperity if not ridicule that the premise or hypothesis – the literal existence of the deities in question – on which such lucubrations are based is very much of an open question at best if not an outright delusion.
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steph
March 18, 2012 at 6:54 pm
Very good, very succinct: the scientific study of religion is essential for all the reasons you’ve made clear. Just a typo – “The formulation is Buddhism is more severe”, should be “in Buddhism”.
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scotteus
March 19, 2012 at 10:14 am
Reminds me of Nietzsche, there aren’t any gods but what are we going to replace the gods with? This still remains the modern dilemma and will likely remain a dilemma for quite some time.
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Dan Gillson
March 19, 2012 at 7:23 pm
I’ve replaced the gods with aquavit cocktails (yum!). Modern dilemma solved.
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scotteus
March 20, 2012 at 8:33 am
Tried Idealism, didn’t work. Someone recommended red wine, that works but only in moderation.
Steersman
March 20, 2012 at 9:01 pm
Good point, an excellent one even. Considering, in the light of the history of those gods, that nothing seems to have engaged humanity’s interest and passion quite as much as a desire for personal immortality – whether that really qualifies as “puerile egotism” or not, one might suggest that we could, potentially anyway, attempt to become as gods ourselves. Although immortality, even a reasonable facsimile thereof, might turn out to be more than we bargain for. As they say, “against boredom the gods themselves struggle in vain”.
But it seems that more than a few people are leaning in that direction if a book such as How to Live Forever or Die Trying is any indication of even a tip of a small iceberg. In addition there’s the view of a Dr. John Hartung who, in his paper Prospects for Existence: Morality and Genetic Engineering, argues that “we teeter on the cusp of purposely directing evolution” to an end that might even include functional if not true immortality. And a view which is buttressed by reference to the somewhat durable mythology of Genesis 3 which echoes that of Prometheus:
And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
Considering that that has been an age-old dream, if an inchoate one and one which Genesis 3 suggests that mankind has expressed some apprehension at the presumption of it, one might reasonably argue that it would be somewhat boorish and piker-ish, if not betraying a failure of nerve and vision, to not make a try for that brass ring. Particularly since the means to that end might actually now be finally within our grasp.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 21, 2012 at 12:17 am
Brilliant comment Steersman, thanks.
Dwight Jones
March 21, 2012 at 10:24 am
Genesis 3:24 can’t be wrong, as a defence of cloning. Time to take each other’s DNA into our keeping, and ask the Jesuits for a new business plan?
Steersman
March 21, 2012 at 4:20 pm
Dwight Jones said,
Genesis 3:24 can’t be wrong, as a defence of cloning. Time to take each other’s DNA into our keeping, and ask the Jesuits for a new business plan?
Exactement!
Who’s to say that each of our souls, the “divine” spark in each of us, is not some fragment of our individual DNA that provides the keystone in the overarching phenomenon of our individual consciousness? And, with enough cloning over a sufficient number of generations, that we might each attain that Holy Grail?
Possibly enough incentive to transform the Jesuits into well behaved Bene Gesserits? So to speak ….
Dwight Jones
March 21, 2012 at 7:25 pm
“Who’s to say that each of our souls, the “divine” spark in each of us, is not some fragment of our individual DNA that provides the keystone in the overarching phenomenon of our individual consciousness?”
Forsooth, and very well said – the course may already be set.
(From Biology 101). Our DNA is our genotype, and our phenotype is the particular body we inhabit in each succeeding generation (if cloned).
Just one more thing is needed – Faith.
The first is that each phenotype is you, and there will be few objections emanating from the graveyard, no arguments from the living. We can at least fool ourselves, as the Christians did.
The second is faith in your fellow man, and nothing else – as the Jesuits bonded around dei gloria.
From there we become angels of Life, fish leaving an ocean of death for a virgin Universe.
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Steersman
March 22, 2012 at 1:48 am
We can at least fool ourselves, as the Christians did.
I would agree that it is to fool oneself to assert dogmatically that such and such a course of action or set of beliefs is a guarantee of a place in some heaven hobnobbing it with Jesus or Muhammad; an entirely different kettle of fish, I think, to assert that there might be some possibility of getting there, or to a reasonable facsimile thereof, on our own steam. As they say, God helps those who help themselves.
Although I’m not really sure that the language and concepts of probability are really adequate in such cases. One wants to be able to say something like “The chances of a literal Jehovah or Allah are 1 in a googolplex whereas the chances of a functional immortality achieved as a consequence of humanity’s own efforts are in the order of 1 in 10^100” – still a very long shot, but many orders of magnitude better than wan hopes. However, measures of probability seem to be only applicable after one has already done a significant number of trials or samples and pertains only to the likelihood of a particular outcome in the next trial. Not all that helpful when we’re only comparing hypotheticals. But the language as metaphor does at least suggest that a proactive approach is more likely than sitting on one’s hands to yield the desired outcome. Reminds me of a joke:
A man is in desperate financial straits and prays to God to save him by letting him win the lottery. Days go by, then weeks, and the man fails to win a single lottery. Finally, in misery, he cries out to God, “You tell us, ‘Knock and it shall be opened to you. Seek and you shall find.’ I’m going down the tubes here, and I still haven’t won the lottery!”
A voice from above answers, “You’ve got to meet me half way, bubbeleh! Buy a ticket!”
[Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes; Cathcart & Klein; pg 106]
But, as mentioned, there is still the question as to what at least some of us would do with the extra time. As Mark Twain said, those apparently most desirous of immortality are those who seem most at a loss in deciding what to do with a rainy Sunday afternoon. Although maybe some of that problem might be laid at the doorsteps of our “dear leaders” – eternally singing hosannas with Jesus or deflowering virgins with Muhammad seems like it would pale after awhile – and apart from the fact that the latter at least seems rather juvenile at best and decidedly pathological at worst. “Where there is no vision the people perish.” In the parishes.
The second is faith in your fellow man, and nothing else – as the Jesuits bonded around dei gloria. From there we become angels of Life, fish leaving an ocean of death for a virgin Universe.
Per aspera ad astra.
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Dwight Jones
March 22, 2012 at 9:18 am
“…an entirely different kettle of fish, I think, to assert that there might be some possibility of getting there, or to a reasonable facsimile thereof, on our own steam.”
Yes, and then we use our best efforts to close that probability, one of them being an examination of necessary differences.
A prime objection will be that two identical twins, being de facto clones of each other, are not the same person, so the proposition fails. But digging deeper, we see that their genotypes remain intact, even with changes wrought by epigenetics and differing phenotypes, which are partial expressions of their full genetic complement.
This variation is indeed necessary, and welcome; one can surmise that each generation will value it as such and stop crying about being rebooted and losing their internal memories, which are not necessary.
“But, as mentioned, there is still the question as to what at least some of us would do with the extra time.”
The same difficulty one would face after winning the lottery you cited, with or without the ticket. How delicious if we successfully counterfeit one! ;-)
If death is a feature of the biological model, and indeed a needed construct thereof, it is not an indelible part of Per Aspera, which is ours alone, as the species/parish vision. We are a parish among Life’s fauna, and Heaven is a glint in every living eye, presumed to be there.
Nature does not quibble about how we choose to reproduce, or remain on the field, but does place practical limits on how many tries we get at it, before extinction.
In our compact with the Jesuits (the Covenant) we must include the clause that “Time is of the essence”.
“Wake me when it’s over.” – Ernie Kovacs
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Steersman
March 23, 2012 at 2:20 pm
A prime objection will be that two identical twins, being de facto clones of each other, are not the same person, so the proposition fails.
Good point: definitely more than a few flies in that ointment; all sorts of problematic aspects; all sorts of dystopian scenarios à la Blade Runner. I periodically wonder about the apprehension I might feel if I were the clone of another “person” [even the definition of several words might require some serious modification], notably the possibility that my organs might be “harvested” to maintain the life of my “parent”.
But regardless of how we might get from here to “there”, assuming that “there” can be adequately defined, there is still the fact that we do seem to have those “intimations of immortality” – the “glint in the eye presumed to be there” that you referred to – so the possibility at least seems to exist that it is a real and attainable goal.
Although I suppose there’s always the possibility that it might simply be technically beyond us. Which, considering the astounding complexity of the “genomic ecosystem” and that we have yet to even come up with a cure for the common cold, much less HIV and cancer, might well be the case. And that is even apart from physics itself which is anything but a “done deal”; as Stephen Hawking said, “I know how the universe works, but I still don’t know why”. Not to mention the sway that irrationalism, in the guise of dogmatic, barbaric and literalist religion, generally has over the public mind and purse. Definitely a few hurdles between the start and finish lines.
But one has a sense of obligation – ably portrayed in Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, a sense of indebtedness to civilization itself, to those who were part of or who led the way in the “long, tortured, uphill climb” to it. A debt that can be at least partially redeemed or discharged by honoring the underlying vision, even if it is only seen “through a glass, darkly”.
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Dwight Jones
March 24, 2012 at 10:58 am
“…I suppose there’s always the possibility that it might simply be technically beyond us. Which, considering the astounding complexity of the “genomic ecosystem” …might well be the case.”
The parallels with conventional religion are there – we need never know everything, just believe and have faith. Our phenotype (..this is my body) are an expressed subset of your genotype (your personal Christ, a superset within you). Your cloning (crucifixion) is preceded by 40 days in the wilderness (Millinocket or Monte Carlo, depending on how the Jesuits have consolidated your estate. :-)
Ritual will interlock with faith – your are in a humanist church, and your baptism and confirmation/mitzva (successful cloning) affirms that before the congregation. You review the facts of your previous incarnations to reinforce your faith (Sunday school) in the transmogrification (Calvinism) etc. and methinks you would take quite some interest in that process. All a prep school for heaven on Earth, Venus and beyond.
“But one has a sense of obligation – ably portrayed in Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, a sense of indebtedness to civilization itself, to those who were part of or who led the way in the “long, tortured, uphill climb” to it. A debt that can be at least partially redeemed or discharged by honoring the underlying vision, even if it is only seen “through a glass, darkly”.
I totally concur with that, Bronowski has been missed. The schisms within religion/atheism/evolution today seem to require the separation of the intellect into independent partitions, when Jacob tried to show us how they interlock, and are mutually supportive, and did so marvellously.
Maybe we can marry religion back into the human family, into a coat of many colours that can be worn around the globe for our next thousand summers – recycle it as a template that validates those who have brought us to this point.
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Vox Populi: A Theology of Messy Democracy
by rjosephhoffmann
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The elections are over. The election is upon us. Long live the Democratic Process! And a tip of the hat to the founding fathers, who in their prescience must have known that the fundamental metaphor for twenty-first century politics would be an endless and pointless NASCAR race.
Now we sigh deeply, wipe away a wanton tear, and try to adjust to the fact that barely two years after the election of Barack Obama (
Read more… 3,580 more words
Remembering the Fiasco of 2010. Anticipating the doldrums of 2012.
Published: March 21, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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2 Responses to “Vox Populi: A Theology of Messy Democracy”
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Bernard Muller
April 3, 2012 at 8:06 pm
RC wrote: “And nowhere in those letters does Paul mention Jesus having had specifically biological brothers. But he frequently talks about Jesus having adopted brothers: all Christians.”
BM: where did Paul talk about Jesus having adopted brothers: all christians?
Nowhere, as far as I know.
But that claim is what makes the result of his Bayes theorem so much in favour of his mythicist cause.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 3, 2012 at 11:27 pm
Perhaps the real issue for Carrier as a scholar is that he makes things up. It is useless to take his single-theorem approach to the NT seriously when he discredits his assumptions with guesses and non-evidence in favour of them. Bernard is quite right on both counts: not once does Paul use a formulation remotely suggesting that all Christians are brothers of Jesus; the “in Christ” language of 1 Corinthians, is used to heal a specific schism in that Church and if anything refers to becoming incorporated in a mystical union. It is totally unsusceptible of Carrier’s interpretation.
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Vox Populi: A Theology of Messy Democracy
by rjosephhoffmann
The Right to Vote
The elections are over. The election is upon us. Long live the Democratic Process! And a tip of the hat to the founding fathers, who in their prescience must have known that the fundamental metaphor for twenty-first century politics would be an endless and pointless NASCAR race.
Now we sigh deeply, wipe away a wanton tear, and try to adjust to the fact that barely two years after the election of Barack Obama (Hope, Change, Fired Up, Ready to Go) America has lost its energy, its nerve, and possibly its mind, and decided it wants to sit on the stoop and watch the civilized world (which it has just voted to quit) pass by for a spell.
Meantime, we will half-hear as the political assessors talk their heads off about what went wrong and whether Obama is listening, whether he gets it, whether the sting he was stung stung enough to hurt, whether he is paying attention or is just out of touch with the American people, and why someone with such a hoity toity education is tone deaf, can’t communicate, and acts sooo professorial. Just who does he think he is?
The assumption on almost everyone’s part is that a (virtual) vote of no confidence conveys a kind of popular wisdom because it is an expression of the collective will of the people and in this Man Up Democracy, vox populi vox dei, People Rule. A little attention to the full quotation from Alcuin to Charlemagne in the eighth century yields a slightly different flavour, however: “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.” : “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.” Leave it to an ingenious country like America to prove Alcuin spot on.
Alcuin, proved right in 2010
I am not a political scientist, not a “political analyst” (read: sports announcer in ill-fitting gray jacket), not even much of an activist, though I do have longish hair and wear turtlenecks. Ideologically, I am a proservative, a progressive who is afraid of the consequences of progressive ideas. I am not even sure I care very much about politics unless it has the capacity to catch my attention, as it did a couple of years ago when Obama struck me as a rare bird in a nasty profession, and may still prove too rare to escape extinction in 2012.
But after last Tuesday I’m fairly certain I will not be paying attention again for a long time to come. Maybe not again in my lifetime. I have talked to many people who feel the same way–even worse, because my cynicism is greater than theirs, and my immunity to bitterness and disappointment slightly more developed. I once stretched my student budget to the limit to attend a Van Cliburn concert, and was virtually giddy the evening of the performance. Even by my pathetic expectations, he was not up to his standard, pleaded the flu before he sat down to play, and cut the program short by thirty minutes. It’s a bad analogy, I know, but I think that is vaguely similar to the performance-reality gap America is dealing with right now. The question really is, whose fault is it?
"Not mine."
I do not think politics matters very much because I do not think it has the power to change things. War and science, and occasionally poignant ideologies, perhaps the odd book, have the power to change things (usually because they lead to war or new technologies), but because people do not change very much, the collective voice of the people is only ever going to be an expression of their state of mind and emotional condition at a certain moment. Modern American elections are fought with only emotion in view–not government, leadership, not the social welfare of the people, and certainly not ideas. The idea of what is “good for me” and what is “best for the country,” for example, are not complementary: Obama worked for the latter and ran afoul of the former. There were no ideas in this election, if you except (as I think you have to) the idea that taking your country back is an idea.
Besides being terribly depressing for smart people, the election was terrifying because it displayed, for the first time, that the American Constitution is not well adapted for the new millennium. The tears and cracks become more obvious with every passing election season and every Supreme Court decision. But the Constitution, which is political sacred writ in the United States, especially among those who have never read it, is an eighteenth century playbook for eighteenth century ideologies about limited government, seldom amended, and largely unable to serve as a proof-text for social reform. Only its plagiarized Lockean preamble (the only bit ever quoted extensively) has lofty rhetoric. The remainder reads like a tax form, like most constitutions throughout history.
But when you think about what it–the Constitution–put into place–the “system” of checks and balances, the bicameral legislature, the separation of powers, the electoral college, the cumbrous protocol for amending the sacred text, and the oligarchical method of interpretation by a panel of men and women who, for all practical purposes are political appointees with private agendas–you have to lose a little sleep. What it also put into place is the scourge of elections to the “lower house” every two years–a practice based on the need to “refer” to the mood of the people frequently in matters directly affecting them, but totally unsuited to an attention-deficient population who are accustomed to doing their Christmas shopping in September. It is true that the closest ancestor of our representative system, the British Parliament, also has provisions for “bringing down a government,” but in the best of times, and as an encouragement for the people to take government seriously and weigh their reserve power carefully, the normal (legal) stretch between elections is five years.
To put this a little more cogently, if this were England, and the “executive” was simply the leader of the party in power, Obama would be out the door. But, as it is, he survives to limp along until 2012 as the mercy of his persecutors. This is democracy, American-style, in action. This what America wants for the rest of the world.
There is a new apocryphon in the press, so popular that it is has a life beyond facts. It is this: Aristotle said democracy “is the worst form of government except for all the rest.” Aristotle, who was not known for his humor, never said any such thing, but it is instructional to look at what he did say in the Politics:
Book III -”But the citizen whom we are seeking to define is a citizen in the strictest sense, against whom no such exception can be taken, and his special characteristic is that he shares in the administration of justice, and in offices. He who has the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state is said by us to be a citizens of that state; and, speaking generally, a state is a body of citizens sufficing for the purposes of life.
…
For tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy: none of them the common good of all. Tyranny, as I was saying, is monarchy exercising the rule of a master over the political society; oligarchy is when men of property have the government in their hands; democracy, the opposite, when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.”
Book VII
“The citizens must not lead the life of mechanics or tradesmen, for such a life is ignoble, and inimical to virtue. Neither must they be farmers, since leisure is necessary both for the development of virtue and the performance of political duties.”
That kind of language will strike every Tea Party operative as elitist because it shifts the blame for the wretchedness of a political outcome such as the recent American election away from a “tone-deaf” ruler to a dumb and blind electorate who vote their gut, not their head, and call it conscience. Equally, it will strike liberals as offensive, not because it emphasizes “smart politics” (which liberals profess to like) but because it sees the citizen-voter as a subset of the whole population and not the whole population. Both liberals and conservatives appeal to the archetype of the Working Man, not the educated “man of leisure” who is simply ridiculous and probably unemployed in our system. (Additionally, the Republican Working Man works in a bank or on Wall Street.) Regardless, both groups depend on the myth of the popular will, as opposed to the idea of informed citizen choice; neither group can afford to stray very far from the modern concept of “constituency” because constituencies vote. In the era of special-interest voting, scientific polling and frontier politics, Aristotle’s ideas about democracy being inherently defective don’t wash well with either political party. Democracy, George Bush famously said, on being told the death toll in Iraq had reached 4427 in 2003, is “messy.” A grateful nation returned him to power in 2004.
Aristotle was both an embarrassment and a challenge for the founders, who weren’t certain whether “mechanics and tradesmen” in addition to men of property and leisure (who had time to read Aristotle) should be factored into the process. Slaves and women were another matter. As every schoolchild used to know, that did not really happen until the nineteenth century for black Americans, and for women not until the twentieth. Enfranchisement on the strict basis of “legal” citizenship (or rights) as opposed to philosophical formation was considered an end in itself. But what was achieved by virtue of stressing the value of participation and inclusion was highly problematical, and the founders weren’t around to fix it. The rights of citizens had been a slogan since the time of our own and the French Revolution. What happens when Leviathan grows so many legs he can no longer walk? Government by whim and need, faction and passion–but worst of all ignorance.
Which brings me to the theology of the whole sordid affair that has emplaced in the chambers of the most powerful legislative assembly in the world a clutch of Know-nothings unlike anything this Needy and often Know-nothing Democracy has ever seen. I am talking, of course, about biblical Israel.
The Old Testament is more relevant to the current crisis than our Constitution because the suspicion of monarchical government originates there and not in Aristotle. The founders had monarchy on their mind, and they had concluded with the philosopher that monarchy unchecked was tyranny, a system that operated only in the interest of the ruler. (They were wrong of course: the English had fought their own civil war and had debated monarchy much more thoroughly than the colonists ever had by the time the Declaration was issued in 1776.) But as men of literary accomplishment, they also knew that monarchy was regarded by the ancient Hebrews, and even the early Christians, as the source of calamity and political distress. Polemicists like Paine referred to George III as a “Herod of uncommon malice” who could rightfully be deposed because “God’s favor has parted from him.”
George III: "Temperance"
It’s amazing, in reading through the historical books of the Bible, from 1 Samuel onward, how king after king is a disappointment, a disgrace, a mistake in God’s eyes. Kings are given to men as a punishment (Saul) and even when very famous (David, 2 Samuel 11.4) are not very nice. British monarchical history seems to follow the biblical pattern (perhaps this is why “Zadok the Priest” is still sung at Coronations?); the American presidency, while young compared to English history, seems doomed to follow suit, though no Shakespeare will arise to sing the praises or recite the flaws of an Eisenhower or a Coolidge.
If there is one thing worse than bad kings, however, it’s people. People, according to ancient Hebrew calculus, are rotten, passional, fickle. They are incapable of paying attention, following the right path, or doing the right thing, or keeping the faith, or enduring hardship, or working together, or solving problems. In metaphor, they “chase after false gods,” and always come back depressed, defeated, and empty-handed. It’s not a track record that would necessarily lead to the vox-populi philosophy.
In the biblical scheme of things, the God of Israel, is “constant.” His constancy is not “personal,” however; it’s embodied in his law and justice, a theme that actually undergirds the judicial philosophy of most modern constitutional democracies. The justice and goodness represented in the Hebrew idea of God through myth remains, primarily, a concept or abstraction in Greek thought. Because certain questions, Euthyphro-style (Which god likes what?) don’t arise in the monotheistic context, the Hebrew vision is crystal clear: People are ingenerately unable to keep to his standards of justice and righteousness. Coaxing, threats, punishment, don’t seem to do the trick (and the Bible is not famous for subtle approaches like irony and appeals to self esteem). So the burden falls roundly on the people–who would change gods if need be–to figure out what kind of system would work. They choose kings.
The writer of I Samuel imagines the following scene: The Judge Samuel has experienced a succession crisis. In old age, he appoints his sons as “judges” (tribal chiefs, fair-minded warlords) to succeed him. They turn out, as sons often turn out, to be bunglers and scoundrels who “took bribes and perverted justice.” In despair, Samuel agrees to the demands of the elders for a monarchy, “a king over Israel.” The people have “voted”–for their own subjugation. They want to be like their more prosperous and successful neighbors. Monarchy is all the rage. Samuel confers with God, and God instructs him to warn the people what they have in store for them when the newfangled system is in place. It is worth quoting:
“Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the LORD will not answer you in that day. But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us.”
And so it began. A history of tyrannical, faithless, lustful, war-hungry, greedy, and immoral men, punctuated (but not in time to have done Israel or the hybrid kingdom of Judaea any good) by a few good rulers. Passion gives you the form of government you want until you don’t want it anymore.
Is there a convergence between Greek and Hebrew political thought, these widely divergent cultures from the first millennium BCE? Of course. Both show the common ancient opinion about the “will of the people.” The people can’t be bothered with the consequences of any political decision, whether it’s shouted or registered on a touch screen. They vote their passion.
The Voice of the People
That is why Aristotle cautions against “need” and ignorance in the choice of political operations. People will choose tyrants who promise them bread, and execute the tyrant when the bread doesn’t appear on the table or costs too much. On the biblical side, they will choose kings who lead them to victory, then rue the day when their sons die in battle. No wonder the two streams of thought have had inordinate influence on the way we think about politics and government in the West.
Democracy was not an option for the Hebrews, and not what we mean by democracy for the Greeks. Given the amount of money the plutocrats inject into political campaigns in the United States in order to keep their hands on the wealth, it is arguable that American democracy isn’t what Americans mean by democracy either–but that’s a different point. In a naive and unexamined way, Americans think that certain phrases like “majority rule,” “the will of the people,” and “representative government” are self-authenticating, even though they smack of power rather than statecraft. Loftier ideas like “good government,” “sound counsel,” and “wise leadership,” even “justice for all” betray their biblical origins: there is not enough time to cultivate ideals like that when the complete political reality of our time, the definitive feature of messy democracy is change on demand. From where we sit, democracy means sending the menu item you thought you’d like, but didn’t, back to the kitchen.
The recent election has proved two things to me. First, we can never count on the American people to do the right thing, whether they choose kings over republics or republics over kings. The political history of the world, as every historian knows and every political “analyst” conveniently forgets at election time, is a history of disappointment, punctuated by remorse, followed by revolutions and wars.
That is the religious and political history of Europe. It is also the history of America in its revolution, its Civil War, and its most recent political spasm, the triumph of the Tea Party para-revolutionaries. When the frighteningly ignorant and undereducated Christian fundamentalist, Sharron Angle of Nevada, announced that Americans were ready for “Second Amendment remedies” to the current “regime” she was using language (probably scripted) in a deliberately provocative way. Alas, however, she may have been right. But I did not hear a single “analyst” with the historical presence of mind to suggest that both John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald (to name only two successful assassins) used these remedies. The phrase “We’ve come to take our government back” may sound more like a football cheer than a threat, but the underlying idea that a particular government is “owned” by a class of people and has been unlawfully seized by the unrighteous is not democratic rhetoric: it is populism gone berserk, Israel shouting for its king. This time, however, the king is not a man: it is their enthroned Echo.
America has fought only two continental wars, one against its colonial masters, the other against itself. Lincoln’s exegesis of Gettysburg–that it was a battleground to test whether the idea of equality and union could survive in a nation without much history (a scant eighty-seven years at the time) to guide it–has not been settled. Lincoln was depicted in the lore of his generation as a Hebrew patriarch: “We are coming father Abraham, 300,000 more.” was one of the most popular songs of the Civil war era.
But he was hated by at least as many thousands. John Wilkes Booth’s shout as he leapt onto the stage of Ford’s theater on the evening of April 14, 1865 summed up the feelings of the Tea Partiers of his day: “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus to tyrants, always”). He served exactly four years, one month, and twelve days as President.
What is it about the Lincolns, the Kennedys and so far, thankfully, nonviolently, the Obamas of this land that awakens the crouching demons of American democracy, the shouters, the haters and the merely suasible, and entitles them to bring their swords?
Some fairly impressive scholars think that the Civil War was merely the first outburst of regionally and socially stratified tensions that are even worse in the twenty-first century than in the nineteenth and twentieth. America, lacking a common enemy–the British, the Nazis, or the Communists–turns predator on itself and sees in the faces of Others traits it has managed to overlook. Until now. Some of us think that people are no smarter and may–if these absurd and destructive elections are any barometer–be getting less smart all the time. They are to enlightened government what obesity is to nutrition. And some of us think that the United States Constitution is simply inadequate (not imperfect, inadequate) to cope with the growing realities of this system of government.
Contrary to what the “winners” of this election say publicly: there is no divine mandate here. There is no country to be “won back,” no regime in place. There is no guarantee that America will survive the savagery of the masses and massively under-informed. The Constitution is not a magical formula, just a rather dull diagram for a political order that seems hopelessly out of step with the times.
As to the victors, the “voice of the people,” may God give them the king they desire, one who looks, feels, speaks, and thinks just like them.
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Published: November 5, 2010
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Aristotle : Christianity : David : democracy : election : Obama : Old Testament kings : political science : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Saul : Second Amendment : Sharron Angle : Tea Party : Theology ..
8 Responses to “Vox Populi: A Theology of Messy Democracy”
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steph
November 5, 2010 at 10:00 pm
Wonderfully written, whimsically witty, woefully tragic, eloquent, incisive. Kyrie eleison.
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Mike
November 6, 2010 at 2:11 am
Thank you for taking the time to post. A great (if tad long) read that makes me glad to be a subscriber.
Reply
Brian
November 6, 2010 at 2:43 am
Wow, that’s brilliant!
Reply
Yesh
November 6, 2010 at 5:35 am
Simply marvelous. Gives voice to my deepest concerns with much thought, eloquence and insight. Add to this, the amount of money spent on this election while states, cities, local , schools go begging, all makes your post so relevant; in questioning the validity of our political system and it’s usefulness going forward. Thank you.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 21, 2012 at 12:29 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
Remembering the Fiasco of 2010. Anticipating the doldrums of 2012.
