WildBloom
June 16, 2012 at 4:48 am
Hi Stephanie and Joseph Hoffmann, thank you very much for having creating this interesting discussion. I’m an environmental scientist with a strong background in mathematics, which plaid a very important role in my PhD.
Why I find probability theory and Bayes’ theorem fascinating in their own right, I don’t believe their application to Jesus studies is going to avoid the subjectivity dominating many historical endeavors.
In order to evaluate the probability of an event E, for example, E = ( Mark wrote his gospel before 50 AC), given our background knowledge, is given by:
P (E|B) = P(B|E) * P(E) / P(B)
P(E|B) is the likelihood of E given our background knowledge B and is the quantity to be calculated.
P(B|E) is the probability of our background knowledge given the truth of the event.
P(E) and P(B) are the a priori probabilities of the event E and our background information.
In order to employ BT, one must first evaluate/estimate the quantity P(B|E), P(E) and P(B).
This is where subjectivity comes into play.
Let us consider P(E), most people in the field believe the gospels were written after the destruction of the second temple, so the number will be low. But why choose 0.04 instead of say 0.07, 0.01 or 0.03?
And if one gives some credence to the theory of Robinson „redating the gospel“ or James Crossley „The Date of Mark’s Gospel: Insight from the Law in Earliest Christianity“, the initial probability may very well vary between 0.4 and 0.8.
Evaluating P(B), if B designates all our background knowledge (like facts about second temple’s Judaism, about the Romans, the early church and so on and so forth.), evaluating its a priori probability will prove to be a tedious task. It is not surprising that different values will come from different authors with different biases.
The evaluation of P(B|E) will certainly be controversial. Folks who believe the mini-apocalypse of Mark to refer to the end of the second temple, and also believe that no supernatural prophecy can occur, will find very low values like 0.01, 0.005 or even lower. (despite the agreement towards low probabilities, the precise value is once again arbitrary.
However, people like James Crossley having developed other arguments will find high value like 0.7 or even 0.8.
As a conclusion, I believe the use of Bayes’ theorem might be useful in some cases for the study of the historical Jesus.
But one has to keep in mind that subjectivity and difference of interpretations of the evidence are still present in choosing the value of the input-probabilities.
To my mind, Carrier’s ambitious goal to use BT to avoid subjectivity and differences of interpretations altogether has failed.
A reminder: I’m not a biblical scholar, the example I gave may have inaccuracies, its only purpose was to illustrate the subjective nature of the use of BT in history and in biblical studies.
I would love to hear your opinion on that.
Regards, Hubert.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 16, 2012 at 8:50 am
I actually think the Bayes’s Theorem discussion has run its ridiculous course. It was a nice try on Richard Carrier’s part to garner attention and keep his fan base enthralled, but it has to be accounted a stillborn project. It is inapplicable mathematical razzle dazzle applied to ancient texts unwarranted by the questions it is is put forward to resolve–in fact silly questions ranging from was there or was there not an earthhquake on the afternoon of April 2, 33 AD to did Jesus exist. It is a debating strategy, not an assist to organic historical methods unless (as in archaeology) those methods have a real world (modal) evidence base that might benefit from various (not just BT) probability strategies.
The basic criterion or warrant for BT is that a problem presents itself in which an event has already happened such that the probability of another event is to be found. I can use it to argue for miracles. I can use it Humean style to argue against miracles. That’s how it works: It revises (reassigns) the probabilities of the events based on what is known beforehand (prior probabilities) and what can be calculated after information (A) is received as posterior probabilities of events. The real world conditions that wouold permit us to create the sample space for these mutually esclusive criteria are at issue. And thge conditions for the application of Baye’s formula is that prior events i.e. A1, A2, ……., An of the sample space are exhaustive and mutually exclusive i.e.
A1 U A2 U ……….. U An = S
and Ai n Aj = F j, i = 1, 2, …….. n and i ? j
But the claim that Bayes “works” is not a warrant for its applicabilty to something as greasy as the historical Jesus question. BT is a theorem; of course it works. You can feed it anything. If I want to make sausage because I don’tike the sausage people are making I can throw my old socks, a stray cat, the noisy kid from next door and some journal articles I haven’t read into the grinder. At the end of the line, I get sausage. That’s what the grinder makes. Bayes can make unarguable conclusions from absurd premises constructed from naive assumptions derived from subjectivity, bias and errors of fact and emit them in a casing of illusion of finality and improbable probabilities.
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Biblioblog Carnival “according to Mark” « Euangelion Kata Markon says:
July 3, 2012 at 8:15 pm
[...] about mythicism? After May’s launch of the Jesus Project (courtesy of Maurice Casey, Steph Fisher and R. Joseph Hoffman), Hoffman continued with posts about the arguments of Shirley Jackson [...]
Reply
Seriös eller oseriös debatt? « Jesus granskad says:
July 14, 2012 at 3:00 pm
[...] sig Caseys forskarassistent Stephanie Louise Fisher i många av sina kommentarer. I inlägget AN EXHIBITION OF INCOMPETENCE: TRICKERY DICKERY BAYES håller hon sig väl ändå något till saken och Godfreys bemötande av hennes inlägg återfinns [...]
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Prove the Bible in One Paragraph | The Great Christian Debate says:
March 5, 2013 at 6:45 pm
[...] to be real and he is his own person. Some great articles I’ve been led to are here, here, and here. There are no sufficient arguments detailing that Jesus was mythical. The greatest argument of them [...]
Reply
A Review of Proving History by Richard Carrier (Part IV) « Diglotting says:
May 4, 2013 at 5:15 pm
[...] especially if they wanted to risk a deadly skirmish. As Stephanie Louis Fisher points out in her review of Proving History, this sort of thing had occurred in the past during the time of Herod [...]
Reply
Matt Gerrans
June 21, 2013 at 5:16 pm
“Critical biblical scholars have known for a long time that this story is not literally true.”
What does that mean? Is it “figuratively true?” If so, what does that mean? Or is it simply not true? Did this miracle not in fact occur?
Does this mean every statement in the Bible is true, but it is only a matter of deciding whether it is “figuratively true” or “literally true?”
Reply
steph
June 21, 2013 at 9:15 pm
No Matt. That it is not literally true does not mean it is figuratively true. No Matt. Miracles contradict the laws of nature and do not happen. No Matt. This does not mean that every statement in the Bible is true, figuratively or literally.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
THE JESUS PROCESS (c)
by rjosephhoffmann
A Consultation on Method, Myth, and Madness in New Testament Studies
Now Published!
Essays by
Maurice Casey, “Mythicism: A Story of Incompetence, Bias and Falsehood”
R. Joseph Hoffmann, “Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus”
Stephanie Louise Fisher, “An Exhibition of Incompetence: Trickery, Dickery, Bayes”
(c) 2012: The Jesus Process Consultative Committee
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Published: May 19, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: amateurism in biblical studies : atheism : Bayes theorem : Bible : Christianity : historical jesus : internet scholars : Jesus : Jesus Seminar : method in biblical studies : myth theory : mythicism : mythology : New Testament : Radical Theology : religion : religious studies ..
9 Responses to “THE JESUS PROCESS (c)”
.
Antonio Jerez
May 19, 2012 at 5:09 pm
Excellent news! I´m really looking forward to it.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 22, 2012 at 7:34 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
The first contributions to The Jesus Process are Now Available
Reply
Jesus Mythicists Smackdown « A 'Goula Blogger says:
May 22, 2012 at 11:08 am
[...] Here. With lots of footnotes! Share this:ShareLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]
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The Jesus Process on The New Oxonian | Ge??aµµ??a says:
May 22, 2012 at 12:08 pm
[...] recently), it would be profitable to take a look at The New Oxonion, the weblog that hosts The Jesus Process: A Consultation on Method, Myth, and Madness in New Testament Studies. The Jesus Process contains the following [...]
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James Daniel Tabor
May 22, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Many thanks for making these available Joe.
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Matthew
May 26, 2012 at 9:53 pm
My thanks to Joe, Stephanie, and Maurice for their fascinating and thought-provoking essays! I learned quite a bit and I look forward to reading more! I look forward to more work by Dr. Casey and his forthcoming book!
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When Is Paul’s Silence Golden? « Vridar says:
June 10, 2012 at 11:16 pm
[...] that sink in for a minute. The senior whiz at The Processed Cheeses Institute mercilessly mocks Doherty for saying essentially the same thing. He sneers and guffaws at [...]
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rjosephhoffmann
June 11, 2012 at 5:31 pm
@ Godfrey: “…for saying essentially the same thing.” If you truly believe this, then the interpretative skills of the mythtics are even more rudimentary than I had at first imagined.
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steph
June 11, 2012 at 7:42 pm
More mythtic glossolalia.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Jesus Process: Stephanie Louise Fisher
by rjosephhoffmann
AN EXHIBITION OF INCOMPETENCE: TRICKERY DICKERY BAYES
(c) 2012 by Stephanie Fisher, University of Nottingham
Introduction.
The purpose of this essay is to make a further contribution to refuting the methods of recent mythicists and drawing attention to their unprofessional attitudes and prejudices. It also exposes their lack of discernment and inability to engage with critical scholarship. Scholarship is compromised by these evangelising, self-promoting pedlars of incompetence. I discuss especially the recent attempt of atheist blogger, Richard Carrier to replace historical method with Bayes’ theorem, followed by scholars of whom he makes use. I go on to refute some criticisms of my previous comments, and finally put Albert Schweitzer, some of whose comments are routinely misinterpreted, in his historical context.
Carrier and Bayes’ Theorem.
Atheist blogger Richard Carrier, has now added to his passionate flushings of incompetence with another book, for which he has eventually found a publisher other than himself. See Richard C. Carrier, Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 2012).
Bayes’ theorem can be traced back to Thomas Bayes (1702-64), in whose name it was first published in 1764. It was generally used, however, only after it was reworked by the mathematician P-S. Laplace (1749-1827), who was not initially aware of Bayes’ work. It has been used much more in recent years, during which it has been applied to all kinds of things, though not without criticism. It was, for example, successfully used by Alan Turing in deciphering the German Enigma code. It is basically at home in aspects of Maths and the Natural Sciences, where abstract measures of probability are needed.
The centre of Bayes’ theorem is the following:
P(A|B) = \frac{P(B | A)\, P(A)}{P(B)}. \,
Here P stands for ‘Probability’, and A and B are two different sets being assessed. Carrier has this slightly more complex version necessitated by the consideration of the relative probability of different hypotheses:
P(h|b) x P(e|h.b)
P(h|e.b)=??—-----??—-----??—-----
[P(h|b) x P(e|h.b] + [P(~h|b) x P(e|~h.b]
Carrier explains briefly, ‘P = probability, h = hypothesis, e = evidence, and b = background knowledge.’[1]
Carrier uses this in a discussion which he calls ‘A Bayesian Analysis of the Disappearing Sun.’[2] This is the story that ‘there was darkness all over the land from the sixth hour until the ninth hour’ (Mk 15.33//Matt. 27.45//Lk 23.44-5). Critical biblical scholars have known for a long time that this story is not literally true.[3] Carrier’s discussion adds nothing significant to this discussion. Carrier includes the completely irrelevant notion that there might have been similar three-hour darkness in 1983, which we all know is false too. Carrier concludes that ‘Instead of letting us get away with vague verbiage about how likely or unlikely things are, Bayes’ theorem forces us to identify exactly what we mean. It thus forces us to identify whether our reasoning is even sound.’[4] Carrier’s discussion shows that this is not what happens. He tries to make it seem plausible by ignoring all the best critical scholarship, and discussing methodologically inadequate, ideologically-motivated pseudo-scholarship instead.
Most analysts would say that Bayes’ theorem is not in the least amenable to complex and composite historical texts. Carrier has too much misplaced faith in the value of his own assumptions. He claims, “[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.”[5] Bayes theorem was devised to ascertain mathematical probability. It is completely inappropriate for, and unrelated to historical occurrence and therefore irrelevant for application to historical texts. Carrier 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, and offers none, of distinguishing the difference and this renders his argument a complete muddle. Effectively in the end, he can conveniently dispose of inconvenient tradition, with a regrettable illusion that Bayes provides a veneer of scientific certainty to prior conclusions he is determined to ‘prove unarguable’.
The Quest of the Historical Jesus: Supercilious Pseudo-Scholars, and the Omission of Inconvenient Critical Scholars.
Carrier begins his book by arguing that the Quest for a historical Jesus has been a failure because it has reached no consensus on criteria or results.[6] He does not seem to realise that this is partly because he has included under the general umbrella of ‘Jesus scholars’ virtually anyone who has written about him, regardless of competence or bias. If he had included only recognised academics in top tier universities with qualifications in ancient history and New Testament Studies, he would have got a different result. As it is, he includes ‘scholars’ such as Burton Mack, who left the Church of the Nazarene to became a methodologically incompetent radical, and Stanley Porter, who is an equally incompetent Christian fundamentalist. Of course they don’t end up with the same picture of Jesus, and this is partly because both of them are totally incompetent in method. It does not follow that we should all drop reasonable historical criteria and use Bayes’ theorem instead, as Carrier has unwittingly demonstrated by means of his own extensive incompetence.
Notably incompetent are his discussions the “Criterion of Embarrassment.”[7] Carrier begins with a blunt declaration of a typical mythicist view: ‘The assumption is that embarrassing material “would naturally be either suppressed or softened in the later stages of the tradition.” But all extant Gospels are already very late stages of the “Gospel tradition”, the Gospel having already been preached for nearly an entire lifetime across three continents before any Gospel was written’.[8] There are two serious things wrong with this. The first is the description of Meier’s view as an ‘assumption’. No-one reading this without checking Meier’s enormous book would imagine that Meier’s comment is the beginning of a coherent argument of some length, not an ‘assumption’ at all. The second problem is the very late date assumed for all the Gospels. As early as 1998, Casey proposed Aramaic reconstructions of a small number of passages of Mark’s Gospel, and on that basis he rather tentatively proposed a date c. 40 CE for this Gospel. This was worked through in detail and reinforced with considerable evidence and argument by James Crossley in a doctoral thesis published in 2004.[9] Carrier knows just what to do with such learned arguments leading to results which he does not wish to believe in: he leaves them all out. What defence does Bayes’ theorem offer against this? It cannot provide any defence against such professional incompetence and methodological bias.
Among many details which illustrate Carrier’s total inability to understand Jesus’ culture is the story of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest and execution. He declares,
‘The authorities did not need Judas… to find or identify Jesus. Given what Mark has Jesus say in 14:49 (and what Jesus had been doing in Jerusalem only days before), the authorities knew what he looked like, and they could have seized him any time he appeared in public.’
It was fortunate for the Jewish people of the time that the Sagan, the chief priest in charge of security in the Temple, was wiser than Carrier. He will not have forgotten what happened in 4 BCE, when Herod Archelaus was faced with a serious protest in the Temple. Archelaus sent people to talk to the protesters, but when Passover came round and support for them increased, he sent in a cohort led by a tribune, so some 500 soldiers led by an officer: the crowd stoned them with such violence that most of the cohort were killed. Archelaus then sent in his army in force: the result was 3,000 dead Jews and the wreckage of a major festival (Jos. War II, 5-13: Ant XVII, 206-8). This is arguably what the chief priests were avoiding by not arresting Jesus in public in the Temple, yet Carrier shows not a glimmer of awareness of the event in the time of Archelaus ever happening..
Mark reports the possible mob scenario events with precision, but Carrier, despite presenting himself as a competent historian of the ancient world, seems to have depended on a traditional English translation. He announces that for the authorities to have arrested Jesus would not only be ‘politically suicidal’, but also that the idea that the ‘Jewish elite would be that stupid is vanishingly small (a fact fully admitted by Mark, cf. 14.1-2, who nevertheless has them stupidly contradict themselves in the very next chapter…’).[10] This supposed contradiction depends on a traditional translation of µ? ?? t? ???t?, (Mk 14.2) as, e.g., ‘Not during the festival’ (NRSV). Jeremias long ago pointed out that the Greek heorte also means ‘festival crowd’, as standard secondary literature intermittently repeats.[11] Moreover, Mark’s Greek will represent the chief priests saying in Aramaic al beh?agga, which also means ‘not in the festival crowd’.[12] This is why Judah of Kerioth led a party to arrest Jesus in a garden at night. They were then able to hand him over to Pilate, the Roman governor, early the following morning, so that he could be crucified outside the city walls at about 9 a.m., when his disciples had fled and there were no crowds about.
As support for not believing the story of the betrayal and arrest at all, Carrier calls on part of the work of the Jewish scholar Haim Cohn.[13] Cohn was a German Jew who emigrated to Israel, where he became Attorney General of Israel, and Minister of Justice, as well as a member of the Supreme Court of Israel and the International Court of Justice in the Hague. He was a member of the “T’hila” Movement for Israeli Jewish secularism. It is culturally ludicrous to expect anyone like Cohn to give a fair account of a New Testament narrative, especially one which has played such an appalling role in the history of Christian anti-Semitism.
Cohn’s total ineptitude in historical research runs through his whole book. For example, at the beginning of his chapter on Jesus, he declares ‘Our purpose is to show that neither Pharisees nor Sadducees, neither priests nor elders, neither scribes nor any Jews, had any reasonable cause to seek the death of Jesus or his removal. Without such, it will be submitted, the reports that they sought to destroy him (Matt. 12:14; Luke 19:47) or that they counseled together “for to put him to death” (John 11:53; Luke 22:2; Mark 14:1) are stripped of all plausibility’.[14] This illustrates the way that Cohn ignores all historical evidence in favour of his own ideologically orientated fantasies, much as Carrier and other mythicists do.
Carrier follows the religious bias of amateurs as greedily as he does his own mistaken prejudices, rather than relying on competent Jewish scholars such as Amy-Jill Levine, Paula Fredriksen and Geza Vermes, when he opines that ‘The fact that Jesus’ betrayer’s name means “Jew” should already make us suspicious’.[15] It should not. Juda(s) (?????: Yehuda, God is praised) was believed to have been the fourth son of the Biblical patriarch Jacob, and hence regarded as the eponymous ancestor of the tribe of Judah; it is a well attested and popular Jewish name of the period. Famous examples included Judah ‘the hammer’, better known in English as Judas Maccabaeus, leader of the Maccabean revolt in the second century BCE: and Rabbi Judah the Prince. Another example is one of Jesus’ brothers (Mk 6.3). Many real people have been called ‘Judah’ ever since: one of the most famous recent examples is the musician, Yehudi Menuhin.
Carrier then suggests that ‘Iscariot’ is ‘an Aramaicism for the Latin “Sicarius”’. This etymology however is barely coherent. The Latin ‘Sicarius’ is not otherwise used for Jewish insurgents until much later, and no-one had any good reason to put the Hebrew Ish and the Latin Sicarius into a single name at any time. The Hebrew Ish was however sometimes used in names, and the very varied forms of Iscariot, including for example Iskarioth (e.g. Mk 3.19) and apo Karyotou (D at Jn 12.4) make perfect sense if his designation was originally ‘man of Kerioth’, a village right in the south of Judaea, and this also makes good sense of him.[16]
How much help is Bayes’ theorem in understanding all this? It is of no help whatever. It can do nothing to prevent Carrier from being totally incompetent in doing the meticulous business of historical research, torturing false assumptions into premises, and using equally incompetent pseudo-scholars such as the hopelessly radical Mack, the Christian fundamentalist Porter, and the equally bigoted Cohn as pillars in his argumentative travesty. Mack and Porter have in common with Carrier that they cannot read Aramaic, and consequently cannot understand any arguments based on features in the text of the synoptic Gospels, especially Mark, which have often been thought to reflect Aramaic sources. Cohn simply seems not to have done so, and wrote too early to have read recent work written in the light of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Caeci caecos decentes: An ambitious blogger on New Testament subjects with no formal training in the field at all, Tom Verenna, who often makes unqualified pronouncements, has praised Richard Carrier’s piece on the ‘Bible and Interpretation’ on-line journal as an ‘Exceptional article’.[17] And it is indeed exceptional: an exceptionally flawed and overblown piece, Bayes’ Theorem and the Modern Historian: Proving History Requires Improving Methods,[18] in which he is typically misleading and characteristically over confident about his convictions. Especially in evidence in this article is his inability to provide sufficient or adequate references.
In an earlier blog post in which Carrier attempted to promote himself and his book Proving History, he made the most extraordinary and unqualified claim that ‘every expert who is a specialist in methodology has concluded, one and all, that the methods now used in Jesus studies are also totally fucked’.
Whom Carrier considers to be expert, and what criteria he assumes qualifies one as an expert are unclear, especially as Carrier considers himself to be an expert in fields in which he has no qualifications. All competent and critical New Testament scholars investigating the history of early Christianity, should be competent in methodology in order to pursue academic enquiry. Carrier’s claim is ludicrous. In this so-called ‘exceptional’ article, Carrier is still unclear and seems completely disconnected from the reality of the academic process of critical enquiry, debate and progress. He would like us to believe that a collection of essays will be featuring
‘such luminaries as Mark Goodacre and Morna Hooker, all coming to the same conclusion: the method of criteria is simply not logically viable. This leaves the field of Jesus studies with no valid method, and puts into question all consensus positions in the field, insofar as they have all been based, to one extent or another, on these logically invalid methods.’
We cannot assess essays which have not been published. Nevertheless Mark Goodacre has generously sent me his contribution prior to publication. Carrier then goes on to include several other people, including Tom Verenna who has no qualifications and Thomas Thompson who is not a New Testament scholar, suggesting they all reject historical method as leading to confusing results. This is a grotesque caricature of scholarship, and Carrier’s expectation that consensus should be reached by people of such different ideological perspectives is fantasy.
Premised on his assumption that methods in historical studies must be non-duplicative, non-competitive and homogenous, Carrier claims
‘When everyone picks up the same method, applies it to the same facts, and gets a different result, we can be certain that that method is invalid and should be abandoned. Yet historians in Jesus studies don’t abandon the demonstrably failed methods they purport to employ.’
He concludes after accepting his own verdict that ‘This has to end’.
It’s a shame Carrier has collected such a disparate group of people and selected helpful words out of context in order to argue his own conviction that New Testament studies is ‘fucked’. It’s also regrettable that Carrier avoids discussion of crucial historical Jesus scholars such as Roger Aus, Maurice Casey (whose work on Aramaic Carrier routinely omits because it is inconvenient and he cannot understand it) Martin Hengel, William Horbury, who discuss method, evaluate it and constantly seek to improve it.
Method evolves with advances in knowledge and technical expertise; it cannot be shortcut by bogus and inapplicable mathematical formulas. Indeed, the nature of critical scholarship is to provide a continuing critique of the historical methods of previous generations and their application; to evaluate and revise them, and to help them to evolve and to improve. At no point in such a process does a critical scholar throw his or her hands in the air and pronounce a fatwah on all preceding efforts. Discussing and debating application and constantly evaluating method, Mark Goodacre whom Carrier cites out of context, writes,
‘This is not to argue for the replacement of one criterion (multiple attestation) for another (accidental information), but to suggest, rather, that crude, ham-fisted application of criteria was never likely to yield reliable historical results in the quest of the historical Jesus.[19]
Goodacre’s incisive comments are entirely correct and illustrate the sort of academic discussion critical scholars are engaged in.
It is presently too early to expect a consensus, even on methods, among all critical scholars, in view of new evidence and new argument especially since the 1970s and in view of more recent developments in Aramaic scholarship. Consensus involving ideological extremes is impossible and this has a regrettable effect on the most critical scholarship because all critical scholars are human beings who necessarily begin and continue their lives within some kind of social framework.
Aramaic, Greek and Porter.
Carrier’s section on ‘Aramaic Context’ moves beyond the incompetent to the barely comprehensible.[20] Astonishingly he once again relies on the Christian fundamentalist Stanley Porter, forcing even an inattentive reader to ask whether he cannot read any reputable critical scholars? Porter needs to believe that Jesus taught in Greek. He put this clearly on the Website of McMaster Divinity College, the theological seminary where he works. Here Porter comments on New Testament 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.’[21]
So that’s it, then. Jesus must have spoken Greek because it is God’s language. It follows that Porter’s scholarship is a sham, and this is why it contains so many predicable mistakes. One mistake is to downplay or even omit the evidence that Jesus spoke and consequently taught in Aramaic. Noting quotations in Aramaic in the synoptic Gospels, Porter comments, ‘By this reasoning it is more plausible to argue that Jesus did most of his teaching in Greek, since the Gospels are all Greek documents.’[22]
This misrepresents the nature of the Gospels themselves. They were written in Greek to communicate the ‘good news’ to Greek-speaking Christians. This mere fact does not tell us in which language Jesus taught, whereas the Aramaic words and idioms in the synoptic Gospels cannot be explained unless the Gospel writers could expect their audiences to know or be told that the ministry took place in an Aramaic-speaking environment, and this is part of the evidence that Jesus must have taught in Aramaic. This is supported by peculiarities such as ? ???? t?? ?????p??, which is not normal monoglot Greek, and which makes excellent sense as a translation of br ’nash(a)’. Porter’s second major mistake is to exaggerate the use of Greek in Israel. For example, Porter has Galilee ‘completely surrounded by Hellenistic culture’.[23] This Hellenistic culture was however Gentile, and its presence in cities such as Tyre and Scythopolis is entirely consistent with its rejection by Aramaic-speaking Jews. Again, Porter refers to the Greek names of the musical instruments at Daniel 3.5.[24] These are however the instruments of Nebuchadnezzar, and represent in real life the favourite instruments of the Hellenistic persecutor, Antiochus IV Epiphanes. They are the only Greek words in the text of Daniel precisely because they represent Hellenistic persecution, so they reveal very little knowledge of Greek and absolute rejection of it.
Moreover, it is notorious that this is the limit of Greek words in Biblical Aramaic. Qumran Aramaic has no Greek loanwords,[25] an there were very few Greek loanwords in Aramaic until after the time of Jesus. Fundamentalist Christians, however, believe in the traditions of their elders, according to which the book of Daniel, iconic in conservative circles for its providential significance to Christianity, is indisputable scriptural evidence of the use of Greek words in Aramaic in the sixth century BCE, a view which on scholarly grounds must be regarded as completely wrong.
Among genuine evidence of Jews using Greek, Porter cites the funerary inscriptions from Beth She‘arim, noting that they date from the first to the sixth centuries CE, and subsequently responding to criticism by continuing to maintain them as evidence that ‘some from that area, including possibly Jesus, used Greek’.[26] But ‘only a few of the village’s tombs date to the first century CE, and these do not contain inscriptions’.[27] Thus all the tomb inscriptions from Beth She‘arim are too late in date to affect the question of which language(s) Jesus is likely to have spoken in order to communicate with audiences in first century rural Galilee.
So much of Porter’s evidence is from a later time or the wrong place that it should not be used to support the notion of Jesus conducting a Greek-speaking ministry in the Galilean countryside or in relatively small towns such as Capernaum. Porter also drew on what was then recent research to support his view, including the blunt declaration that Sepphoris, where Jesus’ ministry conspicuously did not take place, was a ‘thoroughly Hellenized city.’ This has now been exposed as a temporary American trend, and the Jewishness of the area of the historic ministry has been recognised.[28]
Yet fundamentalist Christian Porter is a ‘scholar’ on whom Carrier relies.
Carrier also dismisses all proposed evidence of Aramaisms in the Gospels with ludicrous comments which show that he has not read relevant primary sources nor any significant secondary literature upon which it is based. He comments, ‘If every instance is a Semitism, then it is not evidence of an Aramaic source’,[29] and then assumes that every instance is a general Semitism (although he doesn’t distinguish the difference) and dismisses Casey’s evidence and entire argument of cumulative weight.[30]
Indeed Carrier has assumed it’s sufficient not to read Casey’s meticulous works because he can dismiss them on a prior assumption, but won’t read his academic arguments to see why Casey believes in written Aramaic sources underlying parts of the synoptic Gospels, not just ‘general Semitisms’. Casey does address the possibility of general Semitisms and has demonstrated in his arguments precisely why and where they are invalid. Carrier for his part repeatedly claims to have referred to ‘experts’, but he does not give proper references, and much scholarship precedes the discovery of Aramaic documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls and is consequently out of date. When he says that experts he knows reject Casey’s work on the ‘son of man’ he is oblivious to the difference between critical reviews and those clouded by hopeless bias.[31] Needless to say, Casey’s work is rejected by all fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, who are determined to believe that ‘Son of man’ in the Gospels is derived from Daniel 7, a view which is still attractive to more liberal Christians because it derives what they think of as a Christological title from Scripture. The unfortunate fact is that most New Testament scholars are not competent Aramaists and Casey’s work has to be interpreted and interpreters trusted for critical interpretation. How many of these ‘scholars’ read more than 3,500 examples of the Aramaic term br ’nash(a)’ when they were deciding what it meant? Casey is the only such scholar known to me!
The Family of the Historical Jesus
Another significant point of contention is Jesus’ family, whose existence is one of the arguments in favour of his existence. Mythicists pour scorn on this, and especially on Gal. 1.19. At Gal. 1.18, Paul says that after his conversion he went to Arabia, then after three years he went up to Jerusalem to question Cephas, and stayed with him for 15 days: ‘but I did not see any other of the apostles except Jacob the brother of the Lord.’ Of course the Greek word ‘adelphos’ does not necessarily denote a sibling, because it is also used to denote members of a community. Doherty cites 1 Cor 15.6, according to which the risen Jesus appeared to ‘over 500 brethren at once’.[32] These were obviously members of the Christian community, not siblings of the historical Jesus. Noting however not very accurately Phil. 1.14, where members of the community are described by Paul in prison as ‘most of the brethren who have been made confident in the Lord because of my chains’, he declares that ‘James seems to have been head of a community in Jerusalem which bore witness to the spiritual Christ, a group apparently calling itself “brethren in/of the Lord”; the two versions were probably interchangeable.’[33] This is completely spurious: Jacob, and anyone else who might have been a sibling of Jesus, is never called ‘brother in the Lord’, and members of the community in general are never called ‘brethren of the Lord’.
Doherty then seeks to sidestep 1 Cor. 9.5, which has a long tradition of being misinterpreted, going back at least to Drews and others in the late nineteenth century. Here Paul clearly distinguishes a group and a person, ‘the brothers of the Lord and Cephas’. It is obvious that the term ‘brother(s) of the Lord’ is not applied to all members of the community, but Doherty suggests that this ‘may be due to a certain looseness of language’, and that Peter’s separate mention in this text ‘may be for emphasis and need not mean that he is not one of the “brothers”.[34] This suggestion is completely arbitrary. Paul’s language is mundanely precise. ‘The brothers of the Lord’ are Jesus’ brothers enumerated at Mark 6.3f., and Cephas was not one of them. Doherty then expounds his fantasy world to replace this;
‘…other explanations are possible. My own would be that the Jerusalem sect known to Paul began a number of years earlier as a monastic group calling itself “brothers of the Lord” (possibly meaning God) and after those initial visions revealing the existence of the dying and rising Son as recounted in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7, this group expanded its “mandate” to encompass apostolic work and attracted satellite members who, while being referred to as “brothers,” were thought of as distinctive from the original core group.’[35]
This is creative fiction, not scholarship, assumptions supported by guesses and distortion, by Doherty alone, not historical research at all, and it is regrettable that anyone should take it seriously.
Doherty then makes the convenient suggestion that the word ‘the (ton)’ might not have been in the earliest mss., though there is no evidence of its omission. He then declares, ‘I once asked if Paul had the word ton written in big caps’, because Doherty is too ignorant to know that all mss at this date were written in large capital letters – small letters or miniscules having not yet come into use.[36] This illustrates very well that, years after fundamentalist treatment of the text of the New Testament as inerrant, mythicists treat it as something they can always alter when they feel like it, in accordance with their predilections and in total contempt for anything recognisable as principles of reasonable textual criticism.
Doherty includes a very confused and ignorant discussion of what was possible in Greek, and of what we should call the generic use of the Greek article. First of all he declares that ‘there was no way to specify “a brother of the Lord” except by simply leaving out the definite article.[37] Paul could however have done this. Secondly, he could have written adelphos tis tou kuriou, ‘a brother of the Lord’. Thirdly, he could have written heis ton adelphon tou kuriou, ‘one of the brothers of the Lord’. Paul had however no reason to write any of these things. Jacob was a common name in a culture which had no equivalent of our surnames, and Paul had this very simple way of saying which Jacob he met, in a high context culture in which further explanation was not necessary. After his inadequate discussion of the Greek article, which should have said simply that it is generic more often than e.g. the English definite article ‘the’, Doherty is left without a reason for Paul’s description of Jacob as ‘the brother of the Lord’. He ends up suggesting that it may have originated ‘as an interpolation or a marginal gloss’. All this is caused by anti-historical convictions that Paul could not have referred to Jesus’ brother Jacob, as he did. It is also based on an arbitrary view of New Testament textual criticism, which is hopelessly out of date.
The rest of Jesus’ family also had names drawn from major figures of Jewish history and culture. His father was called ‘Joseph’, after a major patriarch who ruled over Egypt under the Pharaoh. His mother was called ‘Miriam’, after Moses’ sister. ‘Jesus’ is derived from the Greek form of Yeshua‘¸ whom we usually call ‘Joshua’, the major figure of Jewish history who was believed to have succeeded Moses and led Israel across the Jordan into the promised land. At the time of Jesus this name was believed to mean YHWH saves, or the like, so in effect ‘God saves’ (cf. Matt. 1.21). His brother ‘Jacob’ was of course called after the eponymous patriarch of the whole nation, ‘Jacob’ who was also called ‘Israel’. The other brothers were called ‘Judah’, after the fourth son of the Biblical patriarch Jacob, who was regarded as the eponymous ancestor of the tribe of Judah: ‘Joseph’ again: and ‘Simeon’, who was believed to have been the second son of Jacob and Leah, and thus the eponymous ancestor of the tribe of Simeon.
This family background locates Jesus right inside traditional Judaism. Trying to explain this to contemporary English speaking readers, Fredriksen drew a regrettable analogy with famous Americans’ names, regrettable because the result is not what one expects. Atheist blogger Neil Godfrey, an Australian ‘meta-data’ librarian, thus plucked her brief comments completely out of context, and cited her in favour of the opposite interpretation. While she correctly said, ‘the names themselves convey a close identification with the nation’s foundational past’, Godfrey declared,
‘Add to this the fact that the names are introduced within a narrative that serves the purpose of likening Jesus’ family situation to that of other biblical heroes, like Joseph and David to name only the most prominent ones, and thus conforms to the biblical pattern of being rejected by his own family, and we are entitled to hold some reservations about the authenticity of the list.’[38]
This means nothing more significant than that Godfrey proposes not to believe what he does not fancy. As a member of the Worldwide Church of God he could not cope with the Jewishness of Jesus, and when he converted to atheism this did not change. As N.T. Wrong astutely observed, ‘Once a fundie always a fundie. He’s just batting for the other side, now.’ [39]
Still More Incompetence.
The undergraduate student Tom Verenna has recently attempted to contribute a piece, ‘Did Jesus Exist? The Trouble with Certainty in Historical Jesus Scholarship’, in Bible and Interpretation May, 2012.[40] This is yet another scandalously ignorant outpouring written in the form of (yet another) attack on New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman. I do not wish to defend Ehrman’s book but Verenna’s ignorance of New Testament scholarship is indicated by his declaration that the whole idea that Jesus existed is contrary to recent scholarship. In particular, his reference to ‘credible scholars like Thomas Thompson, Bob Price or Carrier’ has two people (Thompson and Carrier) who have never been properly qualified in New Testament Studies, and one (Price) who was a fundamentalist and who was converted to atheism without ever progressing through the rites of academic passage that would make him a critical scholar as opposed to a populariser of radical and unsupportable ideas.[41] Verenna ought to learn more before he pronounces, but his enthusiastic outpourings show no signs of a desire to learn.
Carrier’s over-long blog post[42] reviewing a very very brief piece by Ehrman in the Huffington Post (whenever was a book review ten times longer than the thing reviewed?), misrepresents several things. For example, he cites Philo, De Prov. II, 64, to show that Philo ‘made regular pilgrimages to Jerusalem’. This passage survives only in Armenian, which in general does not provide reliable tradition. Moreover, the passage does not say that he ‘made regular pilgrimages’ at all. It only says that he went via Ascalon, and it is perfectly consistent with the common view that he went only once.
Both Carrier and Verenna claim that Ehrman implies one’s career will be ruined if a scholars challenges the historical existence of Jesus. Ehrman, of course, does not, and Verenna and Carrier, who have never held academic positions, can point to no case since the nineteenth century in German protestant faculties where a career has been jeopardized by holding radical views, competently argued, vetted and defended. This is because there is no evidence and they assume a conspicuous falsehood. The modern university in most parts of the developed world prizes academic freedom as an unalienable right to profess what you have learned without restriction: that is why the convention called academic tenure exists. Indeed, even untenured lecturers, especially in the United Kingdom and the Antipodes, are appointed to permanent positions where they suffer no fear for voicing inconvenient positions. One stands aghast not only that people like Carrier, Godfrey and Verenna subscribe to such opinions but that they feel free to broadcast their ignorance in writing.
Atheist blogger Neil Godfrey defends himself for his misleading comments on the work of Casey, Crossley and other scholars whom he has criticised for ‘circular reasoning, begging the question and special pleading’ after conveniently replacing their learned arguments (which he did not understand) with simplistic and misleading summaries which is all he can understand. It is also apparent he does not read whole books, once claiming on his blog ‘I’m a librarian, but I never see or touch a book.’[43]
This is perhaps the one credible statement in Godfrey’s expanding dabble into the field of biblical studies: if one does not read entire books from beginning to end as a matter of habit before commenting on or attempting to critique them, what chance is there for scholarship to be fairly represented, and what confidence can a reader have in the validity of such critiques? Much scholarship is incompletely available on line which could lead to the sort of hopeless misrepresentations, misinterpretations and muddles, by the likes of these atheist bloggers. A recent example of internet noise passing for information was a post by Godfrey defending Steven Carr who had complained that Casey’s recent book Jesus of Nazareth was not given on a Nottingham university reading list. When I pointed out that there had not been time to put it there, given its recent publication date, Godfrey announced that to list it ’needs nothing more than that the book is available and in print.’[44] This is completely untrue, and shows no grasp of what is involved in running a major university library. This illustrates as well the recurrent petulance of the comments by Godfrey and Carr, to which I have frequently drawn attention–and atheist blogger Neil Godfrey, who is a librarian, ought to know better.
Albert Schweitzer in his Historical Context
Martin Luther, condemning the selection of words out of context and misrepresentation, says, ‘He does nothing more than latch on to a small word and smear over with his spittle as he pleases, but meanwhile he does not take into account other texts which overthrow he who smear and spits, so that he is up-ended with all four limbs in the air. So here, after he has raved and smeared for a long time … [he] is like the ostrich, the foolish bird which thinks it is wholly concealed when it gets its neck under a branch.’[45]
Mythicists also love to quote old scholarship out of its historical context. Schweitzer is one of their favourites for this. For example, atheist blogger Godfrey comments, apparently trying to demonstrate mythicists don’t use Schweitzer to support their claims, but his comment merely demonstrates that they do. He is oblivious to the fact that nobody suggests that mythicists pretend Schweitzer was a mythicist. This is further demonstration that Godfrey shows utter ignorance of what misrepresentation of scholarship is. Mythicists misinterpret Schweitzer to claim there is no historically valid evidence for historicity of Jesus. On his blog Godrey writes:[46]
‘Schweitzer understood the limitations of what generally passes for historical method far better than nearly every contemporary historical Jesus scholar I have read: “In reality, however, these writers [those arguing for the historicity of Jesus against mythicists] are faced with the enormous problem that strictly speaking absolutely nothing can be proved by evidence from the past, but can only be shown to be more or less probable. Moreover, in the case of Jesus, the theoretical reservations are even greater because all the reports about him go back to the one source of tradition, early Christianity itself, and there are no data available in Jewish or Gentile secular history which could be used as controls. Thus the degree of certainty cannot even by raised so high as positive probability.” (From page 402 of The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 2001, by Albert Schweitzer.)
Little wonder that Schweitzer called upon Christians to let go of their faith in an unknowable historical Jesus (whose very existence could not even pass the theoretical norms of positive probability) and ‘turn to a new metaphysic.’
This ignores the fact that, like von Ranke, whom Godfrey also loves to quote , Schweitzer was a committed German Christian and was not inveighing against the historicity of Jesus or advocating an end of the search to establish his actual historical coordinates. As such, Schweitzer believed that salvation was by faith, not by works, and historical research was merely a ‘work’. This is what he considered ‘uncertain’ about all historical research. It has nothing to do with what present-day historians or incompetent bloggers mean when they think that something is ‘historically uncertain’, which normally indicates that it may or may not have happened. It is well known that Schweitzer followed Weiss in supposing that Jesus expected the kingdom of God to come in his own time–and was mistaken. Schweitzer deserves to be quoted at length, since his memorable statement of the status quaestiones has dominated serious historical research for a century:
His [Weiss's] Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, published in 1892, is in its own way as important as Strauss’s first Life of Jesus. He lays down the third great alternative which the study of the life of Jesus had to meet….either eschatological or non-eschatological!….The general conception of the kingdom was first grasped by Johannes Weiss. All modern ideas, he insists…must be eliminated from it; when this is done, we arrive at a kingdom of God which is wholly future….He exercises no ‘messianic functions’, but waits, like others, for God to bring about the coming of the kingdom by supernatural means…. But it was not as near as Jesus thought. The impenitence and hardness of heart of a great part of the people, and the implacable enmity of his opponents, at length convinced him that the establishment of the kingdom of God could not yet take place….It becomes clear to him that his own death must be the ransom price….
The setting up of the kingdom was to be preceded by the day of judgement. In describing the messianic glory Jesus makes use of the traditional picture, but he does so with modesty, restraint and sobriety. Therein consists his greatness….
The ministry of Jesus is therefore not in principle different from that of John the Baptist….What distinguishes the work of Jesus from that of the Baptist is only his consciousness of being the Messiah. He awoke to this consciousness at his baptism. But the messiahship which he claims is not a present office; its exercise belongs to the future….
…Reimarus…was the first, and indeed before Johannes Weiss, the only writer to recognise and point out that the teaching of Jesus was purely eschatological….But Weiss places the assertion on an unassailable scholarly basis.”[47]
Now where has all the supposedly historical uncertainty gone? It was never there! In this second passage, Schweitzer was discussing what really happened, and he had no doubts about that at all. His apparent doubts in the much quoted passage above are not historical doubts. They are entirely due to his conviction, which comes indirectly from his Lutheran beginnings, that salvation is by faith, not works, and historical research is a ‘work’ which does not bring salvation.
Genuine historical knowledge, however, restores to theology full freedom of movement! It presents to it the person of Jesus in an eschatological world-view, yet one which is modern through and through because His mighty spirit pervades it.
This Jesus is far greater than the one conceived in modern terms: he is really a superhuman personality. With his death he destroyed the form of his Weltanschauung, rendering his own eschatology impossible. Thereby he gives to all peoples and to all times the right to apprehend him in terms of their thoughts and conceptions, in order that his spirit may pervade their ‘Weltanschauung’ as it quickened and transfigured the Jewish eschatology.”[48]
Future
Successus improborum plures allicit.[50] Carrier slanders scholars with spurious and unqualified accusations such as being ‘insane’ and a ‘liar’ which is merely a reflection of his own n0n-professionalism and inability to engage in critical academic debate. He has no evidence that his claims are accurate. His attacks are entirely personal and usually conducted in the kind of language we would expect after a few rounds at the local. They merely appear to be defensive emotional outursts.
Carrier holds no academic post and the prospect for such is unlikely, a prophecy he would no doubt find preordained in the conspiracy of ’mainstream’ biblical scholarship against the truth of his conclusions. In any case his field is not New Testament or the History of Religion. To date, his doctoral thesis has not been published. How does an author of self published books, which have never been peer reviewed, become renowned? His atheist blog boasts “Richard Carrier is the renowned author of Sense and Goodness without God, Proving History, and Not the Impossible Faith, as well as numerous articles online and in print. His avid fans span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism, the origins of Christianity, and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He has also become a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and the epistemology of history.” One does not generally assume to have ‘expertise’ in areas one is self taught. Carrier does and his egotistical pretences of learning, compromise his claim to credibility further. As Frank Leahy apparently said ‘Egotism is the anaesthetic that dulls the pains of stupidity’.[51]
His self published books follow here:
http://www.amazon.com/Sense-Goodness-Without-God-Metaphysical/dp/1420802933
self published: AuthorHousehttp://www.amazon.com/Why-Am-Not-Christian-Conclusive/dp/1456588850/ref=pd_sim_b_1
self published: CreateSpacehttp://www.amazon.com/Not-Impossible-Faith-Richard-Carrier/dp/0557044642/ref=pd_sim_b_5
self published: Lulu
Doctoral Thesis?? not published.