Reply
scotteus
March 21, 2012 at 9:56 am
2 years gone and there doesn’t seem to be much difference between Dems and Repubs any longer, they just use different language but the results are largely the same: War and Spend, War and Spend, War and Spend.
Reply
steph
March 21, 2012 at 8:06 pm
Kyrie eleison… “Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed” (Mao Zedong) It’s just more of the same and they’re becoming, it seems, more the same. So… people kill people who kill people because killing people is wrong. Put down the guns and ban the bomb. But as GB Shaw said, you’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
Reply
Usama Khawar
March 21, 2012 at 1:37 pm
BRILLIANT! What about Occupy movement?
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
p -ness Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes's Theorem
by rjosephhoffmann
Reblogged from The New Oxonian:
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In a recent post responding to a blog review of Sources of the Jesus Tradition by atheist blogger Richard Carrier, I made the point that his own contribution to the book does not rise above the level of pedantic lecturing on a theorem of dubious value to engage the literary matter.
Carrier has claimed on a number of occasions that his approach is revolutionary, a…
Read more… 2,058 more words
Several colleagues will be responding on this site in a week to claims made by atheist blogger and amateur "logician" Richard Carrier concerning the historical Jesus (contra Bart Ehrman) and his abuse of Bayes's theorem. In the meantime, this from 2011.
Published: March 25, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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46 Responses to “p -ness Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes's Theorem”
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Mythicism and James the Brother of the Lord (A Reply to Richard Carrier) « Exploring Our Matrix says:
March 25, 2012 at 11:01 pm
[...] things into the method in a manner that accurately reflects these your own presuppositions, then the fact that your method has formulas will not make the results any less dubious.And if it is likely that Paul referred to James whom he had met as “the brother of the [...]
Reply
Bernard Muller
March 29, 2012 at 10:34 pm
I have been banging my head on how Carrier used the Bayes theorem for “the brother of the Lord”. That looks irregular to me mathematically, but more important is the data (generated by his biased opinion) he used and how he manipulated it before being fed into his equation. And the Bayes theorem can only be used with a set of data with a certain relationship between the factors, which seems to be absent in this case.
Carrier always appeals to logic & math, but the Bayes theorem is only a front for his bullying statement “all Christians were “brothers of the Lord”” , based on Carrier own theological extrapolation.
Reply
Bernard Muller
March 30, 2012 at 9:11 pm
Nowhere in 1 Corinthians (and 1 Thessalonians written earlier) the Christians are declared “sons/children of God”. However Paul said he considered these Christians as his children:
1Cor4:14 RSV “I do not write this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children.” (See also 1Cor4:15 & 1Cor4:17 & 1Th2:11)
Therefore Paul considered the Christian males of Corinth as “his sons” (spiritually) but not yet as “sons of God”.
Consequently Paul did not see then these Christians as “brothers of the Lord” (1Cor9:5) because sons of different fathers are not brothers.
That’s for 1 Corinthians. For Galatians, the following can be argued:
In Galatians, the first mention of Christians as “son(s) of God” comes at verse 3:26, that is two chapters after Gal1:19. Furthermore, “son(s) of God” seems to be a new concept introduced then by Paul to the Galatians. So Paul did not intend to have the Christians of Galatia thinking “the brother of the Lord” in 1:19 meant “the Christian”: they were not aware yet a Christian is “son of God” (with the same father than Jesus and consequently brother!).
So going back to the infamous Bayes theorem of Carrier:
P(2) = (.33 x .9) / [(.33 x .9) + (.67 x 1)] = .297 / (.297 + .67) = .297 / .967 = 0.31
The “1? stands for “Christians being the brothers of the Lord has a 100% chance of being true (as I proved it did)” (quote from RC). But I demonstrated, in the specific context of 1 Corinthians and Galatians, this is untrue and the “1? can be replaced by a “0?, which would render the overall result of the equation = 1
I have also more arguments which would solify even further the “1? such as:
a) James and the Church of Jerusalem were not Christian (explaining why Paul never called them as “brother(s)”, “in the lord” or “in Christ”).
b) In 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians, Paul did not adopt yet Jesus as “Son of God” (despite in passages which I think (for several reasons explained in my website) are interpolations: 1Th1:10, 1Cor1:4-9 & 1Cor15:23-28).
c) positive arguments towards explaining the “brothers of the Lord” and “brother of the Lord” do mean “blood brother(s) of Jesus” (which I will not explain here but I already stated on Richard Carrier blog).
Finally, I have very strong reservation that the Bayes theorem is applicable in that case, and whatever values Carrier entered as variables.
Reply
robertb
April 2, 2012 at 6:20 am
Bernard Muller says the following:
“That’s for 1 Corinthians. For Galatians, the following can be argued:
In Galatians, the first mention of Christians as “son(s) of God” comes at verse 3:26, that is two chapters after Gal1:19. Furthermore, “son(s) of God” seems to be a new concept introduced then by Paul to the Galatians. So Paul did not intend to have the Christians of Galatia thinking “the brother of the Lord” in 1:19 meant “the Christian”: they were not aware yet a Christian is “son of God” (with the same father than Jesus and consequently brother!).”
What about:
?a? ?? s?? ?µ?? p??te? ?de?f?? ta?? ?????s?a?? t?? Ga?at?a? ????? ?µ?? ?a? e????? ?p? ?e?? pat??? ?a? ?????? ?µ?? ??s?? ???st??
Reply
Bernard Muller
April 3, 2012 at 12:14 am
I do not see what is your point from Gal1:2-3
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
April 3, 2012 at 12:31 am
Galatians 1.2f.? First, the passage contains a salutation to the brethren, not to “brothers of the Lord.” That “relationship” in fact is contrary to the way the term kyrios is used in the passage God our Father and Jesus our Lord (not brother); taken consecutively the titles are: “Brothers”; “God our Father”; “Jesus Christ”; “the Lord Jesus Christ…” There is no apposition implied or explicit between the brethren and Jesus Christ, let alone any delimited sense of the title brother as it is applied to James at 1.19. And by no stretch of imagination is the unique use of James the Lord’s brother at Gal 1.19 as an honorific related to this salutation in 1.1ff.; even if there was corroborating usage elsewhere, why would Paul apply it to James and not to other super-apostles like Peter?, especially in light of Paul’s implicitly slighting reference to James in 1 Corinthians 15.3-7, as well as the disjunction between “brethren” and “elders” in Acts 15.13-31. If a particular historical precedence is not being associated for James, you are now obliged to explain (a) Paul’s hostility toward James and the special status of Jams in Acts; (c) the redactional muddle in the gospels (Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3, etc.) in their effort to diminish his relationship to Jesus in favour of the Peter tradition, and even the perdurance of the brother tradition in the apocryphal gospels, where one could have expected it to be set side (e.g., the Protevangelium of James). More to the point: why are you arguing usage outside a discussion of the famous opponents controversy within which these special usages occur? This is what inerrantists do–basing arguments on text without context. Is the point of this tortured attempt to overcome the James tradition simply an effort to obliterate a piece of historical data that reflects on a historical Jesus by nuking it with unconvincing assumptions and inferences piled on inferences, most iof which aren’t even supported by grammar let alone text? May I politely suggest that the skills you are wasting on exegesis might more profitably be used on demolishing old buildings with a ball and crane.
Reply
robertb
April 3, 2012 at 6:14 am
“why are you arguing usage outside a discussion of the famous opponents controversy within which these special usages occur?”
Because my contention is simply with Bernard’s assertion that Christians were not aware that they were sons of God until Paul mentions it chapter 3 of the epistle.
If God is our father and Jesus Christ is God’s son then Christians, probably every human being ever born in fact, are brothers of Jesus Christ by default.
I made no comment regarding any specific meaning for ‘brother’ in 1:19, other than to point out the issue with an argument which asserts that, prior to Paul’s mention of the fact in Gal 3, Christians were unaware that they were sons of God and, by default, brothers of the Lord Jesus Christ.
steph
April 3, 2012 at 9:04 am
It’s extraordinary that incompetent atheists can rely exclusively on fundamentalist Christian scholars to support their claims, oblivious to their fundamentalism, blinded, because the fundamentalists’ conclusions conveniently fit the fantasy claims the atheist incompetents want to prove. Thus inconvenient tradition reflecting a historical Jesus is “nuked” out of history with flawed assumptions. This is glaringly obvious in Carrier’s ‘Proving History’, where for example, in order to dismiss Aramaic theories which nobody believes anyway, he cites Stanley Porter, who not only is not a competent Aramaist, he is a fundamentalist Christian. Porter thinks Jesus spoke Greek and ‘his words’ in the New Testament, are ipsissima verba, word for word. And the reason Porter believes students should learn Greek? “I love the challenge of developing students who are passionate about learning New Testament Greek, the language that God used when he wished to communicate with us directly about his Son, and in which the New Testament is written.” … History needs a bunker.
Bernard Muller
April 2, 2012 at 7:40 pm
I would like to bring these arguments against common objections:
a) “The phrase “James the brother of the LORD” therefore, has little if any evidential force, in the case for a biologically-evidenced, historical Christ.”
BM: But in the same epistle, Jesus is declared a descendant of Abraham and having come from a woman, “under the Law”.
b) “While Paul suggests that biological ties between Jesus and so forth, are unimportant.”
BM: But in Rom16:13 & 15, Paul identified two women by blood relationship (mother and sister) with a named man. So blood relationship was used by Paul in order to single out one individual among others such as:
In ‘Galatians’, this is the first reference of “James” in ‘Galatians’. But at the time (around 38) of Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem after his conversion (as narrated in Gal1:18-20) there was another prominent member of the “church of Jerusalem” named James, the brother of John, who got executed around 42 (according to Ac12:1-2). Therefore, Paul probably wanted to identify the “James” he met then, more so because this one became most important later. But why write “the brother of the Lord” instead of “the brother of Jesus”? ‘Jesus’ was a common name then, but “Lord” is very specific in that context and identifies precisely that ‘James’.
c) BM: In 1 Cor11:3 “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman [is] the man; and the head of Christ [is] God.”
It is clear that Paul put Christ above man, which does not hint to a parallel relationship such as spiritual brothers between Christians and Jesus. And Paul had no interest into suggesting equality between believers and Christ, which would lower the later.
d) BM: Paul wrote many times “Jesus”, “the Lord” (meaning Jesus) and “Christ”. Paul also wrote many times “brothers” meaning Christians. But never he wrote this brotherhood also included Jesus, such as “our brother Jesus/the_Lord/Christ”.
Paul had several times the Christians as (spiritually) sons/children of God (2Cor, Php, Gal & Rom) and even explained why they would be called “sons/children of God” (Gal3:26-4:7; Rom8:14,16).
But there is no explanation about any spiritual understanding of “brother(s) of the Lord”.
Bernard
Reply
Bernard Muller
April 3, 2012 at 10:54 am
About the singularity of “brother of the Lord”: this is how Carrier explain it (Ref: http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/749#comments RC posting dated March 27, 2012 at 11:27 am):
RC: “Accordingly, because of how composition was taught in antiquity, we should expect Paul to stick mostly to an idiom ["brother(s)] but occasionally vary it. This entails the prediction that we will see occasional variations in the way he refers to Christians. Pleonastically including the complete phrase “brother of the Lord” would be one possible form of that variation;”
BM: But “brother in the Lord” is no more pleonastic and certainly beyond confusion, because “brother” and “in the Lord” are used by Paul for “Christian”. So why Paul did not used “brother in the Lord”?
RC: “That he would on rare occasion use the complete phrase “brother of the Lord” would not be unexpected. The more so if Peter had a brother named James, as that would require Paul in this instance to distinguish the apostle James from James the brother of Peter, in which case saying just “brother” wouldn’t do, necessitating the full epithet “brother of the Lord,” i.e. not of Peter (because Paul says he met with “Peter” and no other apostle except this James).”
BM: Peter having a brother called James is never stated in the NT.
RC: “I think the most probable explanation is another one entirely: that part of Paul’s point in Gal. 1 is that he is not on intimate terms with the Jerusalem Pillars (the same Peter, James, and John of Gal. 2), and one way to rhetorically emphasize that is to use the complete formal expression “brother of the Lord,” since truncating to “brother” implies more familiarity (which Paul does not want to do here), and Paul’s most common idiom (of saying “my/our/your” brother) implies more than familiarity, but actual intimacy (it is an endearment),”
BM: But Paul called the Christians of Rome “my brothers” (Ro 7:4, 9:3, 15:14) even if he never met most of them. He also called the churches of Judea as being “in Christ” although their members never saw Paul (Gal 1:22).
RC: “The next most probable explanation is the possibility (which has been entertained even under peer review, as I discussed in the previous thread) that Paul is saying the James he met is not the pillar but not even an apostle, possibly a mere companion of Peter, which is why he would have to mention him, so as to make sure no one can accuse him of lying (Gal. 1:20) by pointing out that another Christian was present when Paul met with Peter, just not an apostle (Gal. 1:18-19).”
BM: If in one article, I write “President Obama”, then later I refer to just “Obama”, who is going to think that the later ‘Obama’ is not the President but someone else?
Paul first introduced James as the “brother of the Lord”, so the ‘James’ mentioned later is the same person, that is one of the pillars.
My conclusion: that’s a bunch of lame excuses.
Bernard
Reply
steph
April 3, 2012 at 5:11 pm
Yes indeed Bernard. These Carrion comments are a bunch of extraordinary speculations desperately invented to reject inconvenient historical tradition. He has absolutely no argument or evidence or demonstration of a grasp of the first century cultural environment, including the irrelevant ‘how composition was taught in antiquity’, so we should not ‘expect’ what he wants us to believe. Perhaps it would seem to be disingenious to criticise Carrier for not providing evidence on a comment thread, in much the same way as it would be disingenious for Carrier to make ‘Ehrman look foolish’ (final words in the title of a blog post celebrating Carrier, by blogger Tom Verenna) on the basis of a brief article by Ehrman introducing his book, or for someone to refute any book on the basis of somebody else’s review, a regrettable thing that continues to occur. However, Carrier is not capable of providing critical argument and evidence to support his speculations as his much self promoted book, ‘Proving History’, makes overwhelmingly clear.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
April 3, 2012 at 5:38 pm
Pleonastic: my word, how hard it would be to form a viable assumption from a word like that.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
April 3, 2012 at 5:55 pm
Huh? Can you plug this reasoning into Bayes or Bayes into it?
RC: “That he would on rare occasion use the complete phrase “brother of the Lord” would not be unexpected. The more so if Peter had a brother named James, as that would require Paul in this instance to distinguish the apostle James from James the brother of Peter, in which case saying just “brother” wouldn’t do, necessitating the full epithet “brother of the Lord,” i.e. not of Peter (because Paul says he met with “Peter” and no other apostle except this James).”
BM: Peter having a brother called James is never stated in the NT.
Reply
Bernard Muller
April 3, 2012 at 7:20 pm
to robertb,
I understand your point but there is a big step from calling somebody of importance “father” and considering oneself the adopted son/daughter of that father.
Priests are called “father” but their parishioners are unlikely to feel they are spiritual sons/daughters of them. And in the ancient Roman world, senators were also called “fathers” as a title.
There is also a big step between considering Jesus and regular Christians as brothers, which Paul is never clearly evidenced to have done.
Furthermore Paul was very loose on the matter of sonship for his Christians. In Galatians, his male followers are sons of Abraham (3:7), sons of God (3:26, 4:6-7), sons of the heavenly Jerusalem (4:26) and sons of Sarah (4:31). Paul used these “sons/children of …” only to make points, not to create theology.
But Carrier is very dogmatic about Jesus being the brother of Christians although it is not apparent in Paul’s writings. And James and the other members of the church of Jerusalem are never said to be “in Christ”, “in the Lord” or simply “brothers” (nor did he get his gospel from them).
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
April 3, 2012 at 11:34 pm
I think the whole line of reasoning is appalling: The very idea of Jesus’ Lordship as Paul uses it rules out the notion that Jesus is anyone’s brother. The equality of Christians can be expressed this way, though here the word doulos, or slave of Jesus Christ is the operant metaphor, not brotherhood. This is not just about terminology, it is about a fundamental musundertanding of Paul conceptually, ie in terms of how Christians attain equality as servants under the Lordship, not brotherhood of Jesus. (1 Corinthians 8:6 “Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.” While the Letter to the Ephesians is not by Paul, the author draws out the logic of the hierarchy pretty well at 4.13.
Reply
Bernard Muller
April 3, 2012 at 8:12 pm
RC wrote: “And nowhere in those letters does Paul mention Jesus having had specifically biological brothers. But he frequently talks about Jesus having adopted brothers: all Christians.”
BM: where did Paul talk about Jesus having adopted brothers: all christians?
Nowhere, as far as I know.
But that claim is what makes the result of his Bayes theorem so much in favour of his mythicist cause.
PS: I posted the same by mistake in the wrong blog entry. Sorry!
Reply
Bernard Muller
April 4, 2012 at 12:04 pm
Another argument on 1 Cor 9:5 “brothers of the Lord”:
Carrier said the expression means “all Christians”. But, if it is the case, just “brothers” would have been sufficient. There was no need to add “of the
Lord”, more so when ‘Lord’ is already used three times in the preceding four verses.
Carrier wrote: “I also showed (e) that they believed Jesus had explicitly called them his brothers and (f) they explicitly said Jesus was only “the firstborn among many brethren.””
BM: but RC placed the quote totally out-of-context. NO, Jesus is not the firstborn here! The Christian elect is.
Rom 8:29-30 RSV “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren.
And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified”.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
April 4, 2012 at 3:28 pm
The word “explicitly” usually means without equivocation or ambiguity: where does this happen explicitly? It is utter nonsense and shows a glaring ignorance of the gist and details of Paul’s theology. One does not need to agree with that theology to understand that it is formative in determining his meaning and the universe of his ideas, and Jesus [is] our brother is nowhere to be found in his subordinationist idea that Jesus Christ is Lord. To say that Christians are “brethren” is one thing, abd Paul uses this largely as a salutation. To assert that “Jesus is our brother” is meant or (anywhere) implied by Paul is another and nowhere attested. And to use what is not attested to claim that, therefore, James can be grouped into what has been falsely claimed is a general usage is simply dishonest. I cannot imagine what sorts of “probabilities” can be educed from this dog’s breakfast of unsupported speculation.
Reply
Bernard Muller
April 7, 2012 at 12:24 am
This is how Carrier demonstrates the explicity of “a Christian is a brother of the Lord.”, in his own words:
“Second, you seem not to understand how logic works. Let’s show you:
P1. The evidence in Paul proves Christians called Jesus the Lord.
P2. The evidence in Paul proves Jesus was the adopted son of God.
P3. The evidence in Paul proves baptized Christians were the adopted sons of God.
P4. By definition, sons of the same father are brothers of each other.
P5. By definition, if P2 and P3, then Christians and Jesus were sons of the same father.
C1. Therefore, (baptized) Christians and Jesus are brothers of each other.
C2. Therefore, (baptized) Christians and the Lord are brothers of each other.
P6. In the Greek language, when A is the brother of B, this is stated by saying “A is a brother of B.”
C3. Therefore, in the Greek language when [a Christian] is the brother of [the Lord], this is stated by saying “a Christian is a brother of the Lord.”
C4. Therefore, “a Christian is a brother of the Lord.”
Since this follows by logical necessity from P1-6, and P1-6 are all undeniable facts, this conclusion is undeniable.”
rjosephhoffmann
April 7, 2012 at 3:20 pm
Carrier’s logic is risible; every one of his premises is frontloaded with bad assumptions to validate his conclusion, and the conclusion is false because the premises are flawed. Everyone knows you can do this with something as simple as a syllogism; Carrier goes through a longer process but with no more validity than saying All cheese is green. Take only P1: Paul calls Jesus Lord; there is no evidence that “Christians called Jesus Lord,” except in Phil 2.5-11 where Paul quotes from a hymn and the phrase in Greek is exhortatory not declarative. Do all Christians know this hymn? Clearly not, because Paul is trying to teach it to them. The only thing we can prove is that Paul is trying persuade Christians that Jesus is Lord. Beyond this, the whole “evidence’ and “proves that” formula” is risible on the face of it. He is trying to litigate the truth of ambiguous and inconsistent statements. From P2 downward, his premises get shakier and shakier; what we are left with in the end is green cheese.
rjosephhoffmann
April 7, 2012 at 5:05 pm
“Since this follows by logical necessity from P1-6, and P1-6 are all undeniable facts, this conclusion is undeniable.”
I would hate to set Plantinga loose on these premises, let alone someone whose philosophy I agree with. How do you educe undeniable facts from evidence that cannot support an assertion, let alone a premise?
Bernard Muller
April 4, 2012 at 11:06 pm
When Paul used the word “brothers”, most of the times he meant “Christians”, male and female (Paul never used “sisters”). And Carrier said that “all Christians were “brothers of the Lord”".
Let’s consider the following verse:
1 Cor 9:5 NIV “Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas?”
Here, these “brothers” are male because they are accompanied by (believing) wives; and they are travelling: that definitively limits their number!
“the brothers of the Lord” refers to some travelling married men (minimum two), but not including Cephas/Peter. What about them being apostles? Maybe, but they were set apart from the others by Paul.
Therefore 1 Cor 9:5 is not a good showcase for Carrier’s theory, certainly not demonstrating “the brothers of the Lord” means “the Christians” as in:
“Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and [the Christians] and Cephas?”
Note: that sounds rather odd! Why mention “Christians” when few of them were travelling? Sure because of their relative large number, some were, and among those, a few with their wife (and even less with a believing one –1Cor7:12-14). It’s like saying: “Don’t we have the right to go to Hawaii for vacation with a dog, as do the family next door, the Canadians and my boss?”
Most likely, the expression refers to some itinerant men, excluding the apostles and Peter, but significant enough to be mentioned by Paul to strengthen his point. Who would they be?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
April 5, 2012 at 12:00 am
@Bernard: I think you say too little on behalf of 1 Cor 9:5 NIV “Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas?” Clearly it cannot mean “all the others” ie all other Christians in this context. If we were being blunt, it would mean those who are not either Paul and his troupe, the apostles excluding the Lord’s brothers (i.e, James, Joses, Judas, Simon per the Nazareth tradition) and Peter. Tt cannot reasonably mean “everyone.” Of course the Nazareth tradition is highly inconvenient to the mythtic position; better not to mention it. And if this verse implies Paul not only knows of it but alludes to it, better to deny the existence of Nazareth itself, which of course is a core tenet of mythticism.
Reply
steph
April 5, 2012 at 7:45 pm
The five fundamentals of mythticism: the non existence of God, the non existence of Jesus, the non existence of Nazareth, the non existence of blood brothers, and everything attributed to Jesus had been said before and therefore could not have been repeated. To these five fundamentals, add lashings of Bayes, and Trickery Dickery Doc…
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
April 5, 2012 at 9:29 pm
Exactly.
Reply
Bernard Muller
April 5, 2012 at 11:00 pm
steph, did you read my website? It is in 2nd place on Google.com for “historical Jesus” and I got enthousiastic reviews, even from people who made independant studies on the topic for years.
I also have a critique on Doherty’s first book where I also put forward arguments for the existence of Jesus.
That would be in your alley.
Of course, I would be honored if Mr Hoffmann would take a look also.
Bernard
Reply
steph
April 7, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Yes I did Bernard. I think I clicked on your name or something. You’ll have to forgive me though. Despite having had too much to do with Earl’s recent work, assisting in the research of a forthcoming refutation of mythticist arguments by Professor Maurice Casey, Earl is really really really NOT in my alley and neither is Dick… thank the good Lord God of Battles. ;-)
steph
April 17, 2012 at 10:27 pm
I carelessly omitted two vital fungusmentals:
The seven fungusmentals of mythticism: the non existence of God, the non existence of Jesus, the non existence of Nazareth, the non existence of blood brothers, the non existence of external evidence because it is unreliable and inaccurate so therefore not worth mentioning, the non existence of internal evidence because it depends on circular arguments and is therefore invalid, and everything attributed to Jesus had been said before and therefore could not have been repeated. To these five fungusmentals mythtics remain faithful, with alotta “Lunacy Bayes at the Moon”*, and Trickery Dickery Doc…
* r.joseph.hoffmann
Reply
Bernard Muller
April 5, 2012 at 11:54 pm
Carrier wrote: “Christians were not brothers in the Lord, they were actually the brothers of the Lord.”
BM: That did not prevent the author of Colossians to write:
1.2a “to the saints in Colossae, and to the faithful brethren in Christ: …”
Reply
Bernard Muller
April 7, 2012 at 11:24 pm
@ Dr. Hoffmann,
I have been looking at Romans 8:29b, “e?? t? e??a? a?t?? p??t?t???? ?? p?????? ?de?f???:” that is “that he [might] be the firstborn among many brethren.”
According to what precedes “he also did predestinate [to be] conformed to the image of his Son”, it seems that Paul postulated, that once in heaven, the Christians (“brethren”) will resemble the Son, and the later, as the firstborn, will be among them.
I do not see here any allusion the Son is also a brother of these brethren. Am I right?
What would be expected is “his” as “among his many brethren” in order to validate Carrier’s theory.
I also noted “many” and “brethren” have the dative case. If Paul wanted to indicate the Son was part of the brethren, would he need to use the genitive case, with or even without “his”?
Carrier made great use of Rom 8:29b to prove his point.
Reply
steph
April 8, 2012 at 8:36 am
Yes it would have helped if Paul had done any of these things but Dick is hopelessly biased and cannot interpret Paul.
Reply
Bernard Muller
April 8, 2012 at 3:50 pm
to steph,
Thanks for the support. Do you know koine Greek?
steph
April 8, 2012 at 6:28 pm
It was part of my training in New Testament. If I can’t convince my examiners that I’m competent in Koine Greek and can understand what I’ve written in my thesis, I would expect to fail my viva. ;-)
steph
April 9, 2012 at 8:46 am
Yes.
rjosephhoffmann
April 13, 2012 at 4:59 pm
Bernard
I have been away for a bit and am just getting to this: In about a week there will be a major response to Carrier’s Crackpot Conclusions from Maurice Casey, myself and Stephanie Fisher, and in the meantime I will write a longer note for NO on the Romans 8.29, which is about as far from saying what Carrier wants it to say as it is possible to say. Perhaps he should make sausage instead of trying his hand at NY studies?
I also hope that the three not so weird brethren (of the Lord?) who will be responding will then go on to produce an anthology that puts these crazy ideas away in the intellectual attic they escaped from. Suggestions for a title welcome, but What are the Mythtics Mything is my first choice :) WElcome your involvement.
Reply
Glenn
April 13, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Bayes’ theorem is mathematically valid, and, given some input to it, output from it also is mathematically valid. This is inarguable.
…assumptions usually should have no place in Bayesian argument, as its conclusions will only be as strong as their weakest premise, and an assumption is a very weak premise indeed. Carrier
Yes, an assumption is a very weak premise indeed. But how to avoid using weak premises?
The correct procedure is to choose values for the terms in the equation that are at the limit of what you can reasonably believe them to be, [and] to reflect a wide margin of error[.] ibid
So, it is inarguable that Bayes’ Theorem is mathematically valid. And it is inarguable that output from Bayes’ Theorem is mathematically valid with respect to the input (i.e., values chosen for the terms in the equation).
But it is also inarguable that the quality of the output depends on that of the input (i.e., garbage in, garbage out (if this should happen to be the case)).
And it is likewise inarguable that to hold that output from Bayes’ Theorem is true by virtue of the fact that Bayes’ Theorem is mathematically valid is an obvious fallacy.
Yes, I know it’s more than 10 days, and that old news is old news. But I don’t think it hurts to refresh the old fact, even if obliquely, that validity and truth are horses of a different color.)
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
April 13, 2012 at 4:52 pm
Thanks Glen–you said it much more elegantly than I did.
jh
Reply
robertb
April 16, 2012 at 5:26 am
I found nothing in your post that was not addressed by Carrier, in fact I found nothing in your post that disagrees with Carrier’s treatment at all.