‘Renowned’? If Richard Carrier had been Jesus at least we’d know how the gospels got published. He has claimed on facebook to have covered “the whole issue [of historical criteria, citing] all the relevant scholarship on why those criteria are all flawed.” He has done neither of these things. His forthcoming volume is called On the Historicity of Jesus Christ. The title alone in fact demonstrates how out of touch with critical scholarship Carrier is. “Christ”?
It was unfortunate that Carrier managed to be invited by Robert M Price onto the Jesus Project. As Bruce Chilton wrote in January 2009
“the Project has focused on an incoherent set of some of the least important questions in scholarship. For example, it keeps asking “Did Jesus exist?” as if that issue had not been raised repeatedly during the past two centuries… the Project has attempted to address questions of critical approach without a thorough grounding in academic study since the eighteenth century. The result is that some of the assertions made by contributors to the Project are not well informed and invoke quests for “objectivity” that seem more at home in nineteenth-century Europe than in twenty-first century America. What is more worrying, actual knowledge of primary sources (and of their languages) does not seem as great among participants in the Project as among Fellows of the Seminar… Fundamentalists are not the only partisans who permit their wishes to cloud what they see and that it takes more than a declaration of “objectivity” to acquire the discipline of reasoning from evidence, both textual and archaeological”.[52]
Chilton accurately identifies flaws which are so deplorably typical of the mythicist approaches to religious texts today.
Delusion is defined according to Carrier by three criteria: certainty (held with absolute conviction), incorrigibilty (not changeable by compelling counter argument or proof to the contrary), and impossibility or falsity of content. These criteria are as characteristic of fundamentalist belief, as they are of atheistic Jesus denial, and Carrier’s atheistic convictions, and self image. It is slightly ironic therefore that he announces during this same talk on Christian Delusion, “I don’t think there’s a problem with being a dick”.[53] If that clownish attitude existed in critical scholarship, academia would be a circus.[54]
In order to continue to advance knowledge and make progress in historical enquiry, we need to extinguish the maladroit methods and bumbling amateurism from scholarship. From the muddled and ignorant delusions of Richard Carrier to the ideological extremes which have lingered too long and still creep into scholarship through the theological seminary corridor.
To ensure the healthy future of critical historical enquiry and continue to inspire the process of constructive debate and analysis, the continued development of new argument and evidence, and encourage the evolution of improved methodological approaches and application through precision and fine tuning, we need to start taking responsibility for maintaining high standards in scholarship.
This will be ensured with expertise brought about by specific specialist training in all aspects of New Testament and religion, including ancient languages and history, accompanied with sophisticated interdisciplinary knowledge.
It seems fitting to return to Albert Schweitzer. Although he is renowned as marking the end of the first Quest for a historical Jesus, it could be argued that he inspired future historians with his insight and attitude, and also with his passion for life, his empathy and dedication to clarity: ”What has been presented as Christianity during these nineteen centuries is only a beginning, full of mistakes, not full blown Christianity springing from the spirit of Jesus… To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.”[55]
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[1] Richard C. Carrier, Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 2012) p.50, with p.301 n.10.
[2] Carrier, Proving History, pp.54-60.
[3] See especially R.D. Aus, Samuel, Saul and Jesus: Three Early Palestinian Jewish Christian Gospel Haggadoth, (Scholar’s Press, 1994) ch. 3, esp. pp. 134-57, with a summary for the general reader at Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of His Life and Teaching, (T&T Clarke, 2010) pp. 447-8.
[4] Carrier, Proving History, p. 60.
[5] Carrier, Proving History, p. 45.
[6] Carrier, Proving History, pp. 11-14.
[7] Carrier, Proving History, pp. 126-69.
[8] Carrier, Proving History, p. 126, quoting J.P. Meier, Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, ABRL), vol I p.168.
[9] Maurice Casey, Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel (Society for New Testament Studies, Monograph Series 102; Cambridge: University Press, 1998); J. G. Crossley, The Date of Mark’s Gospel: Insight from the Law in Earliest Christianity (JSNTSup 266. London: T&T Clark International, 2004).
[10] Carrier, Proving History, p. 317 n. 68.
[11] Joachim Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, translated by Norman Perrin, (S.C.M. Press, 1966) pp. 71-3, utilising older secondary literature in German.
[12] For a fully explanatory summary, see now Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of His Life and Teachings (T&T Clarke, 2010) pp. 415-7, 425-8, 438-47.
[13] Carrier, Proving History, pp. 153-5, with p. 317 n. 68, citing Haim Cohn, The Trial and Death of Jesus (NY: Harper & Row, 1971).
[14] Cohn, Trial, p. 38.
[15] Carrier, Proving History, p. 154.
[16] cf. Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of his Life and Teaching, (T&T Clark, 2010) pp. 191-2, 425-8, 439.
[17] http://tomverenna.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/richard-carrier-bayess-theorem-and-historical-jesus-criteria/
[18] http://www.bibleinterp.com/PDFs/Bayes.pdf
[19] Mark Goodacre, “Criticizing the Criterion of Multiple Attestation: The Historical Jesus and the Question of Sources” in Chris Keith and Anthony LeDonne (eds), Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (T & T Clark, 2012) forthcoming.
[20] Carrier, Proving History, pp. 185-6.
[21] http://www.macdiv.ca/faculty/stanleyporter.html
[22] Stanley Porter, “Jesus and the Use of Greek”, 125 n. 9, repeated in Porter, “EXCURSUS”, 171.
[23] Porter, ‘Jesus and the Use of Greek’, p. 135.
[24] Porter, ‘Jesus and the Use of Greek’, p. 139.
[25] F. García Martínez, ‘Greek Loanwords in the Copper Scroll’, in F. García Martínez & G.P. Luttikhuizen, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome: Studies in Ancient Cultural Interaction in Honour of A.Hilhorst (JSJSup 82. Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 119-45 (121), noting also the absence of Greek loanwords from Qumran Hebrew, other than in the Copper Scroll.
[26] Porter, ‘Jesus and the Use of Greek’, 146-7; ‘EXCURSUS’, 172-3, responding to Casey, ‘In Which Language’, p. 327, and Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel (Society for New Testament Studies, Monograph Series 102; Cambridge: University Press, 1998) p. 66.
[27] M. Chancey, The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (SNTSMS 118. Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 108-9, citing N. Avigad, Beth She‘arim. Report on the Excavations during 1953-1958. Vol. III: Catacombs 12-23 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976): 260-1. Avigad (pp. 124-5, 261) has catacomb 21 as the earliest, dating perhaps from the Herodian period, but perhaps later, and with no inscriptions.
[28] Porter, ‘EXCURSUS’, p. 176: see now especially M. Chancey, ‘The Cultural Milieu of Ancient Sepphoris’, NTS 47 (2001): 127-45; id., Myth of a Gentile Galilee; id., Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus (SNTSMS 134. Cambridge: CUP, 2005).
[29] http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/667/comment-page-1#comment-6583
[30] Carrier, Proving History, pp. 185-6.
[31] http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/667/comment-page-1#comment-6839
[32] E. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man: The Case for a Mythical Jesus (Ottawa: Age of Reason, 2009), pp. 60-61.
[33] Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p. 60.
[34] Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p. 61.
[35] Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p. 61.
[36] Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p. 62.
[37] Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p. 62.
[38] P. Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 240; quoted out of context by atheist blogger Neil Godfrey: http://vridar.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/applying-sound-historical-methodology-to-james-the-brother-of-the-lord/#comments
[39] http://ntwrong.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/hector-avalos-blogs/#comment-632
[40] http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/ver368004.shtml
[41] See Casey’s essay in this series: and further on Joel Watts’ blog, with comments by Casey and myself, http://unsettledchristianity.com/2012/04/the-seven-fungusmentals-of-mythticism/. Casey’s comments include a refutation of Verenna.
[42] http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/667/
[43] http://vridar.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/oh-dear-what-half-a-million-books-thrown-on-the-floor-by-a-earthquake-look-like/
[44] http://vridar.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/reasons-not-to-doubt-the-historicity-of-jesus-raising-the-daughter-of-jairus/#comment-17674
[45] Against the Heavenly Prophets: In the Matter of Images and Sacrament, (1525) Vol. 40, Martin Luther’s Works: Church and Ministry II (Translated by Conrad Bergendof) p. 185.
[46] http://vridar.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/fight-club-historical-jesus-scholars-take-on-the-christ-mythicists/
[47] Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (First Complete Edition. Translated by W. Montgomery, J.R.Coates, Susan Cupitt and John Bowden from the German Geschichte der Leben-Jesus-Forschung, published 1913 by J.C.B.Mohr, Tübingen. Ed. John Bowden. London: SCM, 2000), pp. 198-201.
[48] Albert Schweitzer: The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, translated by Walter Lowrie (Dodd Mead and Co, New York, 1914) p. 251.
[49] Albert Schweitzer, Ehrfurcht vor den Tieren: Ein Lesebuch, (München, Beck, 2011) p. 22.
[50] The success of the wicked encourages more: Phaedrus, Fables, II. 3. 7.
[51] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Leahy appropriately Wikipedia for stupid people.
[52] http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/chilton1.shtml
[53] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28PjVaW4kKI (50.47).
[54] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28PjVaW4kKI
[55] Albert Schweitzer: Out of my Life and Thought, (John Hopkins University Press, 1998) pp 241-2.
_____
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Published: May 22, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: amateurism in biblical studies : atheism : Bayes theorem : Bible : historical jesus : internet scholars : Myth theiry : religion : Richard Carrier ..
218 Responses to “The Jesus Process: Stephanie Louise Fisher”
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THE JESUS PROCESS (c) « The New Oxonian says:
May 22, 2012 at 7:32 am
[...] Stephanie Louise Fisher, “An Exhibition of Incompetence: Trickery, Dickery, Bayes” [...]
Reply
ROO BOOKAROO
May 22, 2012 at 10:08 am
Absolutely disappointed by the space devoted to acrimonious vituperations and empty admonitions. A lot of empty language (which she may feel loaded with “meaning”), as in:
“To ensure the healthy future of critical historical enquiry and continue to inspire the process of constructive debate and analysis, the continued development of new argument and evidence, and encourage the evolution of improved methodological approaches and application through precision and fine tuning, we need to start taking responsibility for maintaining high standards in scholarship.”
Superficial demolition job on Richard Carrier. Her message: If you don’t know Aramaic, don’t pretend to understand anything about the Gospels. Leave it to the only few experts who do.
Maurice Casey’s article had much more meat and less fluff. Even if his background research on those infamous mythicists was carried by this lady. LIke Ehrman’s own background research must probably have been provided by his cohort of graduate students.
This lady knows nothing of the misery of PhDs in America: “Why So Many Ph.D.s Are On Food Stamps”. Most PhDs will never get a real teaching career.
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/15/152751116/why-so-many-ph-d-s-are-on-food-stamps?ft=3&f=111787346&sc=nl&cc=es-20120520
In addition, she could have found out that Carrier’s PhD was in History of Philosophy, making his prospects for an academic career doubly problematic. So he may have made a smart survival choice by trying to carve himself a place in the fuzzy, but public, field of Christianity origins.
Reply
stephanie louise fisher
May 22, 2012 at 12:50 pm
“This lady”? :-) ha.
Reply
stephanie louise fisher
May 22, 2012 at 1:24 pm
Roo Buckaroo, thank you for drawing attention to the fact that Carrier’s unpublished doctoral thesis is in Ancient History. It is quoted above in the last section of my brief essay, within his blog self promotion: “His avid fans span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University…” followed by all the areas he fancies himself as a self taught specialist. I also expressed the fact that he is not qualified in New Testament studies earlier in the essay.
Reply
Mike Wilson
May 22, 2012 at 3:55 pm
Great work one and all. I’m getting to like Casey the more I read of his ideas. When time allows I hope to read his book on the historical Jesus. I agree with his position that just because Luke doesn’t use Matthew doesn’t mean he was unaware of it, he very well could have thought it to be spurious. I also agree that the popular post 70 date of Mark based on the prophecy is not iron clad. Given the temperament of the time lots of people may have been expecting a Jewish war with Rome, and it is true that Mark’s prophecy is hardly specific enough for anyone to conclude that it was made in hind sight. Also, the fact that people took the pseudo-graphical Apocalypses to be genuine no doubt means that contemporary would be prophets would have also made their own apocalypses.
Regarding Buckaroo, is he suggesting that you ought not to criticize Carrier because he needs to whore out his PhD to buy bread? Fuck him, if he can’t get honest university work the Army is still hiring.
rjosephhoffmann
May 22, 2012 at 4:04 pm
Not to intervene and certainly not to correct my colleague Steph but I believe Roo (is there a Big Roo and Little Roo, or is mum’s name Kanga?), I think his point was that in fact Carrier can be absolved of knowing anything about history because his PhD was in the history pf philosophy rather than that dreary stuff about dates, names, places, and events, and the like. Somehow, this came as a relief to me. On the other hand, per above: this is not what he says about himself. So which is it?
ROO BOOKAROO
May 23, 2012 at 5:05 am
I’m even disappointed by the quality of your ballyhooed “research”. What you call research is a compilation of quick pickings from the Web, without any additional outside checking.
Real definitive research would have involved an email to the Registry of the graduate School at Columbia, or the chairman of the History Department, just to ask for the title of Carrier’s thesis for instance. But you never went to any such trouble, for sure. You’re happy with your blank condemnation statements as if they expressed some truths that we had never suspected.
You could also have sent an email directly to Carrier asking for information or confirmation. That too, you never did.
I think that Carrier’s Ph.D. thesis was in history of philosophy, probably on a subject of ancient Greek philosophy (my guess), which is intimately connected with the field of ancient Greek literature and religion. Carrier’s final degree was a History Ph.D from the History Dep’t of Columbia.
This is a field infinitely more complex and vast than the field of Christian origins, with has only a pretty limited stock of primary sources, a limited gallery of original characters, and only an immensity of subjective interpretations.
Christianity scholars have a relatively easy life compared to any research in ancient Greek civilization. My own favorite author in this field remains Gilbert Murray.
Similarly, in 1930, Alvin Boyd Kuhn had obtained his Ph.D. in History from Columbia with a thesis on “Theosophy: A Modern Revival of the Ancient Wisdom” (at the remarkable age of 50!)
The Columbia Dep’t of History must have granted quite a few similar Ph.Ds. But only an inquiry with the right office at Columbia could provide data and statistics.
What you present as “research” is, I suspect, superficial culling on the Internet, which certainly is valuable, but remains only the first step of the effort, and not much more. It is too simplistic and secondary to have final scholarly value without verification and authentification from original sources.
rjosephhoffmann
May 23, 2012 at 2:27 pm
Roo writes: “This [ancient history?] is a field infinitely more complex and vast than the field of Christian origins, with has only a pretty limited stock of primary sources, a limited gallery of original characters, and only an immensity of subjective interpretations. Christianity scholars have a relatively easy life compared to any research in ancient Greek civilization.”
This is absolute nonsense. A field whose members have to study everything from the Qumran scrolls to the Nag Hammadi papyri in Coptic and a thousand years of patristic literature in about five languages? I am embarrassed for you.
The Jesus Process on The New Oxonian | Ge??aµµ??a says:
May 22, 2012 at 12:08 pm
[...] Louise Fischer, “An Exhibition of Incompetence: Trickery, Dickery, Bayes.” Share this:FacebookTwitterE-mail Dit bericht werd geplaatst in Bijbel, English, [...]
Reply
Jeffery Jay Lowder
May 22, 2012 at 12:59 pm
I’ve posted a brief defense of the applicability of Bayes’ theorem to historical claims here:
http://secularoutpost.infidels.org/2012/05/is-bayess-theorem-irrelevant-to-history.html
Reply
stephanie louise fisher
May 22, 2012 at 8:58 pm
Interesting “defence” but it does not contribute anything new or demonstrate how a mathematical theorem is relevant the complex historical data. You make a claim and contradict the conclusions here, without providing evidence and argument.
Reply
Jeffery Jay Lowder
May 23, 2012 at 3:30 am
(1) Inferences based upon historical data, including complex historical data, involve uncertainty. (This is the essence of the first paragraph, where I said that T’s report is at best evidence that E occurred.)
(2) Uncertain inferences are by nature probabilistic, i.e., the strength of the evidence for a conclusion can be measured as the probability of the conclusion conditional upon the evidence. (This was the first 3 sentences of the 2nd paragraph.)
(3) Therefore, conditional probability is relevant to inferences based upon historical data, including complex historical data. (3rd sentence of 2nd paragraph)
(4) Bayes’ Theorem can be derived from the axioms of the probability calculus and the definition of conditional probability. (last sentence of 2nd paragraph)
(5) Therefore, Bayes’ Theorem is relevant to inferences based upon historical data, including complex historical data. (last sentence of 2nd paragraph)
To expand on (5), logically (inductively) correct inferences based upon historical data, including complex historical data, must conform to the pattern of probability relations expressed by Bayes’ Theorem. I freely grant that one can “do history” without having ever heard of Bayes’ Theorem, much less use it. But that doesn’t deny the point that Bayes’s Theorem is *relevant*, since any logically (inductively) correct inferences will conform to the pattern of probability relations expressed by Bayes’ Theorem.
rjosephhoffmann
May 23, 2012 at 10:35 am
JJL:
You begin with the “necessarily true” tautology that ” Inferences based upon historical data, including complex historical data, involve uncertainty.” I understand how probabilism works.
1. Neither historical data nor especially complex historical data is quantifed in this assertion [I won't argue differences between assumptions, assertions, prior assumptions and premises here, but they are often tossed around interchangeably]. What counts as complex historical data?
2. To arrive at the point where Bayes might be applicable, there are technical preconditions: To educe such data, even if it assumed that documents like gospels contain complex historical data, linguistic, textual, provenantial and chronological conditions apply. These are lower order conditions involving the nature and state of the evidence itself; higher order conditions involve the training and skills of the interpreter or analyst, just as in the sciences. These are hermeneutical and “skill” sets that affect the epistemic conditions under which basic assumptions are formed. In Bayes, these assumptions should become part of the calculus, although they are mot made explicit at any stage.
3. Bayes attempts to compensate for this by frontloading (your contention) that “Uncertain inferences are by nature probabilistic, i.e., the strength of the evidence for a conclusion can be measured as the probability of the conclusion conditional upon the evidence.” This of course is also true because it is tautological: something is true (or probably true) if the evidence adduced in its favor shows it to be true, allowing for the nature/quality of the evidence. This sounds good–especially a word like probabilistic–but it is simply the philosopher’s way of saying that every inference is defeasible based upon the conditions that apply in forming assumptions. (Every student in basic logic knows that a conclusion is valid (argumentatively sound) no matter how false as long as the terms are distributed correctly in the two premises.).Bayes turns this into values for probability of occurrence and based on the (often fatally flawed) assumptions that have been frontloaded into the equation can then declare the game over and the conclusion unarguable. But this isn’t history; it’s a parlor game.
4. Another, crueler way of saying this would be to say that Bayes fails because the way it will work for Richard Carrier, lacking as he does the technical skills to form the assumptions that would lead to greater or lesser confidence in the probability of a conclusion, is very different from the way it would work for a Maurice Casey, who can bring with him a greater degree of sophistication in satisfying the technical requirements under which such premises can be formed. Bayes may be an atttempt to level the methodological playing field to permit Carrier to play ball, but in fact, rightly deconstructed, it simply calls attention to how uneven the field is and how difficult it is to achieve certainty.
J. Quinton
May 23, 2012 at 1:01 pm
If you are dealing with uncertainty, and building arguments that depend on those uncertainties, then you have to follow the laws of probability. Even if you make educated guesses on “complex historical data”, the rules of probability still apply.
Case in point: The princieple of falsifiability follows necessarily from Bayes’ Theorem. It’s not just a handy demarcation between science and non-science, but a way of separating a more probable hypothesis from a less probable hypothesis (wouldn’t it be nice to know if mythicists were positing unfalsifiable interpretations of evidence…).
Extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence? That is Bayes’ Theorem; the Humean principle that Dr. Hoffmann alluded to in his essay ([a story] even more incredible than the story they are trying to debunk) itself follows necessarily from Bayes’ Theorem.
Rejecting such a ubituitous and powerful tool just because someone you don’t like (or whose conclusions you disagree with) is using it is likely to do yourself a disservice. Just like you implicitly use formal logic correctly when you reason and argue correctly, you also implicitly use Bayesian epistemology correctly when you reason and argue correctly. It can only help if you become consciously aware of these tools.
Jeffery Jay Lowder
May 23, 2012 at 1:25 pm
RJH:
You wrote:
“1. Neither historical data nor especially complex historical data is quantifed in this assertion [I won't argue differences between assumptions, assertions, prior assumptions and premises here, but they are often tossed around interchangeably].”
What does “this” refer to in your first sentence?
“What counts as complex historical data?”
I was re-using Fisher’s wording, so I’ll defer to her to define it. My point is that data is data: it makes no difference to BT whether the data is “simple” or “complex.”
“2. To arrive at the point where Bayes might be applicable, there are technical preconditions: To educe such data, even if it assumed that documents like gospels contain complex historical data, linguistic, textual, provenantial and chronological conditions apply. ”
I am happy to agree with you that “linguistic, textual, provenantial and chronological conditions apply.” In fact, nothing I’ve written contradicts this. In fact, I would think that all of the conditions would need to be included in the background information (B), the evidence to be explained (E), or both, in a proper application of BT to a historical issue.
“These are lower order conditions involving the nature and state of the evidence itself; higher order conditions involve the training and skills of the interpreter or analyst, just as in the sciences. These are hermeneutical and “skill” sets that affect the epistemic conditions under which basic assumptions are formed. In Bayes, these assumptions should become part of the calculus, although they are mot made explicit at any stage.”
I see your point. In that sense, I guess you could describe BT as a sort of “high-level” methodology which specifies the questions that need to be asked without telling you how to get the answers. That doesn’t invalidate the relevance of BT to history, but it does show that BT, by itself, is insufficient to address historical questions. Again, I am happy to agree and nothing I’ve written contradicts that.
“3. Bayes attempts to compensate for this by frontloading (your contention) that “Uncertain inferences are by nature probabilistic, i.e., the strength of the evidence for a conclusion can be measured as the probability of the conclusion conditional upon the evidence.” This of course is also true because it is tautological: something is true (or probably true) if the evidence adduced in its favor shows it to be true, allowing for the nature/quality of the evidence. This sounds good–especially a word like probabilistic–but it is simply the philosopher’s way of saying that every inference is defeasible based upon the conditions that apply in forming assumptions. (Every student in basic logic knows that a conclusion is valid (argumentatively sound) no matter how false as long as the terms are distributed correctly in the two premises.).Bayes turns this into values for probability of occurrence and based on the (often fatally flawed) assumptions that have been frontloaded into the equation can then declare the game over and the conclusion unarguable. But this isn’t history; it’s a parlor game.”
I agree there is a sort of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ risk with BT. The fact that BT can be abused by “frontloading” “(often fatally flawed) assumptions” is not of obvious relevance to the fact that uncertain inferences based upon evidence must conform to the pattern of probability relations specified by BT.
“Bayes may be an atttempt to level the methodological playing field to permit Carrier to play ball,”
My defense of the relevance of BT to history has nothing to do with Carrier. Attributing motives like this–either to Carrier or to others (?)–is not helpful.
“but in fact, rightly deconstructed,it simply calls attention to how uneven the field is and how difficult it is to achieve certainty.”
I agree that BT can show how difficult it is to achieve certainty. It can also do more than that. Again, it can be used to specify the pattern of probability relations that must exist for logically (inductively) correct inferences to be made.
Regards,
Jeff
Soloview
May 22, 2012 at 2:52 pm
It seems there are only two kinds of students of the NT texts in Ms Fisher’s world: unassailable scholarly sages and ‘self-promoting pedlars of incompetence’ with ‘total inability to understand’. Some of her deep thoughts and sommersaults in logic are truly a thing to behold:
“Cohn was a German Jew who emigrated to Israel, where he
became Attorney General of Israel, and Minister of Justice,….
He was a member of the “T’hila” Movement for Israeli Jewish
secularism. It is culturally ludicrous to expect anyone like Cohn to
give a fair account of a New Testament narrative, especially one
which has played such an appalling role in the history of Christian
anti-Semitism. ”
It is not at all clear what Ms. Fisher finds in Mr Cohn credentials that makes it “culturally ludicrous” to expect an intelligent – independent – view of NT from him. Lost a connecting thread perhaps ? Another triple salto with sure-footed landing:
“Are [the synoptics] pristine, objective, verbatim accounts of the life
of Jesus? Hardly. Are they infused with assumptions about who
Jesus is and approximations of what he said? Yes. Can we
find “heresiological”, or more properly controversial material in
them—material intended to defend a sketchy proto-orthodox
teaching about Jesus against less acceptable beliefs?
Of course—as John Fenton showed,especially in relation to
Matthew’s gospel. These considerations, however, are the
surest proof that Jesus really lived and that the
preservers of the Jesus-tradition knew what they were
defending: they were squeamish about the divine man
Christology [sic] that dominated in much of the church, and
is at least “available” in the gospel of John. ”
This is precisely this type of vacuous rhetoric that invites deep skepticism if not outright scorn. Why should this kind of “surest proof” sway me one inch from believing the gospels to be allegorical narratives, or as Jan Wojcik called them, samples of “narrative gnosticism” ? Why should I not read Ms. Fisher’s method of reading the texts, an excellent illustration of what A.N. Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”? Why was Jesus first not an agreed- on form of personifying what the early Christ visionaries believed was the holy spirit of God that was abroad announcing the end of times ? Is it because Steph Fisher’s mentor invented yet another form of a (not yet) academically vetted testimonial that Jesus walked on earth and was recorded early in yet another non-existent, unprovable screed, tablet or plurality thereof ? Why should I take them seriously when the best they can do is self-serving pap like :
Casey: ” I hope…that the forthcoming book by Stephanie Fisher will
establish it (a new theory of gospel sourcing) beyond
reasonable doubt as the normative view of New Testament
scholars. ” (Jesus, p. 80)
“A normative view of NT scholars” ? This statement best testifies of a seriously impaired sense of not just academic standards (since when one comments on as-yet unpublished work ?) but an elementary struggle with reality. Ms Fisher so far overwhelms only the intellectually destitute with her wayward Jesus Process of thinking, to wit:
“All competent and critical New Testament scholars investigating the history of early Christianity, should be competent in methodology in order to pursue academic enquiry.”
Mind-boggling.
Best,
Jiri
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 22, 2012 at 3:48 pm
Jiri retorts: “Why should this kind of “surest proof” sway me one inch from believing the gospels to be allegorical narratives, or as Jan Wojcik called them, samples of “narrative gnosticism” ?
I suspect nothing will sway you as you are determined not to be swayed. But commenting only on Wojick’s illiterate view of the gospels as “narrative gnosticism” I suggest that you prefer reading fairy tales to real history. Wojcik knew zilch about the modern study of gnosticism and would have called breakfast a myth if it was lunchtime. Try to do better and read more carefully. The very fact that you cite Wojcik as a reliable standard authority is embarrassing enough, were it not for the fact that this is exactly the kind of silliness that all mythicists do, stretching for supporting footnotes into the land of non-specialists. If you want (to repeat) the best proof that the gospels are not allegories, get a cheap copy of the Nag Hammadi Library in English (no Coptic needed) and read through it. Then after a breath of fresh air, sit down and read the gospel of Mark. If that doesn’t cure you, nothing will.
Reply
Soloview
May 22, 2012 at 6:19 pm
The thing is this: There is this bright guy, Mark Vonnegut, the son of a famous American writer, who is an MD and who like myself has a challenge called “bi-polar disorder”. (I am a retired computer engineer). He wrote a memoir called “Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So” asking why there are not more questions about Early Christianity. Do you understand what he is saying ? I bet you haven’t a clue.
Not because you have no personal familiarity with the phenomena which the texts advertize and seek to interpret, but because you don’t even know that should know something about that. You will read in Mark 10:46 that Jesus and Co went in and out of Jericho without incident, and you have no way to interpret that. (It’s not because of Secret Mark I pray you; Mark waves the same flag with Bethany 11:11-12). You have no idea why the trip to Bethsaida in 6:45 – with Jesus in the boat ends – in Gennesaret. You are at a loss to explain the defiance of the ‘multitude’ in 7:36 : ‘he charged them to tell no one; but the more he charged them the more they proclaimed (him)’. You probably even think there was a multitude. How about Jesus curing Jarius daughter and people laughing when he says she is only sleeping. Why would they do that ? Would that be the expected human reaction in the context for which it is suggested ? Ie, human life believed lost and a hope for it is rekindled by the expert brought into the house for that very purpose. Ha, ha, ha ! That’s funny ! How about people so busy when they have Jesus around they cannot even eat ? Hello ? Any idea what this alludes to ? I bet not ! Bartimaeus throwing off his cloak when asked to join ? Not either, good. Jesus tells his apostolic angels to go by themselves to a secluded place, but everyone knows where they are going and arrive there before them. No problem: true story ! And then the Lord shortening the days of the elect (it appears it already happened) as a way to save them through the future tribulations ? Makes perfect sense in Aramaic, I bet !
Now all of this – and there is more, trust me – argues vigorously against Mark writing actual events. It looks rather obvious he was writing for his friends, potential converts and pulling the leg of accredited scholars of his time who were wont to swoop on the Jesus apparitions from Jerusalem and declare his (!) cures the work of the prince of devils.
Yep, I have read Mark and made my independent assessment of him. Over twenty four years. Final verdict: He is a Pauline allegorist. The women running away from the tomb without telling anyone anything is a way to assert the primacy of the Paul’s gospel over the claims of the traditions associated with the disciples. The missing body in the tomb is a pun carried over from 4:10, ‘those around Jesus’ (hoi peri Iesou) when he is alone (kata monas) are the ‘body of Christ’ as per 1 Cor 12:27. They are in the mythical Galilee. The disciples, or rather their followers, are asked to accept the cross and join !
Don’t believe it ! Gnostic black magic ! Sure, sure ! Except you see, there are the statistical odds against finding the second half of the hidden Malachi 3:1 reference (from Mk 1:2) in the messenger’s reporting in the tomb. What would they be, I wonder, if Mark was reporting and not composing : one in a million, two in ten million ? Oh, you have not found the reference was explicit enough ? What a pity ! We could have had a reasoned conversation.
Best,
Jiri
ETA: ok, I give you the solution for 7:36. The ‘disobedience’ relates to glossolalia. The multitude cannot stop the praise of Jesus, because the visions of him themselves are ‘apo kyriou pneumatos’ (2 Cor 3:2). Typical ecstatic humour of Mark !
Rabbie
June 4, 2012 at 12:03 pm
You might demonstrate your faith in the non-allegorical nature of Mark by adopting several pet rattlesnakes, allowing them to slither freely around you as you write your posts. Things might have gone better for a recently deceased charismatic preacher had he not taken Mark “au pied de la lettre”.
rjosephhoffmann
June 4, 2012 at 12:17 pm
@Rabbie: yes, of course: we were all taught in our graduate classes to take Mark literally. I regularly let my children play with black mambas while they were growing up just to test the word of God. In fact, I used Bayes’s Theorem to decide the probability of their getting bit, and then, of course, of their dying should they get bit. I kept getting .50 because the verses occur in the longer ending of Mark and there is a 50% chance it was added after Mark, and then of course only a 50% chance that Mark had ever seen a snake. Taking account of this, the solar eclipse, and the fact that I had had tacos for dinner and rushed through the equation, I finally was able to push the envelope to get 75% prob. that they would survive a venomous attack. God rest their souls.
stephanie louise fisher
May 22, 2012 at 8:45 pm
Repeat and contradict. Your comment is indeed mind boggling Jiri. It fails to have apprehended the main points outlined above. It fails to contribute anything helpful to the conversation. And Jiri, I’m an Antipodean and we don’t believe in ‘mentors’ – they’re dangerously close to tall poppies. The little idea that I have a ‘mentor’ is constructed in your own imagination to satisfy your own beliefs. Your inability to perceive bias is probably a reflection of your own
Reply
Soloview
May 23, 2012 at 8:53 pm
Steph,
do you really, truly, believe that when people see a quickie off-the-cuff essay titled ‘An Exhibition of Incopetence: Trickery Dickery Bayes’ they’ll figure, ‘Aha, Steph wants to stimulate a rational conversation’ ? Really, truly ? Because you see, it looks to this former dummy-half more like a regular ‘haka’.
stephanie louise fisher
May 24, 2012 at 12:27 am
and what do you mean by a ‘regular haka’? It sounds not just culturally insensitive but a massively ignorant racist slur.
stephanie louise fisher
May 22, 2012 at 8:54 pm
Jiri, you repeat and contradict. Your comment is indeed mind boggling. It fails to apprehend any main points outlined above or contribute anything relevant of helpful to the conversion. Indeed, it seems to reflect a lack of elementary skills of reading comprehension. And Jiri, I am an Antipodean and I don’t believe in ‘mentors’ or titles. The idea of ‘mentor’ creeps dangerously close to the idea of tall poppies. Your failure to recognise bias where it exists probably reflects your own.
stephanie
Reply
Grog
May 23, 2012 at 12:22 am
I’m really glad you said this twice, because I didn’t get it the first time.
stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 12:40 pm
Not surprising.
brettongarcia
May 26, 2012 at 1:47 pm
Is the “debate” between Historicists and Mythicists, really an objective debate?
The language, the emotional tone and axis of blogs, is not really objective scholarly debate; though ideas are often advanced, deeper underneath it is all to often, normally, a simple contest of adolescent egos, rivals. One in which the players all see themselves in terms that are finally, rather too much like cartoon superheroes: heros vanquishing evil villains. “Brilliant” heroes vanquishing “fools” and so forth. But of course? Tthere is something far from scholarship in the prevailing ego contest, fo the internet,
And in fact, there is something even psychologially dangerous, in this self-vs.-others agonism of Internet blogs: there is something that feeds into/creates more serious disorders. My own theory of one “antipodean” mode for example – Manic Depressive disorder – sees it as stemming from an exaggerated sense of self. And for that matter, sees it in nearly biblical or ethical terms: as beginning with 1) simple Vanity. With an exaggerated sense of self, of the self as powerful hero, in the manic phase. But 2) then, after having committed excesses of Vanity, and errors of overselfconfidence in that phase? Next comes the depressive phase. Which need not be seen as hopelessly inexplicable or arcane. But which I see as … simply natural sense of Remorse; or contrition. Which is called “depression.” But is more properly, simply? Remorse.
In the lower realms of academe there is a sense especially, that the most erudite voice is the superhero, that is always right. And that always wins; since the erudite voice knows the rules of The Game better than anyone, and plays by them better than the untutored. And yet however? There are so many cases where the best knowledge base that we have is by no means enough. So that the most academic and erudite discussion, amounts to mere wheel-spinning. And the showest exihibitions? Failing, soon lead to simple … Remorse.
The task of vanquishing “fools,” and “miscreants,” and evil mythicists … interfaces all too completely, with the basic character of the Internet. Or for that matter, with a moral, CHristian evil: Vanity. One hopes that this character is presented in so obvious a way on blogs, exaggerated, in order to be obviously, self-parodying.
Though if the perpetrator is experiencing Remorse later on? Undoubtedly it was all too real, for all too many participants.
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 4:26 pm
@Garcia: This is thoughtful. I can assure you that what precipitates this discussion–which is not a debate because the sides are not matched as they would be in serious academic interchange–is the increasing adventurism of the mythtics and their repeated sniping at scholarship. Many of us on what is being called the “historicist” side of the discussion are concerned that left unchallenged, a whole generation of people who get most of their information from the internet will simply assume that the idea of the historical Jesus is equivalent to belief in a divine savior. The propositions are entirely different and openly acknowledged by members of the profession–many of whom–myself included–do not mind being called unbelievers. But “belief” is not the issue here: it is how historical sources are handled. Is the internet the best place for serious discussion–of course not, and Professor Casey has said as much in his opening remarks. Should scholars respond to suggestions that a profession–to quote Mr Carrier-is “fucked up”– when, as far as anyone can determine, the religious studies and cognate departments at Chicago, Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Nottingham and Stanford are chugging along just fine and turning out methodologically sophisticated scholars. Of course. There is no reason to be moralistic about this and to accuse people who are stating confidently the facts as they know them of ‘acting superior.” Scholarship is not an internet debate: you are right about that. But ideas that can be substantiated are superior ideas. What I am discovering is that this discussion is long overdue, and if it prevents even five people from accepting the appeals to unreason and superstitious reading of texts using discredited “authorities” a century old, it will have been worth the trouble. Let me say also for the benefits of those who are just looking in on tis discussion and may surprised at its tone: atheist like to say that the belief in God is irrational and that atheism is therefore a reasonable position. I’ve often said, that is a perfectly valid position to take and has to be argued philosophically. There is NOTHING remotely similar between that position and the “belief” that Jesus of Nazareth was an historical individual. Philosophy and especially logic play implicit roles in this discussion, but they are not the primary tools for deciding the question. The fact is, we need the most efficient, simplest, and most plausible explanation for the beginning of the Christian movement which developed not in a haze but in the full glare of antiquity. Our primary sources offer a sufficient if loaded explanation for that event. The mythtics offer us jello.
Ananda
May 22, 2012 at 9:49 pm
“At no point in such a process does a critical scholar throw his or her hands in the air and pronounce a fatwah on all preceding efforts”
Well Stephanie that was so funny and so true for not until we let go of the literal letter can we begin to appreciate the life of the spirit.
Now this matter of Joseph’s breakfast might just take on a new light if one were performing deep self inquiry , “Is the self that had breakfast the same as the self now eating lunch” Yep a brand new critter is having lunch and we can take Paul literally here……2 Cor. 5:17; Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. You can be very thankful we are not in a historical Christ……lol….. It’s the Magic of ordinary life ! We are all mythical creatures for nobody is who they “THINK” they are.
Actually it’s the NHC which may actually assist in opening the understanding of the spiritual allegories in the canon.
Stephanie says;
“But all extant Gospels are already very late stages of the “Gospel tradition”, the Gospel having already been preached for nearly an entire lifetime across three continents before any Gospel was written”
I wonder who‘s gospel’s you are thinking about, maybe Maricon or Valentinus , Cerinthus, or perhaps even Philo and Basilides. Bet ya Simon Magus, Apollos and Cephas had mighty gospels as well. I would even contend that Ecsebius merged four entirely different traditions into one universal ring to rule them all. Perhaps you consider Paul the end all which could live and guide a community entirely without the gospels as Maricon did without the OT. How many pagan oral traditions were whirling around in the soup as well?
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Ananda
May 29, 2012 at 9:47 am
Much Expanded……………
.Alogi
Apellianists
Artemonites
Basilidians
> Cainites
Capocratians
Cerdonians
Cerinthians
Cleobians
Dosithereans
Ebionites
Elchasaites
Encrites
Manicheans
Marcelinians
Marcionites
Menandrians
Montanists
> Nazarenes
Nicolatians
> Noetians
Novatians
Ophites
Praxeans
Proto-Orthodox
Saturninians
Sethians
Simonians
Theodotians
Valentinians
Thanks to Jake Jones IV at Jesus Mysteries
http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/JesusMysteries/messages/62654?threaded=1&m=e&var=1&tidx=1
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rjosephhoffmann
May 29, 2012 at 1:00 pm
Nice list; what’s it for? Is the girlfriend a myth, too? Darn
Ananda
May 29, 2012 at 2:03 pm
“Nice list; what’s it for? Is the girlfriend a myth, too? Darn”
Well,I was thinking again, of that old Latin saying; “Never less alone than when alone”
The proto-orthodox were not alone………………lol
neodecaussade
May 22, 2012 at 10:19 pm
Reblogged this on Neodecaussade’s Weblog and commented:
Excellent read.
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stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 12:27 am
Thank you. :)
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alnitak
May 23, 2012 at 2:00 am
“Atheist blogger Richard Carrier, has now added to his passionate flushings of incompetence with another book,…”
I’m afraid you lost me at that early point. If you are a reputable academic (sorry, I don’t know -your- credentials, for all your shaming of his) then you have not only the weight of an in-depth formal education in this or related subjects coupled to years of thought, discussion, and analysis, but you are also trained to communicate your ideas effectively. Surely you are prepared to deal concisely with the facts of Carrier’s presentation, firmly but without rancor. It should be easy if he is as inept as you imply. I gather that he used has used intemperate language in the past; perhaps that fault of his is worth a footnote, perhaps not.
I am perhaps overly affected by my own field, biology, where ideas are dealt with in egalitarian fashion, and even the most rank amateur can present an idea or ask a question that provokes discussion, sometimes among the most learned in their field. In a field like mine, “having written several books” often equates to “being learned about -past- research.”
I will try to more than scan your essay, but it is made difficult by the hyperbolic tone, which has been used by authors less knowledgeable than yourself to hide insufficiency of thought or fact.
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ROO BOOKAROO
May 23, 2012 at 9:59 am
Alnitak, that is a great point.
This lady Fisher does not realize that she undermines her own message (assuming there’s one) with her abundance of vitriol, because there’s so much of it that it’s hard to see what else is there she wants to communicate.
It often seems that her only satisfaction is to throw aspersions on the victims of her anger. Even after having read her stuff completely, I have a hard time remembering the points she is trying to make, whereas I remember more distinctly what Casey is trying to prove.
For your amusement, and possible use in the future, note that scholars and debaters of the 19th century had some cute, Latin expressions to express those two aspects inherent in most debates on religion: If your opponent criticized you without even having read or understood your stuff, you would say that he/she attacked you “sine studio” (without any examination), which you would answer, in your high-minded nobility of mind, “sine ira” (without anger, or resentment).
This lady Fisher could try to use this “sine ira” mode of response. But it goes against her grain and freedom of expression. It is not possible to switch centuries so easily.
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stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 12:48 pm
Roo: It is astonishing that you seem not to have evolved since the nineteenth century, and joined the modern convention of addressing human beings equally without being sexually discriminating and derogatory to boot.
stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Carrier makes unqualified pronouncements without sound argument or evidence and accompanies it with plenty of vitriol against New Testament scholars and their work. I am in favour of discussion and debate and interested people being involved. However this is not how Carrier approaches the study of history. I am glad you appreciated Professor Hoffmann’s essay so much. I did too.
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ROO BOOKAROO
May 23, 2012 at 2:58 pm
Alnitak:
You were hoping for fair dealings “without rancor”, that is “sine ira.” However, the opposite, “cum ira” is this lady Fisher’s modus vivendi. She seems to thrive only when venting out invectives, derogations and deprecations.
Coming from we don’t know where, she suddenly arrogates to herself the right to “express the fact that [Carrier] is not qualified in New Testament studies”, that’s right, as if she’s been designated by the Holy Spirit to declare incompetences and adjudicate qualifications about who can do what.
After 15 years of studies, he’d been waiting for her kind of final endorsement, and, surprise, he’s finally been given his pink slip from the profession. How is he going to make a living and support his wife and children?
That this is promoted as a site for learned discussions of Christian interpretations, when it is in fact a site for pouring out hostility on certain visitors and scholars she despises like Richard Carrier or Earl Doherty (a harmless, aging man who’s not even given a modicum of respect for his silver hair) is discouraging. I was naively expecting quality of tone, and some depth of insight, but nothing like this no-holds-barred mano a mano. Even Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, was more gracious in style than this modern Fury.
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Neil Godfrey’s response 1 to Maurice Casey and Stephanie Fisher « Vridar says:
May 23, 2012 at 2:06 am
[...] on his blog ‘I’m a librarian, but I never see or touch a book.’[43] (Stephanie Fisher, An Exhibitions of Incompetence . . . accessed [...]
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stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 11:45 am
Our comments Neil, were slightly tongue and cheek. I didn’t find it the post accidentally. I noted it at the time. Yes I commented at the time about the benefits outweighing the risks of living on a faultline but could hardly forget your light hearted post which was a consequence of an earthquake that subsequently devastated the lives of many people, some of whom I know. I also took note of that particular post because it was ironic considering the fact that you constantly misrepresent scholarship you claim to have thoroughly read. Hence literal interpretation: tongue and cheek to ‘explain’ your misrepresentation of scholarship conveniently.
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stephanie louise fisher
May 24, 2012 at 11:40 am
Poor Neil – he goes on, really scraping the barrel.
stephanie louise fisher
May 24, 2012 at 11:41 am
… reflecting more about themselves than anyone else.
Ben Schuldt
May 23, 2012 at 2:34 am
Subscribing.
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stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 12:51 pm
Be happy and smile.
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steph
May 25, 2012 at 8:50 pm
Aw isn’t this sweet Ben Schuldt, all this effort for your mate Dick Carrier. And all this effort in addition to all the foul language you direct at us. “War on Error” – but that’s so characteristic, isn’t it. You have alot of “courage” coming here don’t you. http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/268
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David Mills
May 23, 2012 at 4:18 am
Stephanie,
‘Speaking’ as an agnostic on the issue of Jesus’ historicity, my uncertainty about ‘Brothers of the Lord’ in 1 Cor 9.5 is that if this is siblings, then it it eminent/privileged members of the upper end of the church, indeed arguably travelling missionaries.