Can you point out, exactly, where you believe that Carrier states that the output of BT is true simply by virtue of BT being mathematically valid?
I didn’t get that impression, from Carrier’s argument itself.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
April 17, 2012 at 9:56 am
?
Bernard Muller
April 13, 2012 at 9:31 pm
Just a few notes:
a) Carrier wrote: “Christians were not brothers in the Lord, they were actually the brothers of the Lord.”
BM: That did not prevent the author of Colossians to write:
1.2a “to the saints in Colossae, and to the faithful brethren in Christ: …”
b) For Romans 8:29, “the firstborn of many brothers” would have helped Carrier’s case.
c) For 1 Cor 9:5, “the brothers of the Lord” (as also the apostles and Cephas/Peter, but NOT Paul), according to what transpires in the whole of Chapter 9 (more so 9:1-14), were not working for a living, were financed by the Christian communities they visited, had all expenses paid (including the ones of their accompanying wives).
These “brothers of the Lord” commanded a lot of respect among some distant Christian communities (who were willing to fork money for them).
The solution is obvious.
Reply
Carrier’s “Proving History”, Chapter 3(a) — Review « Vridar says:
April 15, 2012 at 8:29 am
[...] visitor to R. Joseph Hoffmann’s blog has, and with Hoffmann’s own expressed approval, ignorantly accused Carrier of a logical fallacy as if he is suggesting any old nonsense that is put into Bayesian terms is [...]
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
April 15, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Vridar has a knack for using words like ignorantly to disguise his utter ignorance: there is nothing ignorant about accusing Carrier of having a crackpot theory made up of ersatz-logic pretending to be a logical knock down argument for his myth theory. Godfrey has become a cheerleader and postmaster for the mythtics, but hardly has anything worth contributing himself. This is what vetting and critique look like; it is what happens when NT scholars float ideas and theories. It is time for Carrier to respond to these criticisms with facts. He is frontloading assumptions into his Bayes machine and coming out with sausage. None of the assumptions as far as I can tell bear scrutiny–but we’ll get to that on this site in about a week…
Reply
Glenn
April 16, 2012 at 2:53 pm
Vridar has a knack for…
I see what you mean.
A little research turns up the curious fact that he wrote, My past cult experience taught me that no matter how clever and diligent one was in researching and “proving” a set of beliefs, the results of such studies were all an illusion if the whole enterprise had been built on faulty assumptions.
Yet here he is, popping a gasket over what he considers to be an ignorant accusation, namely the statement that,
[I]t is…inarguable that to hold that output from Bayes’ Theorem is true by virtue of the fact that Bayes’ Theorem is mathematically valid is [to commit] an obvious fallacy.
steph
April 17, 2012 at 9:05 am
Vridar extracts a passage from the conclusion of Schweitzer’s ‘Jesus’. This ambiguous passage out of context, is often hijacked by mythtics and used in a way that assumes Schweitzer’s agnosticism on historicity, and assumes that he acknowledges a lack of historical controls and methodology.
Schweitzer, writing a century ago with a different philosophical idea of ‘truth’, was following Weiss and his conclusion that Jesus was a mistaken prophet. Schweitzer was a deeply philosophical and religious man and this malicious mythtic messy and muddled misleading misrepesentation of him reflects a failure to recognise his historical context and poor comprehension of his philosophy and outstanding intellectual contribution to the advancement of culture and ideas. Vridar impregnates his own ideas into the passage, inserting them in square brackets, failing to acknowledge that he, Vridar, is dealing with mixed material, and consequently he clearly contradicts the message Schweitzer was conveying in the context of discussion.
Vridar, like Carrier, has no method of differentiating tradition which is composite. They both fail to recognise the difference between primary, and secondary tradition, legendary and myth mixed accretion. Both are oblivious to the history of tradition criticism. Carrier has no method of distinguishing the difference and this renders his Bayes a complete muddle. Vridar consistently misrepresents arguments and evidence, with mere sloppiness as well as pure dishonesty, and is deliberately misleading and characteristically cloudly and unclear.
Vridar messily misquotes Hoffmann, and having falsely accused Hoffmann of basing his academic criticism on a personal dislike of Carrier, he falsely accuses Hoffmann of criticising himself “because I pointed out with quotations from Richard Carrier the falsity of a claim about Carrier’s argument on Hoffmann’s blog” which is utterly erroneous. Vridar hadn’t pointed out the falsity at all. He merely contradicted the accusation but simultaneously reinforced its truth, by quoting Carrier’s demonstrating the accusation accurate. Carrion inserts invalid assumptions into his equation and therefore all conclusions are invalid. However Carrier assumes that HIS assumptions are true.
“[Bayes'] conclusions are always necessarily true — if its premises are true. By “premises” here I mean the probabilities we enter into the equation, which are essentially the premises in a logical argument.” (p. 45)
Yet Carrier’s premises which he assumes true, are false, and the claims eliminate variables, therefore conclusions are necessarily false. Neither atheist blogger – Vridar nor Carrier, has the historical knowledge or critical skills to determine evidence of which there is none. Carrier has not ‘proved’ any truth. Historians do not ‘prove’ but aim to demonstrate with argument and evidence, and Carrier has neither.
Yet Carrier declares, claiming proof and evidence with a fantastical concept of logic and cultural lunacy:
“P1. The evidence in Paul proves Christians called Jesus the Lord.
P2. The evidence in Paul proves Jesus was the adopted son of God.
P3. The evidence in Paul proves baptized Christians were the adopted sons of God.
P4. By definition, sons of the same father are brothers of each other.
P5. By definition, if P2 and P3, then Christians and Jesus were sons of the same father.
C1. Therefore, (baptized) Christians and Jesus are brothers of each other.
C2. Therefore, (baptized) Christians and the Lord are brothers of each other.
P6. In the Greek language, when A is the brother of B, this is stated by saying “A is a brother of B.”
C3. Therefore, in the Greek language when [a Christian] is the brother of [the Lord], this is stated by saying “a Christian is a brother of the Lord.”
C4. Therefore, “a Christian is a brother of the Lord”
Perhaps on this logic, or cultural lunacy, the evidence in the gospels ‘proves’ that Jesus existed, if Paul claiming Christians called Jesus the Lord ‘proves’ that they did. The ‘evidence’ or writing in Paul’s letters, don’t ‘prove’ that Jesus was the adopted son of God. If it did then it would ‘prove’ that Jesus must have existed, according to this fantastical premise. If Paul writes something does that make it literally true? In any case, Carrier’s logic assumes there are no blood brothers in antiquity. Carrier, regrettably fails to interpret Paul’s theology and merely makes an anachronistic jumble.
“…assumptions usually should have no place in Bayesian argument, as its conclusions will only be as strong as their weakest premise, and an assumption is a very weak premise indeed…. The correct procedure is to choose values for the terms in the equation that are at the limit of what you can reasonably believe them to be, [and] to reflect a wide margin of error”
Simple formulas to not correspond with complex composite historical texts. Carrier has too much misplaced faith in the value of his own assumptions.
steph
April 17, 2012 at 9:08 am
Simple formulas DO not correspond with complex composite historical texts.
Ben Schuldt
April 24, 2012 at 9:39 pm
Subscribing.
Reply
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
p -ness Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes’s Theorem
by rjosephhoffmann
In a recent post responding to a blog review of Sources of the Jesus Tradition by atheist blogger Richard Carrier, I made the point that his own contribution to the book does not rise above the level of pedantic lecturing on a theorem of dubious value to engage the literary matter.
Carrier has claimed on a number of occasions that his approach is revolutionary, a tour de force and essentially over the heads of New Testament scholars. Apart from the naivety of saying anything like this in a field littered with the corpses of dead theories and “discoveries,” this is scarcely where you’d want a revolution to be fought.
Strauss
There are numerous critical issues attached to using a theorem that is primarily about probability to assess material that isn’t. It is, however, a common feature of forensic (i.e. controversialist) approaches to the Bible on both the fundamentalist side and the atheist side to engage the material on a literal level. This is so because both sides have to meet on the field at that point where literal claims about the text are being made, if not with the claim that the texts themselves are designed to propose facts–though most biblical literalists would say that they are, and most of their opponents would say that they are defeasible at this level.
Accordingly, a particular way of reading the text has been the main source of “rationalistic” critiques of the Bible since the Enlightenment though many of those critiques were superficial and almost all have been improved by serious academic study in the last two and half centuries.
Reasonably speaking, it is analytically impossible to assess claims of “factuality” without assessing the texts on which such claims are based, even if we begin with relative certainty or skepticism (for example) about the occurrence of miracles or the reliability of a written tradition. Despite the fact that the multiplication of “conditions” and ”assumptions” violates the sensibility of most post-modernists who deplore looking at things like authorial intention, criticality, or audience (community) in discussing narrative, the character of the text is the conditio sine qua non–the starting point–for all discussion. It is a condition a literalist believer, on the basis of his epistemological suppositions, tries to avoid since his prior assumption is that the text has a particular integrity, and the skeptic, guided by opposite beliefs, no less literal, is often able to ignore.
Modern New Testament scholarship emerged precisely in response to the impasse between credulity and skepticism, neither of which seemed a sufficient answer to the “problem of the text.” Forensically speaking, text is text. Critically speaking, it isn’t.
Generally speaking, the biblical literalist feels he is under no compulsion to defend his confidence in the text; he assumes he has warrants for his confidence. He can invoke a number of interdependent subordinate claims to support his position–arguments from antiquity (the age of the text or its distance from the reported events), reliability (a kind of mock-psychological assessment of the trustworthiness of “reporters”), self-consistency (whether the text is basically coherent within itself and among variants, where they exist), inspiration and inerrancy (the belief that the text is autonomous as a product of revelation and thus superior to any methods used in its evaluation). Most subordinate claims have been savaged by modern critical approaches that have grown organically out of the study of the gospels and cognate literature, though some are still of interest to historians.
A forensic approach to the Bible means that key debating points like the six-day creation story, the resurrection of Jesus and (perhaps) the existence of Jesus have to be treated as historical assertions to the same extent they are asumed to be true by the most literal readers. This is a severe limitation to forensic approaches since they initiate discussion with the question of whether a text is vulnerable as a truth-claim, using a formula more suitable for modal logic than for history: Is something possible or probable? Are events described in a text more likely to have happened or not to have happened?
Hume
Even the study of the text for both literalists and skeptics will be subordinated to the modality of claims. Texts that assume propositional value for the literalist (even if that value has to be manufactured) are the very texts the skeptic needs to find defeasible. Scholars have understandably winced at this level of discussion because it’s easily seen as a branch of apologetics rather than as a field of serious literary and cultural study. Its preoccupation is not with what the text has to tell us, but with whether you or your opponent is right or wrong about a relatively small number of events.
Gunkel
Debaters like Carrier have suggested that the critical methods developed for dealing with the Bible in the nineteenth and twentieth century are insufficiently rigorous. But that is simply not the case. In fact, the methods grew in tandem with evolving perceptions of what the character of the text actually was, how it was formed, and what its creators thought about the world. In the language of an older school of criticism, what its “life situation” was. They continue to evolve and to adapt in an organic way. Only if the sole question to be answered is whether the description of an event corresponds directly and generically to “what really happened” (if it were possible to answer that question, as it isn’t in many cases) would the modality of a forensic approach be useful, and its usefulness would still depend on prior questions.
“Conventional” and revisionist approaches remain central to academic study, however, if we assume that the New Testament is not making its case propositionally, event by event, but narratively. If Genesis was not intended to teach astronomy, the New Testament was not intended to teach medicine. Neither of those statements tells us what the Bible was intended to do, yet such a determination would be essential for answering questions about how it fulfills its purposes.
Beyond the forensic approach, the question about the kind of literature the New Testament literature represents remains absolutely prior and absolutely crucial. As an example, the amount of material that can be removed into the category of “myth” (a great deal, from most of Genesis to all of Revelation) can never be determined by modal assessment of the truth properties of a text, since analytically myth is not amenable to modal analysis and only a wrong definition of myth as a kind of rhetorical lie or pre-scientific error–a definition that flies in the face of modern anthropology–would make such analysis possible. The forensic approach does itself a huge disservice by paying insufficient attention to the history of criticism, where the general mythological character of much of the material is almost taken for granted, and focusing instead on a discounted view of myth as non-factuality.
What is true of myth, moreover, is true of the other “forms” (literary and historical genres) that exist within the Bible and the New Testament especially. So much of the Jesus story is myth, in the sense of µ?????af?a (writing of a fabulous story), that I have no objection to the phrase “the Jesus Myth.” –But a great deal to object to in the sentence “Jesus ‘was’ a myth,” implying absolute non-historicity and a method designed simply to document his irreality. In Sources, this is the subject of two essays, one of which (“On Not Finding the Historical Jesus”) suggests that the gospel writers bore no interest in the “question” of the historical Jesus but had a profound interest in his reality.
For the forensicists, “Was the cosmos created or was it not created in six days”; “Did Jesus or did he not rise from the dead?”; ”What did he really say?” and “Did he exist?” are primary questions that should not be swept under the rug of literary analysis: they are questions of right and wrong. The text exists primarily to settle these questions.
In my view, this is an impoverished way to approach the Bible since the book (taken as a kind of religious artifact rather than an accident of editorial history) was not construed to answer such questions and the methods that have been devised to explore it have been driven by different phenomena and concerns: what communities believed; how they understood society; how they manipulated history and politics religiously to provide social coherence; why ideas like salvation and redemption gained ascendancy in the first century and how they evolved to become something quite different in the second. Put flatly: the questions asked by the forensic approach are not primary questions at all because they do not arise from the text.
Not unless you accept the prior assumption that the literature of the Bible puts itself forward as hard fact (and most scholars in the present century would say, it doesn’t) all operations on the material should derive naturally from what it is. Certain techniques like hermeneutical suspicion, mutiple attestation, “dissimilarity,” and redaction, source (and various other) criticisms and linguistic distribution are simply code for ways of testing how the tradition developed and how the sources evolved over time. If anything, the “factuality” or modal probability of events in using any of these methods is held in suspense in the same way Coleridge describes the willing suspension of disbelief (and for not altogether different reasons) in the Biographia Literaria.
Back to Bayesics?
I was reminded of the danger and potential irrelevance of imposing non-literary templates on the biblical material by a former student, whose comments on the use of Bayes’s theorem are significant because (a) he is not critiquing the use of this device as a New Testament scholar: he is a PhD candidate in mathematics and is properly reckoned a prodigy in pure mathematics; and (b) he is not a Christian.
I personally find his comments devastating to the use of the theorem as an assist to the modal approach to the Bible. But I’ll leave it to others to decide:
“Is this insistence [Carrier] of trying to invoke Bayes’ theorem in such contexts a manifestation of some sort of Math or Physics envy? Or is it due to the fact that forcing mathematics into one’s writings apparently confers on them some form of ‘scientific’ legitimacy?
The fact of the matter, as far as I know, and as I thought anyone would realize is that Bayes’ theorem is a theorem which follows from certain axioms. Its application to any real world situation depends upon how precisely the parmeters and values of our theoretical reconstruction of a real world approximate reality. At this stage, however, I find it difficult to see how the heavily feared ‘subjectivity’ can be avoided. Simply put, plug in different values into the theorem and you’ll get a different answer. How does one decide which value to plug in?
Secondly, is it compulsory to try to impose some sort of mathematically based methodological uniformity on all fields of rational inquiry? Do there exist good reasons to suppose the the methods commonly used in different areas that have grown over time are somehow fatally flawed if they are not currently open to some form of mathematization?
If this kind of paradigm does somehow manage to gain ascendency, I assume history books will end up being much more full of equations and mathematical assumptions etc. While that will certainly make it harder to read for most (even for someone like me, who is more trained in Mathematics than the average person) I doubt that it would have any real consequence beyond that.
The fatal flaw in Carrier’s misuse of the theorem therefore is that the “real world conditions” he finds described in the gospels are not real world conditions. Thus its application does not flow from axioms designed for its use. The gospels are the complex record of the reactions of communities to conditions that are extremely difficult to assess. Even though Carrier may know and accept this premise, he finds it unimportant to address its consequences.
It may be that in further work Carrier will lay the theoretical groundwork, justifying his use of Bayes as a cipher for understanding the gospels. But even if his mission is not that–even if it’s just a game-playing exercise for debunking their historicity in front of believers–it seems to me that Ayez has raised a fatal objection: Bayes is for apples and the gospels are oranges. And Carrier’s persistent defense that no one is really on the same page–or able to “get” the page he’s writing–is becoming increasingly difficult to swallow.
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Published: June 6, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: analysis of the gospels : Bayes's theorem : Criticism : gospels : penis envy : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Richard Carrier : Sources of the Jesus Tradition ..
74 Responses to “p -ness Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes’s Theorem”
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steph
June 6, 2011 at 3:28 pm
I agree absolutely with every word from beginning to end including the astute observation of your former student. Apples and oranges – the major flaw of applying non historical methods to historical research. However I would suggest there may be in the Bayesic advocate’s methodological misapplication, a case of penis envy, which like his Bayes theorem is to historical research, also completely irrelevant.
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Rich Griese
June 6, 2011 at 3:52 pm
I applaud Carrier’s attempt to bring more precision to the study of early Christianity. We have know since Strauss that a great deal of the Christian scriptures are mythical. If we can now apply the tools of the natural sciences to obtain more precision… great. So little has been learned by the learned by the religion industry. The history industry tends to just avoid the whole issue. Perhaps the social science folks can have a crack at it. It will of course anger the folks that are trained more in the humanities, and the philosophical types. But philosophy is really just a vestal discipline today. the average man on the street is simply amazed that after 2000 years of searching, we have to date found zero historical data on the jesus character. Anything can do a better job would be welcomed.
Cheers! RichGriese.NET
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steph
June 6, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Spock: “Logic and practical information do not seem to apply here.”
McCoy: “You admit that?”
Spock: “To deny the facts would be illogical, Doctor”
As Mark Twain wrote: “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”
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Dwight Jones
March 25, 2012 at 11:24 am
Carrier’s work is akin to an assessment of Shakespeare by Dick Tracy. As RJH maintains, if you don’t consider the motives and purposes behind the history of the bible, you had may as well discard Aesop’s fables for being non-factual at the same time. Bring in Disney for questioning.
The Bible is/was an envelope for teaching the new ethics of agriculture/trade/urbanization to our species, as it underwent rapid cultural flux (note powerful scientific word), by whatever hyperbole/fact mix was available to the authors of the day.
We carried around the idea of Ark of the Covenant as a representation of powers we did not yet have, but aspired to. So too was ritual the mortar of communal trust. You cannot evaluate the history of the Bible without considering its purpose.
Any butterfly can be broken on a wheel, but you do need a tiny mind to do it right.
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steph
June 6, 2011 at 4:21 pm
baah – Bayes’s, belonging to Bayes.
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Scott
June 6, 2011 at 4:44 pm
Carrier’s use of Bayes Theorem just seems like an example of domain confusion more than anything else.
Following H’s student, do we apply mathematical principles to Longinus’s ” On the Sublime; or Drydens “Essay Concerning Dramatic Poesy” or to “explicacion du text”? I can’t think of too many serious scholars I have been fortunate to sit with who would think the latter would be a fruit giving endeavor.
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Mark David Dietz
June 6, 2011 at 5:21 pm
Joseph,
Thanks. I picked up a lot from this essay. This is really where the hard thought of our age is coming down. Not in the hard sciences as simple solution engineering, but in science that demands modal logic and a depth of understanding of the nature of humans from the inside out, not just the outside in.
I am reading a book on the presocratics just now in which, to too great a degree, the author pictures mythology as the precursor to science/philosophy. He focuses on the new thoughts that Thales introduced (or borrowed from the Babylonians) but fails to account for what he held on to or brought with him from an older tradition, perhaps too easily called mythology. The presocratics are thus seen as the beginning of a broach between two irreconcilable positions — although, surely we are pushing a little too much to say that two clearly distinct positions existed for Thales or Anaximander, et al.
The questions I have focused on are: to what degree did the presocratics tend not to see the disctinctions we now make or, for that matter, that Aristotle made a hundred years later? Did they continue to value that which we call mythological even as they began, in a near forensic way, to exercise reason and challenges to older traditions? Is challenging an older tradition really a sign of rational thought, or more a matter of a kind of mythopoeic thought that seeks more complex and articulated conceptions that resonate with both the ideal and the real?
More and more I grow concerned that we have so favored one tradition that the other (call it mythological, rhetorical, whatever) all but disappears — and the modal question of possibility, or the imaginative question of where do the axioms (archai) come from, become deep, black magic to be run out of town on a rail if they ever make themselves too obvious or too noticable.
Best, Mark
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The Last, Best Hope for Mythicism? | Exploring Our Matrix says:
June 6, 2011 at 11:39 pm
[...] Click through to read the rest. [...]
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beallen0417
June 9, 2011 at 1:10 pm
One is immediately reminded of Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria. Is that a conscious decision? Also, is missue a typo for misuse?
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rjosephhoffmann
June 9, 2011 at 1:46 pm
-I do like missue as a sentiment but misuse is what is meant–thanks. I have some doubts about Gould’s thesis, which amounts to ideological dualism and it is hard to say that methodologies are the same as worldviews. “Religion”/theology isn’t immune from scientific critique, but the extent to which methods appropriate for real world situations can be applied to problematical descriptions of irreal situations would steer me away from probabalism, unless I were really just looking to make a literalist look stupid. My own view is that most good biblical scholars are not stupid and would find would want to know the heuristic value of advocating this technique. Why not , e.g., use relative frequency as the heuristic instead. The answer is, it gets you no further than what we already know on the basis of techniques better suited for the literature.
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Soloview
June 15, 2011 at 10:22 am
Excellent analysis, Joseph ! The Bayes’ folly of Carrier is shocking because he is smart guy. One wonders how he can sustain the illusion of obtaining a valid set of input data that would make his scheme work. How would he prevent Garbage-In ? Evidently, Carrier does not understand that even in the study of historical materials there is a difference between managing data and obsessing about data. The difference is that one approach does not admit options.
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Steven Carr
June 27, 2011 at 1:24 am
Carrier’s method is fatally flawed.
For example, what is the probability that ‘Mark’ used Aramaic sources? No number can be assigned to this probability, making it impossible to apply Baye’s Theorem.
Real scholars of the New Testament would never dream of using phrases like ‘We must make an overall assessment of the probability of what we have suggested.’ or attempt to put numbers on probabilities by saying things like ‘…I cannot assume more than 51 percent probability for my best guess.’
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rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2011 at 8:10 am
I agree, but all BayesBoyz do it. Swinburne does it in his philosophical theology as well. Seems to be especially important to debaters (and to almost no one else in this area) to be able to quantify things, just to score points, but the quantification is completely spurious since the assessment of the data doesn’t affect its initial reliability, relevance, usefulness or truth value. Reminds me of slapping a coat of paint on boards that are already full of dry rot.
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Robert
July 4, 2011 at 11:52 am
Nicely done, Steven!
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Steven Carr
June 27, 2011 at 12:42 pm
I was quoting Maurice Casey, in his book ‘Aramaic sources of Mark’s Gospel’.
I’m not certain if these quantifications that Maurice made in his book are ‘completely spurious’. Can you explain further please?
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Steven Carr
July 3, 2011 at 5:39 am
I’m curious to know why you haven’t approved my post informing your readers of the person I quoted. I now am in the invidious position of quoting people anonymously, which is not a good thing to do…
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Demystifying R. Joseph Hoffmann, and the war over Bayes’ theorem « Vridar says:
July 4, 2011 at 4:29 am
[...] Joseph Hoffmann has let a crotchety side to his nature show as he publicly attempts to humiliate a younger scholar who, in exchanges with the aging don, has exposed a dint of mediocrity in his [...]
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rjosephhoffmann
July 8, 2011 at 11:30 am
I love the reference to “ageing don”. It must rhyme with something. Alas, however, while not Mozart I am more than ten years short of my biblical mandate and still able to navigate my way without a walker across a sitting room. As to the use of “scholar” in relation to Carrier, let’s reserve that term for someone who practices the trade and has a life beyond self published books and blogs.
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steph
July 11, 2011 at 11:32 am
(I still can’t get “Major Tom” out of my head – bit of a cult song really – lingering – and always had a bit of a thing for Bowie and his different coloured eyes. Star Man: ageing dom Major Tom…) :-)
steph
July 4, 2011 at 3:45 pm
As usual, no reference is given by Carr. The author he is trying to implicate does not recognise the quotation, so at best been taken out of context, and at worst, made up. It is not to be found by searching the ms submitted to Routledge, a book written to argue that John’s gospel is not remotely true.
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steph
July 4, 2011 at 4:14 pm
And that scholar implicated would never use statistics to make mathematical judgements of precision. He is not a Bayesboyes – Carrier and Swinburne: they’re Bayesboyes.
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steph
July 4, 2011 at 7:08 pm
It’s ironic that Carr’s friend Neil attempts to deride a highly qualified critical scholar and Highly Distinguished Professor, by referring to him as “an aging don” when Neil himself, at 62 years old, is actually much older than the Highly Distinguished Professor, and holds only elementary qualifications as a librarian. An ageing librarian.
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steph
July 4, 2011 at 8:06 pm
It’s ironic too that Carr’s friend Neil provides no references either to these alleged quotes which are not recognised by the alleged author and which have not been found now after searches in manuscripts of three different books. But Neil cannot even describe Carr’s “quote” accurately. Instead he writes that the author “was interested in assessing probabilities of something being a fact, and even quantifying a probability at not more than 51%” whereas Carr claims the author wrote about probability and guessing, not “fact’. So while it looks suspiciously like Carr made it up, it looks suspiciously like Neil has neither quoted the alleged “quote”, nor asked Carr for a reference, in order to conveniently exaggerate.
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steph
July 5, 2011 at 7:26 pm
It is ludicrous for Neil to suggest that Professor Hoffmann has “rejected a valuable tool” that was really waiting to be used “for his advantage” because of a “personal dispute” with Carrier. Professor Hoffmann is absolutely and blatantly clear that Carrier is wrong in his application of Bayes Theorem to history. It is malicious to suggest otherwise.
It is ludicrous for Neil to imply that Professor Hoffmann is inconsistent with his criticism of mythicists as Professor Hoffmann is well aware of the differences between critical historical method and the mistakes the mythicists make, just as he is well aware that ‘Is John’s Gsopel True?’ was written to argue that it isn’t true at all.
It is ludicrous for Neil to speculate and create fiction about the content of a book he knows nothing about, and say “Presumably the book will be (like Bart Erhman’s) an argument for why we can believe the Gospels as testimony for certain historical facts about Jesus.” It has absolutely nothing to do with Ehrman’s book and is not remotely like it or Neil’s fiction. It is taking time to write because the gross mistakes of mythicists take a long time to work out with accuracy rather than with creative fiction in which they are expert. It focuses on decent historical method. It points out the gross misuse of texts, in total contempt for historical method, by Doherty, Murdock, and their followers.
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Steven Carr
July 7, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Alleged quotes?
Aramaic sources of Mark’s Gospel – page 110 and page 165.
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 12:05 pm
How on earth does Carr expect Professor Hoffmann to assume Carr’s ‘quote’ was anything other than a hypothetical statement of someone applying mathematical precision to historical argument, when he didn’t give a reference? Extracted from a real passage has distorted the meaning making it appear to represent something else, and is nothing other than false attribution to create a straw man.
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steph
July 7, 2011 at 7:09 pm
Carr has condescended and provided a reference. It is not slanderous to suspect someone has made something up when he doesn’t provide a reference and the “quote” is taken out of context from a book written in 1998, and in isolation is uncharacteristic of the author, who has written many published books and articles, and obviously could not possibly remember every word he has written, especially taken out of context without a quote. While Carr’s malicious intention was to try to ‘trap’ Professor Hoffmann into criticising a critical scholar, by taking the quote out of context in order to pretend that scholar was applying mathematical precision to history, what Carr and his friends don’t seem to realise is that critical scholars disagree about particular arguments and methods all the time, and that it’s important that we do so that we are free to change our minds, and this is how critical scholarship makes progress. While I now have the context in front of me, I can determine the argument made by the author and while I do not disagree with the fundamental method, I would prefer to use even stronger uncertainty.
In context of p. 110 of Aramaic Sources, it is clear that this quote has nothing to do Bayes Theorem. He did say we must ‘make an overall assessment of the probability of what we have suggested’ which he has obviously not done in mathematical terms at all, because they are not in his view appropriate to this sort of work at all. His comments on page 165 have been taken out of context, and interpreted in a grossly overliteral manner. Whereas the whole passage which he discussed in the whole chapter, he argues has many indications of an Aramaic original, including the Aramaic idioms in vss. 27-28, the first Greek word in verse 28, hoste, does not. This is why, as he points out, there are only three examples in the whole of the LXX. He comments (pp 164-5):
The connecting hoste, has caused great problems to interpreters, for hoste + ind. does not have a natural semitic equivalent, and consequently we find no more than three examples in the LXX. At Esther 7.8, it is an extraordinary elliptical rendering of hgm: 2 Kgs. 21.12 and Job 21.27 are more relevant, because in both cases the translators have rendered freely in accordance with the sense (one might say they were rendering ’shr and hn respectively). We must deduce that our translator has done the same. Man’s mastery declared in 2.28 is in a profound but not remote theological sense dependent on the will of God shown in creation and declared at 2.27, so the translation with hoste + ind. correctly gives the sense. It follows that we do not really know what the underlying Aramaic word was, even though we can reconstruct the sense. In the suggested reconstruction of Mark’s source, I have put n’. I cannot assume more than 51% probability for my best guess. Another possibility is ’ru. expect the translator to render it with ’idou, but the very fact he has produced hoste,rikaans + ind. shows he has rendered freely, and we have seen that Job 21.27 would give us a good parallel. Again, the simple w is possible, and kl qbk dnh would be another sound suggestion. It follows that we may not rely on some of the details of the proposed reconstruction to expound the precise force of Jesus’ statement.”
It should be blindingly obvious from this paragraph as a whole that his comment on not more than ‘51% probability’ is English English for ‘don’t really know’ or ‘haven’t a clue’, and has nothing to do with maths at all, let alone the misapplication of Bayes’ theorem to historical probability. He has been misinterpreted by people who cannot read Aramaic or Hebrew, and are not much good at Greek either, which is typical of the damage being done by mythicists on the internet
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 10:25 am
I corrected my transliteration and took out the ‘rikaans’ which wouldn’t come out before – I can’t italicise the aramaic, it won’t transfer. But I added a bit about Meyer’s earlier attempt discussed by Casey. All in corrected comment below… :-)
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rjosephhoffmann
July 8, 2011 at 10:55 am
I am not an expert in Aramaic sources, unlike Maurice, but Matthew Black and James VanderKam and I had occasion to work together on extracanonical materials more than fifteen years ago. I think I know what a plausible and what a hyperbolic case looks like. The existence of aramaicisms cannot be swept aside and it is ludicrous to suppose that they are peppered in to create an illusion of authenticity. I do not regard them as pillars of historical authenticity but their provenential significance is enormous. As to Carrier, I’ve said all I need to say. Partly he is a victim of a trend in proper NT studies that seeks always to revolutionize the ordinary and the well known. I have not suggested that his work is totally useless but that instead of providing greater certainty about the sources it is nothing more than quantified interpretation superimposed on “data” for which the theorem is not suited. I am not used to substituting press releases for critical reviews and no one can say whether or not Carrier’s effort has any value until he reaches the point of being noticed by journals. As far as I am concerned, he is learning biblical methodology on the run and has a primarily polemical agenda in view — which is frankly not radical but antithetical so sound scholarship–not unlike the approach of a committed evangelical at the other extreme. Call me cantankerous, but better still prove me wrong.
Robert
July 11, 2011 at 10:04 am
Do you think that the LXX contained aramaicisms?
Do you think that it is reasonable to contend that the LXX was likely a major source for the gospel writers?
If so, is it a wonder that aramaicisms appear in the gospels, or are these particular aramaicisms too far removed as to have been, in any way, influenced by similar passages in the LXX?
rjosephhoffmann
July 11, 2011 at 10:37 am
Mishnah, Talmud, targums, in the Palestinian air: aramaicisms everywhere. ???? gamara–considering the context and despite freebasing use of the LXX by the writers, it is not a sufficient explanation. Recommend you have a look at Vermes and Chilton, though I have pts of disagreement with both.
Robert
July 11, 2011 at 10:47 am
What, specifically, do you believe would fall out of the uncountable aramaicisms, possibly derived as the result of inbreeding with a Greek translation?
Any particular passage(s) that gives you pause?
Anon
July 11, 2011 at 1:46 pm
There seem to be some misconceptions here as to the applicability of Bayes’ theorem. The truth is, there is no department of thought where it can’t profitably and validly be used, for as Physicist Richard T. Cox showed, probability (and BT in particular) is the natural extension of Aristotelian logic (in which every statement is either true or false) into the realm of reasoning in the presence of uncertainty (where the premises of the argument are represented by numbers between 0 and 1, with traditional logic being invoked to nail the limiting cases). As Carrier demonstrates in his tutorial, BT isn’t confined to ‘statistics’ or even math – it’s about inductive reasoning.
The so-called ‘subjectivity’ of the theorem is no more an impediment that it is to the ordinary syllogism; garbage-in, garbage-out is as relevant here as it is to probabilistic conclusions. If two people have exactly the same prior knowledge and beliefs, then they will, if we assume they are both rational, assign the same number to the probability of an event. If they assign different numbers because they have different prior knowledge, then surely they OUGHT to assign different numbers?
In any case, the subjectivity objection is irrelevant; People differ over whether propositions are true or false, but that doesn’t invalidate logic, which isn’t actually concerned with whether a given proposition is true or false, just with what follows if it is. The actual truth value is a separate matter determined by other quite different procedures and quite frequently disputed, hence, presumably, subjective.
Nevertheless, it IS possible to assign probabilities to premises such that the conclusions are highly probable. The way to do this (again, see Carrier’s tutorial for examples) is to choose values for the terms in BT which are the limit of what you can reasonable expect them to be. Using a wide margin of error gives confidence in the results, regardless of the inexactness of your estimates.
rjosephhoffmann
July 12, 2011 at 8:54 am
What permits you to reduce narrative to propositions? That was the whole point of the blog. You have to begin by adducing propositions from texts that make no claims about themselves, perhaps the one exception being the final ch and appendix to John which on this premise should enjoy a high degree of probability.
Robert
July 13, 2011 at 6:58 am
Propositions like the one where the authors intended to write history?
I agree.
steph
July 8, 2011 at 11:54 am
“The existence of aramaicisms cannot be swept aside and it is ludicrous to suppose that they are peppered in to create an illusion of authenticity. I do not regard them as pillars of historical authenticity but their provenential significance is enormous.” Absolutely completely correct from beginning to end. I agree and Casey has agrees absolutely too. He’s also read now what I wrote and approved of my interpretation of his work.
steph
July 8, 2011 at 11:55 am
“The existence of aramaicisms cannot be swept aside and it is ludicrous to suppose that they are peppered in to create an illusion of authenticity. I do not regard them as pillars of historical authenticity but their provenential significance is enormous.” Absolutely completely correct from beginning to end. I agree and Casey agrees absolutely too. He’s also read now what I wrote and approved of my interpretation of his work.
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 2:19 pm
I know Maurice spent a year in St Andrews with Matthew Black in 1978-9 (I think), and learnt alot from him. He has a great deal of respect for him and liked him alot. He told me that he was incredibly easy to talk to and liked being contradicted – with reason.
steph
July 7, 2011 at 8:12 pm
And by the way, I don’t use google books and don’t know scholars who do. As I understand it, the whole text is generally not available and I wouldn’t rely on it for my sources. While the deceptive tactics of Carr to pull the quote out of context, make the words look ludicrous not only to Professor Hoffmann and myself (which is why I suspected it was made up as no reference was offered in that initial comment) but also to Professor Casey because he had no context, the three of us are now clear of the argument (which has nothing to do with mathemantical precision or Bayes Theorem) which we can assess and be free to debate and disagree.
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steph
July 7, 2011 at 9:19 pm
Carr’s deception of quoting out of context in order to distort the intended meaning of the whole passage, is nothing other than a logical fallacy, a type of contextomy, false attribution of quoting out of context in order to misrepresent an author and make them appear to support another position, is creating a straw man. It’s ludicrous and typical.
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 10:21 am
Carr has condescended and provided a reference. It is not slanderous to suspect someone has made something up when he doesn’t provide a reference and the “quote” is taken out of context from a book written in 1998, and in isolation is uncharacteristic of the author, who has written many published books and articles, and obviously could not possibly remember every word he has written, especially taken out of context without a quote. While Carr’s malicious intention was to try to ‘trap’ Professor Hoffmann into criticising a critical scholar, by taking the quote out of context in order to pretend that scholar was applying mathematical precision to history, what Carr and his friends don’t seem to realise is that critical scholars disagree about particular arguments and methods all the time, and that it’s important that we do so that we are free to change our minds, and this is how critical scholarship makes progress. While I now have the context in front of me, I can determine the argument made by the author and while I do not disagree with the fundamental method, I would prefer to use even stronger uncertainty.
In context of p. 110 of Aramaic Sources, it is clear that this quote has nothing to do Bayes Theorem. He did say we must ‘make an overall assessment of the probability of what we have suggested’ which he has obviously not done in mathematical terms at all, because they are not in his view appropriate to this sort of work at all. His comments on page 165 have been taken out of context, and interpreted in a grossly overliteral manner. Whereas the whole passage which he discussed in the whole chapter, he argues has many indications of an Aramaic original, including the Aramaic idioms in vss. 27-28, the first Greek word in verse 28, hoste, does not. This is why, as he points out, there are only three examples in the whole of the LXX. He comments (pp 164-5):
The connecting hoste, has caused great problems to interpreters, for hoste + indicative does not have a natural semitic equivalent, and consequently we find no more than three examples in the LXX. At Esther 7.8, it is an extraordinary elliptical rendering of hgm: 2 Kgs. 21.12 and Job 21.27 are more relevant, because in both cases the translators have rendered freely in accordance with the sense (one might say they were rendering ’shr and hn respectively). We must deduce that our translator has done the same. Man’s mastery declared in 2.28 is in a profound but not remote theological sense dependent on the will of God shown in creation and declared at 2.27, so the translation with hoste + ind. correctly gives the sense. It follows that we do not really know what the underlying Aramaic word was, even though we can reconstruct the sense. In the suggested reconstruction of Mark’s source, I have put n’. I cannot assume more than 51% probability for my best guess. Another possibility is ’ru. We might expect the translator to render it with ’idou, but the very fact he has produced hoste plus indicative shows he has rendered freely, and we have seen that Job 21.27 would give us a good parallel. Again, the simple w is possible, and klqbl dnh would be another sound suggestion. It follows that we may not rely on some of the details of the proposed reconstruction to expound the precise force of Jesus’ statement.”
It should be blindingly obvious from this paragraph as a whole that his comment on not more than ‘51% probability’ is English English for ‘don’t really know’ or ‘haven’t a clue’, and has nothing to do with maths at all, let alone the misapplication of Bayes’ theorem to historical probability. He has been misinterpreted by people who cannot read Aramaic or Hebrew, and are not much good at Greek either, which is typical of the damage being done by mythicists on the internet.
Casey did of course also discuss the earlier attempt at a reconstruction of Mark 2.27-28 by Meyer, Jesu Muttersprache (1896), p.12, when much less work had been done and much less Aramaic was available. He pointed out that while the reconstruction of two whole verses was for the most part a great step forward, “The use of the late expression bgll kn behind the difficult hoste is also problematical: it would surely have been more likely to have given rise to dia touto” (Casey, Aramaic Sources, p.12, part of a sympathetic critical assessment of Meyer’s work, in the light of what could and could not be done later).
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Carr doesn’t realise that taken things out of context is misrepresentation. I’ve just seen that he has blogged on Maurice Casey’s “Is John’s Gospel True?” but misrepresented the argument as usual. He claims to quote Casey, but he gives only a partial quotation. Carr has completely misrepresented Casey’s argument by ignoring it and selecting for mention only the part of his argument that mentions the absence of Lazarus from later sources, and then comparing this with the absence of other figures from Paul’s epistles. Casey in fact put forward a complete argument for the secondary nature of Lazarus. Of course fundamentalists do not take that seriously, but it remains quite ludicrous that mythicists ignore most serious critical scholarship and misrepresent arguments which dispute the ‘truth’ of scripture, which was really the subject of Casey’s whole book. Godfrey’s description of Casey’s work in a comment on the post, as ‘fraud’ is typical of his inaccurate rudeness, and his description of him as ‘part of the reasonably known set of Sheffield scholars who boast…’ is rude and inaccurate too. Casey is Emeritus Professor of the University of Nottingham, not Sheffield. Of course he has long-standing connections with the University of Sheffield, as also with many other universities, as should be especially obvious from his Festschrift. Godfrey’s personal attack of me in the same comment is silly and malicious.
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 2:42 pm
On pages 208-9 of Is John’s Gospel True?, Casey wrote (and obviously this is only part of his argument),
“The Lazarus story is a Johannine composition from beginning to end (n.15. see pp. 55-7). The narrator tells us that many of `the Jews’ believed in Jesus because of this miracle (11.45). The reaction of the chief priests and the Pharisees is remarkable. They convened a sanhedrin and said, `What are we doing? – for this man is doing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy our place and people’ (11.47-8). Widespread faith in Jesus would not have given the Romans cause to do this. This is an extraordinary perception, formed by the Neronian persecution, which showed genuine Roman hostility to Christianity, and by the destruction of Jerusalem after the Roman war of 66-70CE. Some Jews attributed this to failure to observe the Torah, and Christians did not observe it. From this perspective, everyone having faith in Jesus could indeed lead to the destruction of the place and the people. This perspective has however no place in the Judaism of 30 C.E.. It leads through the prophecy of Caiaphas to the decision to have Jesus put to death. This is also profoundly ironical. Jesus has been presented as the Resurrection and the Life, and the source of life to those who believe in him. His gift of life to Lazarus is now presented as the reason why the chief priests and Pharisees seek to have him put to death.
After the anointing story, things get worse and worse. At 12.9-11, many were leaving `the Jews’ and believing in Jesus, and consequently the chief priests took counsel to kill Lazarus. This begins a set of statements, according to which Lazarus was exceptionally important. If this were true, we would not be able to explain the omission of Lazarus from the synoptic Gospels. Secondly, the plot is incredible. Killing someone raised from the dead is not a feasible Jewish reaction to such a miracle, and the plot is never mentioned again. It either worked or it did not. It is difficult to see how the plot against Lazarus could fail, when that against Jesus succeeded. Nonetheless, it is not acted upon, yet Lazarus does not reappear in the early chapters of Acts. Nor does he appear again in the fourth Gospel, surviving an unsuccessful plot. Finally, in the Judaism of Jesus’ time, having faith in Jesus did not mean `leaving’ in any reasonable sense. The fourth evangelist has imposed on the Judaism of Jesus’ time the situation of his own, when Jews converted to Jesus did indeed leave the Jewish community.
But the narrator has not yet finished. Verse 12.12 slides into the old tradition of 12.13-15. More trouble begins at verse 16, where the disciples are to `remember’ what they had not previously known. It becomes serious in verses 17-19, where the crowd bear witness that Jesus had raised Lazarus, so the Pharisees declare, `the world has gone after him.’ Lazarus, however, is heard of no more. The Johannine narrative is thus internally incoherent, as well as inconsistent with synoptics. The decisive incoherence is that the story of Lazarus just stops. With so many Jews `leaving’ because of the raising of Lazarus, with the crowd who saw this miracle bearing witness to it, with a crowd meeting because they have heard of this sign, with a plot against Lazarus’ life, Lazarus was such an important figure that his further presence, and his fate, were bound to have been recorded. But they are not recorded. Why not? The only possible explanation emerges from the absence of Lazarus from the synoptic Gospels. His fate is not recorded because he never was an important figure. He does not turn up in Acts, and he neither wrote nor figures in any epistle, for the same reason. This also tells us something about the way in which this Gospel has been written. The profound and real feeling that Jesus brought life and `the Jews’ brought death (cf. 16.2) to the Johannine community is presented in story mode. Hence the stress on the love of Jesus for Lazarus, as even `the Jews’ notice (11.36), and for Martha and Mary (11.5), for Jesus loves his disciples. Hence also the narrative precedents for Jesus’ own resurrection, especially the difference in the graveclothes, for Lazarus came forth bound (11.44), whereas Jesus left the graveclothes behind and vanished, a difference great enough for a disciple whom Jesus loved to come to faith (20.7-8) Such factors have quite overridden the historical inconcinnities which we can see.”
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 8:30 pm
The point is that Carr treats Casey’s argument as if it is an argument from silence, which it is not. He spends his whole post condemning arguments from silence. It is for the most part an argument from what is said about Lazarus in the Gospel attributed to John and is an argument from cumulative weight scattered over many pages. Obviously the quotation I reproduced above only represents one part. It does matter, however, that Lazarus as a supposed historical character is absent from the synoptic Gospels. This is quite different from the absence of a variety of people who were not important in the early church from most of Acts, and all this is quite different from the absence of all sorts of people and things from the occasional epistles of Paul.
What both Godfrey and Carr fail to distinguish is the difference between apologetic and critical scholarship, part of which they could use to their advantage if they had the critical skills. But they don’t. All they have is bias. So while scholarship is eternally grateful to librarians, Casey himself keeps thanking libraries in prefaces to most of his published books e.g. Aramaic Sources p. ix. But scholarship is not dependent on an individual librarian.
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steph
July 9, 2011 at 7:09 pm
In a comment on his post (4th July) ironically with a title beginning “Demystifying…” Godfrey commented “Steph sadly cannot even demonstrate that she understands the discussion. She fails to see she supports my point when she declares Casey wrote “Is John’s Gospel True?” to argue it is not factually true. That is the very debate Hoffmann says we should bypass, but I am not surprised Steph herself fails to understand Hoffmann’s post that she says she fully agrees with.”
Professor Hoffmann has not said historical debates should be bypassed and I never said anything about ‘factually true’. Godfrey has no references. His abilities as a librarian are not the same as abilities to assess critical scholarship honestly and he has not demonstrated any awareness of what ‘Is John’s Gospel True?’ is about – in fact Carr’s and Godfrey’s blog comments on it have demonstrated they don’t understand it at all. Casey’s book Is John’s Gospel True? was originally drafted in 1987 because the reasons for believing that this Gospel does not contain significant historically correct information not available in the synoptic Gospels were well known to professional scholars, but not available to students or to interested people in the churches, many of whom believed it was literally true. As he continued work, Casey became more and more concerned at the use of the Gospel of John in persecutions of Jews. Thus his 1996 book argued firstly that, where John differs from the synoptics, it could usually be shown to be wrong. He examines in detail the use made of it by Martin Luther. He provides many details and reasons to argue that the document is dangerous, when held to be scripture, as that term was understood at the time. I do not however wish to land Professor Hoffmann, me or anyone else with all of Casey’s opinions. In particular, I often disagree with him as to how certain his conclusions are. This is part of ongoing fruitful debate, which Godfrey shows no signs of understanding.
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edj19
July 11, 2011 at 3:22 pm
My identity is in eror. It should be:
Name Ed Jones
Email: edhj1@msn.com
Please correct this.
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steph
July 12, 2011 at 7:55 pm
Dizzy misrepresentations and laughable things continue over on Vridar including a comment at the bottom of one funny post: “Evidently, Stephanie Fisher, who is credited with having worked meticulously through “every word” of more than one draft of Casey’s Jesus of Nazareth also feels that this story of a resurrection is literally true.” Of Jairus’s daughter? Really? I do not, and anyway Casey follows Mark’s report that Jesus said she was not dead, rather than the fundamentalist tradition that she was.
Godfrey again refers to Casey as my mentor, which he is not, as I have pointed out before but Godfrey can’t actually comprehend that I disagree with Casey on minor as well as quite major points all the time. What I do though, is represent Casey’s work accurately (which does not mean I endorse it) and correct those who misrepresent it, like Godfrey and Carr, which they do all the time possibly because they don’t understand it. Godfrey says he can hear me “screaming” – funny that because I don’t scream … but I do sing. I hope he wasn’t insulting my singing… He suggests I am “emotionally unstable” which I’m not so perhaps he’s got a bit of psychological projection going on, because he does make so many many more personal attacks.
Godfrey and Carr misrepresent so many things that it would be dull to enumerate them all. For example, Casey’s comments on the healing of the blind man in Bethsaida are dependent on the work of Keir Howard, whom Carr just manages to mention. He does not however note that when Keir Howard wrote this book, he was a fully qualified medic, experienced in the healing of psychosomatic illnesses and competent in the anthropology of medicine, and that his comments were partly based on the work of professional ophthalmologists, a quite different world from that of the miracles which Godfrey and apparently Carr used to believe in, and on account of which they will no longer believe stories which are perfectly plausible as natural events in the real world.
Carr’s comments that students paying £9,000 to study at Nottingham will have Casey as their professor are incompetent and misleading as usual. The New Testament professors are Roland Deines and Richard Bell. Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey retired several years ago. That is why he is ‘Emeritus’. It’s a shame that Godfrey, who is a librarian, and Carr have such little respect for integrity and truth.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 12, 2011 at 8:17 pm
@ Steph It is all too ludicrous for words and has forfeited any claim to be taken seriously. Perhaps he hopes that James Randi will set it all straight.
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Steven Carr
July 13, 2011 at 2:01 am
‘Carr’s comments that students paying £9,000 to study at Nottingham will have Casey as their professor are incompetent and misleading as usual.’
I must apologise most sincerely for my insinuation that the University of Nottingham will expect students to regard Professsor Casey as a Professor of their University and for my unfounded malicious allegation that the University of Nottingham will expect students to read Professor Casey’s work.
I am genuinely sorry for this mistake of mine.
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steph
July 13, 2011 at 10:38 am
Joe :-) that would be truly amazing. Funny Carr equates “unfounded malicious allegation” with “incompetent and misleading as usual” … which that equation effectively is – incompetent and misleading.
However he would be quite accurate if he applied “unfounded malicious allegation” to his continual ridiculous parodies of the Emeritus Professor, such as “No wonder Casey is misrepresented so often. Nobody can follow his train of thoughts or work out which ad hoc hypothesis is supposed to be active at any one time… He is the only person in the world who can read Aramaic documents behind Mark that nobody else can see and that no Christian in the first century ever mentioned existing… With the superhuman ability to read Aramaic documents that nobody has seen or heard of, and to read them better than Mark himself, who allegedly had them in front of him, it is little wonder that Casey managed to get such a prestigious appointment…Mythers cannot compete with people who can read invisible documents… The only surprise is that with such powers, Casey has not been invited to be our next Prime Minister.
But perhaps the ability to read invisible Aramaic documents is not needed in Number 10 Downing Street, although it is invaluable in becoming an Independent Biblical Scholar…That is Independent as in not being Dependent upon texts actually existing before you translate them into Greek…”
Clownish? And this ain’t no “teary defence”(!!) although tears do swell well when we laugh. :-)
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steph
July 13, 2011 at 11:52 am
Carr continues to choose to ignore that fact that most of Casey’s argument is based on what is said in the Gospel attributed to John, so it is basically not an argument from silence. One of the main points about scholarship about the Jesus of history is that the major historical sources are the synoptic Gospels, so that an argument showing that what is said in the Gospel of John has no support in the synoptic Gospels is not an argument from silence as that term is normally understood, when it has begun by showing that the account in the Gospel attributed to John is not remotely plausible.
For example, on pages 208-9 of Is John’s Gospel True?, Casey wrote (and obviously this is only part of his argument), “The Lazarus story is a Johannine composition from beginning to end (n.15. see pp. 55-7). The narrator tells us that many of `the Jews’ believed in Jesus because of this miracle (11.45). The reaction of the chief priests and the Pharisees is remarkable. They convened a sanhedrin and said, `What are we doing? – for this man is doing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy our place and people’ (11.47-8). Widespread faith in Jesus would not have given the Romans cause to do this. This is an extraordinary perception, formed by the Neronian persecution, which showed genuine Roman hostility to Christianity, and by the destruction of Jerusalem after the Roman war of 66-70CE. …Some Jews attributed this to failure to observe the Torah, and Christians did not observe it. From this perspective, everyone having faith in Jesus could indeed lead to the destruction of the place and the people. This perspective has however no place in the Judaism of 30 C.E.. It leads through the prophecy of Caiaphas to the decision to have Jesus put to death. This is also profoundly ironical. Jesus has been presented as the Resurrection and the Life, and the source of life to those who believe in him. His gift of life to Lazarus is now presented as the reason why the chief priests and Pharisees seek to have him put to death… After the anointing story, things get worse and worse. At 12.9-11, many were leaving `the Jews’ and believing in Jesus, and consequently the chief priests took counsel to kill Lazarus. This begins a set of statements, according to which Lazarus was exceptionally important.”
None of this is an argument from silence as that is normally understood. It is an argument that the narrative of the Gospel attributed to John is hopelessly implausible. Of course, anyone who believes that the narrative of the synoptic gospels is important for understanding the historicity of such stories will add the complete absence of Lazarus from the synoptic Gospels. But this is not what is normally understood by an ‘argument from silence’, because the Gospel attributed to John is not silent at all, it is historically useless. Godfrey cannot take this seriously because he has an intellectually arbitrary commitment (apparently unconscious) to the notion that Jesus did not exist, so nothing in the synoptic gospels could have any historical value: to any absence from them is an argument from ‘silence’. What Casey has quoted from the Gospel attributed to John is obviously not silence at all, but something which fits conveniently into the narrative and theology of the Gospel attributed to John.
Carr quotes Casey, “Secondly, the plot is incredible. Killing someone raised from the dead is not a feasible Jewish reaction to such a miracle, and the plot is never mentioned again” and Carr comments “Yep, another argument from silence”.
Again, this is not what is normally understood by an ‘argument from silence’, because the first part of the argument is not silence at all. The rest simply complements the total implausibility of John’s account.
The rest of Carr’s allegations that Casey’s arguments are from silence are of the same kind. For example, he quotes Casey: “It either worked or it did not. It is difficult to see how the plot against Lazarus could fail, when that against Jesus succeeded. Nonetheless, it is not acted upon , yet Lazarus does not reappear in the early chapters of Acts.” And Carr comments: “Another argument from silence”.
This too is nor an argument from silence as that is normally understood. If John’s story were true, we need to know what happened to the plot against Lazarus. Casey fitted the story into Johannine theology, and that is not ‘silence’. That Lazarus is absent from the main primary sources underlines the fact that the account of him in a late secondary sources are entirely secondary. That is what Casey argues and I am representing his argument. Can Carr not recover from the fundamentalist concept which believes that all ‘scripture’ is inerrant? For that is needed Randi’s amazing wand perhaps? That’s it, no more clowns. Entertainment with more serious things are generally more inspiring and fruitful. :-)
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rjosephhoffmann
July 13, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Jerusalem Talmud Ketubot 11:1 and the Mishna, Avot 1:1; Talmud Yevamot 21a, per Leviticus 18:3 and the whole ethos of dissuasion concerning departing from the ways of the community would indicate that a plot against Jesus for violating a tomb is not implausible in the Lazarus situation. It is perfectly plausible; indeed, in sources like the Toldoth Yeshu, the accusation against Jesus for such feats is given explicitly as the reason he is executed as a mamzer (bastard) and magician. The Yorah Deah requires that the body be buried “in the earth” and must not be disturbed. This is at least implicitly a scandal in the resurrection stories as well, where pains are taken despite inconsistencies to suggest that no one disturbed the grave (e.g., “moved the stone.”) And these are the people assigning Bayes values to their assumptions?