Given what I think is a complete absence of any tradition in which siblings had such roles or held such positions, I feel that the suggestion that this is a clear reference to siblings is unwarranted. They do not even, for example, appear on the list of witnesses later in the same book. As far as I know, they do not appear anywhere.
As for looking for a distinct group, why not just those brothers who are far enough up the pecking order to qualify for privileges? Does it have to be a clear and distinct group, in those very early days in which we might reasonably expect a degree of flux? One word which springs to mind is ‘elders’.
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stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 1:18 pm
David: The tradition in Mark 6.3 points to Jesus having siblings. There does not seem to be any reasonable argument to doubt that this tradition is true. Interpreting Paul, he refers to brothers in the Lord as plural suggesting close followers, which is distinguished from brothers ‘of’ the Lord in 1 Cor 9.5 which suggests siblings. For example when Paul refers to a brother of the Lord, ?de?f?s t?? ??????, in Gal 1.19, it is reasonable to interpret a sibling. The assumption that traditions must be repeated and repeated if they are true is not reasonable considering the limited writings preserved of Paul, the expectations of his audience who didn’t need to be constantly reminded, and ultimately the limited evidence from early Christianity.
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David Mills
May 23, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Thanks Stephanie.
Regarding Mark, didnt Paula Fredriksen once offer the observaton that the names of Jesus’ brothers were, er, notably symbolic. I believe the analogy she used was that it was a bit like describing a significant American as having brothers named Washington, Lincoln and Truman. I may not have recalled the correct prsidents there. :)
My problem with Mark is that a lot of it seems as if it might be allegory, not history, and I don’t know how one can reliably tell the difference.
I take your points about 1 Cor 9.5, but I can’t honestly say I can agree with them. To me, 1 Cor 9.5 is pretty ambiguous, if not in fact accessible to a more coherent explanation as non-siblings, in my humble opinion, for a variety of reasons, including the ones I mentioned.
I do accept that Gal 1.19 seems more like sibling, but, rational sceptic that I am, I find it hard to justify any certainty, or even decisive likliehood. And Gal 1.19 depends on 1 Cor 9.5.
As an agnostic, I can agree with a lot of what is said about mythicists, including a number of your points. I do wish there was more agnosticism though, since I feel it is the most warranted position.
David
stephanie louise fisher
May 24, 2012 at 2:39 pm
We all evolve in thinking as critical and self critical human beings. I began as a complete agnostic two decades ago, when I first specifically approached the history of religions, as to the historicity of a Jewish Jesus. I had never believed in any religion and had no crosses to burn, but alot of burning questions about the origins of religions, why they came to be, why humanity needed them and how they developed and who developed them and other things. I have since studied and learned and read broadly and specialised in early Christian origins. I have researched and enquired and questioned and contradicted and changed my mind a million times. However gradually over the last six years cumulative weight of argument and evidence has led me to conclude that I think I have moved beyond the question of actual existence to questions of what to do with the evidence and argument. Despite this, evidence will always be debatable and precision is unattainable… and new evidence could change my mind. However not everyone has the luxury of time and training to read or know what to read so the most honest non specialist critic may always hold an agnostic view. There will always probably be those who for various reasons will create myths out of their agnosticism to deny any historical figure at all, behind a religion they might want to dismiss. I am still agnostic about most things to degrees and rely on specialists in other fields to help me reach tentative conclusions.
samphire53
May 23, 2012 at 1:25 pm
“….that if this is siblings, then it it (sic, presumably “they were”) eminent/privileged members of the upper end of the church, indeed arguably travelling missionaries.”
It is a pity none of them could write or even dictate then we wouldn’t have had 2,000 years of non-stop argumentation. Could it have been so difficult for a real person or his brothers to have set down his ideas in a clear and concise manner in a form which would have survived until the present day? Given that Matthew, Mark etc managed it then why not Jesus? Perhaps the problem is that he was born just 40 years too early. What a convenient cock-up.
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Dustin Cooper
May 23, 2012 at 2:35 pm
Given the apocalyptic nature of much of Jesus’ teaching, are you really surprised that neither he nor his earliest followers didn’t see an immediate need to preserve Jesus’s words and deeds for posterity?
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Thom Stark
May 24, 2012 at 12:40 am
Exactly right, Dustin.
samphire53
May 23, 2012 at 1:38 pm
Stephanie,
“the crowd stoned them with such violence that most of the cohort were killed. Archelaus then sent in his army in force: the result was 3,000 dead Jews and the wreckage of a major festival (Jos. War II, 5-13: Ant XVII, 206-8). This is arguably what the chief priests were avoiding by not arresting Jesus in public in the Temple, yet Carrier shows not a glimmer of awareness of the event in the time of Archelaus ever happening..”
Good point. So Jesus having been arrested secretly to avoid a riot is then just a few hours later put in front of a baying mob who, presumably, had been first checked out by the new stone-detector machines just introduced by the Romans.
I also like another point you make that Luke thought Matthew a complete liar on the matter of the nativity. In that, I agree with Luke. But I go one step further and think Luke was a liar too in his claim to be writing history. Clearly, he was writing theology.
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stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 2:43 pm
Hi Sam, Thank you for your comments. I think Maurice discusses this, but I say too, that the nativity stories are far from historical truth! I hope it is implicit that storytelling in ‘Matthew’ is replaced by storytelling of ‘Luke’. However I wouldn’t call Matthew or Luke ‘liars’. I think that’s anachronistic. It was storytelling, and ‘Luke’ was replacing the mess in ‘Matthew’ with something ‘better’ and more fitting. The author of Matthew was also a horrendous misogynist and ‘Luke’ wasn’t. The late great Michael Goulder pointed that out. Goulder wrote: “Matthew, as is evident from his recasting of Mark’s divorce ruling, was a conventional Jewish male chauvinist, to whom it was natural to think of Jesus’ birth from the angle of the putative father. But Luke was of a more liberal cast of mind, for which women were in many ways the spiritual equals of men” (LNP 221). If only Roo Bookaroo (thread above), was a little more like ‘Luke’. :-)
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samphire53
May 23, 2012 at 1:45 pm
“….that if this is siblings, then it it (sic, presumably “they were”?) eminent/privileged members of the upper end of the church, indeed arguably travelling missionaries.”
It is a pity none of Jesus’ siblings could write or even dictate then we wouldn’t have had 2,000 years of non-stop argumentation. Could it have been so difficult for a real person or his real brothers to have set down their ideas and histories in a clear and concise manner and in a form which would have survived until the present day? Given that Matthew, Mark etc managed it then why not Jesus or Jacob? What an incompetent way to run an apostolic church.
Perhaps the problem is that Jesus was born just 40 years too early. What a convenient cock-up.
P.S. I love it when Stephanie quotes dirty.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 23, 2012 at 2:17 pm
The problem with amateur detectives applying their “skill set” to the gospels is that they ask questions like the following without realizing how obtuse they are:
Could it have been so difficult for a real person or his real brothers to have set down their ideas and histories in a clear and concise manner and in a form which would have survived until the present day?
The answer is, yes. Probably impossible. And why would they? Have you read the autobiography of Alexander the Great? Do you know why?
Augustine did leave us one, in the 5th century–sort of–and good luck sorting out fact and fiction in that.
My non-sarcastic point is that the road back through time is riddled with potholes and sinkholes and the farther back you go the more treacherous they become. The argument against the mythicists isn’t about authority and credentials–except when a surprising number show that they believe they can fly over these anachronisms (like angels?) without ever learning how to drive.
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stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 2:48 pm
A couple of useful references on the realities and difficulties of reading and writing in antiquity might be found with:
Alan Millard, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000).
R. A. Derrenbacker Jr., Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 186; Leuven: Peeters, 2006).
and a brief article for luck (very good)
R. A. Derrenbacker, “Greco-Roman Writing Practices and Luke’s Gospel” in Christopher A. Rollston, The Gospels According to Michael Goulder: A North American Response (Harrisburg: PA; Trinity Press, 2004).
samphire53
May 23, 2012 at 6:23 pm
“The answer is, yes. Probably impossible. And why would they? Have you read the autobiography of Alexander the Great?”
Not yet. The 40-ton 32 wheeler lorry with the tablets containing Chapter 1 arrives tomorrow.
“Do you know why?”
Yes – but Alexander wasn’t the Son of God. It doesn’t matter to me or the rest of mankind whether Alexander existed or not any more than it matters to me and my fellow English whether or not King Arthur was real or mythical.
I’m told that the entire and perfectly-preserved New Testament was completed within 100 years of the date a resurrected body (in a form St Paul and William Lane Craig cannot agree on) disappeared upwards into a conveniently placed white cloud.
This is my eternal soul and those of another 100 billion people I’m talking about here. Why couldn’t Jesus or his brothers do what St Paul did? Nothing startling in data recording and transmission was invented in between the supposed crucifixion and the date “St Paul” allegedly started writing to his flock so what’s your objection to Jesus and/or his brothers jotting down a few notes to convince me and my fellow 100 billion of the reality of his historical existence?
Let me spell it out. Jesus could have written or dictated stuff to Cephas and/or James. Cephas and James could have had the memoir copied and they could have given one of the copies to Paul when he visited them in Jerusalem. Paul could have then copied the copy and stapled a copy to each of his letters etc etc. But this perfectly technically-acheivable process did not happen. Why not? Because faith is more important than truth?
In view of the fact that the whole purported point of christianity is that it achieves the reconnection of mankind to God for all time are you suggesting that, unlike Mohamed, the Son of the genuine God couldn’t afford the cost of a few leaves of papyrus and half a pint of squid ink to ensure that his message was transmitted down the centuries?
Why couldn’t God achieve what Paul is supposed to have managed time after time?
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David Hillman
May 23, 2012 at 6:30 pm
I can not get to the arguments through all the ad hominem attacks, name dropping. snobbery, and abuse. When I argue with Physicists about quantum theory I get to grips with their ideas and their arguments and facts, not with what degree they got or whether they once believed in the Copenhagen interpretation. Does it matter, really, if someone was once a fundamentalist? This supercilious attitude makes getting to any real contribution to history like treading through treacle – and after several tries I give up.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 23, 2012 at 7:10 pm
I can not get to the arguments through all the ad hominem attacks, name dropping. snobbery, and abuse. When I argue with Physicists about quantum theory I get to grips with their ideas and their arguments and facts
Good for you. And your qualifications in Biblical studies are….what? I’d be very happy to argue with you.
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David Hillman
May 24, 2012 at 5:05 am
Yeah, O.K., I have a B.A. and M.A. in History from Oxford and also first class honours in Physics and Maths. But these mean less than my own studies over 50 years, including many visits to the holy land. I am not interested in peoples’ qualifications, rather in the quality of their arguments. Thank God people love my poetry without asking if I’ve done a course in creative writing.Long live Faraday and William Blake who spoke with authority but not as the scribes.
stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 8:10 pm
Sounds like it’s long past time for you to give up David. Yes it does matter if someone has deconverted from some form of fundamentalist belief in which they held convictions without argument or evidence. Nobody can approach problems in life with pure objectivity. We are human beings who necessarily begin and continue our lives within some kind of social framework and we are shaped by our environments life experiences.
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David Mills
May 24, 2012 at 10:11 am
I could not agree more, David. Though you forgot arguments from authority.
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stephanie louise fisher
May 24, 2012 at 3:42 pm
Eh – talking to yourself? See comment currently at bottom of entire comment thread by rjosephhhoffmann on authority.
samphire53
May 23, 2012 at 6:50 pm
Stephanie,
“A couple of useful references on the realities and difficulties of reading and writing in antiquity might be found with:…”
I’m not naive. I understand the difficulties in the writing and transmission of delicate documents down the ages but fundamentalists tell me that the New Testament (and, indeed, the OT) have indeed arrived on our doorstep pretty much in the same form as in the original autographs all of which proves, despite the extreme difficulties and Mr Hoffman’s opinion, that such transmission is possible. But, Mr Hoffman tells me, that in the case of Jesus and his brothers such transmission is “probably impossible”. Even for the Son of God?
So please tell me why Jesus couldn’t do what Paul and the evangelists seemingly did without difficulty.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 23, 2012 at 7:09 pm
Oh Gish Samphire : Do you really want me to respond to this?
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samphire53
May 23, 2012 at 7:23 pm
Yes, please. Please explain why the historical Jesus Christ and/or his brothers couldn’t do what Paul manage to do many times? Well, seven times, maybe.
And don’t gallop through it.
rjosephhoffmann
May 23, 2012 at 7:29 pm
Let me spell it out. Jesus could have written or dictated stuff to Cephas and/or James. Cephas and James could have had the memoir copied and they could have given one of the copies to Paul when he visited them in Jerusalem. Paul could have then copied the copy and stapled a copy to each of his letters etc etc. But this perfectly technically-acheivable process did not happen. Why not? Because faith is more important than truth?
I am sure this sounds reasonable to you. That is sad. Because it is unreasonable to not just me but to anyone in ancient history or classical studies. Are you for example saying that if there had been a historical Jesus who knew he was the son of God he should have … x,y, z? Fascinating thought. But that is not what scholars are saying or thinking. Except perhaps the mythicists like Carrier. The fact that you do not know why it is ludicrous is why we need the Jesus Process. But in language I think you will understand, your question is an inductive fallacy: hypothesis contrary to fact.
Grog
May 24, 2012 at 1:44 am
RJH
“Are you for example saying that if there had been a historical Jesus who knew he was the son of God he should have … x,y, z? Fascinating thought. But that is not what scholars are saying or thinking. Except perhaps the mythicists like Carrier.”
Hmmm…This strikes me as a mischaracterization of Carrier’s views. Care to defend?
stephanie louise fisher
May 24, 2012 at 10:57 am
Well ‘grog’ – why for example, does Carrion struggle so desparately, contrary to critical argument and evidence, to deny that Jesus had siblings? Without x=siblings Jesus has less historical verisimilitude and the mythtic illusion is perceived by themselves as necessarily ‘unarguable’.
David Mills
May 24, 2012 at 10:43 am
Samphire53,
He/they could have done, but apparently he/they didn’t. It doesn’t seem unusual to me. I don’t think we should infer anything from it.
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Dustin Cooper
May 24, 2012 at 10:53 am
Samphire, I think you (and really most mythicists) should read up on the Positivist Fallacy:
http://www.livius.org/th/theory/theory-positivist.html
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samphire53
May 23, 2012 at 7:14 pm
Hi Steph
“I think Maurice discusses this, but I say too, that the nativity stories are far from historical truth! I hope it is implicit that storytelling in ‘Matthew’ is replaced by storytelling of ‘Luke’. However I wouldn’t call Matthew or Luke ‘liars’.”
I agree. As I wrote above, the gospels are theology and not history (IMAO).
I was taught never to call anybody a “liar” – a very nasty word – so, when we were caught lying, we were told “not to tell stories”. This could mean not gossiping or sneaking but it also had this second meaning of not lying. In an historical setting telling stories not based upon historical actuality is telling untruths or lying. In a theological setting one can say what one likes because some-one will always find theological truth within the historical falsity.
“I think that’s anachronistic.”
As in “thou shall not bear false witness”? Or is the admonishment against bearing false witness purely relevant solely in a legalistic setting?
“It was storytelling, and ‘Luke’ was replacing the mess in ‘Matthew’ with something ‘better’ and more fitting.”
And inspired?
“The author of Matthew was also a horrendous misogynist …….”
So not inspired?
“If only Roo Bookaroo (thread above), was a little more like ‘Luke’. ”
Beardwise, they are very similar. But Luke never wore white socks with sandals, I bet.
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stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Ancient storytelling is not synonymous with 21st century lying to deceive. The gospel authors were following cultural conventions and norms in an historical context far removed from our own where we have the post enlightenment clear distinction between myth and reality.
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samphire53
May 24, 2012 at 5:08 am
These things I’m aware of. But it is this colloidal mix of fact and myth which makes Mr.Casey’s apologetics of why Paul failed to provide any history of or reference to a recently living man so risibly incongruous as, indeed, is Paul’s claim that he failed to meet the other apostles on his visit to Jerusalem, a city of 60,000 and which any healed cripple could limp across in half an hour.
Is it likely a real Paul who had walked hundreds of tough miles along rough stoney tracks to a far off city to meet his co-religionists would fail to seek the company of most if not all of Jesus’ death-defying proselytising and closest mates? Would anybody fly across the Atlantic in relative comfort to stay a fortnight with Billy Graham and not seek out an evening’s entertainment with George Beverley Shea? But when it comes to discussing the mythic virginity of Mary it isn’t necessary to talk to the entire College of Cardinals to discover what the Catholic church’s teaching is on the matter; one man in a red hat and red shoes will do. In Paul’s story, only if Jesus was a mythic Son of God character who none of the lads had actually ever physically met would this tale make any sense.
Or, perhaps, if Paul himself was mythic.
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 7:18 am
“Paul himself was mythic.” You really are reading selectively aren’t you mate?
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 9:10 am
http://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/hoffmann-cold-cocks-mythers/
David Mills
May 24, 2012 at 10:27 am
Joseph,
How has it come to this? Only a few years ago you were describing the historicity question as open and unanswerable. At that point, I admired you for saying what I personally thought was the most reasonable, rational thing I believed I had ever heard from an NT scholar. Now it’s derision and not much else.
I can understand exasperation with mythicists, really I can, but what about a return to a healthy dash of uncertainty? :)
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 11:02 am
@David: It is clear alas! David that you have not read my essay at all; you are not even posting this comment on it. There is nothing derisive in it except derision of some bad ideas. I say repeatedly ” I have come to the conclusion.” That is a process, not a fixed position. Some of us see that process as reasonable as we learn more and investigate more. At this moment, the cumulative weight of what I know makes the existence of Jesus the reasonable position. Of course, that could change, but it will not change without substantial additional evidence to the contrary: that is to say, not on the basis of a contrived method that turns analogies and bad assumptions into premises at the touch of Midas’s finger.
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 1:28 pm
Samphire: “Is it likely a real Paul who had walked hundreds of tough miles along rough stoney tracks to a far off city to meet his co-religionists would fail to seek the company of most if not all of Jesus’ death-defying proselytising and closest mates? Would anybody fly across the Atlantic in relative comfort to stay a fortnight with Billy Graham and not seek out an evening’s entertainment with George Beverley Shea?” It is always difficult to have to invent an imaginary and anachronistic scenario to get to a “probability” as you have done here. This is a good example of why the Bayes Machine produces sausage rather than conclusions.
stephanie louise fisher
May 24, 2012 at 10:49 am
Sam… what is the point of inventing 21st century analogies from your own culture? It is all completely irrelevant. Apologetics is defence of a faith. Providing historical evidence combined with textual interpretation and analysis is not apologetics.
David Mills
May 24, 2012 at 1:49 pm
@ Joseph.
No, Joseph, it is not ‘clear’ that I haven’t read your article, but since I accept that my saying ‘derision and not much else’ was not a good choice of words and not accurate, I can understand why it seemed like that to you.
Yes, you do spend a lot of time on decent arguments, IMHO, but I am not the only poster here, nor elsewhere on other discussion forums where I have currently seen the issue discussed, who feels that there is a tad too much of a, shalll we say, less measured and mannered debate.
However, that is bye the bye, and arguably a proto-ad hom in itself. :)
My general impression is that there is not much of a middle ground in this matter, which I think is unfortunate for any debate, and that was why I was curious to know how it was that you came to go from ‘open, unanswerable question’, to your present position, since it was, I think, only in 2009 that you wrote that.
So, I would like to ask you the same question again. It’s not a leading question. I am a genuine agnostic.
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 2:07 pm
@David Thanks, and I do detect a sincere open mindedness on your part. Unfortunately the positions are emotionally charged on both sides. There are undoubtedly a few who think that a mythical Jesus would “serve the Church right” for the harm it has foisted on people. I take it for granted that people in that circle are merely looking for emotional support. There are at the other extreme people who see the historical existence of Jesus as the sine qua non of their born-again belief system. The idea of a mythic Jesus is repugnant to them. For about three centuries now, liberal theology has stripped away the supernatural garments of the divine man and has done such a good job of deconstructing him that there is not much left of Paul s savior figure, the fully divine-full-human hybrid that the church eventually taught. Neither the old mythtics nor the new dispatched him; liberal theology and various schools of biblical criticism did. In the long run, the historical existence of Jesus may not matter very much: it certainly does not matter to me at any emotional level. The early deists and rationalists like Paine would have been much happier with a merely human Jesus who did exist than with a myth–and said as much–but I think (and have said so) that we are in the throes of certain thoroughgoing atheists who think that Jesus denial is a logical complement to God denial. I happen to think that while you can account for the beginnings of any religion without postulating an historical founder, it is ludicrous to think that historical religions like Judaism, Islam and Christianity developed as the result of some religious big bang or as the work of an overzealous fiction writer or story teller. Those of us who consider ourselves ‘experts” in this field would do better to explain our reasoning in archaeological terms because we look at the details by strata and try not to mix the beliefs of say the year 100CE into the formative beliefs of, say, the year 40CE. I would be the first to say it is risky business. Also the first to say that it cannot be done by intuition, appeals to analogy or to “common sense,” which has led many a scholar down the road to disaster. A lot of what I am seeing on this site is infinitely commonsensical and almost certainly wrongheaded–e.g., If Jesus or his brothers existed they could have written their memoirs. But enough for now. Thanks for writing.
David Mills
May 24, 2012 at 6:32 pm
@ Joseph
Thanks for that. It is reassuring and sensible. I can’t think of anything in it I would strongly disagree with. And thanks for not correcting my syntax. I think it ought to have been ‘by the by’ not ‘bye the bye’. I need to proofread more thoroughly. :)
It seems to me, as an outsider (i.e. not a scholar) that there is quite a risk in trying to discuss the issue ‘agnostically’, if that’s the correct word, perhaps ‘as an open question’ is better. I get the impression that to do so, perhaps especially these days, invites a sort of sensationalizing stampede of what I can agree are inexpert and somewhat tenuous contributors.
I have a pet theory (I’m guessing of course) that you started the Jesus Project in good faith, only to find the process hijacked, if that’s not too strong a word, by those who leaned a bit too much in the direction of mythicism.