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steph
July 14, 2011 at 4:26 pm
I know curiosity killed the cat but I have an insatiable instinct and the latest comment is too funny to pass. Neil once likened me to a ‘vampire’ so I’d better not mention appetites. But I must stop the irresistible urge to peek at what nonsense continues to be repeated. Maybe I keep looking to check it’s actually true – true that they lack all sense of comprehension not only of Casey’s work, but my representation of it, and pour personal attacks against our characters as a substitute for honest analysis.
Today, I’m apparently ‘fretting’ Neil claims, at what is being written on Vridar. I can only imagine this is another example of psychological projection of someone projecting their unwanted emotions onto others. But it’s ironic because it’s more my numb astonishment at what he and his friends continue to say. He even quotes my comment but doesn’t even represent what I wrote and misses completely the fact that I am representing Casey’s arguments and not endorsing his views or even putting forward my own hypothesis, yet he attributes all Casey’s arguments (which he doesn’t understand) to me. He cannot understand the fact that not only do we critical scholars disagree on many points which we can debate and discuss, but that the ability to disagree is what critical scholarship is about and how we make progress in forming and improving hypotheses. And the rhetorical accusation of ‘circular reasoning, begging the question, special pleading’ is nothing more meaningful than a demonstration that he doesn’t know what they mean, or I mean, or Casey means, or even Professor Hoffmann, who Neil accuses of “vacuous approval”.
He still insists I contradict Professor Hoffmann but cannot produce the evidence to demonstrate how or where the contradiction lies in Casey’s argument (which Neil continually attributes to me) and refuses to entertain the fact that when Professor Hoffmann has points of disagreement we can debate those respectfully and fruitfully without resorting to personal attacks. The yet again Neil invents one of his ridiculous little analogies and says “trying to reason with steph is like Alice trying to get sense out of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”
It amuses me that that they constantly refer to a PhD student at Nottingham University, sometimes identifying that person with me, yet they seem to have no understanding of what is involved in independent research or why I travelled 12000 miles to work with a critical scholar who has an internationally acknowledged particular expertise in Aramaic. They have no idea it seems that I spend far more time with colleagues who are working in my field, and they are from other British, European and Antipodean universities including scholars sometimes in America. And Carr announces also today, that ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ by Maurice Casey is not on the reading list for undergraduates. I don’t know what courses they offer in the Nottingham department for undergraduates and whether such a book would be useful, but it’s ridiculous to expect a book published in 2010 to be on everybody’s reading list. When I was an undergraduate I investigated and read new research myself in addition to what was on generally limited reading lists. Carr’s silly little comment is as ignorant as it is misleading and malicious.
They certainly have no respect or comprehension for the use made of interdisciplinary expertise by the best critical scholarship today. Casey has benefited from the recent expertise of scholars such as Justin Meggitt and Howard Keir. Keir is a qualified medic including cure of psychosomatic illnesses and has read himself into the anthropology of medicine which means he understands how traditional healers could heal some of the things he could heal. Carr just rubbishes him and thereby rejects any possible value that his contribution to critical inquiry might have, which is slightly ironic.
God only knows what methods they apply – they’re a mess to untangle. I suggest we have a bonfire and attract all the ‘tics’ to a bright flaming fire. Falstaff had a remedy to bring to the celebration which will inevitably increase the numbness but reduce the astonishment and replace it with glee and plain ordinary happy…
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steph
July 14, 2011 at 4:50 pm
Even the British Library which is bound by law to have a free copy of every book published in England, has not yet received a copy of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ published late 2010 … and Carr expects it to be on everyone’s reading list?
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rjosephhoffmann
July 14, 2011 at 6:19 pm
Well, this is a situation where we invoke teachers. The role of the pupil is to surpass the teacher, as Porphyry did Plotinus when the word “education” meant what it said (educare). I have no patience for the amateurism of this trend–not that untrained people like Carrier (how’s his Aramaic?) and Godfrey et al. can’t have opinions, and not that they do not have the right to sniff out the amateurism and parochial interests of scholars who cannot distinguish between apologetic and inquiry. Yet pure skepticism is not a method, and now the amateurism of the critics is becoming embarrassing–I hope for them as well. I will not names names, but I am speaking of people who haven’t even mastered English grammar and are holding forth as skeptical NT blogmeisters. I have nothing against autodidacts except that it’s the academic equivalent of autoeroticism. Good scholarship like good sex needs additional, expert validation.
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The Unhelpful Way In Which The . . . Debate Has Moved (Or, attempting to understand why the misrepresentations from Hoffmann, McGrath, et al?) « Vridar says:
July 15, 2011 at 4:19 am
[...] (my time) Dr R. Joseph Hoffmann wrote: I have no patience for the amateurism of this trend–not that untrained people like Carrier [...]
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steph
July 15, 2011 at 11:23 am
Godfrey can’t even understand the procedure between book publication and the realities of university syllabuses, reading lists and the existence of publications in libraries, yet he is a librarian. He misrepresents everything, including independent scholarship, and the whole idea that he can classify a rather diverse group of differently qualified people, independent of each other, into something called ‘mainstream scholarship’ is ludicrous.
Godfrey has distorted Professor Hoffmann’s comment. Professor Hoffmann is accused of chiming in, emphasising that his distaste is more for the grammar than the arguments. This is not a representation of what he wrote. Professor Hoffmann wrote “people who haven’t even mastered English grammar…” which is not the same as saying that grammar is more important than the arguments. He offered no approval let alone a ‘vacuous’ one. He merely noted his mutual despair at the ludicrous affair which has forfeited any claim to be taken seriously and implied Casey was more of an expert in Aramaic. What is important is the fact that expert validation is missing in the blogging world.
I never suggested in a blog comment that a medical explanation increases the likelihood of the scene being historical. I didn’t even endorse Casey’s particular argument, which involves a complex web of arguments including Aramaisms and so forth, and not merely the idea that psychosomatic cures are plausible. What I did was criticise Carr for rejecting outright the usefulness of Keir Howard’s expertise and rejecting the usefulness of his expert interdisciplinary research for historical inquiry. And so it goes on and on and on, and it will continue to go on and on, and it is very dull.
I don’t endorse the group of bloggers who blog against mythicists and I don’t endorse those who represent mythicist views. In fact I don’t pay much serious attention at all because it’s all such a mixture of the incestuous, mutually self supporting bloggers, feeding off each other’s absolute skepticism, with bloggers who lack the ability to differentiate between apologetic and critical scholarship. With the non existence of expert peer review or validation, all extremes are embarrassing to critical enquiry and quite honestly I can’t afford this time. I have better things to do, such as genuine constructive inquiry with positive and fruitful debate, and more inspiring conversation.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 15, 2011 at 11:58 am
My reference to those who have not mastered English grammar pronouncing on arguments and conclusions that require a high degree of philological competence in ancient languages (as well) is what it is. Like a rose. But surely, since grammar and syntax are also the building blocks for argument, what can possibly be the sense of making such an absurd separation? Personally, I care about grammar because it is intricately associated with thought and the assessment of grammatical expressions and orderly representation of ideas. The internet by its very nature undermines this and specializes in blurts, intellectual spasms and half-thought out ideas. It’s also a great “leveler” of opinion, where pundits have to deal with enthusiasts.
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steph
July 15, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Precisely – you can’t have one without the other. A double-edged sword but better a rose, because it’s beautiful duality, not ferocious. It has reminded me of this (but not this particular recording which isn’t the one I’m listening to). The perfection of its passionate completeness.
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kiloxray
July 17, 2011 at 5:14 am
Steph,
I have never come across someone who actually seems to specialize in pathetic, unadulterated, insolent whining.
Will that be the dissertation for your Ph.D?
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steph
October 4, 2011 at 11:50 am
Infuriating woo woo. I wonder how he managed to earn a phd in maths. He doesn’t demonstrate clear headed logical thinking at all. Analagomaniac woo. And he’s conceited beyond belief. Poppy.
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steph
October 4, 2011 at 11:51 am
not for moderation. just browsing.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 25, 2012 at 5:06 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
Several colleagues will be responding on this site in a week to claims made by atheist blogger and amateur “logician” Richard Carrier concerning the historical Jesus (contra Bart Ehrman) and his abuse of Bayes’s theorem. In the meantime, this from 2011.
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steph
March 25, 2012 at 7:54 am
Applying Bayes theorem to texts is like applying a banana to an air valve to pump up a tyre. Imposing post enlightenment views of history and myth onto ancient storytelling cultures is anachronistic nonsense.
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Robert
March 26, 2012 at 5:28 am
One wouldn’t apply Bayes theorem to texts. One would apply Bayes theorem to assumptions made about the texts.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 30, 2012 at 3:34 pm
How does that work l exactly @ Robert as the assumptions have to be based on content?
Leo
March 25, 2012 at 8:09 pm
I think maybe Godel applies to the way Carrier is attempting to use Bayes. Just because we can ask the question, doesn’t mean there’s an answer.
Reply
SocraticGadfly
March 25, 2012 at 11:02 pm
Hoffmann seems to create somewhat of a straw man between literalists and skeptics with himself presented as the “white knight” who knows the sweet spot. Had he confined his comments to Carrier and Bayes, with perhaps a sidebar into Carrier’s Gnu Atheist connections via CFI, he might well have had something stronger. But, he doesn’t.
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Jim Lippard
March 29, 2012 at 7:07 pm
Leo: I strongly suspect not. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are often misused by trying to apply them where they do not have any relevance, to make erroneous claims of impossibility. Check out Torkel Franzen’s book, Gödel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse, for a guide to many of the things that are popularly, but incorrectly, said to be entailed by the theorems.
Reply
Bernard Muller
March 29, 2012 at 8:42 pm
I have been banging my head on how Carrier used the Bayes theorem for “the brother of the Lord”. That looks irregular to me mathematically, but more important is the data (generated by his biased opinion) he used and how he manipulated it before being fed into his equation. And the Bayes theorem can only be used with a set of data with a certain relationship between the factors, which seems to be absent in this case.
Carrier always appeals to logic & math, but the Bayes theorem is only a front for his bullying statement “all Christians were “brothers of the Lord”” , based on Carrier own theological extrapolation.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 30, 2012 at 12:38 am
Bernard is right. “Bullying assumptions” made by force majeure are then used to establish values that tilt the outcome in the directions of the presumption. The evidence for “all Christians being brothers in the Lord” is based on sources that are fraught with controversy and further subdivide into three different problems from different periods: The gospels do not use or envisage the convention; the use of the phrase in Paul is subordinate to his preoccupation with apostleship, which in turn presupposes a hierarchical rather than “adelphic” model; and the Acts though not pivoting from Paul’s personal crisis imagines this hierarchical model already to be in place and defends it. We have no idea how pervasive was the idea of brethren and brotherhood was as a term of personal usage, just extrapolations based on inferences, e.g., the fact that Tertullian in the third century defends Christians from the charge of incest & cannibalism may arise from pagan misunderstanding of the term, but we have no idea that this is what pagans thought. Moreover, in some house churches, the biological relationship clearly would have preceded any metaphorical usage and might have arisen by extension, and if so it is disjunctive from any special usage that would have arisen in the Jerusalem church or in relation to e.g. James. Paul refers to tines apo Iakabou interfering with his message, not brothers, so it cannot be true that “brothers” was standard usage that would nullify any form of literal biological relationship–indeed, the assumption itself makes no sense at all. Assumptions in, assumptions out, and Bayes can’t make them good ones, let alone “facts.” Carrier wants to dispense with the James tradition because it is inconvenient, for reasons not unlike its inconvenience to the Catholic doctrine of Mary. Maybe he should try to sell Bayes to the Vatican. Or apply Bayes to the assumptions made by used car salesmen, which are far fewer than the ones we have to deal with in the study of the gospels.
Reply
steph
March 30, 2012 at 9:14 am
Apart from mathematical formulae devised to ascertain mathematical probability, being inappropriate for, and unrelated to historical probably and therefore irrelevant to historical texts, he doesn’t have a structured method of application, but worse, he is dealing with mixed material, some of which is primary, much of which is secondary, legendary, myth mixed accretion. He has no method of distinguishing the difference and this renders his Bayes a complete muddle. But as you say, it’s convenient to dispose of inconvenient tradition and he is under the illusion that Bayes provides a veneer of scientific language to conclusions he is determined to ‘prove’. And he claims to have ‘proved’… such an anomaly to reliable and credible critical scholarship of history.
rjosephhoffmann
March 30, 2012 at 3:32 pm
Exactly, he takes the text as given rather than composite and chronologically and ideologically composite. Partly because he dismisses tradition criticism, partly because he is just a lousy historian.
http://tinyurl.com/imeaward17609
January 23, 2013 at 11:02 pm
Just what exactly truly stimulated you to post “p -ness
Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes?s Theorem ? The New Oxonian”?
I reallydefinitely enjoyed reading it! Thanks a lot ,Trista
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
p -ness Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes’s Theorem
by rjosephhoffmann
In a recent post responding to a blog review of Sources of the Jesus Tradition by atheist blogger Richard Carrier, I made the point that his own contribution to the book does not rise above the level of pedantic lecturing on a theorem of dubious value to engage the literary matter.
Carrier has claimed on a number of occasions that his approach is revolutionary, a tour de force and essentially over the heads of New Testament scholars. Apart from the naivety of saying anything like this in a field littered with the corpses of dead theories and “discoveries,” this is scarcely where you’d want a revolution to be fought.
Strauss
There are numerous critical issues attached to using a theorem that is primarily about probability to assess material that isn’t. It is, however, a common feature of forensic (i.e. controversialist) approaches to the Bible on both the fundamentalist side and the atheist side to engage the material on a literal level. This is so because both sides have to meet on the field at that point where literal claims about the text are being made, if not with the claim that the texts themselves are designed to propose facts–though most biblical literalists would say that they are, and most of their opponents would say that they are defeasible at this level.
Accordingly, a particular way of reading the text has been the main source of “rationalistic” critiques of the Bible since the Enlightenment though many of those critiques were superficial and almost all have been improved by serious academic study in the last two and half centuries.
Reasonably speaking, it is analytically impossible to assess claims of “factuality” without assessing the texts on which such claims are based, even if we begin with relative certainty or skepticism (for example) about the occurrence of miracles or the reliability of a written tradition. Despite the fact that the multiplication of “conditions” and ”assumptions” violates the sensibility of most post-modernists who deplore looking at things like authorial intention, criticality, or audience (community) in discussing narrative, the character of the text is the conditio sine qua non–the starting point–for all discussion. It is a condition a literalist believer, on the basis of his epistemological suppositions, tries to avoid since his prior assumption is that the text has a particular integrity, and the skeptic, guided by opposite beliefs, no less literal, is often able to ignore.
Modern New Testament scholarship emerged precisely in response to the impasse between credulity and skepticism, neither of which seemed a sufficient answer to the “problem of the text.” Forensically speaking, text is text. Critically speaking, it isn’t.
Generally speaking, the biblical literalist feels he is under no compulsion to defend his confidence in the text; he assumes he has warrants for his confidence. He can invoke a number of interdependent subordinate claims to support his position–arguments from antiquity (the age of the text or its distance from the reported events), reliability (a kind of mock-psychological assessment of the trustworthiness of “reporters”), self-consistency (whether the text is basically coherent within itself and among variants, where they exist), inspiration and inerrancy (the belief that the text is autonomous as a product of revelation and thus superior to any methods used in its evaluation). Most subordinate claims have been savaged by modern critical approaches that have grown organically out of the study of the gospels and cognate literature, though some are still of interest to historians.
A forensic approach to the Bible means that key debating points like the six-day creation story, the resurrection of Jesus and (perhaps) the existence of Jesus have to be treated as historical assertions to the same extent they are asumed to be true by the most literal readers. This is a severe limitation to forensic approaches since they initiate discussion with the question of whether a text is vulnerable as a truth-claim, using a formula more suitable for modal logic than for history: Is something possible or probable? Are events described in a text more likely to have happened or not to have happened?
Hume
Even the study of the text for both literalists and skeptics will be subordinated to the modality of claims. Texts that assume propositional value for the literalist (even if that value has to be manufactured) are the very texts the skeptic needs to find defeasible. Scholars have understandably winced at this level of discussion because it’s easily seen as a branch of apologetics rather than as a field of serious literary and cultural study. Its preoccupation is not with what the text has to tell us, but with whether you or your opponent is right or wrong about a relatively small number of events.
Gunkel
Debaters like Carrier have suggested that the critical methods developed for dealing with the Bible in the nineteenth and twentieth century are insufficiently rigorous. But that is simply not the case. In fact, the methods grew in tandem with evolving perceptions of what the character of the text actually was, how it was formed, and what its creators thought about the world. In the language of an older school of criticism, what its “life situation” was. They continue to evolve and to adapt in an organic way. Only if the sole question to be answered is whether the description of an event corresponds directly and generically to “what really happened” (if it were possible to answer that question, as it isn’t in many cases) would the modality of a forensic approach be useful, and its usefulness would still depend on prior questions.
“Conventional” and revisionist approaches remain central to academic study, however, if we assume that the New Testament is not making its case propositionally, event by event, but narratively. If Genesis was not intended to teach astronomy, the New Testament was not intended to teach medicine. Neither of those statements tells us what the Bible was intended to do, yet such a determination would be essential for answering questions about how it fulfills its purposes.
Beyond the forensic approach, the question about the kind of literature the New Testament literature represents remains absolutely prior and absolutely crucial. As an example, the amount of material that can be removed into the category of “myth” (a great deal, from most of Genesis to all of Revelation) can never be determined by modal assessment of the truth properties of a text, since analytically myth is not amenable to modal analysis and only a wrong definition of myth as a kind of rhetorical lie or pre-scientific error–a definition that flies in the face of modern anthropology–would make such analysis possible. The forensic approach does itself a huge disservice by paying insufficient attention to the history of criticism, where the general mythological character of much of the material is almost taken for granted, and focusing instead on a discounted view of myth as non-factuality.
What is true of myth, moreover, is true of the other “forms” (literary and historical genres) that exist within the Bible and the New Testament especially. So much of the Jesus story is myth, in the sense of µ?????af?a (writing of a fabulous story), that I have no objection to the phrase “the Jesus Myth.” –But a great deal to object to in the sentence “Jesus ‘was’ a myth,” implying absolute non-historicity and a method designed simply to document his irreality. In Sources, this is the subject of two essays, one of which (“On Not Finding the Historical Jesus”) suggests that the gospel writers bore no interest in the “question” of the historical Jesus but had a profound interest in his reality.
For the forensicists, “Was the cosmos created or was it not created in six days”; “Did Jesus or did he not rise from the dead?”; ”What did he really say?” and “Did he exist?” are primary questions that should not be swept under the rug of literary analysis: they are questions of right and wrong. The text exists primarily to settle these questions.
In my view, this is an impoverished way to approach the Bible since the book (taken as a kind of religious artifact rather than an accident of editorial history) was not construed to answer such questions and the methods that have been devised to explore it have been driven by different phenomena and concerns: what communities believed; how they understood society; how they manipulated history and politics religiously to provide social coherence; why ideas like salvation and redemption gained ascendancy in the first century and how they evolved to become something quite different in the second. Put flatly: the questions asked by the forensic approach are not primary questions at all because they do not arise from the text.
Not unless you accept the prior assumption that the literature of the Bible puts itself forward as hard fact (and most scholars in the present century would say, it doesn’t) all operations on the material should derive naturally from what it is. Certain techniques like hermeneutical suspicion, mutiple attestation, “dissimilarity,” and redaction, source (and various other) criticisms and linguistic distribution are simply code for ways of testing how the tradition developed and how the sources evolved over time. If anything, the “factuality” or modal probability of events in using any of these methods is held in suspense in the same way Coleridge describes the willing suspension of disbelief (and for not altogether different reasons) in the Biographia Literaria.
Back to Bayesics?
I was reminded of the danger and potential irrelevance of imposing non-literary templates on the biblical material by a former student, whose comments on the use of Bayes’s theorem are significant because (a) he is not critiquing the use of this device as a New Testament scholar: he is a PhD candidate in mathematics and is properly reckoned a prodigy in pure mathematics; and (b) he is not a Christian.
I personally find his comments devastating to the use of the theorem as an assist to the modal approach to the Bible. But I’ll leave it to others to decide:
“Is this insistence [Carrier] of trying to invoke Bayes’ theorem in such contexts a manifestation of some sort of Math or Physics envy? Or is it due to the fact that forcing mathematics into one’s writings apparently confers on them some form of ‘scientific’ legitimacy?
The fact of the matter, as far as I know, and as I thought anyone would realize is that Bayes’ theorem is a theorem which follows from certain axioms. Its application to any real world situation depends upon how precisely the parmeters and values of our theoretical reconstruction of a real world approximate reality. At this stage, however, I find it difficult to see how the heavily feared ‘subjectivity’ can be avoided. Simply put, plug in different values into the theorem and you’ll get a different answer. How does one decide which value to plug in?
Secondly, is it compulsory to try to impose some sort of mathematically based methodological uniformity on all fields of rational inquiry? Do there exist good reasons to suppose the the methods commonly used in different areas that have grown over time are somehow fatally flawed if they are not currently open to some form of mathematization?
If this kind of paradigm does somehow manage to gain ascendency, I assume history books will end up being much more full of equations and mathematical assumptions etc. While that will certainly make it harder to read for most (even for someone like me, who is more trained in Mathematics than the average person) I doubt that it would have any real consequence beyond that.
The fatal flaw in Carrier’s misuse of the theorem therefore is that the “real world conditions” he finds described in the gospels are not real world conditions. Thus its application does not flow from axioms designed for its use. The gospels are the complex record of the reactions of communities to conditions that are extremely difficult to assess. Even though Carrier may know and accept this premise, he finds it unimportant to address its consequences.
It may be that in further work Carrier will lay the theoretical groundwork, justifying his use of Bayes as a cipher for understanding the gospels. But even if his mission is not that–even if it’s just a game-playing exercise for debunking their historicity in front of believers–it seems to me that Ayez has raised a fatal objection: Bayes is for apples and the gospels are oranges. And Carrier’s persistent defense that no one is really on the same page–or able to “get” the page he’s writing–is becoming increasingly difficult to swallow.
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Published: June 6, 2011
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: analysis of the gospels : Bayes's theorem : Criticism : gospels : penis envy : R. Joseph Hoffmann : Richard Carrier : Sources of the Jesus Tradition ..
74 Responses to “p -ness Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes’s Theorem”
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steph
June 6, 2011 at 3:28 pm
I agree absolutely with every word from beginning to end including the astute observation of your former student. Apples and oranges – the major flaw of applying non historical methods to historical research. However I would suggest there may be in the Bayesic advocate’s methodological misapplication, a case of penis envy, which like his Bayes theorem is to historical research, also completely irrelevant.
Reply
Rich Griese
June 6, 2011 at 3:52 pm
I applaud Carrier’s attempt to bring more precision to the study of early Christianity. We have know since Strauss that a great deal of the Christian scriptures are mythical. If we can now apply the tools of the natural sciences to obtain more precision… great. So little has been learned by the learned by the religion industry. The history industry tends to just avoid the whole issue. Perhaps the social science folks can have a crack at it. It will of course anger the folks that are trained more in the humanities, and the philosophical types. But philosophy is really just a vestal discipline today. the average man on the street is simply amazed that after 2000 years of searching, we have to date found zero historical data on the jesus character. Anything can do a better job would be welcomed.
Cheers! RichGriese.NET
Reply
steph
June 6, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Spock: “Logic and practical information do not seem to apply here.”
McCoy: “You admit that?”
Spock: “To deny the facts would be illogical, Doctor”
As Mark Twain wrote: “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”
Reply
Dwight Jones
March 25, 2012 at 11:24 am
Carrier’s work is akin to an assessment of Shakespeare by Dick Tracy. As RJH maintains, if you don’t consider the motives and purposes behind the history of the bible, you had may as well discard Aesop’s fables for being non-factual at the same time. Bring in Disney for questioning.
The Bible is/was an envelope for teaching the new ethics of agriculture/trade/urbanization to our species, as it underwent rapid cultural flux (note powerful scientific word), by whatever hyperbole/fact mix was available to the authors of the day.
We carried around the idea of Ark of the Covenant as a representation of powers we did not yet have, but aspired to. So too was ritual the mortar of communal trust. You cannot evaluate the history of the Bible without considering its purpose.
Any butterfly can be broken on a wheel, but you do need a tiny mind to do it right.
Reply
steph
June 6, 2011 at 4:21 pm
baah – Bayes’s, belonging to Bayes.
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Scott
June 6, 2011 at 4:44 pm
Carrier’s use of Bayes Theorem just seems like an example of domain confusion more than anything else.
Following H’s student, do we apply mathematical principles to Longinus’s ” On the Sublime; or Drydens “Essay Concerning Dramatic Poesy” or to “explicacion du text”? I can’t think of too many serious scholars I have been fortunate to sit with who would think the latter would be a fruit giving endeavor.
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Mark David Dietz
June 6, 2011 at 5:21 pm
Joseph,
Thanks. I picked up a lot from this essay. This is really where the hard thought of our age is coming down. Not in the hard sciences as simple solution engineering, but in science that demands modal logic and a depth of understanding of the nature of humans from the inside out, not just the outside in.
I am reading a book on the presocratics just now in which, to too great a degree, the author pictures mythology as the precursor to science/philosophy. He focuses on the new thoughts that Thales introduced (or borrowed from the Babylonians) but fails to account for what he held on to or brought with him from an older tradition, perhaps too easily called mythology. The presocratics are thus seen as the beginning of a broach between two irreconcilable positions — although, surely we are pushing a little too much to say that two clearly distinct positions existed for Thales or Anaximander, et al.
The questions I have focused on are: to what degree did the presocratics tend not to see the disctinctions we now make or, for that matter, that Aristotle made a hundred years later? Did they continue to value that which we call mythological even as they began, in a near forensic way, to exercise reason and challenges to older traditions? Is challenging an older tradition really a sign of rational thought, or more a matter of a kind of mythopoeic thought that seeks more complex and articulated conceptions that resonate with both the ideal and the real?
More and more I grow concerned that we have so favored one tradition that the other (call it mythological, rhetorical, whatever) all but disappears — and the modal question of possibility, or the imaginative question of where do the axioms (archai) come from, become deep, black magic to be run out of town on a rail if they ever make themselves too obvious or too noticable.
Best, Mark
Reply
The Last, Best Hope for Mythicism? | Exploring Our Matrix says:
June 6, 2011 at 11:39 pm
[...] Click through to read the rest. [...]
Reply
beallen0417
June 9, 2011 at 1:10 pm
One is immediately reminded of Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria. Is that a conscious decision? Also, is missue a typo for misuse?
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rjosephhoffmann
June 9, 2011 at 1:46 pm
-I do like missue as a sentiment but misuse is what is meant–thanks. I have some doubts about Gould’s thesis, which amounts to ideological dualism and it is hard to say that methodologies are the same as worldviews. “Religion”/theology isn’t immune from scientific critique, but the extent to which methods appropriate for real world situations can be applied to problematical descriptions of irreal situations would steer me away from probabalism, unless I were really just looking to make a literalist look stupid. My own view is that most good biblical scholars are not stupid and would find would want to know the heuristic value of advocating this technique. Why not , e.g., use relative frequency as the heuristic instead. The answer is, it gets you no further than what we already know on the basis of techniques better suited for the literature.
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Soloview
June 15, 2011 at 10:22 am
Excellent analysis, Joseph ! The Bayes’ folly of Carrier is shocking because he is smart guy. One wonders how he can sustain the illusion of obtaining a valid set of input data that would make his scheme work. How would he prevent Garbage-In ? Evidently, Carrier does not understand that even in the study of historical materials there is a difference between managing data and obsessing about data. The difference is that one approach does not admit options.
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Steven Carr
June 27, 2011 at 1:24 am
Carrier’s method is fatally flawed.
For example, what is the probability that ‘Mark’ used Aramaic sources? No number can be assigned to this probability, making it impossible to apply Baye’s Theorem.
Real scholars of the New Testament would never dream of using phrases like ‘We must make an overall assessment of the probability of what we have suggested.’ or attempt to put numbers on probabilities by saying things like ‘…I cannot assume more than 51 percent probability for my best guess.’
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rjosephhoffmann
June 27, 2011 at 8:10 am
I agree, but all BayesBoyz do it. Swinburne does it in his philosophical theology as well. Seems to be especially important to debaters (and to almost no one else in this area) to be able to quantify things, just to score points, but the quantification is completely spurious since the assessment of the data doesn’t affect its initial reliability, relevance, usefulness or truth value. Reminds me of slapping a coat of paint on boards that are already full of dry rot.
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Robert
July 4, 2011 at 11:52 am
Nicely done, Steven!
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Steven Carr
June 27, 2011 at 12:42 pm
I was quoting Maurice Casey, in his book ‘Aramaic sources of Mark’s Gospel’.
I’m not certain if these quantifications that Maurice made in his book are ‘completely spurious’. Can you explain further please?
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Steven Carr
July 3, 2011 at 5:39 am
I’m curious to know why you haven’t approved my post informing your readers of the person I quoted. I now am in the invidious position of quoting people anonymously, which is not a good thing to do…
Reply
Demystifying R. Joseph Hoffmann, and the war over Bayes’ theorem « Vridar says:
July 4, 2011 at 4:29 am
[...] Joseph Hoffmann has let a crotchety side to his nature show as he publicly attempts to humiliate a younger scholar who, in exchanges with the aging don, has exposed a dint of mediocrity in his [...]
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rjosephhoffmann
July 8, 2011 at 11:30 am
I love the reference to “ageing don”. It must rhyme with something. Alas, however, while not Mozart I am more than ten years short of my biblical mandate and still able to navigate my way without a walker across a sitting room. As to the use of “scholar” in relation to Carrier, let’s reserve that term for someone who practices the trade and has a life beyond self published books and blogs.
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steph
July 11, 2011 at 11:32 am
(I still can’t get “Major Tom” out of my head – bit of a cult song really – lingering – and always had a bit of a thing for Bowie and his different coloured eyes. Star Man: ageing dom Major Tom…) :-)
steph
July 4, 2011 at 3:45 pm
As usual, no reference is given by Carr. The author he is trying to implicate does not recognise the quotation, so at best been taken out of context, and at worst, made up. It is not to be found by searching the ms submitted to Routledge, a book written to argue that John’s gospel is not remotely true.
Reply
steph
July 4, 2011 at 4:14 pm
And that scholar implicated would never use statistics to make mathematical judgements of precision. He is not a Bayesboyes – Carrier and Swinburne: they’re Bayesboyes.
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steph
July 4, 2011 at 7:08 pm
It’s ironic that Carr’s friend Neil attempts to deride a highly qualified critical scholar and Highly Distinguished Professor, by referring to him as “an aging don” when Neil himself, at 62 years old, is actually much older than the Highly Distinguished Professor, and holds only elementary qualifications as a librarian. An ageing librarian.
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steph
July 4, 2011 at 8:06 pm
It’s ironic too that Carr’s friend Neil provides no references either to these alleged quotes which are not recognised by the alleged author and which have not been found now after searches in manuscripts of three different books. But Neil cannot even describe Carr’s “quote” accurately. Instead he writes that the author “was interested in assessing probabilities of something being a fact, and even quantifying a probability at not more than 51%” whereas Carr claims the author wrote about probability and guessing, not “fact’. So while it looks suspiciously like Carr made it up, it looks suspiciously like Neil has neither quoted the alleged “quote”, nor asked Carr for a reference, in order to conveniently exaggerate.
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steph
July 5, 2011 at 7:26 pm
It is ludicrous for Neil to suggest that Professor Hoffmann has “rejected a valuable tool” that was really waiting to be used “for his advantage” because of a “personal dispute” with Carrier. Professor Hoffmann is absolutely and blatantly clear that Carrier is wrong in his application of Bayes Theorem to history. It is malicious to suggest otherwise.
It is ludicrous for Neil to imply that Professor Hoffmann is inconsistent with his criticism of mythicists as Professor Hoffmann is well aware of the differences between critical historical method and the mistakes the mythicists make, just as he is well aware that ‘Is John’s Gsopel True?’ was written to argue that it isn’t true at all.
It is ludicrous for Neil to speculate and create fiction about the content of a book he knows nothing about, and say “Presumably the book will be (like Bart Erhman’s) an argument for why we can believe the Gospels as testimony for certain historical facts about Jesus.” It has absolutely nothing to do with Ehrman’s book and is not remotely like it or Neil’s fiction. It is taking time to write because the gross mistakes of mythicists take a long time to work out with accuracy rather than with creative fiction in which they are expert. It focuses on decent historical method. It points out the gross misuse of texts, in total contempt for historical method, by Doherty, Murdock, and their followers.
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Steven Carr
July 7, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Alleged quotes?
Aramaic sources of Mark’s Gospel – page 110 and page 165.
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 12:05 pm
How on earth does Carr expect Professor Hoffmann to assume Carr’s ‘quote’ was anything other than a hypothetical statement of someone applying mathematical precision to historical argument, when he didn’t give a reference? Extracted from a real passage has distorted the meaning making it appear to represent something else, and is nothing other than false attribution to create a straw man.
Reply
steph
July 7, 2011 at 7:09 pm
Carr has condescended and provided a reference. It is not slanderous to suspect someone has made something up when he doesn’t provide a reference and the “quote” is taken out of context from a book written in 1998, and in isolation is uncharacteristic of the author, who has written many published books and articles, and obviously could not possibly remember every word he has written, especially taken out of context without a quote. While Carr’s malicious intention was to try to ‘trap’ Professor Hoffmann into criticising a critical scholar, by taking the quote out of context in order to pretend that scholar was applying mathematical precision to history, what Carr and his friends don’t seem to realise is that critical scholars disagree about particular arguments and methods all the time, and that it’s important that we do so that we are free to change our minds, and this is how critical scholarship makes progress. While I now have the context in front of me, I can determine the argument made by the author and while I do not disagree with the fundamental method, I would prefer to use even stronger uncertainty.
In context of p. 110 of Aramaic Sources, it is clear that this quote has nothing to do Bayes Theorem. He did say we must ‘make an overall assessment of the probability of what we have suggested’ which he has obviously not done in mathematical terms at all, because they are not in his view appropriate to this sort of work at all. His comments on page 165 have been taken out of context, and interpreted in a grossly overliteral manner. Whereas the whole passage which he discussed in the whole chapter, he argues has many indications of an Aramaic original, including the Aramaic idioms in vss. 27-28, the first Greek word in verse 28, hoste, does not. This is why, as he points out, there are only three examples in the whole of the LXX. He comments (pp 164-5):
The connecting hoste, has caused great problems to interpreters, for hoste + ind. does not have a natural semitic equivalent, and consequently we find no more than three examples in the LXX. At Esther 7.8, it is an extraordinary elliptical rendering of hgm: 2 Kgs. 21.12 and Job 21.27 are more relevant, because in both cases the translators have rendered freely in accordance with the sense (one might say they were rendering ’shr and hn respectively). We must deduce that our translator has done the same. Man’s mastery declared in 2.28 is in a profound but not remote theological sense dependent on the will of God shown in creation and declared at 2.27, so the translation with hoste + ind. correctly gives the sense. It follows that we do not really know what the underlying Aramaic word was, even though we can reconstruct the sense. In the suggested reconstruction of Mark’s source, I have put n’. I cannot assume more than 51% probability for my best guess. Another possibility is ’ru. expect the translator to render it with ’idou, but the very fact he has produced hoste,rikaans + ind. shows he has rendered freely, and we have seen that Job 21.27 would give us a good parallel. Again, the simple w is possible, and kl qbk dnh would be another sound suggestion. It follows that we may not rely on some of the details of the proposed reconstruction to expound the precise force of Jesus’ statement.”
It should be blindingly obvious from this paragraph as a whole that his comment on not more than ‘51% probability’ is English English for ‘don’t really know’ or ‘haven’t a clue’, and has nothing to do with maths at all, let alone the misapplication of Bayes’ theorem to historical probability. He has been misinterpreted by people who cannot read Aramaic or Hebrew, and are not much good at Greek either, which is typical of the damage being done by mythicists on the internet
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 10:25 am
I corrected my transliteration and took out the ‘rikaans’ which wouldn’t come out before – I can’t italicise the aramaic, it won’t transfer. But I added a bit about Meyer’s earlier attempt discussed by Casey. All in corrected comment below… :-)
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rjosephhoffmann
July 8, 2011 at 10:55 am
I am not an expert in Aramaic sources, unlike Maurice, but Matthew Black and James VanderKam and I had occasion to work together on extracanonical materials more than fifteen years ago. I think I know what a plausible and what a hyperbolic case looks like. The existence of aramaicisms cannot be swept aside and it is ludicrous to suppose that they are peppered in to create an illusion of authenticity. I do not regard them as pillars of historical authenticity but their provenential significance is enormous. As to Carrier, I’ve said all I need to say. Partly he is a victim of a trend in proper NT studies that seeks always to revolutionize the ordinary and the well known. I have not suggested that his work is totally useless but that instead of providing greater certainty about the sources it is nothing more than quantified interpretation superimposed on “data” for which the theorem is not suited. I am not used to substituting press releases for critical reviews and no one can say whether or not Carrier’s effort has any value until he reaches the point of being noticed by journals. As far as I am concerned, he is learning biblical methodology on the run and has a primarily polemical agenda in view — which is frankly not radical but antithetical so sound scholarship–not unlike the approach of a committed evangelical at the other extreme. Call me cantankerous, but better still prove me wrong.
Robert
July 11, 2011 at 10:04 am
Do you think that the LXX contained aramaicisms?
Do you think that it is reasonable to contend that the LXX was likely a major source for the gospel writers?
If so, is it a wonder that aramaicisms appear in the gospels, or are these particular aramaicisms too far removed as to have been, in any way, influenced by similar passages in the LXX?
rjosephhoffmann
July 11, 2011 at 10:37 am
Mishnah, Talmud, targums, in the Palestinian air: aramaicisms everywhere. ???? gamara–considering the context and despite freebasing use of the LXX by the writers, it is not a sufficient explanation. Recommend you have a look at Vermes and Chilton, though I have pts of disagreement with both.
Robert
July 11, 2011 at 10:47 am
What, specifically, do you believe would fall out of the uncountable aramaicisms, possibly derived as the result of inbreeding with a Greek translation?
Any particular passage(s) that gives you pause?
Anon
July 11, 2011 at 1:46 pm
There seem to be some misconceptions here as to the applicability of Bayes’ theorem. The truth is, there is no department of thought where it can’t profitably and validly be used, for as Physicist Richard T. Cox showed, probability (and BT in particular) is the natural extension of Aristotelian logic (in which every statement is either true or false) into the realm of reasoning in the presence of uncertainty (where the premises of the argument are represented by numbers between 0 and 1, with traditional logic being invoked to nail the limiting cases). As Carrier demonstrates in his tutorial, BT isn’t confined to ‘statistics’ or even math – it’s about inductive reasoning.
The so-called ‘subjectivity’ of the theorem is no more an impediment that it is to the ordinary syllogism; garbage-in, garbage-out is as relevant here as it is to probabilistic conclusions. If two people have exactly the same prior knowledge and beliefs, then they will, if we assume they are both rational, assign the same number to the probability of an event. If they assign different numbers because they have different prior knowledge, then surely they OUGHT to assign different numbers?
In any case, the subjectivity objection is irrelevant; People differ over whether propositions are true or false, but that doesn’t invalidate logic, which isn’t actually concerned with whether a given proposition is true or false, just with what follows if it is. The actual truth value is a separate matter determined by other quite different procedures and quite frequently disputed, hence, presumably, subjective.
Nevertheless, it IS possible to assign probabilities to premises such that the conclusions are highly probable. The way to do this (again, see Carrier’s tutorial for examples) is to choose values for the terms in BT which are the limit of what you can reasonable expect them to be. Using a wide margin of error gives confidence in the results, regardless of the inexactness of your estimates.
rjosephhoffmann
July 12, 2011 at 8:54 am
What permits you to reduce narrative to propositions? That was the whole point of the blog. You have to begin by adducing propositions from texts that make no claims about themselves, perhaps the one exception being the final ch and appendix to John which on this premise should enjoy a high degree of probability.
Robert
July 13, 2011 at 6:58 am
Propositions like the one where the authors intended to write history?
I agree.
steph
July 8, 2011 at 11:54 am
“The existence of aramaicisms cannot be swept aside and it is ludicrous to suppose that they are peppered in to create an illusion of authenticity. I do not regard them as pillars of historical authenticity but their provenential significance is enormous.” Absolutely completely correct from beginning to end. I agree and Casey has agrees absolutely too. He’s also read now what I wrote and approved of my interpretation of his work.
steph
July 8, 2011 at 11:55 am
“The existence of aramaicisms cannot be swept aside and it is ludicrous to suppose that they are peppered in to create an illusion of authenticity. I do not regard them as pillars of historical authenticity but their provenential significance is enormous.” Absolutely completely correct from beginning to end. I agree and Casey agrees absolutely too. He’s also read now what I wrote and approved of my interpretation of his work.
.
steph
July 8, 2011 at 2:19 pm
I know Maurice spent a year in St Andrews with Matthew Black in 1978-9 (I think), and learnt alot from him. He has a great deal of respect for him and liked him alot. He told me that he was incredibly easy to talk to and liked being contradicted – with reason.
steph
July 7, 2011 at 8:12 pm
And by the way, I don’t use google books and don’t know scholars who do. As I understand it, the whole text is generally not available and I wouldn’t rely on it for my sources. While the deceptive tactics of Carr to pull the quote out of context, make the words look ludicrous not only to Professor Hoffmann and myself (which is why I suspected it was made up as no reference was offered in that initial comment) but also to Professor Casey because he had no context, the three of us are now clear of the argument (which has nothing to do with mathemantical precision or Bayes Theorem) which we can assess and be free to debate and disagree.
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steph
July 7, 2011 at 9:19 pm
Carr’s deception of quoting out of context in order to distort the intended meaning of the whole passage, is nothing other than a logical fallacy, a type of contextomy, false attribution of quoting out of context in order to misrepresent an author and make them appear to support another position, is creating a straw man. It’s ludicrous and typical.
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 10:21 am
Carr has condescended and provided a reference. It is not slanderous to suspect someone has made something up when he doesn’t provide a reference and the “quote” is taken out of context from a book written in 1998, and in isolation is uncharacteristic of the author, who has written many published books and articles, and obviously could not possibly remember every word he has written, especially taken out of context without a quote. While Carr’s malicious intention was to try to ‘trap’ Professor Hoffmann into criticising a critical scholar, by taking the quote out of context in order to pretend that scholar was applying mathematical precision to history, what Carr and his friends don’t seem to realise is that critical scholars disagree about particular arguments and methods all the time, and that it’s important that we do so that we are free to change our minds, and this is how critical scholarship makes progress. While I now have the context in front of me, I can determine the argument made by the author and while I do not disagree with the fundamental method, I would prefer to use even stronger uncertainty.
In context of p. 110 of Aramaic Sources, it is clear that this quote has nothing to do Bayes Theorem. He did say we must ‘make an overall assessment of the probability of what we have suggested’ which he has obviously not done in mathematical terms at all, because they are not in his view appropriate to this sort of work at all. His comments on page 165 have been taken out of context, and interpreted in a grossly overliteral manner. Whereas the whole passage which he discussed in the whole chapter, he argues has many indications of an Aramaic original, including the Aramaic idioms in vss. 27-28, the first Greek word in verse 28, hoste, does not. This is why, as he points out, there are only three examples in the whole of the LXX. He comments (pp 164-5):
The connecting hoste, has caused great problems to interpreters, for hoste + indicative does not have a natural semitic equivalent, and consequently we find no more than three examples in the LXX. At Esther 7.8, it is an extraordinary elliptical rendering of hgm: 2 Kgs. 21.12 and Job 21.27 are more relevant, because in both cases the translators have rendered freely in accordance with the sense (one might say they were rendering ’shr and hn respectively). We must deduce that our translator has done the same. Man’s mastery declared in 2.28 is in a profound but not remote theological sense dependent on the will of God shown in creation and declared at 2.27, so the translation with hoste + ind. correctly gives the sense. It follows that we do not really know what the underlying Aramaic word was, even though we can reconstruct the sense. In the suggested reconstruction of Mark’s source, I have put n’. I cannot assume more than 51% probability for my best guess. Another possibility is ’ru. We might expect the translator to render it with ’idou, but the very fact he has produced hoste plus indicative shows he has rendered freely, and we have seen that Job 21.27 would give us a good parallel. Again, the simple w is possible, and klqbl dnh would be another sound suggestion. It follows that we may not rely on some of the details of the proposed reconstruction to expound the precise force of Jesus’ statement.”
It should be blindingly obvious from this paragraph as a whole that his comment on not more than ‘51% probability’ is English English for ‘don’t really know’ or ‘haven’t a clue’, and has nothing to do with maths at all, let alone the misapplication of Bayes’ theorem to historical probability. He has been misinterpreted by people who cannot read Aramaic or Hebrew, and are not much good at Greek either, which is typical of the damage being done by mythicists on the internet.
Casey did of course also discuss the earlier attempt at a reconstruction of Mark 2.27-28 by Meyer, Jesu Muttersprache (1896), p.12, when much less work had been done and much less Aramaic was available. He pointed out that while the reconstruction of two whole verses was for the most part a great step forward, “The use of the late expression bgll kn behind the difficult hoste is also problematical: it would surely have been more likely to have given rise to dia touto” (Casey, Aramaic Sources, p.12, part of a sympathetic critical assessment of Meyer’s work, in the light of what could and could not be done later).
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Carr doesn’t realise that taken things out of context is misrepresentation. I’ve just seen that he has blogged on Maurice Casey’s “Is John’s Gospel True?” but misrepresented the argument as usual. He claims to quote Casey, but he gives only a partial quotation. Carr has completely misrepresented Casey’s argument by ignoring it and selecting for mention only the part of his argument that mentions the absence of Lazarus from later sources, and then comparing this with the absence of other figures from Paul’s epistles. Casey in fact put forward a complete argument for the secondary nature of Lazarus. Of course fundamentalists do not take that seriously, but it remains quite ludicrous that mythicists ignore most serious critical scholarship and misrepresent arguments which dispute the ‘truth’ of scripture, which was really the subject of Casey’s whole book. Godfrey’s description of Casey’s work in a comment on the post, as ‘fraud’ is typical of his inaccurate rudeness, and his description of him as ‘part of the reasonably known set of Sheffield scholars who boast…’ is rude and inaccurate too. Casey is Emeritus Professor of the University of Nottingham, not Sheffield. Of course he has long-standing connections with the University of Sheffield, as also with many other universities, as should be especially obvious from his Festschrift. Godfrey’s personal attack of me in the same comment is silly and malicious.
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 2:42 pm
On pages 208-9 of Is John’s Gospel True?, Casey wrote (and obviously this is only part of his argument),
“The Lazarus story is a Johannine composition from beginning to end (n.15. see pp. 55-7). The narrator tells us that many of `the Jews’ believed in Jesus because of this miracle (11.45). The reaction of the chief priests and the Pharisees is remarkable. They convened a sanhedrin and said, `What are we doing? – for this man is doing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy our place and people’ (11.47-8). Widespread faith in Jesus would not have given the Romans cause to do this. This is an extraordinary perception, formed by the Neronian persecution, which showed genuine Roman hostility to Christianity, and by the destruction of Jerusalem after the Roman war of 66-70CE. Some Jews attributed this to failure to observe the Torah, and Christians did not observe it. From this perspective, everyone having faith in Jesus could indeed lead to the destruction of the place and the people. This perspective has however no place in the Judaism of 30 C.E.. It leads through the prophecy of Caiaphas to the decision to have Jesus put to death. This is also profoundly ironical. Jesus has been presented as the Resurrection and the Life, and the source of life to those who believe in him. His gift of life to Lazarus is now presented as the reason why the chief priests and Pharisees seek to have him put to death.
After the anointing story, things get worse and worse. At 12.9-11, many were leaving `the Jews’ and believing in Jesus, and consequently the chief priests took counsel to kill Lazarus. This begins a set of statements, according to which Lazarus was exceptionally important. If this were true, we would not be able to explain the omission of Lazarus from the synoptic Gospels. Secondly, the plot is incredible. Killing someone raised from the dead is not a feasible Jewish reaction to such a miracle, and the plot is never mentioned again. It either worked or it did not. It is difficult to see how the plot against Lazarus could fail, when that against Jesus succeeded. Nonetheless, it is not acted upon, yet Lazarus does not reappear in the early chapters of Acts. Nor does he appear again in the fourth Gospel, surviving an unsuccessful plot. Finally, in the Judaism of Jesus’ time, having faith in Jesus did not mean `leaving’ in any reasonable sense. The fourth evangelist has imposed on the Judaism of Jesus’ time the situation of his own, when Jews converted to Jesus did indeed leave the Jewish community.
But the narrator has not yet finished. Verse 12.12 slides into the old tradition of 12.13-15. More trouble begins at verse 16, where the disciples are to `remember’ what they had not previously known. It becomes serious in verses 17-19, where the crowd bear witness that Jesus had raised Lazarus, so the Pharisees declare, `the world has gone after him.’ Lazarus, however, is heard of no more. The Johannine narrative is thus internally incoherent, as well as inconsistent with synoptics. The decisive incoherence is that the story of Lazarus just stops. With so many Jews `leaving’ because of the raising of Lazarus, with the crowd who saw this miracle bearing witness to it, with a crowd meeting because they have heard of this sign, with a plot against Lazarus’ life, Lazarus was such an important figure that his further presence, and his fate, were bound to have been recorded. But they are not recorded. Why not? The only possible explanation emerges from the absence of Lazarus from the synoptic Gospels. His fate is not recorded because he never was an important figure. He does not turn up in Acts, and he neither wrote nor figures in any epistle, for the same reason. This also tells us something about the way in which this Gospel has been written. The profound and real feeling that Jesus brought life and `the Jews’ brought death (cf. 16.2) to the Johannine community is presented in story mode. Hence the stress on the love of Jesus for Lazarus, as even `the Jews’ notice (11.36), and for Martha and Mary (11.5), for Jesus loves his disciples. Hence also the narrative precedents for Jesus’ own resurrection, especially the difference in the graveclothes, for Lazarus came forth bound (11.44), whereas Jesus left the graveclothes behind and vanished, a difference great enough for a disciple whom Jesus loved to come to faith (20.7-8) Such factors have quite overridden the historical inconcinnities which we can see.”
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steph
July 8, 2011 at 8:30 pm
The point is that Carr treats Casey’s argument as if it is an argument from silence, which it is not. He spends his whole post condemning arguments from silence. It is for the most part an argument from what is said about Lazarus in the Gospel attributed to John and is an argument from cumulative weight scattered over many pages. Obviously the quotation I reproduced above only represents one part. It does matter, however, that Lazarus as a supposed historical character is absent from the synoptic Gospels. This is quite different from the absence of a variety of people who were not important in the early church from most of Acts, and all this is quite different from the absence of all sorts of people and things from the occasional epistles of Paul.
What both Godfrey and Carr fail to distinguish is the difference between apologetic and critical scholarship, part of which they could use to their advantage if they had the critical skills. But they don’t. All they have is bias. So while scholarship is eternally grateful to librarians, Casey himself keeps thanking libraries in prefaces to most of his published books e.g. Aramaic Sources p. ix. But scholarship is not dependent on an individual librarian.
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steph
July 9, 2011 at 7:09 pm
In a comment on his post (4th July) ironically with a title beginning “Demystifying…” Godfrey commented “Steph sadly cannot even demonstrate that she understands the discussion. She fails to see she supports my point when she declares Casey wrote “Is John’s Gospel True?” to argue it is not factually true. That is the very debate Hoffmann says we should bypass, but I am not surprised Steph herself fails to understand Hoffmann’s post that she says she fully agrees with.”
Professor Hoffmann has not said historical debates should be bypassed and I never said anything about ‘factually true’. Godfrey has no references. His abilities as a librarian are not the same as abilities to assess critical scholarship honestly and he has not demonstrated any awareness of what ‘Is John’s Gospel True?’ is about – in fact Carr’s and Godfrey’s blog comments on it have demonstrated they don’t understand it at all. Casey’s book Is John’s Gospel True? was originally drafted in 1987 because the reasons for believing that this Gospel does not contain significant historically correct information not available in the synoptic Gospels were well known to professional scholars, but not available to students or to interested people in the churches, many of whom believed it was literally true. As he continued work, Casey became more and more concerned at the use of the Gospel of John in persecutions of Jews. Thus his 1996 book argued firstly that, where John differs from the synoptics, it could usually be shown to be wrong. He examines in detail the use made of it by Martin Luther. He provides many details and reasons to argue that the document is dangerous, when held to be scripture, as that term was understood at the time. I do not however wish to land Professor Hoffmann, me or anyone else with all of Casey’s opinions. In particular, I often disagree with him as to how certain his conclusions are. This is part of ongoing fruitful debate, which Godfrey shows no signs of understanding.
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edj19
July 11, 2011 at 3:22 pm
My identity is in eror. It should be:
Name Ed Jones
Email: edhj1@msn.com
Please correct this.
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steph
July 12, 2011 at 7:55 pm
Dizzy misrepresentations and laughable things continue over on Vridar including a comment at the bottom of one funny post: “Evidently, Stephanie Fisher, who is credited with having worked meticulously through “every word” of more than one draft of Casey’s Jesus of Nazareth also feels that this story of a resurrection is literally true.” Of Jairus’s daughter? Really? I do not, and anyway Casey follows Mark’s report that Jesus said she was not dead, rather than the fundamentalist tradition that she was.
Godfrey again refers to Casey as my mentor, which he is not, as I have pointed out before but Godfrey can’t actually comprehend that I disagree with Casey on minor as well as quite major points all the time. What I do though, is represent Casey’s work accurately (which does not mean I endorse it) and correct those who misrepresent it, like Godfrey and Carr, which they do all the time possibly because they don’t understand it. Godfrey says he can hear me “screaming” – funny that because I don’t scream … but I do sing. I hope he wasn’t insulting my singing… He suggests I am “emotionally unstable” which I’m not so perhaps he’s got a bit of psychological projection going on, because he does make so many many more personal attacks.
Godfrey and Carr misrepresent so many things that it would be dull to enumerate them all. For example, Casey’s comments on the healing of the blind man in Bethsaida are dependent on the work of Keir Howard, whom Carr just manages to mention. He does not however note that when Keir Howard wrote this book, he was a fully qualified medic, experienced in the healing of psychosomatic illnesses and competent in the anthropology of medicine, and that his comments were partly based on the work of professional ophthalmologists, a quite different world from that of the miracles which Godfrey and apparently Carr used to believe in, and on account of which they will no longer believe stories which are perfectly plausible as natural events in the real world.
Carr’s comments that students paying £9,000 to study at Nottingham will have Casey as their professor are incompetent and misleading as usual. The New Testament professors are Roland Deines and Richard Bell. Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey retired several years ago. That is why he is ‘Emeritus’. It’s a shame that Godfrey, who is a librarian, and Carr have such little respect for integrity and truth.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 12, 2011 at 8:17 pm
@ Steph It is all too ludicrous for words and has forfeited any claim to be taken seriously. Perhaps he hopes that James Randi will set it all straight.
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Steven Carr
July 13, 2011 at 2:01 am
‘Carr’s comments that students paying £9,000 to study at Nottingham will have Casey as their professor are incompetent and misleading as usual.’