I’m sure you and I could have a delightful discussion, had we the time. I respect your position, even if I do not entirely agree with it and think that you were on the money in 2009. :)
Anyhows, I’ll finish by saying that one of my favourite pieces on this topic was an article by linguist Elvar Ellegard, entitled ‘Theologians as Historians’ which was followed by a set of commentaries/reviews, from various scholars and historians (not many of whom agreed with him I might add) but all conducted with the sort of reasoned argument that one could hope for. The last review piece was by Professor Rolf Torstendal, not a scholar, but an historian. If any one piece summed up my own persp[ective, that was it. You are probably familiar with it.
http://www.sciecom.org/ojs/index.php/scandia/article/viewFile/1078/863
David
May 25, 2012 at 6:38 am
@ Joseph
ps
I meant the Torstendahl commentary, not the Ellegard article, when I said it represented my approximate approach.
samphire53
May 23, 2012 at 8:03 pm
Stephanie,
“and a brief article for luck (very good)
R. A. Derrenbacker, “Greco-Roman Writing Practices and Luke’s Gospel” in Christopher A. Rollston, The Gospels According to Michael Goulder: A North American Response (Harrisburg: PA; Trinity Press, 2004).”
i found plenty of references but no link to the Derrenbacker article. Is it available on the net and, if so, may I have the link?
At £32 for the Millard even in paperback I shall have to remain in ignorance of its contents until my winter fuel allowance comes through later this year. Could I swop a barely-opened Lee Strobel for your copy?
Thought not.
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stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 9:55 pm
It is an essay in a book. All three books I cited are available in most university libraries I imagine – check the CAT. Alternatively you can interloan them as well. I paid less than £32 for all three – try harder… haggle. :-)
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Blood
May 24, 2012 at 11:14 am
“It is culturally ludicrous to expect anyone like Haim Cohn to give a fair account of a New Testament narrative…”
Oh really? It isn’t any more “ludicrous” than expecting the average Christian NT scholar to give a fair account … as if they weren’t culturally biased.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 11:29 am
I have a dog in this fight but not concerning this essay, but I do find a piece of illogic in this thread disconcerting. Many of you are complaining that Fisher and Casey have “appealed” to authority. This apparently is an attempt to make their arguments fallacious, as appeals to authority are usually considered fallacious. But they are not appealing to authority: they are appealing to knowledge and merit. It is the same sort of appeal we use in any profession to establish qualifications. Unless you want to say that qualifications and credentials are irrelevant, you need to make this distinction. If you do think this, then you have no way of distinguishing the bogus view of a Baptist preacher who says the Bible is verbatim true and the PhD of a Richard Carrier, which credential is repeatedly invoked by many of you in favour of his ideas. I am only playing umpire here, but this is very sloppy reasoning on your part: An appeal to knowledge and skill and demonstrated accomplishment vs incompetence or prejudice is not an appeal to authority, so please calm down a bit when you see words like “respectable” or “highly regarded” or “expert” used.
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Ken Scaletta
May 25, 2012 at 12:46 am
Steph said
“Well ‘grog’ – why for example, does Carrion struggle so desparately, contrary to critical argument and evidence, to deny that Jesus had siblings?”
Hoffman also denies this – or at least rejects the consensus that ?de?f?? t?? ?????? in Gal. 1:19 indicates a biological relationship between Jesus and James. Hoffman obviously does not see this as an argument against historicity, but he does deny that James was Jesus’ brother, so if you’re going to disparage the scholarly validity of this view then you also have to disparage RJH (http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2007/faccidents-bad-assumptions-and-the-jesus-tomb-debacle/).
I’m not a myther, by the way, nor am I convinced by Hoffman’s argument that Paul was using the term, ADELPHOS, ecclesiastically/congregationally (for multiple reasons), but it’s not a crackpot view.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 25, 2012 at 8:46 am
@Ken: I cited the 2007 blog piece (“Faccidents”) on Talpiot in my own article in footnote 85 to reflect new considerations in the James inventory and my own thinking about the issue, especially in the light of John Painter’s illuminating study. The article you reference was in response to the use of Gal. 1,19 “dispositively” in the Talpiot tombs discussion, and as is clear my point was really to draw attention to the plurality and ambiguity of James in the tradition. Just fyi, however, I do not regard Paul’s use of the name brother in relation to James clear cut, but I do not rule it out (see below) and I do think the idea that Jesus had actual brothers and sisters a very early and probably unerasable part of the tradition—one that obviously became inconvenient as doctrines about the person of Jesus and the chastity of Mary evolved. Here is footnote 85 for the record: [85] A credible recent survey is the study by John Painter, Just James: The Brother of Jesus in Hnistory and Tradition (SPNT; Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina, 2004), especially as it concerns his critique of Robert Eisenman’s ingenious but unconvincing identification of James with the Qumran teacher of Righteousness. Puzzlingly, Hegesippus (d. 180?) Comm. 5.1, “After the apostles, James the brother of the Lord surnamed the Just was made head of the Church at Jerusalem.” I consider the “James” and “Mary” traditions instances of doublets that were unsatisfactorily resolved by the compilers, both between the gospels and between the letters of Paul and the Book of Acts. (On the multiple-Mary problem, especially see Jesus outside the Gospels, pp. 41-50). It seems clear that apologetic tendencies govern this confusion. The external evidence is unhelpful and unreliable, causing the difficulty of determining which James is in view, as well as the possibility of pseudonymity and redactional stages, rendering any discussion of the name untidy: James the (obscure) father of Judas (Luke 6:16; Acts 1:13); James the son of Alphaeus (Matt. 10:3; Mark 3:18; 15:40 [here called James the Younger]; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13); James the son of Zebedee and brother of John (Matt. 4:21; 10:2; 17:1; Mark 1:19, 29; 3:17; 10:35; 13:3; Luke 9:28; Acts 1:13; 12:2); James the Lord’s brother (Matt. 13:55; Mark 6:3; Gal. 1:19; called [?] simply James in Acts: 12:17; 15:13; 21:18; and in 1 Cor. 15:7), mentioned only twice by name in the Gospels (Matt. 13:55; Mark 6:3). Hegessipus’ conclusions however must be read back into the tradition to secure the identity of James as head of the Jerusalem church as Luke asserts. See also my online comments on the topic, “Faccidents: Bad Assumptions and the Jesus Tomb Debacle,” Butterflies and Wheels 7 March 2007, at http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2007/faccidents-bad-assumptions-and-the-jesus-tomb-debacle/ retrieved 7 May 2012. Since 2007 I have come to see Galatians 1, 18-20 as more problematical. While clearly reflecting a key element in the opponents tradition, it seems that 1.16 is in apposition to 1.18-19 as a list of the hyperlian apostoloi, though Paul does not use the language of 2 Corinthians 11.15//12.11; using instead phrases that imply historical priority (p??? t??? p?? ?µ?? ?p?st?????); for that reason, it is entirely possible that the phrase ton adelphos tou kyriou applied to James in Galatians 1.19 is meant to suggest biological relationship and as a term to distinguish James from the dishonesty (Gal 211-13) of Cephas. Rhetorically, in this section, Paul uses himself and Barnabas as a paradigm of faithful preaching of a gospel to the detriment of Peter, James and John (Gal 2.9), who merely “seem to be pillars”: ????ß?? ?a? ??f?? ?a? ???????, ?? d?????te? st???? e??a? de???? ?d??a? (i.e., of significance). Accordingly, the possibility that Paul is asserting biological relationship between James and “the Lord” in this passage between James and Jesus cannot be ruled out, since he is ridiculing the pretensions of the “reputed pillars,” not affecting to be inclusive.
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David Mills
May 25, 2012 at 11:43 am
Carrion?
Please tell me that’s not a snide moniker, to go with ‘penis-nose’ on another comments section here. :)
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steph
May 25, 2012 at 3:14 pm
David, Ironic but irrelevant isn’t it. It might have escaped your notice however that Carrier, in his outpourings loaded with foul language and abuse against Professor Hoffmann (see Carrier’s blog), persists in spelling Hoffmann inaccurately. His fans often imitate.
David Mills
May 25, 2012 at 7:58 pm
Well, Steph and Joseph, I have been, if you’ll pardon a pun, no saint, when it comes to banter, and what I believe is known on internet discussion forums as douchebaggery. I guess i just wasn’t expecting to find it here, from, er, both sides. From Richard Carrier, it is not surprising. He comes across as a bit of a hothead at times.
steph
May 25, 2012 at 9:40 pm
Excuse me? I miss typed Carrier on this thread once. Perhaps you might like to count how many times Carrier uses the ‘f’ word in connection with NT studies, method, scholarship and individuals. http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/255
I’m disappointed you are behaving like the moral authority without contributing useful conversation or engaging with actual arguments.
steph
May 25, 2012 at 12:19 pm
My point was about Carrier considering the sibling evidence vital and better when conveniently got rid of. However you seem to have made some effort to determine a disagreement of opinion between Joe and myself. Now would a hypothetical disagreement of opinion in scholarship be an indication of one disparaging another? Really? Do you understand what academic discussion and debate is about? The three of us approach the texts critically with independent trained minds. We share ideas, and constantly apply critical methods self critically and our ideas evolve. If we agreed on all things we’d be prone to unhealthy convictions. Disagreement is generally healthy and can lead to advanced resolutions and we do tend to form ideas which blend. By the way you spelt Hoffmann wrong.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 25, 2012 at 12:42 pm
In fairness to the Inquirer, the majority of people tuned into this are not here for academic discussion; they are interested in debate, and that involves assuming an argumentative position, usually fixed and unyielding, and winning. It’s pretty common in atheist and freethought circles–and I see nothing wrong with it in context–but of course, trying to settle a question like this can’t be done as though the goal were to score points. I just want to say that modern universities couldn’t exist if fixed positions ruled the waves. We had that once: it was called the Middle Ages. Debates ruled; discussion was unheard of. Sic et Non, up or down, the advantage being, the Church always had the final answer.
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May 25, 2012 at 3:23 am
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Enigma
May 25, 2012 at 1:05 pm
Question for Carrier fans: GIven the revolutionary nature of Dr. Carrier’s argument, can you please cite the article where he makes his case? I’m not interested in blog posts or popular books. I’m looking for the peer-reviewed journal article(s).
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Bradley Bowen
May 25, 2012 at 1:13 pm
Perhaps we are trying to swallow the whole elephant, and would have better luck digesting it one bite at a time.
I’m a supporter of the use of BT in historical analysis, but there are more basic issues that should probably be addressed first, before trying to answer the question ‘Is BT relevant to historical analysis?’.
If there is agreement on some more basic issues, that could provide common grounds for further discussion of the relevance or irrelevance of BT. If there is disagreement on the more basic issues, then further discussion of the merits of BT are likely to be unproductive, because the real issues are at a more basic level.
The more basic issues I have in mind are: ‘Are quantified probabilities relevant to historical analysis?’ and ‘Are logical/mathematical manipulations of quantified probabilities relevant to historical analysis?’
I also have a specific example in mind for each of these more basic questions:
Quantified Probabilities were used by the Jesus Seminar. (The Five Gospels, p.36-37). The 0 to 1.0 scale is not explicitly stated to be a scale of probabilities, but given the descriptions on page 36, this is a natural way of interpreting the 0 to 1.0 scale. Is such a quantification of probability of authenticity helpful, useful, and relevant to historical analysis?
Logical/Mathematical manipulation of quantified probabilities was used by Robert Stein in a skeptical argument about Q in Jesus the Messiah, p.39 & 40. Stein assigns estimated probabilities to various assumptions related to Q, and then uses the simple rule of multiplication to derive the low probability that all of the set of assumptions about Q are correct. The assumptions are supposedly required by any attempt at reconstruction of the original text of Q, and so Stein concludes that we should be skeptical about such efforts.
I don’t necessarily buy Stein’s argument, but it seems to me that his use of the simple multiplication rule on quantified probabilities is useful, helpful, and relevant to the presentation of his skeptical argument about reconstructions of Q.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 25, 2012 at 2:21 pm
It has been a while since I read Stein, but I don’t recall he used Bayes and almost all recent discussion uses some form of “probability” calculus that grows organically from the sourses and incorporate basic hermeneutical principles. Am I wrong about Stein? I am looking at Mark Goodacre’s reaction to it, which calls it weak and a little unbalanced. As a judgement, however, I should have thought that the Jesus Seminar would have been a billboard warning against putting faith in probabilistic calculus in biblical studies.
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Bradley Bowen
May 25, 2012 at 6:04 pm
Correct. Stein does not use Bayes Theorem in the argument I mentioned. He uses a simple multiplication rule:
If claim X has a probability of .8 and claim Y has a probability of .6, and if the probability of X is independent of the probability of Y, then the probability of it being the case that both X and Y are true is equal to the product of the probability of X and the probability of Y, which in this example is .8 x .6 = .48 or .5 rounded to one significant figure.
I was trying to get away from arguing about BT and to focus on more basic questions about the use of quantified probabilities.
It sounds like there is no disagreement here about the relevance of quantified probabilities in historical analysis.
It also sounds like there is no disagreement here about the relevance of logical/mathematical manipulation of quantified probabilities in historical analysis.
Did I understand you correctly?
David Mills
May 25, 2012 at 8:21 pm
I believe someone once said that mathematizing history is like dancing about architecture. Or something like that.
At a fundamental level, I doubt if it is possible for the human mind to rationally analyse anything, including historical data/evidence, without resort to logic, maths, statististics and probability, at least informally. I think that the danger arises when it becomes a formalized approach, because the input data is usually heavily assumptive. I don’t think maths is designed to answer historical questions.
On the other hand, nor, it seems to me, is the criterion of embarrassment, so perhaps there is a case for both, so long as their degree of reliability is understood, and they are not used, at least not on their own, to support or justify any conclusions.
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steph
May 25, 2012 at 9:33 pm
First of all the Jesus Seminar failed to be useful in furthering historical knowledge and determining reliable historical critical method or establishing convincing arguments for historical evidence. In fact, “The Jesus of the Westar project is a talking doll with a questionable repertoire of thirty-one sayings. Pull a string and he blesses the poor” (RJH 1993). Second Robert Stein has not been helpful in critical analysis. He teaches at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is a fundamentalist Christian as demonstrated in Jesus the Messiah: A Survey of the Life of Christ.
“Without an openness to the supernatural, the result of any investigation of the life of Christ has predetermined that the resulting Jesus will be radically different from the Jesus who was born of a virgin, was anointed by the Spirit, healed the sick, raised the dead, died for the sins of the world, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. Yet it is this supernatural Jesus that humanity desperately needs, for only this supernatural Jesus can bridge the gap between human sin and God’s holiness. What the world so critically needs is a Savior, but only a supernatural Jesus can be a Savior….In writing this work I have assumed the presence of the supernatural in the life of Jesus. In other words, this life of Christ has been written from a believer’s viewpoint.”(Jesus the Messiah, p. 13)
Stein considers the virgin birth, Herod’s slaughter of the children, and the visit of the three wise men to be historical incidents. Stein concludes by saying that the life of Jesus did not end with the crucifixion, as Jesus rose from the dead and will return on the last day.
Bradley, you suggest: “It sounds like there is no disagreement here about the relevance of quantified probabilities in historical analysis. It also sounds like there is no disagreement here about the relevance of logical/mathematical manipulation of quantified probabilities in historical analysis.”
We discuss probability in relation to sources and characteristics of authors in textual interpretation, but the quantified probabilities that you are referring to, and manipulation of such, are agreed by most historians to be unhelpful for application to complex and composite historical texts. They don’t allow for human inconsistencies and fluctuations and composite nature of the texts and they are dependent on assumptions being consistently true and ‘unarguable’. There are no short cuts in method. Method is constantly evaluated and careful and cautious critical application of appropriate criteria continually assessed. We do not declare that continual discussion and evaluation in conjunction with new evidence and argument, is declaration of failure. However that is the unbelievable assumption of the author of ‘Proving History’.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 25, 2012 at 10:09 pm
Candor for a moment: Even if it could be argued that BT is useful for historical studies, and I do not grant that, it is far from clear that biblical studies and historical studies are the same thing. I will be happy to unpack that comment in another space. But for now let me make it abundantly clear that BT is not useful for biblical studies as biblical studies currently works. To put to rest any fears, I do not mean by this that “The Bible” is immune from historical analysis, but the way in which raw data can be extracted is far different and more susceptible of linguistic, anthropological and hermeneutical approaches prior to any operations that can be described as simply “historical.” Not coincidentally, the mythtics make most of their errors at these levels. As far as I know, Carrier & Co., Doherty, Godfrey and Verenna for example, have no qualifications at all to be doing research in biblical studies. I am fascinated by work in linguistic anthropology–even have a Masters degree in the area–but would e terribly gun shy about writing a professional article in the subject since I have nothing beyond that and have never studied the field in depth. So I have to ask: what makes these guys so confident, if not their errant presuppositions, that anyone who can read can read and make scholarly pronouncements about the Bible. Worse, when corrected, they pronounce the whole field askew and themselves right. That is not the way serious scholarship works–and I think, in their heart of hearts they must know that they are simply playing a game.
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David Mills
May 26, 2012 at 2:55 am
Fresh as I am from a lively discussion on another forum where those arguing the case for an historical Jesus were keen to stress that biblical studies and ancient history share the same methodology, and that this lends credibility to the former, I would be curious to briefly know what distinction you would draw between biblical studies and history generally.
History is, ultimately, a humanity, arguably at least in part an art. Furthermore, when the subject matter is ancient history, and ‘hard’ evidence is largely lacking (primary and secondary evidence, archaeology etc) then it seems to me it becomes, for any similar figure, a matter of assessing texts, and this will probably pull in considerations of linguistics, hermeneutics and anthroplogy.
I hear what you say about a particularly important need for an appreciation of the subtleties in this case, and would agree up to a point, but I can’t help sometimes thinking that there is a related issue, that if we step off the well worn track of historiographical method, we may inevitably (I sometimes think) need to admit that the ground becomes quite soft, in epistological terms.
Perhaps my, er, concern is best summed up by my saying that I don’t find it reassuring that even a scholar as qualified as E. P. Sanders can say (and I’m paraphrasing from memory here) that the evidence for Jesus is on a par with the evidence for Alexander the Great, and perhaps better, since the nature of the evidence for the latter does not generally allow us to work out what Alexander thought.
In other words, I wonder if Jesus isn’t a special case, in some ways, because he is treated as a special case. :)
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 8:12 am
@David: Sorry for the delay–I am behind on moderation. Biblical studies is far more composite than what is usually classified “ancient history”; they obviously are not identical fields–not least because a great deal of textual and physical biblical history is pre-ancient and has more in common with archaeology and anthropology–and biblical studies isn’t a subset of ancient history because the primary artifacts have different historical and cultural origins. At the same time, there could be no such thing as a conclusion which would be “true” for ancient history that is not also “true” for biblical studies at a factual level. Maybe your source was trying to discuss biblical history and archaeology which is one piece of biblical studies. It has probably contributed at least as much to the study of ancient history as the study of ancient history has ever contributed to it, especially in the study and authentication of texts and dating. Finally, and far more closely related to biblical studies is classics and what used to be designated philology (historical and descriptive linguistics/linguisitic anthropology) where much of the heavy lifting usually then made available to historians of the ancient world is actually performed. I remember thinking it odd that Richard Carrier took umbrage when Bart Ehrman called him a “classicist” and how eager he was to distance himself from that designation–when he should have taken it as a compliment. My own field is patristics and early Christianity; I would frankly be unable to function if I weren’t first and foremost a classicist. As to Jesus being a special case: I think I said pretty clearly in my own wrticle that the field of New Testament studies is infested with the belief in the divinity of Jesus and that this has had methodological implications for the way the literature has been treated. But perhaps you are saying something different?
David Mills
May 26, 2012 at 11:42 am
@ Joseph
Not being an historian, I can only say that my impression of ancient history generally is that it too is composite, in terms of all the various strands of inquiry and analysis that you mentioned. Though I accept distinctions for different circumstances, obviously.
I suppose what I am asking is if we, any of us, were to forage for “true facts” (double inverted commas intentional there :) ) about any minor figure from ancient history, then why would we adpot a different approach for this figure, Jesus? Or, are we going in the direction of saying he is an unusual case, evidentially?
I think I may as well be candid here, becaue I think you appreciate I have no sharp axes to grind. Is it possible that Jesus has become over-analysed? Do some scholars, immersed as they have been dring a lifetime of study, lose sight of the fact that at bottom, the evidence is, er, ultimately ,not strong’?
My basic position is that if you presented me with another figure having the same set of accounts and evidences, I believe i would be justified in having doubts.
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Bradley Bowen
May 26, 2012 at 12:13 pm
Stephanie Fisher – Thank you for taking the time to respond to my comments. I agree with your assessment of Mr. Stein.
My point was not that Mr. Stein is a great Jesus scholar and that since he uses BT, we ought to all jump on the bandwagon with him.
So far as I know Mr. Stein may well have never used BT in any argument about the historical Jesus.
My point was a much more humble one. Although Mr. Stein may not be much of a Jesus scholar, he did manage to produce at least one interesting argument, not necessarily a good argument either, but a skeptical argument that is interesting, at least to me. It may well be a bad argument that commits the fallacy of Straw Man or that is based on some questionable probability claims in his premises.
Nevertheless, on this one particular occasion, perhaps the only one in his career, Mr. Stein used quantified probabilities and the simple multiplication rule of probability, and I think that in doing so he enhanced his argument. Even if the argument fails to establish its conclusion, it is a better argument because of his use of quantified probabilities and use of the simple multiplication rule.
He could have presented the argument without doing this. He could have said “Look, there are a whole bunch of assumptions that scholars who are attempting to reconstruct the original text of Q are making, and none of those assumptions is certain, each is only probable at best, so given that there are many such assumptions it is very likely that at least one of them will turn out to be mistaken.” But his point was more precise and more logically rigorous by his assigning probability estimates to various assumptions that allegedly are being made by those attempting to reconstruct the original text of Q.
I’m just saying that I think there are some instances where quantified probabilities and mathematical calculations involving probabilities can enhance an argument that relates to the historical Jesus.
It appears to me that neither you nor Mr. Hoffman disagree with this point, so perhaps my example was not necessary.
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David Mills
May 27, 2012 at 2:55 am
Antonio,
If BT turned out positive estimates of probability in this case, I doubt there would be such an issue.
I’m kidding. :)
I see the historian Christopher McCullough has a chapter on the use of statistics in history in his book, ‘Justifying Historical Descriptions’. You can actually read it online here:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dH46AAAAIAAJ&pg=PR7&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
I just love the last part of this sentence from the publisher’s blurb, because as with Rolf Torstendahl, it seems to sum up what i consider to be the most interesting, perhaps even crucial, though not in my experience often aired aspect of the matter:
‘The author concludes that no historical description can be finally proved, and that we are only ever justified in believing them for certain practical purposes.’
Incidentally, I believe McCullough has a particular interest in early Christianity, and is a committed Christian himself.
Bradley Bowen
May 28, 2012 at 3:35 pm
David – Thank you for the Google Book reference to Justifying Historical Descriptions. Pages 58 and 59 have a couple of objections to the use of BT in relation to inferences from general knowledge to singular historical claims.
McCullagh argues that statistical inferences are much more common in historical reasoning of this sort, and that statistical inferences are superior to inference to best explanation (p. 46).
The pattern of statistical inference involves two premises involving probability, in which the probabilities are multiplied to yield the probability conferred on the conclusion by that particular evidence (not taking into account other evidence which might either confirm or dis-confirm the conclusion):
1. There is a probability (of the degree p1) that whatever is an A is a B.
2. It is probable (to the degree p2) that this is an A.
Therefore (relative to these premises):
3. It is probable (to the degree p1 x p2) that this is a B.
(see p.48)
So, it appears that McCullagh agrees that quantified probabilities and mathematical calculation using those quantified probabilities has an important role to play in historical reasoning, esp. the use of the simple rule of multiplication.
Bradley Bowen
May 28, 2012 at 4:24 pm
I had Chinese take out for dinner last night, and my fortune cookie contained this message: “Mathematics will figure in a fortunate occasion for you this week.” What are the chances of getting this fortune this week? (Perhaps a sign from God for me to sing the praises of probability calculations?).
I’m no math whiz. Never had a course in statistics. Only took algebra and trig in college….many decades ago. But I do enjoy math, and try to use it whenever I can in my reasoning, especially probability.
John Locke was a believer in probability. It made a nice contrast between his empiricist attitude and that of Descartes and Spinoza, who tried to turn philosophy into a branch of Geometry, with their deductive metaphysical ‘proofs’.
Locke focused probability as the critical thinker’s alternative to the unmerited and unmitigated certainty of religious enthusiasts. Like Locke, probability reminds me of our limitations as humans, and of the difficulty of achieving certainty, as well as the suspicion that is appropriate to feel towards those who frequently assert their beliefs to be certain.
I especially appreciate quantified probabilities, because they provide a bit more precision than ordinary language terms, such as ‘probable’, ‘very probable’, ‘improbable’, ‘very improbable’, ‘almost certain’, and so on. Even when the data does not clearly imply a particular probability (like .73), it is at least helpful to know the degree of confidence someone places in a claim or assumption (a probability of .6 or .7 is significantly different than a probability of .9, although .7 might be said to be ‘very probable’ in some instances, and .9 expressed as simply ‘probable’ in some instances).
Multiplication of probabilities, when multiple assumptions are required to get to a conclusion, is a simple bit of math, but I think it is common to fail to appreciate this little bit of logic.
In my job (Project Management) a common failure of project management is the failure to recognize this bit of logic. If you have a schedule with consecutive tasks A, B, and C, where task A must complete prior to starting task B, and B must complete prior to starting C, each task having a high probability of completing on time (say .8), people often fail to see how it is somewhat probable that such a schedule will fail to complete on time. Since each task must complete on time for the project to complete on time, the probability of the project completing on time is .8 x .8 x .8 = .512 or .5 rounded to one significant figure. Although each individual task is very likely to complete on time, the three phase project has only a 50/50 chance of completing on time. It is very common for people to fail to do this simple bit of reasoning and to recognize the degree of risk that the project will fail to complete on time.
I also look on conditional probability with a significant degree of affection.
P (A/B) means The probability that A is the case, given that B is the case.
A basic principle of probability is that the probability of a claim is always relative to a body of evidence or assumptions. So, the little slash mark serves as a constant reminder (to me) of how our beliefs and claims are bound by point of view. Good scholarly writing generally begins with a statement of ones basic assumptions.
Mr. Hoffmann, for example, listed several background assumptions about first century Palestine in one of his comments here concerning whether there was an historical Jesus. There are many such assumptions made by Jesus scholars, assumptions that may be generally accepted by other Jesus scholars, but not by all. For example, that Matthew and Luke used a written copy of Mark as one of their main sources is a common assumption made by most Jesus and NT scholars, but this assumption is not universally accepted. So, it is good to lay out such assumptions at the beginning of a book or article, so others can see the point of view in which one’s thinking is grounded.
It is entirely possible to spend one’s life thinking and reasoning from a particular point of view, only to discover late in life that this point of view is fundamentally in error. This is a sad and even tragic event for someone who loves to think and make intellectual discoveries, but it is an unavoidable risk of being a finite and limited human being.
In any case, the little slash in conditional probability reminds me that not only should my beliefs generally be ‘probable’ rather than ‘certain’ but also that there is an additional layer of uncertainty in all human thinking, which is the unavoidable fact that we must always think from some point of view or other, from one particular set of assumptions rather than another set, and that those assumptions themselves are subject to doubt, dis-confirmation, or revision in the light of new evidence.
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Ananda
May 29, 2012 at 10:16 am
“Mathematics will figure in a fortunate occasion for you this week.”
Thats your next girlfriend….34-26-38
Bradley Bowen
May 31, 2012 at 4:28 pm
I have not studied Carrier’s articles proposing BT as the solution to ‘the problem’ of ‘invalid or defective’ methodology in historical Jesus studies. So, I’m not in a position to pass judgment on his proposal.
It does seem, on the face of it, to be a rather implausible proposal, like suggesting the use of Venn diagrams or symbolic logic to turn philosophy into a science. I have nothing against Venn diagrams or symbolic logic, but (a) bad philosophy will not be fixed by such technical means, and (b) philosophy is not and never will be a science.
But there appears to be an interesting disagreement here over whether or not there is a crisis or dramatic turning point in historical Jesus studies, where an old paradigm is being widely challenged and there is a scramble to develop a new approach.
Another question, perhaps the unmentioned elephant in the living room, is whether historical Jesus studies can or should be scientific. Your comment about consensus strikes me as hitting on that issue:
“It is presently too early to expect a consensus, even on methods, among all critical scholars, in view of new evidence and new argument especially since the 1970s and in view of more recent developments in Aramaic scholarship. Consensus involving ideological extremes is impossible and this has a regrettable effect on the most critical scholarship because all critical scholars are human beings who necessarily begin and continue their lives within some kind of social framework.”
The idea that is is ‘too early’ to expect consensus on methods seems like special pleading to me, and pointing to some recent change in the field is irrelevant, because the same point could be made about any alleged scholarly or scientific field, including pseudo sciences such as astrology and Scientology.
But the problem of the failure to arrive at consensus among historical Jesus experts is one that cannot be easily side-stepped. Chemistry and biology don’t vary according to ideology. There is no ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ chemistry. No ‘Christian’ verses ‘Hindu’ biology. We have international and cross-cultural consensus in the sciences, but cannot even get American Christian Jesus scholars to come to any consensus about the historical Jesus.
Please say a bit more about your views on historical analysis, science, and the problem of lack of consensus about the historical Jesus.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 31, 2012 at 5:06 pm
“But the problem of the failure to arrive at consensus among historical Jesus experts is one that cannot be easily side-stepped.” I don’t think anyone is. It was experts in Christian origins who identified the problem, which is a residuum of source analysis–pretty technical stuff–which I’d be happy to demonstrate–which is precisely why packing the problem into predictive templates (see Albert’s useful comment on “Proving What?”) is useless. Given many of the same assumptions that are piled onto different species of ancient literature, I can plausibly argue that Alexander and Pythagoras did not exist and that he rose from the dead.
As far as I can see, it is a simple cart-horse problem which certain probablists are trying to apply to dead horses and dysfunctional carts. “There is no ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ chemistry. No ‘Christian’ verses ‘Hindu’ biology. We have international and cross-cultural consensus in the sciences, but cannot even get American Christian Jesus scholars to come to any consensus about the historical Jesus.” As you must know, these are obvious points; but then you cannot expect history to work like the pure sciences and mathematics, which is not to say that there are not relatively sophisticated and relatively objective methods for dealing with questions of evidence and composition. Besides, consensus as to method has never been an end in itself in scholarship; consensus is not the same as finding the right method, and in historical studies, conclusions remain to be overturned by the next “find,” as happened with the Dead Sea scrolls and the Nag Hammadi documents—which btw, the mythtics hardly ever mention as having toppled some of their pillar assumptions. Please try to avoid using emotive terms like “American Christian Jesus scholars”–I do not deny their existence, if you mean people who practice their religion through their scholarship; for historical reasons, we have more of our share in the United States. But no one who drives research forward in this area is unaware of the special burden they represent–just as there are apparently “respected” scientists out there who deny global warming and claim to use the same method that other scientists use. Where is your consensus then?
rjosephhoffmann
May 31, 2012 at 5:26 pm
@Brad: Sorry, My answer got ahead of your question.
David Mills
May 31, 2012 at 5:46 pm
@ Joseph
Briefly, what parts of some mythicist assumptions would you say are incompatible with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi documents?
Bradley Bowen
June 1, 2012 at 1:24 am
Mark Powell’s survey of modern historical Jesus scholars does, as Carrier states, “the whole confusion of contradictory opinions that has resulted from applying these methods” [i.e. the methods used for distinguishing authentic sayings and deeds of Jesus from inauthentic sayings and deeds.
However, it is important to note that what modern historical Jesus scholars have in common, is those methods, and Powell sees no problem with that fact:
“…scholars will usually rely most heavily on those sources that they determine to be the earliest. …some scholars rely more heavily upon certain criteria than others. Some also modify the criteria that are defined here, in an attempt to apply them with more precision than their peers. For now though, let us list six factors that, in one way or another, come into consideration for almost all researchers studying the historical Jesus.” (Jesus as a Figure in History, p.46)
Powell then covers: multiple attestation, dissimilarity, memorable content or form, language & environment, explanation, and coherence (p.46-50).
Jesus scholars covered by Powell’s book are: John Crossan, Marcus Borg, E.P. Sanders, John Meier, and N.T. Wright.
Carrier also quotes James Charlesworth:
“James Charlesworth concurs, concluding that ‘what had been perceived to be a developing consensus in the 1980s has collapsed into a chaos of opinions.’ ”
Again, Charlesworth does not draw the conclusion that Carrier does from this lack of consensus among modern historical Jesus scholars:
“What are the most reliable methods for discerning Jesus’ own traditions recorded by the Evangelists? Five are major.” (The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide, p.20)
Charlesworth then goes on to describe the following five methods:
embarrassment, dissimilarity, multiple attestation, coherence, Palestinian Jewish setting/historical plausibility. (p.20-27). He then describes ten “additional supporting methods” (p.27-30).
Powell and Charlesworth acknowledge the diversity of views and lack of consensus among modern Jesus scholars, but they don’t see this as implying a crisis for the methodology used in historical Jesus research.
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rjosephhoffmann
June 2, 2012 at 3:09 am
@Brad: Yes, good points: Variety of method and even theories of method are not indicative of “chaos.” Even if you are using the term scientific method as a norm, it doesn’t consist of a single approach “but refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge” (Goldhaber, 2010) The Oxford English Dictionary says that scientific method is “a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses…” The way in which the method works on empirical data–microbes for example– will obviously differ from the way it is applied to historical data or social phenomena.
Ananda
May 26, 2012 at 9:00 am
“Yet it is this supernatural Jesus that humanity desperately needs, for only this supernatural Jesus can bridge the gap between human sin and God’s holiness”
Didn’t we do this already for 1500 some odd years ? but we need more of the same………….lol
Also of major importance is that all supernatural events need to be understood on other levels beyond a literal past,a Gnosis so to speak…………..
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steph
May 26, 2012 at 11:06 am
I was quoting a fundamentalist Christian, Stein, who is completely out of touch with ciritical historical analysis of texts. He was professing his convictions of faith. Critical scholarship distinguishes the difference between myth and plausible reality in texts. Gnosticism is a completely separate matter.
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Ananda
May 26, 2012 at 1:11 pm
Still Steph, the distinctions the Critical scholars make between myth and plausible reality are contained in a vacuum of one dimensional literal interpretation in a piece of literature that is Spiritual. What is spiritual? Well beyond the material literal understanding for sure.
Example: Jesus walks on water is dismissed by historians as a myth, prop for the story or legend when taken in the literal sense however it is as oblivious as skating on ice,a walk in the park or a piece of cake if one considers waters are none other than the cares, riches and pleasures of the world and being able to enter one of the three heavens in this flesh and blood body as Paul mentioned one is not sinking into deeps of the waters attractions and aversions of worldly existence (Equanimity) It’s not like these states of consciousness have not been fully quantified in the east as the 8 Jhanas as well as in Pistis Sophia and the NHC or even the born again experience. Waters is also symbolic of the second chakra responsible for the whole host of attractions and aversions of the other kind…..lol…(sexual)
One cannot surgically remove un-plausible reality inherent for the overall comprehension of the story and expect anything other than a butchered unrecognizable patient.
The only solution is that Critical scholars must join John of the Cross or Ibn Arabi and become Scholar mystic ships and plunge past the dark night of critical material literalism.
Ps I am a natural redhead………lol……….really
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steph
May 26, 2012 at 2:24 pm
I think Joe is right: ‘when corrected, they pronounce the whole field askew and themselves right. That is not the way serious scholarship works–and I think, in their heart of hearts they must know that they are simply playing a game.’ I think perhaps the alarming over confidence, there is still a conviction that it really is all just a game.
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steph
May 26, 2012 at 2:25 pm
or rather ‘despite’ the alarming over confidence.
Antonio Jerez
May 26, 2012 at 8:48 pm
Steph,
I think you are on to something. I often get the impression that for people like Richard Carrier and Neil Godfrey the search for the non-existent Jesus is just an intellectual game. It´s like they are testing a very odd idea to see how far they can stretch things by making intellectual acrobatics (Bayes theorem.. etc etc), making extremely farfetched mythological analogies (Comparing the death of Hercules with the death of Jesus etc etc) and thereby earn some adulation by a lot of others fools and incompetents on the Internet who think heroes like Carrier, Doherty and Godfrey have finally given a deathly blow to Christianity by sheer brainpower.
Ken Scaletta
May 27, 2012 at 1:00 am
I would agree. Carrier strikes me not so much as an objective investigator as a hired expert witness. He’s qualified and smart enough to know how to massage and frame the data to support a desired conclusion, but it feels forced and predisposed and leans on tendentious interpretations and connections. I don’t think he’s generally reckless or dishonest. His stuff is presented in a superficially logical way, and he’s not irresponsible about facts or sources, but his arguments come off more as “clever” to me than revelatory.
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Neil Godfrey’s response 2: @ Stephanie Fisher « Vridar says:
May 27, 2012 at 2:00 am
[...] faults me for supposedly quoting Paula Fredriksen’s words out of context. Stephanie at no point presents and dissects my own arguments that relate to mythicist conclusions. [...]
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steph
May 27, 2012 at 10:48 am
think Neil is a little bit miffed my brief essay wasn’t all about him. Like Carrier he has gone to great lengths to contradict a slight allusion. Perhaps he was just too irrelevant. He thinks his ‘skills’ in analysis ought to have been celebrated and I’m a little astonished he still doesn’t quite grasp his abuse of Schweitzer. Never mind – he has his own soap box.
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David Mills
May 27, 2012 at 2:25 am
@ Steph and Joseph.
As a percentage, where would you normally choose to put the strength of your view that Jesus existed, with zero as total certainty that he didn’t, 100 as total certainty that he did and 50 as completely neutral.
Yes, I know it’s a hugely oversimplified question. On the other hand, it can be interesting, and potentially constructive, because a lot of the time those discussing this hot topic can appear to slide, perhaps needlessly, into either the 0-10 trench or the 90-100 trench and end up lobbing points across a no man’s land.
Same question to any other poster who is interested in giving their answer.
For myself, I tend to fluctuate between 45 and 60, that is to say not far away from neutral and if anything usually falling slightly on the side of historicity. A few years ago, I would have said always slightly on the side of historicity, but I have widened my range a tad. :)
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rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2012 at 12:23 pm
@David: If you begin with facts that are supported by general agreement: Rome existed, the province of Palestine existed, the Herodians existed, Pilate existed, apocalyptic Judaism existed, radical political and dissident religious parties existed, food rules existed, sexual apartheid between men and women existed, sects existed, the Herodian bulding proejct existed, “publicans” existed, eschatological preachers existed, the Galil ha’goyim called Galilee in the the gospels existed, magicians and healers existed, cults existed, the cruicifixion of bandits and troublemakers existed, messiahs existed, baptism existed, both rabinical and synagogue Judaism (we now know for sure) existed, the Sanhedrin existed, Caiphas existed, Greek as a lingua franca of Judaea existed, Aramaic as a language of both Judaea and the region existed, .. I will stop, but not because I am out of items. Does parsimony then lead you to the following: Jesus of Nazareth, who is perfectly typical of this context, did not exist. Or are you basing an argument for non-historicity on exceptions (e.g., syanagogue Judaism may have existed but there may not have been one in Nazareth…)–or something more visercal (Resurrections and sons of god don’t exist…) or something conspiratorial (All Cretans are liars; the gospels are written by Cretans)? It seems to me an exception to the clear historicity of context would have to use some extrapolation of one or more of those bases.
The seduction of BT, for those easily seduced, is merely that Carrier is using it like a priestly argot to impresss his followers; in fact, everyone knows that Bayes is nothing more than a logic game performed on premises devised by the machine operator. Stuff in sausage out. In Carrier’s Bayes machine, the assumptions and the values are Carrier’s; Bayes is just the system. Onlookers need to be clear about that before they think this is really about degrees of certainty in relation to facts as opposed to degrees of confidence in propositions. In (for the sake of argument) John Q. Fundamentalist’s Bayes machine, the variables will be different and so will the unarguable conclusion. I am happy to play the plausibility game because that is where research takes us. But I’m not at all persuaded that throwing probability dust at unsorted assumptions–many of them real absurdities and worn down by age and criticism–gets us closer to facts. BT deals with probability as the data are loaded into the system; and anyone knows that probability in logic has nothing necessarily to do with factuality.
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David Mills
May 27, 2012 at 6:25 pm
@ Joseph.
You don’t need to convince me to be sceptical about the application of BT here. I already have enough reservations not to give it undue weight, so I agree with you on that.
As to your initial question, and here I hope you will appreciate that I am temporarily considering one side of an argument which I consider to be undecided in overall terms, I would simply say this, that being plausible in context seems qite a separate thing from historicity for an individual, not least because figures who are or were taken to be historical but about whom there are doubts, often fit plausibly into the context of accounts concerning them. Muhammad al Mahdi is one example which springs to mind, but there are many others, Prester John, Buddha, Budai, Krishna, Ned Ludd, William tell, Betty crocker, John Frum, Paul Bunyan…..so I am not sure how much weight to give to that.
IMO, there are features of the evidence which are in favour of historicity, and there are features which aren’t, and when I either add up the former, starting from a hypothetical zero, or alternatively start from 1 and deduct according to the shortcomings and conta-indicators, I find myself close to 0.5 in both cases.
David Mills
May 27, 2012 at 6:27 pm
@ Joseph. Whoops, that was meant to be ‘contra-indicators’ and ‘quite’, not conta-indicators and qite.
Ken Scaletta
May 27, 2012 at 2:24 pm
I think you have to define “Jesus” here. I’ve found that it’s difficult to pin mythicists down on what would constitute a “Historical Jesus,” or what would falsify mythicism. I’ve generally try to unload the question by completely ignoring the Gospels and asking whether the basic Tacitus claim is inherently implausible. I’ve found that some of them, if pushed, will grant that some kind of historical crucifixion is possible, or that some real personality cult lies at the root of Christian origins but they are vague about whether this is sufficient to constitute a Historical Jesus. To some of them, it seems, only Bible Jesus is Jesus, and Bible Jesus didn’t exist, ergo Jesus didn’t
exist.
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ROO BOOKAROO
May 27, 2012 at 3:45 pm
You’re touching the real problem.
And it is not one for the mythicists alone, it’s equally true for the historicists.
For us, being born in the 20th century, how do we approach the concept of “Jesus”? What is the phenomenological birth and growth of the concept in a 20th century brain? It’s got to start with the Christian Churches, the Bible documents, the popular images and icons of the Christ on the Cross. Has it not struck you that Christianity seems to be the only religion universally adoring the image of a corpse?
Anyway, if you don’t start with the Jesus Christ of the Bible, how on earth are you ever going to define or clarify the mental concept of “Jesus”?
When Paul was writing his letters, how come his recipients were fustigated for listening to “other” Gospels of the Christ. Who were those other apostles competing with Paul? How come they were already there? Was there a pre-existing concept of Jesus Christ already circulating and different from Paul’s? Were there many Christs being already preached around the Meditteranean when Paul was travelling?
Gabriel in Luke’s annunciation gives the future baby the name of Jesus, “the Son of the Most High,”. After the birth, an angel is kind enough to come down and advertise the event to the shepherds out in the field: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” This Jesus was a “Savior”.
Whichever way you take it, our concept of Jesus starts with the Christ of the Bible, the one and only divine Jesus.
Then it’s up to you how to define your concept of Jesus stripped of divinity, and reduced to a normal human figure, and make sure that you can make it clearly identifiable from the multitude of other Jesuses crowding the early manuscripts of the 1st and 2d centuries.
If this figure turns out to be a pale shadow lost in the mists of times, how do we know we’re still dealing with a residue of our original Jesus? This is homeopathic theology or would-be history. Strip, reduce, dilute, bury in the fog, and you’re still dealing with Jesus? What Jesus?
Your final remarks are just a little too glib for the fundamental problem.
rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2012 at 4:41 pm
@Roo: There are interesting points but a few too many assumptions in this comment. My Schweitzer is not in front of me (he is probably in front of Steff, who thinks of him as her Schweitzer) but at the conclusion of the QofHJ he says that the Jesus of the popular mind and of the church has died a death of a thousand cuts–indeed, that that Jesus never really lived. Almost all critical Christian origins scholars agree with that assessment. I know I do. And most would also say that contemporary investigation began with that challenge; it didn’t end there. Your further point however — that you are left with a cipher — is simply not correct. And the tendency of the mythtics, who conflate the results of 19th and 20th century scholarship with their own hyper-view of “how it really happened,” is simply an attempt to fill in the gaps with fluff instead of the hard cement and reasoned conclusions based in real research. The Jesus of later Christian doctrine who had no historical existence is no more the cul de sac to investigation of the Jesus who did than the Augustus who became a god by proclamation would be an end of inquiry into the life and works of Octavian. In fact, what was done with and to the image of Jesus is also entirely plausible within its historical context: this is the way signifcant men were memorialized. We don’t get any sort of record of insignificant events and men. –Except of course Augustus had a Livy and even a Vergil and Jesus had nothing like it. Plus, as Helmut Koester used to remind his students, papyrus was expensive.
ROO BOOKAROO
May 27, 2012 at 5:36 pm
The question asked by Ken Scaletta is not being answered.