I must apologise most sincerely for my insinuation that the University of Nottingham will expect students to regard Professsor Casey as a Professor of their University and for my unfounded malicious allegation that the University of Nottingham will expect students to read Professor Casey’s work.
I am genuinely sorry for this mistake of mine.
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steph
July 13, 2011 at 10:38 am
Joe :-) that would be truly amazing. Funny Carr equates “unfounded malicious allegation” with “incompetent and misleading as usual” … which that equation effectively is – incompetent and misleading.
However he would be quite accurate if he applied “unfounded malicious allegation” to his continual ridiculous parodies of the Emeritus Professor, such as “No wonder Casey is misrepresented so often. Nobody can follow his train of thoughts or work out which ad hoc hypothesis is supposed to be active at any one time… He is the only person in the world who can read Aramaic documents behind Mark that nobody else can see and that no Christian in the first century ever mentioned existing… With the superhuman ability to read Aramaic documents that nobody has seen or heard of, and to read them better than Mark himself, who allegedly had them in front of him, it is little wonder that Casey managed to get such a prestigious appointment…Mythers cannot compete with people who can read invisible documents… The only surprise is that with such powers, Casey has not been invited to be our next Prime Minister.
But perhaps the ability to read invisible Aramaic documents is not needed in Number 10 Downing Street, although it is invaluable in becoming an Independent Biblical Scholar…That is Independent as in not being Dependent upon texts actually existing before you translate them into Greek…”
Clownish? And this ain’t no “teary defence”(!!) although tears do swell well when we laugh. :-)
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steph
July 13, 2011 at 11:52 am
Carr continues to choose to ignore that fact that most of Casey’s argument is based on what is said in the Gospel attributed to John, so it is basically not an argument from silence. One of the main points about scholarship about the Jesus of history is that the major historical sources are the synoptic Gospels, so that an argument showing that what is said in the Gospel of John has no support in the synoptic Gospels is not an argument from silence as that term is normally understood, when it has begun by showing that the account in the Gospel attributed to John is not remotely plausible.
For example, on pages 208-9 of Is John’s Gospel True?, Casey wrote (and obviously this is only part of his argument), “The Lazarus story is a Johannine composition from beginning to end (n.15. see pp. 55-7). The narrator tells us that many of `the Jews’ believed in Jesus because of this miracle (11.45). The reaction of the chief priests and the Pharisees is remarkable. They convened a sanhedrin and said, `What are we doing? – for this man is doing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy our place and people’ (11.47-8). Widespread faith in Jesus would not have given the Romans cause to do this. This is an extraordinary perception, formed by the Neronian persecution, which showed genuine Roman hostility to Christianity, and by the destruction of Jerusalem after the Roman war of 66-70CE. …Some Jews attributed this to failure to observe the Torah, and Christians did not observe it. From this perspective, everyone having faith in Jesus could indeed lead to the destruction of the place and the people. This perspective has however no place in the Judaism of 30 C.E.. It leads through the prophecy of Caiaphas to the decision to have Jesus put to death. This is also profoundly ironical. Jesus has been presented as the Resurrection and the Life, and the source of life to those who believe in him. His gift of life to Lazarus is now presented as the reason why the chief priests and Pharisees seek to have him put to death… After the anointing story, things get worse and worse. At 12.9-11, many were leaving `the Jews’ and believing in Jesus, and consequently the chief priests took counsel to kill Lazarus. This begins a set of statements, according to which Lazarus was exceptionally important.”
None of this is an argument from silence as that is normally understood. It is an argument that the narrative of the Gospel attributed to John is hopelessly implausible. Of course, anyone who believes that the narrative of the synoptic gospels is important for understanding the historicity of such stories will add the complete absence of Lazarus from the synoptic Gospels. But this is not what is normally understood by an ‘argument from silence’, because the Gospel attributed to John is not silent at all, it is historically useless. Godfrey cannot take this seriously because he has an intellectually arbitrary commitment (apparently unconscious) to the notion that Jesus did not exist, so nothing in the synoptic gospels could have any historical value: to any absence from them is an argument from ‘silence’. What Casey has quoted from the Gospel attributed to John is obviously not silence at all, but something which fits conveniently into the narrative and theology of the Gospel attributed to John.
Carr quotes Casey, “Secondly, the plot is incredible. Killing someone raised from the dead is not a feasible Jewish reaction to such a miracle, and the plot is never mentioned again” and Carr comments “Yep, another argument from silence”.
Again, this is not what is normally understood by an ‘argument from silence’, because the first part of the argument is not silence at all. The rest simply complements the total implausibility of John’s account.
The rest of Carr’s allegations that Casey’s arguments are from silence are of the same kind. For example, he quotes Casey: “It either worked or it did not. It is difficult to see how the plot against Lazarus could fail, when that against Jesus succeeded. Nonetheless, it is not acted upon , yet Lazarus does not reappear in the early chapters of Acts.” And Carr comments: “Another argument from silence”.
This too is nor an argument from silence as that is normally understood. If John’s story were true, we need to know what happened to the plot against Lazarus. Casey fitted the story into Johannine theology, and that is not ‘silence’. That Lazarus is absent from the main primary sources underlines the fact that the account of him in a late secondary sources are entirely secondary. That is what Casey argues and I am representing his argument. Can Carr not recover from the fundamentalist concept which believes that all ‘scripture’ is inerrant? For that is needed Randi’s amazing wand perhaps? That’s it, no more clowns. Entertainment with more serious things are generally more inspiring and fruitful. :-)
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rjosephhoffmann
July 13, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Jerusalem Talmud Ketubot 11:1 and the Mishna, Avot 1:1; Talmud Yevamot 21a, per Leviticus 18:3 and the whole ethos of dissuasion concerning departing from the ways of the community would indicate that a plot against Jesus for violating a tomb is not implausible in the Lazarus situation. It is perfectly plausible; indeed, in sources like the Toldoth Yeshu, the accusation against Jesus for such feats is given explicitly as the reason he is executed as a mamzer (bastard) and magician. The Yorah Deah requires that the body be buried “in the earth” and must not be disturbed. This is at least implicitly a scandal in the resurrection stories as well, where pains are taken despite inconsistencies to suggest that no one disturbed the grave (e.g., “moved the stone.”) And these are the people assigning Bayes values to their assumptions?
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steph
July 14, 2011 at 4:26 pm
I know curiosity killed the cat but I have an insatiable instinct and the latest comment is too funny to pass. Neil once likened me to a ‘vampire’ so I’d better not mention appetites. But I must stop the irresistible urge to peek at what nonsense continues to be repeated. Maybe I keep looking to check it’s actually true – true that they lack all sense of comprehension not only of Casey’s work, but my representation of it, and pour personal attacks against our characters as a substitute for honest analysis.
Today, I’m apparently ‘fretting’ Neil claims, at what is being written on Vridar. I can only imagine this is another example of psychological projection of someone projecting their unwanted emotions onto others. But it’s ironic because it’s more my numb astonishment at what he and his friends continue to say. He even quotes my comment but doesn’t even represent what I wrote and misses completely the fact that I am representing Casey’s arguments and not endorsing his views or even putting forward my own hypothesis, yet he attributes all Casey’s arguments (which he doesn’t understand) to me. He cannot understand the fact that not only do we critical scholars disagree on many points which we can debate and discuss, but that the ability to disagree is what critical scholarship is about and how we make progress in forming and improving hypotheses. And the rhetorical accusation of ‘circular reasoning, begging the question, special pleading’ is nothing more meaningful than a demonstration that he doesn’t know what they mean, or I mean, or Casey means, or even Professor Hoffmann, who Neil accuses of “vacuous approval”.
He still insists I contradict Professor Hoffmann but cannot produce the evidence to demonstrate how or where the contradiction lies in Casey’s argument (which Neil continually attributes to me) and refuses to entertain the fact that when Professor Hoffmann has points of disagreement we can debate those respectfully and fruitfully without resorting to personal attacks. The yet again Neil invents one of his ridiculous little analogies and says “trying to reason with steph is like Alice trying to get sense out of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”
It amuses me that that they constantly refer to a PhD student at Nottingham University, sometimes identifying that person with me, yet they seem to have no understanding of what is involved in independent research or why I travelled 12000 miles to work with a critical scholar who has an internationally acknowledged particular expertise in Aramaic. They have no idea it seems that I spend far more time with colleagues who are working in my field, and they are from other British, European and Antipodean universities including scholars sometimes in America. And Carr announces also today, that ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ by Maurice Casey is not on the reading list for undergraduates. I don’t know what courses they offer in the Nottingham department for undergraduates and whether such a book would be useful, but it’s ridiculous to expect a book published in 2010 to be on everybody’s reading list. When I was an undergraduate I investigated and read new research myself in addition to what was on generally limited reading lists. Carr’s silly little comment is as ignorant as it is misleading and malicious.
They certainly have no respect or comprehension for the use made of interdisciplinary expertise by the best critical scholarship today. Casey has benefited from the recent expertise of scholars such as Justin Meggitt and Howard Keir. Keir is a qualified medic including cure of psychosomatic illnesses and has read himself into the anthropology of medicine which means he understands how traditional healers could heal some of the things he could heal. Carr just rubbishes him and thereby rejects any possible value that his contribution to critical inquiry might have, which is slightly ironic.
God only knows what methods they apply – they’re a mess to untangle. I suggest we have a bonfire and attract all the ‘tics’ to a bright flaming fire. Falstaff had a remedy to bring to the celebration which will inevitably increase the numbness but reduce the astonishment and replace it with glee and plain ordinary happy…
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steph
July 14, 2011 at 4:50 pm
Even the British Library which is bound by law to have a free copy of every book published in England, has not yet received a copy of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ published late 2010 … and Carr expects it to be on everyone’s reading list?
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rjosephhoffmann
July 14, 2011 at 6:19 pm
Well, this is a situation where we invoke teachers. The role of the pupil is to surpass the teacher, as Porphyry did Plotinus when the word “education” meant what it said (educare). I have no patience for the amateurism of this trend–not that untrained people like Carrier (how’s his Aramaic?) and Godfrey et al. can’t have opinions, and not that they do not have the right to sniff out the amateurism and parochial interests of scholars who cannot distinguish between apologetic and inquiry. Yet pure skepticism is not a method, and now the amateurism of the critics is becoming embarrassing–I hope for them as well. I will not names names, but I am speaking of people who haven’t even mastered English grammar and are holding forth as skeptical NT blogmeisters. I have nothing against autodidacts except that it’s the academic equivalent of autoeroticism. Good scholarship like good sex needs additional, expert validation.
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The Unhelpful Way In Which The . . . Debate Has Moved (Or, attempting to understand why the misrepresentations from Hoffmann, McGrath, et al?) « Vridar says:
July 15, 2011 at 4:19 am
[...] (my time) Dr R. Joseph Hoffmann wrote: I have no patience for the amateurism of this trend–not that untrained people like Carrier [...]
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steph
July 15, 2011 at 11:23 am
Godfrey can’t even understand the procedure between book publication and the realities of university syllabuses, reading lists and the existence of publications in libraries, yet he is a librarian. He misrepresents everything, including independent scholarship, and the whole idea that he can classify a rather diverse group of differently qualified people, independent of each other, into something called ‘mainstream scholarship’ is ludicrous.
Godfrey has distorted Professor Hoffmann’s comment. Professor Hoffmann is accused of chiming in, emphasising that his distaste is more for the grammar than the arguments. This is not a representation of what he wrote. Professor Hoffmann wrote “people who haven’t even mastered English grammar…” which is not the same as saying that grammar is more important than the arguments. He offered no approval let alone a ‘vacuous’ one. He merely noted his mutual despair at the ludicrous affair which has forfeited any claim to be taken seriously and implied Casey was more of an expert in Aramaic. What is important is the fact that expert validation is missing in the blogging world.
I never suggested in a blog comment that a medical explanation increases the likelihood of the scene being historical. I didn’t even endorse Casey’s particular argument, which involves a complex web of arguments including Aramaisms and so forth, and not merely the idea that psychosomatic cures are plausible. What I did was criticise Carr for rejecting outright the usefulness of Keir Howard’s expertise and rejecting the usefulness of his expert interdisciplinary research for historical inquiry. And so it goes on and on and on, and it will continue to go on and on, and it is very dull.
I don’t endorse the group of bloggers who blog against mythicists and I don’t endorse those who represent mythicist views. In fact I don’t pay much serious attention at all because it’s all such a mixture of the incestuous, mutually self supporting bloggers, feeding off each other’s absolute skepticism, with bloggers who lack the ability to differentiate between apologetic and critical scholarship. With the non existence of expert peer review or validation, all extremes are embarrassing to critical enquiry and quite honestly I can’t afford this time. I have better things to do, such as genuine constructive inquiry with positive and fruitful debate, and more inspiring conversation.
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rjosephhoffmann
July 15, 2011 at 11:58 am
My reference to those who have not mastered English grammar pronouncing on arguments and conclusions that require a high degree of philological competence in ancient languages (as well) is what it is. Like a rose. But surely, since grammar and syntax are also the building blocks for argument, what can possibly be the sense of making such an absurd separation? Personally, I care about grammar because it is intricately associated with thought and the assessment of grammatical expressions and orderly representation of ideas. The internet by its very nature undermines this and specializes in blurts, intellectual spasms and half-thought out ideas. It’s also a great “leveler” of opinion, where pundits have to deal with enthusiasts.
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steph
July 15, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Precisely – you can’t have one without the other. A double-edged sword but better a rose, because it’s beautiful duality, not ferocious. It has reminded me of this (but not this particular recording which isn’t the one I’m listening to). The perfection of its passionate completeness.
Reply
kiloxray
July 17, 2011 at 5:14 am
Steph,
I have never come across someone who actually seems to specialize in pathetic, unadulterated, insolent whining.
Will that be the dissertation for your Ph.D?
Reply
steph
October 4, 2011 at 11:50 am
Infuriating woo woo. I wonder how he managed to earn a phd in maths. He doesn’t demonstrate clear headed logical thinking at all. Analagomaniac woo. And he’s conceited beyond belief. Poppy.
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steph
October 4, 2011 at 11:51 am
not for moderation. just browsing.
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rjosephhoffmann
March 25, 2012 at 5:06 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
Several colleagues will be responding on this site in a week to claims made by atheist blogger and amateur “logician” Richard Carrier concerning the historical Jesus (contra Bart Ehrman) and his abuse of Bayes’s theorem. In the meantime, this from 2011.
Reply
steph
March 25, 2012 at 7:54 am
Applying Bayes theorem to texts is like applying a banana to an air valve to pump up a tyre. Imposing post enlightenment views of history and myth onto ancient storytelling cultures is anachronistic nonsense.
Reply
Robert
March 26, 2012 at 5:28 am
One wouldn’t apply Bayes theorem to texts. One would apply Bayes theorem to assumptions made about the texts.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 30, 2012 at 3:34 pm
How does that work l exactly @ Robert as the assumptions have to be based on content?
Leo
March 25, 2012 at 8:09 pm
I think maybe Godel applies to the way Carrier is attempting to use Bayes. Just because we can ask the question, doesn’t mean there’s an answer.
Reply
SocraticGadfly
March 25, 2012 at 11:02 pm
Hoffmann seems to create somewhat of a straw man between literalists and skeptics with himself presented as the “white knight” who knows the sweet spot. Had he confined his comments to Carrier and Bayes, with perhaps a sidebar into Carrier’s Gnu Atheist connections via CFI, he might well have had something stronger. But, he doesn’t.
Reply
Jim Lippard
March 29, 2012 at 7:07 pm
Leo: I strongly suspect not. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are often misused by trying to apply them where they do not have any relevance, to make erroneous claims of impossibility. Check out Torkel Franzen’s book, Gödel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse, for a guide to many of the things that are popularly, but incorrectly, said to be entailed by the theorems.
Reply
Bernard Muller
March 29, 2012 at 8:42 pm
I have been banging my head on how Carrier used the Bayes theorem for “the brother of the Lord”. That looks irregular to me mathematically, but more important is the data (generated by his biased opinion) he used and how he manipulated it before being fed into his equation. And the Bayes theorem can only be used with a set of data with a certain relationship between the factors, which seems to be absent in this case.
Carrier always appeals to logic & math, but the Bayes theorem is only a front for his bullying statement “all Christians were “brothers of the Lord”” , based on Carrier own theological extrapolation.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
March 30, 2012 at 12:38 am
Bernard is right. “Bullying assumptions” made by force majeure are then used to establish values that tilt the outcome in the directions of the presumption. The evidence for “all Christians being brothers in the Lord” is based on sources that are fraught with controversy and further subdivide into three different problems from different periods: The gospels do not use or envisage the convention; the use of the phrase in Paul is subordinate to his preoccupation with apostleship, which in turn presupposes a hierarchical rather than “adelphic” model; and the Acts though not pivoting from Paul’s personal crisis imagines this hierarchical model already to be in place and defends it. We have no idea how pervasive was the idea of brethren and brotherhood was as a term of personal usage, just extrapolations based on inferences, e.g., the fact that Tertullian in the third century defends Christians from the charge of incest & cannibalism may arise from pagan misunderstanding of the term, but we have no idea that this is what pagans thought. Moreover, in some house churches, the biological relationship clearly would have preceded any metaphorical usage and might have arisen by extension, and if so it is disjunctive from any special usage that would have arisen in the Jerusalem church or in relation to e.g. James. Paul refers to tines apo Iakabou interfering with his message, not brothers, so it cannot be true that “brothers” was standard usage that would nullify any form of literal biological relationship–indeed, the assumption itself makes no sense at all. Assumptions in, assumptions out, and Bayes can’t make them good ones, let alone “facts.” Carrier wants to dispense with the James tradition because it is inconvenient, for reasons not unlike its inconvenience to the Catholic doctrine of Mary. Maybe he should try to sell Bayes to the Vatican. Or apply Bayes to the assumptions made by used car salesmen, which are far fewer than the ones we have to deal with in the study of the gospels.
Reply
steph
March 30, 2012 at 9:14 am
Apart from mathematical formulae devised to ascertain mathematical probability, being inappropriate for, and unrelated to historical probably and therefore irrelevant to historical texts, he doesn’t have a structured method of application, but worse, he is dealing with mixed material, some of which is primary, much of which is secondary, legendary, myth mixed accretion. He has no method of distinguishing the difference and this renders his Bayes a complete muddle. But as you say, it’s convenient to dispose of inconvenient tradition and he is under the illusion that Bayes provides a veneer of scientific language to conclusions he is determined to ‘prove’. And he claims to have ‘proved’… such an anomaly to reliable and credible critical scholarship of history.
rjosephhoffmann
March 30, 2012 at 3:32 pm
Exactly, he takes the text as given rather than composite and chronologically and ideologically composite. Partly because he dismisses tradition criticism, partly because he is just a lousy historian.
http://tinyurl.com/imeaward17609
January 23, 2013 at 11:02 pm
Just what exactly truly stimulated you to post “p -ness
Envy? The Irrelevance of Bayes?s Theorem ? The New Oxonian”?
I reallydefinitely enjoyed reading it! Thanks a lot ,Trista
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Improperia: For Good Friday
by rjosephhoffmann
Popule meus, quid feci tibi? Aut in quo constristavi te? Responde mihi.
Why do you look away?
Look at me: you put me here—
Is it the sight of a man alone,
Injured beyond repair,
Bones cracked, flesh flayed
That makes you turn away?
What drove you to it?
Old habits, too much wine,
A careless remark,
Or because I said the poor
Are happier than you
And the lovers of peace better
Than the lovers of war?
Or because I said a rich man
Will sit on a stool
And a humble woman
On an ivory throne
in my house.
You want me dead.
You want me out of the picture–
The rock strewn way
The hard truth
The inconspicuous life:
Not for you, no.
Ah! Now you are looking at me.
Any minute now, you say.
You hated me
As soon as I opened my mouth;
You tried to kill me then.
And now my mouth is dry
And the words come slowly
And all I can say
Is forgive them,
Forgive them
Forgive them.
I gave you bread,
You give me vinegar.
I taught you mercy,
You give me justice.
I led you across a desert,
You packed me off to die.
Would you kill God
By killing me?
Or truth by siding with a lie?
You check the hour.
You must not miss your supper.
It is growing dark:
My mother is weeping
And my brothers
cannot console her.
She does not understand.
Her love is simple,
Pure, like your hate.
Soon, it will be finished
And I will say, My God
Why did you forget me?
I loved you
With a full heart
And you brought me here
To slit my side
And hold me to ransom–
Not like a son
Who could buy his way
Out of trouble
But like a goat, a lamb,
A thieving servant..
Are you satisfied
With the outcome?
Are these smirking strangers
Entertained?
Have we reached
The conclusion?
Answer me!
File:ImproperiaChant.jpg
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Published: April 5, 2012
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One Response to “The Improperia: For Good Friday”
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steph
April 5, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Tragic story. Passionately told. Overwhelming real and utterly human. Terribly wonderful poem. Deeply relevant too. A contemporary story.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
Mythtic Pizza and Cold-cocked Scholars
by rjosephhoffmann
Over at the Freethought Blog Ghetto, Atheist blogger and part-time Jesus-denier Richard Carrier has recently been applauded by atheist blogger and full-time loudmouth P Z Myers for “coldcocking” New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman. This suggests that the sewer of internet-facilitated nastiness that exists, among other places, in the US Congress is also fully flowing into what used to be called academic discussion.
Except this isn’t discussion and it certainly isn’t academic.
The reason for the cheering? Professor Ehrman had the audacity to suggest that Jesus actually existed.
For those of you not paying attention, the New Atheism has a new postulate: Not only does God not exist but Jesus didn’t exist either. It is a theory that zips past Planet America every fifty years or so, like a comet, then fades away until a new generation of nutters tries to resuscitate it. Lucky us: We are living at the right time.
Just to give you the flavor of the discussion—header: Richard Carrier Coldcocks Bart Ehrman
This is great: Richard Carrier Blogs totally destroys Bart Ehrman’s argument for the reality of a historical Jesus. Jesus is a legend, like King Arthur or Robin Hood or Paul Bunyan. There may have been some individual in the past who inspired the stories, but he’s not part of the historical record, and the tall tales built around him almost certainly bear little resemblance to the long-lost reality. It’s simply bad history to invent rationalizations for an undocumented mystery figure from the distant past.
I’ll make a deal with PZ Myers: I don’t try to lecture him on grasshoppers and he doesn’t lecture anybody on Jesus and “bad history.” I can’t quite imagine that the combined religion faculties at Harvard, Claremont and Tuebingen are awaiting further instruction on Bayes Theorem from Richard Carrier or packing up their offices, having been served notice that an associate professor of biology at the Morris campus of the University of Minnesota has discovered that Jesus is just like Robin Hood—and Paul Bunyan. I know it gives the mythtics a rush to think that the scholarly establishment discourages revolutionary ideas but in fact it is designed to discourage error and non-revolutionary discredited ideas. Like these.
Piltdown Man Discovered
On the other hand, this had to happen: the coalescence of God deniers and Jesus deniers I mean. After all, if God is a “story,” like Robin Hood and King Arthur then it stands to reason (inarguable Carrier might say) that a story about a god’s son is just a myth—EZ, PZ. But more to the point, the endorsement of amateurs by amateurs is becoming a rampant, annoying and distressing problem for biblical scholarship—one that apparently others in my discipline think will go away by assuming, as I do not, that saner heads will prevail. We can just ignore the provocative ignorance of Myers, Jerry Coyne, Neil Godfrey, and Richard Carrier et al. like so many mosquitoes.
Except mosquitoes are tough to ignore, and some carry Dengue and Malaria. If the last two years has proved anything, it is that the spawn of the new atheist movement, like Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction, will not be ignored. Insult works. Spew works. Faitheist baiting works. What works works.
The disease these buggers spread is ignorance disguised as common sense. They are the single greatest threat, next to fundamentalism, to the calm and considered academic study of religion, touting the scientific method as their Mod Op while ignoring its application to historical study.
***
When you reach the conclusion that Jesus did not exist before you start your journey, everything falls neatly into place: after all, the ancient world is populated with gods and every god has his myth. And as the new atheists have so deftly shown (though without footnotes) the fact that none of these gods has ever existed, increases the probability that the one in the Bible has to go too. Jesus is in the Bible, isn’t he? He has to go. Covers shut, case closed. Now all we have to do is “cold- cock” scholars who think otherwise and jerry-rig new methods to make their work look like the baseless, faith strewn twaddle it really is.
It is almost cruelty to begin picking on the methodological wowsers implied in the reasoning of the mythtics–the Jesus- deniers, who conflate God denying and Jesus denying as though they were on the same level of discussion and susceptible of the same kinds of proof.
Embarrassing–really–because these same folk who hold up the scientific method to religionists want to walk past the complex evidence of textual and linguistic studies as though it weren’t there. ”Hermeneutics” for them is just a word theologians like to throw around to impress seminarians: how can it be useful in forming assumptions that lead to premises that force foregone conclusions? Like God-denying, Jesus-denying is tidy, simple and efficient.
In their own areas, it would be as though the supporters of flat earth theory and spontaneous generation were given equal time at the podium and a spotlight to scoff at astronomy and biology, but—the impoverished reasoning seems to run—this is Biblical studies—how serious do you have to be? “Atheist biblical studies” as it is represented by Carrier and company is nothing more than a conspiracy theory in search of respectability. Since that isn’t forthcoming through the normal channels of recognition—scholarship I mean—it has to rely on trivializing the settled or nearly-settled conclusions of modern scholarship itself, and if that doesn’t work, bashing the scholars. For some very strange reason, they like to quote Schweitzer. But Schweitzer famously refused to give up the historical Jesus. Prove me wrong and divide an extra hundred dollars. The likelier result is that I can prove to you that the mythtics don’t read complete verses in the texts they quote from.
The free thought rabble have chosen Carrier as their standard bearer, without any reason to put their trust in his inane conclusions and methods—a man who has never published a significant piece of biblical scholarship, never been peer reviewed (peers?), never been vetted, and never held an academic position. His “reputation” depends on deflecting his mirror image of himself as a misunderstood, self-construed genius onto a few dozen equally maladroit followers. This billboard for poor method, we are now asked to believe by freethought’s bad boy, PZ Myers, has cold-cocked a senior New Testament scholar for saying something as reasonable as “Jesus existed.” Only in the age of instant misinformation and net-attack is this kind of idiocy possible. Only in the atheist universe where the major premise– “religion is a lie so the study of religion is a study of lying”—infects everything is this kind of lunacy possible. Unfortunately, we have Richard Dawkins to thank for the original formulation of that premise.
Carrier is committed to making up methods as he goes along and pretending that he has found an evidence-based way of approaching the biblical books. He is about to re-publish (he had vanity published it already) his “research” on this subject with Prometheus Books, and scores wait with bated breath for his results, though from what I have seen of it so far, he could have saved us all the trouble by simply telling us what we already knew: that the Buddha, Jesus Christ, and King Arthur are all figments of the teenage imagination and never really existed. If they had, presumably, they would have studied grasshoppers.
In any case, Carrier has had plenty of time to build up the suspense of this little drama: he blogs about himself, frolics at other sites that tout the fact that he has a PhD in ancient history, and disses the work of any one who disagrees with him, which leaves him both a very lonely and a very busy man.
Sticking to the main point however—the cold-cocking of Bart Ehrman: let me say straight off that Bart and I have a difference of opinion about many things. We disagree especially on the influence of Marcion (a second century “heretic”) on the shaping of the New Testament canon. I have always been ready to accept that I may not be right about Marcion, and other scholars have been gracious enough, including some very conservative ones, to say that although I am probably wrong there is a thin chance that I am right. In the push and tug of historical scholarship, you take what you can get if you can’t sell it for the price you ask. That is the way the game is played.
But Carrier’s challenge is not about “How the New Testament canon was shaped.” I suspect that prior question is of comparatively small interest to him as a meat and potatoes sensationalist. It is about a fundamental question that I and my critics have answered positively: While there is some very slight chance that Jesus did not exist, the evidence that he existed is sufficiently and cumulatively strong enough to defeat those doubts. To get around this evidence, you have to begin by excluding second- order questions which can be answered, and have been answered for a hundred years negatively– questions, which up until recently Carrier was focused on: Did Jesus rise from the dead or perform miracles? Was he born of a virgin, or at Bethlehem, or say all of the things ascribed to him? Then there is the perennially dull question that was laid to rest in the writings of the French triumvirs almost a century ago—Loisy, Goguel and Guignebert–who were not strangers to radical conclusions: where was the Nazareth that Jesus was supposed to be from?
The study of the gospels is often the study of the lacunae of ancient history: we know less than we would like to know to form a coherent picture of Jesus, and the sources for knowing as much as we know are not disinterested reporting but the writings of believers propagating a certain message about him. This is not new. This is not radical. This is where discussion starts.
By the same token we know more about Jesus than we know about a great many figures that we think existed, from far fewer sources—often from faint allusions in the work of only one ancient writer. Did Diogenes exist? Cincinnatus? Outside the gospels, Pontius Pilate is virtually unknown except for a reference in Tacitus and mentions in Philo and Josephus, if we discount the so-called Pilate stone
Does his central role in the gospel nullify these sources or corroborate them? Alexander the Great believed he was the son of Ammon; Plutarch believed that Alexander’s mother gave birth after being penetrated by divine lightening, and was seen in the embrace of a giant snake. In the gospels, Caiaphas and Augustus are also mentioned in the historical frame, and they are well known outside it; do we assume that they were merely added to a gospel as historical ornamentation, while names like Joseph of Arimathea and Simon of Cyrene, or the “Sons of Zebedee,” or James the Lord’s brother, are made up in the writer’s head? How would we justify that assumption? The difficulty of being certain should not lead to the conclusion that nothing can be known, and the fact is, we know a great deal more for certain, especially of his historical context, than we did a century or two centuries ago.
Given a literary tradition that begins with statements of belief from Paul and his associates rather than the tantalizingly difficult accounts called gospels, can we be sure of anything a gospel has to tell us about Jesus? These are all fair questions, and questions that New Testament scholars, including scholars like Bart Ehrman, have thought about for a long time.
You can cold -cock them if you want to, but they will still be there to haunt you.
This little rant (and it is a rant, I acknowledge and I do not apologize for it: somebody’s got to do it) will be followed next week by three essay-length responses to Richard C. Carrier’s ideas: The first by me, the second by Professor Maurice Casey of the University of Nottingham, and the third by Stephanie Fisher a specialist in Q-studies. We will attempt to show an impetuous amateur not only where he goes wrong, but why he should buy a map before starting his journey. Other replies will follow in course, and we invite Carrier, his fans, and anyone else interested in this discussion to respond to it at any stage along the way.
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Published: April 23, 2012
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254 Responses to “Mythtic Pizza and Cold-cocked Scholars”
.
Usama Khawar
April 23, 2012 at 4:51 pm
haha! you can get angry too :p
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rjosephhoffmann
April 24, 2012 at 11:02 am
@Usama: Angry? Me? Maybe :)
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Jeremy Stangroom
April 23, 2012 at 4:52 pm
Glad to see you’re still fighting the good fight, but I’m afraid the barbarians are at the gate, and they have the numbers.
“The disease these buggers spread is ignorance disguised as common sense. They are the single greatest threat, next to fundamentalism, to the calm and considered academic study of religion…”
But you should keep saying this as loudly as possible…
Reply
Larry Tanner
April 23, 2012 at 5:02 pm
Looking forward to what’s upcoming. I advise you to follow the sage guidance of Josey Wales and get “plumb, mad-dog mean.” I say this not to stir up anything, but rather to make sure we all know–as we do–that the Internet can me a mean and vicious place, lawless and chaotic. Beat your foes with better facts and better inferences. That’s Dylan: “to live outside the law you must be honest.”
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rjosephhoffmann
April 23, 2012 at 7:06 pm
Ah!Larry. As someone once said, When you have the facts, argue the facts. When you don’t have the facts, argue the law. Mythticsm argues the law.
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scotteus
April 23, 2012 at 8:55 pm
Mythticism is just a disguise for Positivism, nothing more.
SocraticGadfly
April 24, 2012 at 5:35 pm
I disagree with your take on mythicism, starting with the word. (That said, I’m not a Gnu by any means.) Were I to offer Bayesian-like odds, based on current levels of scholarship, I’d offer 10 percent odds, maybe 20 percent, that Yeshua bar Yusuf never lived. In other words, high enough probability for it to be legitimate discussion. That said, PZ is really ridiculous here. While Ehrman believes in the actual existence of Jesus, he’s always, from what I’ve seen, been cordial about the issue. And, I know that from personal experience
And, quoting Paul? The only thing he says in an authentic letter is that Jesus was “born of a woman.” That says nothing about his historicity, and could be interpreted as nothing more than an anti-Gnostic statement.
Q? Q says nothing historically grounded about Jesus’ existence other than his baptism, and thousands of people were baptized by him.
As for mentions of Caiphas, etc.? Well, Matthew mentions a likely non-historic “massacre of infants.” Mark has no birth account. Luke of course botches the historicity of Jesus book and in a royal way, enough to argue AGAINST anything else he claims that is alleged to be historical.
Besides, as I’ve said, there’s option 3: Yeshua was the Pharasaic Yeshua crucified by Alexander Jannai. That gives more than a century for the myth to develop adn the history to be replaced.
rjosephhoffmann
April 25, 2012 at 2:24 am
“And, quoting Paul? The only thing he says in an authentic letter is that Jesus was “born of a woman.” That says nothing about his historicity, and could be interpreted as nothing more than an anti-Gnostic statement.
“Q? Q says nothing historically grounded about Jesus’ existence other than his baptism, and thousands of people were baptized by him.
Does Paul seem anti-gnostic to you? Can you name a place where he names gnostics?
Q is a sayings source. The dialogues of Plato do not say anything about the historical Socrates by your standard. If the baptism of Jesus is part of Q (not sure), how can you say that it says nothing about his existence?
I’m afraid I don’t understand the logic of either of these assertions. Do you?
Jake Jones IV
April 25, 2012 at 6:48 am
Hi Dr. Hoffmann,
You asked “Does Paul seem anti-gnostic to you? ”
Bart Ehrman, _The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament_, in chapter “Anti-Docetic Corruptions of Scripture” page 238 documents that orthodox scribes continued to tamper with Galatians 4:4 and Romans 1:3-4 even *after* we reach the extant texts (3rd century and later), and comments on how likely this makes it that tampering occurred in the second century when the stakes were even higher.
Thus Ehrman should be aware that his very own research undercuts the argument for a historical Jesus in the Pauline epistles. He already knows these passages are best understood as anti-docetic corruptions by the proto-orthodox. With a little more study, we can establish that these passages not in Marcion’s version, and possibly that these passages were never in the earliest Pauline text at all.
Jake Jones IV
rjosephhoffmann
April 25, 2012 at 8:30 am
By tampering you mean redaction, presumably–not to quibble. I do not agree with Ehrman about the provenance of these passages. For one thing, Paul’s salvation myth is too synthetic to be recognizably gnostic and “docetic” is a made up word to describe a kind of soft belief in a physical Jesus. It is totally useless outside its own heresiological matrix. The categories we use to describe these emphases are really pretty useless before Irenaeus’s typology at the end of the 2nd century, but as for me I am not convinced that there is any fully fledged gnostic system behind any of Paul’s writings, not do I think (agreeing here with you) that Paul can be used for any serious discussion of historicity. But I limit this to information: I am pretty certain that Paul’s view of the historical Jesus is apologetically driven…. Will be interested in your response to what we produce next week!
rjosephhoffmann
April 25, 2012 at 8:40 am
But Jake: If you think the historical Jesus is elusive, I can promise you that you will break your teeth trying to establish the “text” of Marcion’s gospel–which is what opponents like Tertullian wanted.
Jake Jones IV
April 25, 2012 at 6:47 pm
Dear Dr. Hoffmann,
You wrote, “For one thing, Paul’s salvation myth is too synthetic to be recognizably gnostic and ‘docetic’ is a made up word to describe a kind of soft belief in a physical Jesus. It is totally useless outside its own heresiological matrix.”
Just to clarify, in the later half of the second century and early third century, certain heretics were appealing to the Pauline Epistles to support their Docetic Christology.
‘Of course the Marcionites suppose that they have the apostle on their side in the following passage in the matter of Christ’s substance— that in Him there was nothing but a phantom of flesh. For he says of Christ, that, “being in the form of God, He thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but emptied Himself, and took upon Him the form of a servant,” not the reality, “and was made in the likeness of man,” not a man, “and was found in fashion as a man,” (Philippians 2:6-7) not in his substance, that is to say, his flesh; just as if to a substance there did not accrue both form and likeness and fashion.’ Tertullian AM 5.6
The proto-orthodox (Bart Ehrman’s term) then redacted certain other Pauline texts (e.g. Romans 1:1-3, Gal 4:4) to sweeten the support of their Incarnational Christology, i.e. that Christ became real human flesh. These texts concern the very real Christological battles of the second century. To jump forward to the present day discussion, the appeal to these texts in the Historical Jesus debates are misplaced.
——-
Dr. Hoffmann, you wrote “But Jake: If you think the historical Jesus is elusive, I can promise you that you will break your teeth trying to establish the text of Marcion’s gospel–which is what opponents like Tertullian wanted.”
It is relatively simple to reconstruct Marcion’s text of Gal 4:4 from Tertullian AM 5.4.2.
“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son”— the God, of course, who is the Lord ……
If Marcion’s text had contained “born of a woman, born under the law” Tertullian would certainly have used it to refute Marcion’s docetism and antiomianism. Indeed, I am not aware of a single scholar argues that Marcion’s text of Gal 4:4 was other than “God sent forth his son.”
Best Regards,
Jake Jones IV
rjosephhoffmann
April 25, 2012 at 8:01 pm
No, it is not at all easy–you have not read Tertullian’s story of how he had no copy of Marcion in front of him–more troubling, you have not read my book on the topic.
rjosephhoffmann
April 26, 2012 at 6:55 am
Can you name any of these heretics you allude to? Why do you capitalize “docetic.”
stephanie louise fisher
April 25, 2012 at 7:08 pm
“Q? Q says nothing historically grounded about Jesus’ existence other than his baptism, and thousands of people were baptized.”
Not sure of your critieria without argument and evidence, for ‘historical grounding’. Not sure either, how, or even if, you claim, which Jesus tradition material, is or is not ‘historically grounded’.
Q is a hypothetical sayings source based on the double tradition material in Matthew and Luke and some of the triple tradition is sometimes included in hypothetical reconstructions, such as the baptism story. It is an over-simplified hypothetical single written Greek document hypothesis and it’s supposed existence has been refuted by Goulder, Casey, Goodacre and other recent critical scholarship. But even John Kloppenborg who is Q’s most prominent proponent, concedes “Synoptic hypotheses are simplifications … [p]arsimony, however, is a virtue of explanatory logic; it is not a feature of historical or literary realities” (Excavating Q pp.50-1). Nevertheless, despite this extraordinarily honest and logical concession, the Klopp himself proceeded to reconstruct a document based on just such a simplistic hypothesis, squeezing the complex evidence to fit the simple theory called Q. He then co-edited it in “THE Critical Edition of Q” assuming it existed. Some of the Q material is primary tradition, some secondary and myth mixed accretion. There are strong arguments for plausible historicity in some of the primary material. But the Q material is various and stronger arguments demonstrate plausible models of multiple sources, some Greek, some Aramaic, some oral. The arguments for multiple sources are arguments of cumulative weight and are based on scientific historical methods and literary textual criticism and evaluate the texts synoptically with multiple criteria.
Applying Bayes theorem, a historically inappropriate mathematical formula, to composite historical texts, is like applying a lawnmower to an unshaved chin – or a banana to a hockey ball. They do not correspond.
Jake Jones IV
April 26, 2012 at 4:56 pm
Dear Dr. Hoffmann,
Thank you for patience with me!
You wrote that I have not read the story of how Tertullian had no copy of Marcion before him.
Would you be so kind as to cite this passage?
The general accepted guideline is still stated by Harnack:
„Daß Tert.s Wiedergabe des Marcionitischen Textes zuverlässig ist, weil er Sorgfalt übte und weil er fast ausschließlich nur diesen Text vor sich hatte … zeigt fast jede Seite“ (Harnack Marcion 45*).
Cmp. from modern view of point: Eva Maria Becker, S. 107 in: May, Gerhard (Hg.) (2002): Marcion und seine kirchengeschichtliche Wirkung. 2001
You are right, I do not have your book at hand, an omission that will soon be corrected. But not all readers will have access to your book. Could you please cite the passage that pertains to this subject?
But back to Gal. 4:4.
Cmp Van den Bergh, Marcion 1, S.34 „ Daß Christus als „unter das Gesetz getan“ bezeichnet wird (Gal 4,4), steht im Gegensatz zu 3,10, wo Marcion nicht las, was der Redaktor daraus gemacht hat und was offensichtlich einer fremden Ausdrucksweise entspricht: „Alle, die aus den Werken des Gesetzes sind, sind unter dem Fluch.“ Marcion las deutlicher: „Alle, die unter dem Gesetz sind, sind unter dem Fluch.“ Hätte Christus, wie die kirchliche Lesart es will, unter dem Gesetz gestanden bzw. wäre er darunter geboren, dann hätte er selber unter dem Fluch gestanden und hätte andere nicht erlösen können. Erst am Kreuz wurde Christus zum Fluch (3,13). Die Lesart des Marcion: „Gott sandte Gott seinen Sohn, damit er die unter dem Gesetz loskaufte, damit wir die Sohnschaft erlangten.“ Das Gesetz als eine gottfeindliche Macht, die zu den stoicheia oder Elementen dieser Welt gehört, das ist gnostischer Dualismus.“
Best Regards,
Jake Jones IV
rjosephhoffmann
April 26, 2012 at 5:14 pm
Harnack was so optimistic about so much wasn’t he? Including the accuracy of much of the teaching of Jesus as recorded. By the time Tertullian wrote his third version of the work (AM 1.1) he claimed, using Evans’s trans from 1972,
“My first edition, too hurriedly produced, I afterwards
withdrew, substituting a fuller treatment. This also, before enough
copies had been made, was stolen from me by a person, at that
time a Christian but afterwards an apostate, who chanced to have
copied out some extracts very incorrectly, and shewed them to a
group of people. Hence the need for correction. The opportunity
provided by this revision has moved me to make some additions.
Thus this written work, a third succeeding a second, and instead
of third from now on the first, needs to begin by reporting the
demise of the work it supersedes….” It is not unusual for ancient authors to work from memory, but this is quite a literary bungle. The further arguments are a bit complicated but show that most of what Tertullian says about Marcion’s “positive” statements are framed as suppositions using terms like nescio (I do not know [what Marcion might say]) or I suppose, or the Marcionites will say (rhetorical). This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t try to reconstruct the main lines of Marcion’s literary output (as you know, many have tried) but the result will be/is highly speculative–compared say to Origen’s lengthy reporting of Celsus.
Jake Jones IV
April 26, 2012 at 7:54 pm
Dear Dr. Hoffmann,
You wrote, “This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t try to reconstruct the main lines of Marcion’s literary output…”
Quite so.
Do you consider the priority of Paul was with Marcion?
Best regards,
Jake Jones IV
rjosephhoffmann
April 26, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Jake you really need to read my book, and Tyson’s: these questions have been answered. You’ll get at least a preview next week in the essays however.
Jake Jones IV
April 26, 2012 at 8:39 pm
My question is if your your position has evolved since your book was published?
Jake
rjosephhoffmann
April 26, 2012 at 8:41 pm
Maybe.
Jake Jones IV
April 26, 2012 at 8:53 pm
Ah, then. I await next week’s essays and wish you a very pleasant good evening.
Jake
Gbarrett
April 30, 2012 at 12:39 am
Dr. Hoffman: You end your essay “On Not Finding the Historical Jesus” in Sources with a provocative rejoinder to the observation that in the case of Newman’s empty tomb, a priest responded, “It’s enough that he was here”. You end your insightful article (here I disagree with Carrier) with the previously mentioned rejoinder, “In the cas of Jesus of Nazareth, we cannot even say that.”
Earlier in that essay, you observe, “Historically, then, the reality of Jesus cannot be indubitable because his existence does not meet the high standard of proof we set for other historical figures.”
You say further, “Indeed, nothing is more unsupported by the sources than the standard liberal critical perspective that Jesus’ death was unexpected, the Gospels attempt to theologize away the embarrassment of the early church, and the residual parts of the tradition developed ‘backward’ from the seminal moment–the catastrophe–of his mission.”
Have you rethought these points? It seems like observations like these are exactly what lead some people to hypothesize that there was no Jesus of Nazareth at the birth of Chrisitianity. Is it so far from your statements here to consider that the idea of Jesus evolved out of suffering servant/failed messiah motifs?
rjosephhoffmann
April 30, 2012 at 9:29 am
Don’t misunderstand: There is a difference between the myth theory and the question of the historical Jesus. I continue to believe that the question of the historical Jesus is open; the myth theorists traditionally consider it closed or “probably” deiced in favour of Jesus not having existed. Frankly, the gospels on their own (in my opinion) do not provide sufficient evidence to close the case, but as I look increasingly at the shape of controversy and context from the end of the first century,I am more persuaded that the historicity 9though they would not call it that) of something is being defended. I don’t know where this interrogation will end; to call it a change of mind would be extravagant. I doubt it will be solved by screaming “I am right and others are lying” from the roof tops.
rjosephhoffmann
April 30, 2012 at 10:05 am
A commenter named Geoff has just written a comment which epitomizes the sad state of where Carrier had driven this discussion: It has become this year’s fave as a debating topic in the Rational Response Squad Agenda and now is all about “defending positions.” This is not war. It is not a football line. It’s not whistle-blowing on ‘conservative” or “mainstream” scholarship. Like any other field of inquiry, scholars in biblical studies and Christian origins go where the evidence takes them; to take a position and never budge is what dogmatists do, not people who practice the academic craft. In the last 48 hours, Carrier has called me crazy (not the first time), Ehrman a liar and a dissembler (as well as ignorant) and as far as I know, no one has commented substantively on any of the online pieces I have written on the topic nor any of the essays in Sources of the Jesus Tradition. I have never said (and don’t believe) that saying Jesus did not exist is equivalent to Holocaust denial and UFO abductions–if Ehrman said this, then I disagree with him. But let’s be clear about the merits of disagreeing in moderated tones and calling (even erroneous) opinion the work of “dicks,” “insane people,” and “liars.” It is that kind of approach and these polemical tactics that disqualifies people like Richard Carrier from a tenured position, or even surviving a first round interview.
Dwight Jones
April 23, 2012 at 7:07 pm
After some short detention in the ultimate junkyard, Joe is good to go, it appears. And boy, is he pissed.
I fear for Grasshopper, this could end in ex-communication from academia, Macadamia, and the Green Bay Packers.
Do you think the A-holes will ever guess that Jesus was actually a Marshall McLuhan type; living and detailing an evolving species consensus around progressive social constraints attending the urbanizing Med? No?
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rjosephhoffmann
April 23, 2012 at 7:19 pm
Grasshopper will be OK. So will the Carrier. This is all code.
steph
April 23, 2012 at 6:40 pm
The best satire is not only wickedly accurate and brutally witty, but it is also profoundly and ironically sad. It splits your sides and makes your heart bleed simultaneously with frustration at the idiocy. But what can you do? Just laugh. And critique their contradictions precisely. I disagree with Jeremy a bit though – the mythtics and other antics don’t have the numbers. They just have the volume in noise. Nonsense speaks more loudly than sense, especially metaphorically on the internet.
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Jim
April 23, 2012 at 8:23 pm
“The free thought rabble have chosen Carrier as their standard bearer, without any reason to put their trust in his inane conclusions and methods—a man who has never published a significant piece of biblical scholarship, never been peer reviewed (peers?), never been vetted, and never held an academic position. ”
Indeed so.
“While there is some very slight chance that Jesus did not exist, the evidence that he existed is sufficiently and cumulatively strong enough to defeat those doubts.”
I wondered what you thought of philosopher Stephen Law’s paper on EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS (Faith and Philosophy 2011. Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011).and recently made available here:
http://stephenlaw.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/published-in-faith-and-philosophy-2011.html
Unlike PZ or RC, he could enter into a sensible and civil conversation and countenance the suggestion he might be wrong – or not fully informed – about something.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 23, 2012 at 8:27 pm
What could Stephen Law possibly contribute to this subject?
david
May 10, 2012 at 1:04 pm
In that case, what was the point of Stephen Law being on the Jesus project?
Response to Carrier « Christianity in Antiquity (CIA): The Bart Ehrman Blog says:
April 23, 2012 at 8:01 pm
[...] In the meantime, someone forwarded to me the following post on R. Joseph Hoffmann’s blog. I think it’s pretty good and amusing and worth reading. I don’t think I’ve ever met Hoffmann, but I’ve known about him as a scholar in the field for about 25 years. I believe when I first encountered his work he was a professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Michigan. So he’s the real thing! And has some interesting things to say. http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/mythtic-pizza-and-cold-cocked-scholars/ [...]
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Robert Acurso
April 23, 2012 at 8:22 pm
“Ehrman had the audacity to suggest that Jesus actually existed.”
Clearly this wasn’t Dr. Carrier’s point. He was clear that he was hoping for a *scholarly* account of the historicist’s perspctive while all Dr. Ehman presented was… well, less than that, if Dr. Carrier is to be believed. I’m looking forward to a more thoughtful, well rationed response, because clearly this self-admitted “rant” is no better than what you claim Dr. Carrier’s critique is.
I don’t see why historicists are making this a political/popularity issue. Take Dr. Carrier’s critique for what it is, never mind the tone. It’s not “ad hominem” as Dr. Carrier is critiquing *clear* omissions of fact and *clear* misapplication of methods and reasoning; he’s not atacking Dr. Ehrman’s character.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 23, 2012 at 8:28 pm
Dr Carrier will be treated to precisely the deference his position deserves. Clear is not a word that bears discussion at this stage.
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Viv
April 23, 2012 at 8:31 pm
Excellent post, Joseph, as usual. Looking forward to that discussion. Unfortunately, and I apologize for the ” religious” vocabulary, you are preaching to the choir here. The ignorants usually don’t read scholar texts, except to dissect sentences that they fit to their to their agenda. In that sense, there is not difference between PZ Myers, Dick Carrier and followers and the Westboro church : same ignorance and fanaticism, just different “hate” goals
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alnitak
April 25, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Viv, “The ignorants usually don’t read scholar texts,…” simply classifies those who disagree with you as ignorant. You proceed to call them fanatic and hateful. Yet I am mildly persuaded that no person named Jesus existed, I read scholarly publications and books on the subject, and I’m looking forward to the discussions to be posted here. Why do you dislike me? I want the truth.
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Don M. Burrows
April 23, 2012 at 8:49 pm
Thank you, this is the best response to the attacks on Ehrman yet, and to the bizarre anti-academic attacks on the study of religion and New Testament among many unfortunates in the New Atheist movement.
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josh
April 24, 2012 at 6:41 pm
I’m trying to understand: how could any rational person think Hoffman’s piece above is a good response? It’s just a slew of bluster and invective with nary a fact to be found. Carrier’s posts have been chock-full of facts and arguments discussed at length, he pretty much vivisects Ehrman’s article in the HuffPo and anyone can go and see the remains for themselves.
Now it may be that in the end the historicists actually have a strong case (although it’s hard to imagine one strong enough to bear Hoffmann’s arrogance), but so far they’ve demonstrated a gross incompetence at making it to the general public. Maybe Hoffman will lay out a devastating critique of Carrier in his promised posts, but given his inability to understand or accurately report what the ‘New’ Atheists are saying I’ve got my doubts.
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rjosephhoffmann
April 25, 2012 at 1:59 am
No one has an obligation to lay out a devastating critique of Carrier; his views are not unassailable and are far from being proved let alone accepted. If we are going to litigate scholarship, the normal procedure would be for Carrier to be tested in the usual way.Can you name one senior biblical scholar–someone who actually knows what he or she is doing–who accepts his thesis? Or do you regard the deck so stacked against his self-advertised revolutionary ideas that he cannot get a fair hearing from the “establishment”?
John Andrew MacDonald
April 26, 2012 at 11:47 am
You never know Josh, the atheists may still have their day.
Here’s a point you may find kind of neat. The biggest problem critics have with Paul’s story of his conversion is that he was going after Christians, then he had his conversion experience, then he became Christian. But the former people he was working for never went after him for joining the Christians, which would have been the policy at the time. The book, “Operation Messiah” makes the argument that Paul lied about his conversion experience: It may have all been a conspiracy to start a new religion that would control the people really well.
It is historically possible. Plato in the Republic advocates the “noble lie,” deceiving the people so the rulers can get them to behave properly. “The noble lie” is a reference to Euripides’ Baccahe where someone says even though Dionysus isn’t a God, pretend that he is because it would be better for the people. There is a very slim chance that may be the reason behind the reference to Dionysus in this midrash from the gospel of John:
The Gospel of
John2. Water into Wine
(2:1-11)
Though the central feature of
this miracle story, the transformation of one liquid into another, no doubt
comes from the lore of Dionysus, the basic outline of the story owes much to the
story of Elijah in 1 Kings 17:8-24 LXX (Helms, p. 86). The widow of Zarephath,
whose son has just died, upbraids the prophet: “What have I to do with you, O
man of God?” (Ti emoi kai soi,
17:18). John has transferred this brusque address to
the mouth of Jesus, rebuking his mother (2:4, Ti emoi kai soi,
gunai). Jesus and Elijah both tell people in need of
provisions to take empty pitchers (udria in 1 Kings 17:12, udriai in John 2:6-7), from which sustenance miraculously emerges. And
just as this feat causes the woman to declare her faith in Elijah (“I know that
you are a man of God,” v. 24), so does Jesus’ wine miracle cause his disciples
to put their faith in him (v. 11).
But whether Paul was being honest about his conversion experience is anyone’s guess. Comes down to an act of faith I guess. Anyway, I thought you might find that kind of neat.
John Andrew MacDonaldI
Don M. Burrows (@DonMBurrows)
April 27, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Carrier’s “facts” contain numerous problems, as saturated as his responses might be with them.
I consider this a good response in part because it laments what many of us in philology have lamented: that those in the Freethinkery ridicule every day people who make outlandish assertions that fall far outside of scholarly consensus in the sciences, but seem to be just ducky with using the precise same methodology in dismissing the findings of Biblical and classical scholars, almost all of whom find problems with the mythicist position. Hoffman’s piece is admittedly a rant, but it’s one so many of us in the related fields have been making to ourselves over the past month amid this bizarre fervor.
It might be true that established scholars have not won the public over with their critiques, which are by nature more complex and far less sensational. But that doesn’t really mean anything. After all, a sizable plurality of the general public in America still doesn’t accept evolutionary theory.
That said, I look forward to the additional material on this, and applaud the scholars involved for doing so, even though it will inevitably lead to more attacks by the mythicist faithful.
rjosephhoffmann
April 27, 2012 at 12:54 pm
Brilliant Don and thank you…
I think someone just Cold-cocked a ‘scholar’ | Unsettled Christianity says:
April 23, 2012 at 8:53 pm
[...] via Mythtic Pizza and Cold-cocked Scholars « The New Oxonian. [...]
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Jim
April 23, 2012 at 9:06 pm
‘What could Stephen Law possibly contribute to this subject?’
Presumably rather more than Richard Carrier.
It just seemed an interesting paper by a reputable philosopher. I thought your opinion on the paper might be interesting and sharing your opinion with Law might be useful. Just a thought.
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