“I think you have to define “Jesus” here.” Sure, and that it s the problem.
Accepting the divine Jesus is no problem. You simply absorb whatever the churches or theologians are willing to push down your throat, or your brain.
Modern existence deniers have a simple solution: they finesse the problem entirely.
Ancient skeptics couldn’t swallow the tall tales and thought that Christians were inventing their Jesus Christ.
Modern mythicists reject the whole construction altogether. Clean the table, label all the Christian documents as great literature, or interesting fictions, or a subtle invention of a new mystery cult (an attractive hypothesis), or see in your new God a Gnostic spirit floating somewhere and connected by holy radio to human brains. Sublunar? Why not? Supralunar and in the clouds? Why not?
Or a construct of a preacher spewing out Seneca-like wisdom, like with Bruno Bauer, or cynic-like morality, as is the modern fashion? Any way you want to conceive this imaginary figure.
But the problem is more acute for historicists. They can’t sweep all the biblical stuff under the carpet. Something has to be salvaged. What? Jesus as a “historical man”? What man? Why is he called Jesus? How is he differentiated from the thousand of Jesuses in Palestine history?
And if he is lost in the mist of times, what can we say about this phantomatic figure? Why is that nearly evanescent shadow still Jesus?
Herakles didn’t exist? Fine, suit yourself. But then, why did this Jesus (assuming we’ve satisfied Ken Scaletta’s inquisitive mind) exist? On what basis? What on earth do we know of him?
Thomas Paine thought it was philanthropy. Or are we constructing and inventing another Jesus? Schweitzer thought so. What was his criterion for spotting the existence of Jesus? His immense “spiritual” influence that descended through the ages to him. Spiritualism was a rage in Europe and the States at the end of the 19th century. Schweitzer’s Jesus joined the crowd of famous spiritual influences.
And why does Bart Ehrman, undisputedly a fine brain, feel that he has to produce a book “proving” the existence of Jesus? He’s declared that he’s the first one to do so. Really? Nobody had done it before? Never mind the spate of books on “Jesus: Myth or History?” produced since the late 19th century, all the way to 1946.
Once we’ve rejected the Jesus of divine origin, the questions of who is this historical Jesus? How do we get to him? Who is this man Jesus? have no obvious immediate answers.
Ken Scaletta has a great point. It touches on the phenomenological perception of Jesus, and beyond that the mental definition of a “historical” Jesus. You have to analyze your own brain to discover what you mean by a “historical Jesus”. Empty sentences on the generalities of “good” critical research don’t even get to it.
rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2012 at 6:21 pm
@Roo: “But the problem is more acute for historicists. They can’t sweep all the biblical stuff under the carpet.” I think you just shot yourself in the foot. I suspect that even Carrier and Doherty might agree, though who can tell?
ROO BOOKAROO
May 27, 2012 at 7:54 pm
I don’t know about shooting oneself in the foot, or the mouth, or the head. I don’t get the answer.
I still don’t understand how a 20th century brain can “define” a historical Jesus by starting from thin air. What Jesus?
That brain has got to start from somewhere, and this starting point must be the concept and images presented and transmitted by the Bible documents. Historicists cannot escape starting from the original Biblical documents even to formulate any simple idea of Jesus.
Then they take out their scissors, like Thomas Jefferson, or they mark out the “mythical parts” like David Strauss, until by a process of elimination and reduction, they obtain a “residue” that they call the “historical” Jesus. So the whole process hinges on the reduction and cutting out process.
Otherwise I don’t understand how any “historical” Jesus can be defined and reached by a modern brain. Historicists are obliged to start with the Biblical material in order to reach a reduction which is the “historical ” component of their initial material.
The definition of the Jesus requested by Ken Scaletta will consist of outlining the process of elimination and reduction, and pointing to the residue, if there is any.
I don’t understand how else can a 20th century brain conceive any idea of a Jesus, if this brain is not connected by a mysterious radio to some mystical source of knowledge.
rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2012 at 8:18 pm
“Still don’t understand how a 20th century brain can “define” a historical Jesus by starting from thin air. What Jesus?” There comes a point where Jesus denial borders on Holocaust denial and germ theory of disease denial: If you know of a reputable historical verdict achieved by major faculties that gets us to that point, I should like to hear about it. Or are you saying that the coven you belong to has all the answers, and the rest of scholarship is, in the words of Richard Carrier, fucked because it can’t bring itself to that conclusion. This is probation. Not a tutorial or a sounding board for your increasingly private views.
steph
May 27, 2012 at 2:36 pm
The problem is, I think it’s not just ‘over simplified’ but it is an irrelevant question to the nature of responsible historical enquiry. Probability and parsimony can be useful in explanatory logic, like simple hypotheses, but neither reflect historical realities or incorporate literary complexity. For example the simple hypothesis of Q as a single written Greek document, when reconstructed and claimed to be a source for history, is not only flawed, forcing evidence where it does not fit for the sake of simplicity, but it is based on the assumption that it exists. It is therefore unhelpful and destructive to critical historical enquiry. As Joe says, “I’m not at all persuaded that throwing probability dust at unsorted assumptions–many of them real absurdities and worn down by age and criticism–gets us closer to facts.”
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David Mills
May 27, 2012 at 6:35 pm
@ Steph. That may be your view, but it appears statistical analysis is accepted by some professional historians to have a minor role in historiography. How minor is probably up for grabs. But I don’t think it’s justified to say that is is blanket ‘destructive and unhelpful to critical historical enquiry’. My view is in no way to support carrier’s use of BT.
ROO BOOKAROO
May 27, 2012 at 7:13 pm
David Mills:
Not only it is a personal view, but it is an answer loaded with empty sentences and phrases. That’s the sad part of this blog.
Watch:
“an irrelevant question to the nature of responsible historical enquiry. ” What does that mean? Do you get it? I don’t.
“Probability and parsimony can be useful in explanatory logic, like simple hypotheses, but neither reflect historical realities or incorporate literary complexity”. Do you get it? I don’t.
“For example the simple hypothesis of [Q as a single written Greek document,] when reconstructed and claimed to be a source for history, is not only flawed, forcing evidence where it does not fit for the sake of simplicity, but it is based on the assumption that it exists. ” You get the part in bracket, but what about the part outside the brackets? Who wants to read that stuff?
“It is therefore unhelpful and destructive to critical historical enquiry. ” What does that really mean? Empty sentence.
““I’m not at all persuaded that throwing probability dust at unsorted assumptions–many of them real absurdities and worn down by age and criticism–gets us closer to facts.” Is there anything really said in here? Anything to learn? Or is it just empty text?
And reams after reams of this profound-sounding but really empty language are being offered as…as what indeed? Advice? Generalities? Platitudes? Or space fillers?
Which publisher would accept to publish this kind of empty text? Bewildering.
When it comes to factual pronouncements, they edge and equivocate, because they don’t want to be quoted later.
They’ll never give you your percentage of conviction.
rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2012 at 8:38 pm
Dear Roo:
“Factual Pronouncements.” The only factual pronouncements you want to hear is Jesus did not exist. That is not factual. You have no way to corroborate this. But you speak of facts. You have evidently not read much in this area, but every comment is a bit worse and less knowledgeable than the one before. If you wish to whine about this, go and whine within the mythtic cult and not here. You seem to regard yourself as an arbiter of what counts as evidence. Silence is not evidence. Superficial analogies from indeterminate sources randomly assigned are not evidence. You proclaim your ignorance as though it was a credential, and sound very much like a sophomore when you say you don’t “get” things that, in order to be a meaningful participant in a discussion like this, you need to get. You are careless of fact, indifferent toward detail, dismissive of consensus and frankly just not very knowledgeable but want to be taken seriously. Why? I suggest you post your further comments on another site–because no one who is trying to engage the material has time to conduct the tutorial necessary to bring you up to speed. The only empty sentences I see here are your assertions that there are empty sentences. Other correspondents have been challenging on matters of fact and history. But not you. I think they have been treated rather well because, after all, truth comes from learning, not from digging holes in trenches and defending positions. There is another Harvard song, btw: http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/music/mar_24_2006/mar_24_2006_001.mp3
James
May 27, 2012 at 3:47 pm
I’m a little late to this discussion but just to lend my support to Stephanie’s case and the good points she raises. Nothing much to add to her essay or the other cases made but we could really do without the sexist discourse attributed to “Roo Buckaroo” (!!) when the internet warrior says “this lady”.
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steph
May 27, 2012 at 8:07 pm
Thanks James. The cowardly Roo no relation to Kanga (except Disney’s)… he’s a dinosaur from the Victorian era and like NT Wright’s zombies, still haunting the globe. I have honestly never personally encountered this sort of sexism before. It’s not just inappropriate, it’s pathetic. Buckaroo… who would choose that!! Maybe Philip Philips.
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David Mills
May 27, 2012 at 6:49 pm
@ Steph and joseph
I see that neither of you wants to ascribe a figure. That’s perhaps understandable in one way, but also a bit puzzling, since surely you must lie somewhere on the spectrum of conviction?
The way it would be understandable would be if you think I am confusing a personal estimation with a mathematical probability, which would be silly. What I am asking is nothing more that what could be also expressed in language (and often is, in questionnaires and polls for example) as, ‘do you agree/disagree slightly, somewhat or strongly, or are you undecided.’
I won’t press this question. I just wanted to clarify that point. :)
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rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2012 at 7:01 pm
“Spectrum of conviction.” Gosh: was there a spectrum of conviction before probability? I suspect there was. Same as here was Plato before Aristotle. John before Jesus (whoops).
How’s this: I would be dumbfounded if, transported back to Jerusalem round about the time it is supposed to have happened, not to put too fine a point on it, an accused felon name Yeshua, pejoratively Yeshu ben Stada, but immortalized as Yshu ben h’enosh, was not sentenced to die by a Roman tribunal. Is that Okay? What do I have on my side: a collection of very early documents that only a very odd skepticism can trump. What do the mythicists have on theirs? A very odd skepticism based on silence, analogies that do not fit the picture, and private mythologies “more incredible than anything in a gospel.” Like Hercules. And David: I really have no confidence based on your comments that you have read my article. Sorry to say so. There are many better things to read on the topic–but interestingly, nobody at Carrierville and Vridarland is asking for suggestions–they are just batting away at whatever contradicts them.
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steph
May 27, 2012 at 8:36 pm
You haven’t demonstrated from the direction of your comments, a reasonable comprehension of Joe’s essay. Perhaps you have ‘read’ it but not read it. How can you fail to understand context means everything and expression in context is not expression in another context? How can you fail to understand that as scholarship makes progress, new evidence and argument take shape. Inspired by healthy discussion and debate, self critical independent critical thinking individuals form new ideas. Ideas evolve. Convictions stay the same and belong to fundamentalisms. Change of heart? Belongs to people with convictions without evidence and argument, who end up ‘changing heart’ and batting for the other side. Contrary conviction, no argument or evidence, new heart.
steph
May 27, 2012 at 8:17 pm
Do you like playing games David?
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David Mills
May 28, 2012 at 3:37 am
When I came here, it was out of honest curiosity as to why someone changed their view from one to which I would subscribe to one to which I would not subscribe. If that was because of new evidence, or new reasoning, then what were the new bits?
I have no idea what you mean about playing games.
Regarding Joseph’s essay, I’m sure there may be elements of his argument which I do not fully appreciate. That’s a given, in the circumstances.
When the mythic and allegorical and supernatural features are stripped away from Jesus, there is no doubt that what is left can be a plausible person, in harmony with context. But surely, establishing plausibility in a context is not the same as establishing historicity, by a long chalk? To say that Jesus should not be compared to antecedent mythologies is one thing, but to say that he can’t be compared to other figures who were also plausible in context is another.
I might add that to an outsider, it seems that there are quite a variety of plausible Jesuses, with several versions being presented by different scholars.
steph
May 28, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Probabilily games David.
As to seeming lack of comprehension of Joe’s essay, your direction of questioning dealt with issues discussed in his essay and you showed no signs of engaging with them, disagreeing, agreeing or acknowledging them.
And as to a number of plausible Jesuses eminating from recent critical scholarship, there are more agreements than disagreements and certain major socio-historical things can be agreed upon with evidence and argument. It is not a probability game. With constant evolution of methodology we make progress in ascertaining the reason for and shaping of Christian origins.
steph
May 28, 2012 at 1:08 pm
probability… (plobiblee?)
Antonio Jerez
May 28, 2012 at 2:57 pm
I think some folks who have shown up in the discussion are playing games with us. Definitely Roo Bookaroo. The fact that they don´t dare show up with their real names on a site like this with academic standards show it. I wish that they could go to some islamology site and play intellectual games trying to prove that Mohammed never existed and that the Quaran was fabricated hundreds of years after the traditional dating.
David Mills
May 28, 2012 at 3:45 am
As an aside, when I discussed this topic with Earl Doherty on a different forum, he also felt that I hadn’t read his stuff, or if I had I hadn’t understood it, and indeed that I must be playing games of some sort. That’s not to compare or equate Joseph Hoffmann with Earl Doherty in terms of knowledge and expertize, but it is puzzling. I sometimes think that, in general terms, those on either side of a debate do really have trouble comprehending why some are not on any side, and so treat such people as if they were part of the other side.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 28, 2012 at 10:26 am
@David: Rest assured, my concern is not that anyone be “on my side” in this discussion. It is that a fair number of questions posed by you, and not just by you, seemed not to reflect the fact that I had dealt at some length with the issues in my article. My article deals with tips of tips of icebergs, so there would be nothing, of a big picture variety, to side with me about…
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David Mills
May 28, 2012 at 11:24 am
@ Joseph.
Thanks.
I have been in many a conversations on this fascinating topic. It seems to me there are two basic types. One is to go up close, close enough to analyse the pixels, to temporarily use a visual analogy, and the other is to step back and look at the overall. picture. IMO, both are important, perhaps equally so. This did not seem to be the place for the former. :)
That is why I restricted my response to your article to the general question, how can fit with context, no matter what level of conformity we find, go any closer to historicity than establishing plausibility?
Perhaps you would agree that it can’t. Perhaps you would say that it is a matter of comparing the relative coherence of various explanations. I can understand this argument, and accept that going with what may appear to be the ‘most plausible scenario’ option is sufficient for many thoughtful, intelligent people.
But I do think one has to opt for this definition of ‘convincing’ before the evidence is even inspected. Which is fine. In many respects that is what historians and scholars do.
For myself, I cannot say that if I were presented with an identical set of evidences and accounts for any other figure, that i would not have doubts.
steph
May 28, 2012 at 6:29 pm
Bayes is only useful in determining conditional probability, which by definition is a probability regarding future events based on historical occurrrence.
The probability that event A occurs, given that event B has occurred, is called a conditional probability.
The conditional probability of A, given B, is denoted by the symbol P(A|B).
In other words, it could not be used for historical occurrences where the event is sui generis.
The mythtics also invent mythtics victories (see Vridar for the latest) to create the illusion of success; maybe they think this is what the apostles did to spread news of the resurrection Hallelujah, except – O wait – there was no resurrection, so what were they on about?
Because there was no Jesus, they also invented their joy at the death of their non existent nondead non raised nonleader, which makes perfect sense; it was hiding under our noses all the time… but the truth and the stench…
When to Apply Bayes’ Theorem
Part of the challenge in applying Bayes’ theorem involves recognizing the types of problems that warrant its use. You should consider Bayes’ theorem when the following conditions exist.
The sample space is partitioned into a set of mutually exclusive events { A1, A2, . . . , An }.
Within the sample space, there exists an event B, for which P(B) > 0.
The analytical goal is to compute a conditional probability of the form: P( Ak | B ).
You know at least one of the two sets of probabilities described below.
P( Ak n B ) for each Ak
P( Ak ) and P( B | Ak ) for each Ak
Unarguable.
I heard it somewhere.
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steph
May 28, 2012 at 7:36 pm
Neil complains that I haven’t drawn attention to his main focus which he claims focuses mainly on the question of Christian origins. I am drawing attention to his misuse of Schweitzer as an atheist blogger in a post that is about flawed methodology among people who reject critical evidence and argument for historicity. The point is that Vridar’s questioning of Christian origins involves contradicting and misrepresenting scholarship and a high degree of manipulating evidence out of context. Besides he is irrelevant ultimately and not the subject of my post. He is merely an example demonstrating mad method.
He claims I say historical arguments can’t be summarised. It is Neil I have criticised for misrepresenting historical arguments. His comment on James Crossley was: “Any one of these arguments, Crossley admits, may not be persuasive for all readers, but together they become an argument of “cumulative weight” and therefore much stronger. The maths proves it: 0+0+0=3.” This is obviously not a summary of anything which James ever wrote, but a deliberate attempt to make him look stupid. This is basically what is wrong with Godfrey’s summaries. The problem with summaries in general is only that they are summaries and can never be proofs. Godfrey does not seem to understand that difference either. None of us has every suggested that no-one should summarise arguments accurately, or that even an accurate argument is a substititute for a learned proof. Neil is incapable of summarising historical arguments with conclusions he disagrees with. He merely mocks and invents silly analogies and misrepresents. And now he misrepresents me on his blog post and claims I never demonstrated his misrepresentations. But then he has denied that all along the way despite evidence to the contrary.
Neil says ‘I have pointed out on numerous occasions that the very reason I quote Schweitzer’s statement on historical methodology is BECAUSE he is a “historicist” and “not a mythicist”. His words would hardly have any force for my own particular point, otherwise. Stephanie is simply flat wrong when she says I am “oblivious to the fact that nobody suggests that mythicists pretend Schweitzer was a mythicist”.’
Yet Neil just confirms what I said. Yes indeed Neil, nobody is accusing you or other mythtics of pretending Schweitzer was a mythicist. We know you know he believed in a historical figure. I can’t believe Neil’s failure to comprehend something so simple, and quote it and still interpret it as the opposite to what it says. So yes we all agree that Schweitzer did believe in a Jesus who was historical, and he followed Weiss, as I pointed out in my essay: Schweitzer was a committed German Lutheran Christian. What mythicists don’t understand is that Schweitzer like Weiss DID think we could use historical methodology to demonstrate it in historical terms because they quote him out of his own historical context and I pointed this out in my essay which Neil fails to comprehend. As such, Schweitzer believed that salvation was by faith, not by works, and historical research was merely a ‘work’.
This is what he considered ‘uncertain’ about all historical research. It has nothing to do with what decent present-day historians or incompetent bloggers mean when they think that something is ‘historically uncertain’, which normally indicates that it may or may not have happened. It is well known that Schweitzer followed Weiss in supposing that Jesus expected the kingdom of God to come in his own time, and was mistaken. He commented,
His Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, published in 1892, is in its own way as important as Strauss’s first Life of Jesus. He lays down the third great alternative which the study of the life of Jesus had to meet….either eschatological or non-eschatological!….The general conception of the kingdom was first grasped by Johannes Weiss. All modern ideas, he insists…must be eliminated from it; when this is done, we arrive at a kingdom of God which is wholly future….He exercises no ‘messianic functions’, but waits, like others, for God to bring about the coming of the kingdom by supernatural means….But it was not as near as Jesus thought. The impenitence and hardness of heart of a great part of the people, and the implacable enmity of his opponents, at length convinced him that the establishment of the kingdom of God could not yet take place….It becomes clear to him that his own death must be the ransom price….
The setting up of the kingdom was to be preceded by the day of judgement. In describing the messianic glory Jesus makes use of the traditional picture, but he does so with modesty, restraint and sobriety. Therein consists his greatness….
The ministry of Jesus is therefore not in principle different from that of John the Baptist….What distinguishes the work of Jesus from that of the Baptist is only his consciousness of being the Messiah. He awoke to this consciousness at his baptism. But the messiahship which he claims is not a present office; its exercise belongs to the future….
…Reimarus…was the first, and indeed before Johannes Weiss, the only writer to recognise and point out that the teaching of Jesus was purely eschatological….But Weiss places the assertion on an unassailable scholarly basis.[1]
Now where has all the supposedly historical uncertainty gone? It was never there! In this second passage, Schweitzer was discussing what really happened, and he had no doubts about that at all. His apparent doubts in the much quoted passage above are not historical doubts, as Neil understands them, at all. They are entirely due to his German Lutheran conviction that salvation is by faith, not works, and historical research is a ‘work’ which does not bring salvation. Neil says, ‘I have always in discussions stressed that the methodological principle is NOT an argument for mythicism. It is an argument for an understanding of what constitutes a valid historical methodology.’
Once again, Neil misses the point and has taken Schweitzer out of his historical context, and deliberately persistently fails to acknowledge it, to make him sound like people he had never heard of him. Moreover, the whole idea that the judgement of anyone more than a century ago can be treated as if it were a judgement on the work of Sanders, Vermes and competent scholars who have written since then shows a total lack of historical sense.
For all Neil’s trumpeting of holding a degree which includes modern history, he failed to learn something we all learned in stage one if we weren’t already aware of it. He fails to put people in their own modern historical context. He does this with Fredriksen’s regrettably unhelpful analogy which he took out of historical context and applied to ancient history which is a clear abuse of her demonstration. No he is not implying that didn’t suggest “Fredriksen’s point meant that Jesus was a myth.” I never said that. He is abusing her analogy out of context. Neil does not understand context and the implications of context. Neil also refers to Fredriksen as “a naughty schoolgirl who has no interest in the content of the lesson, believing the teacher to be a real dolt, and who accordingly seeks to impress her giggly “know-it-all” classmates by interjecting the teacher with smart alec rejoinders at any opportunity” and me as “a vampire declaring an outrage if someone shows it the sign of the cross” and biblical scholars as “silly detectives” etc: all completely ludicrous.
As for identification of Neil as an ‘atheist’ blogger, that epithet is significant in view of ‘Christian origins’ and his bias, just as he would refer to a Christian scholar or atheist scholar etc. I never identify people by their race or sexual orientation like Roo Buckaroo. It’s irrelevant here or anywhere. Does Neil regularly identify people like that?
As to his final sentence in his post, I can’t resist repeating it because it is a clear example of his malice and spite ‘But if “The Jesus Process (c)” aspires to make a serious contribution to the “required debunking” of the Christ-Myth it is going to have to refrain from diluting their efforts with the uncomprehending Stephanie Louise Fisher.’ Neil has already pronounced that the copyright symbol is “unnecessary but pretentious, demonstrating his ignorance of the necessity of litigation processes, and now, in addition to his malice and spite, he demonstrates a complete lack of comprehension of the purpose and aims of the Jesus Process.
I suspect Neil has found criticisms of me while gazing at himself in the mirror.
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Ananda
May 29, 2012 at 10:48 pm
“As such, Schweitzer believed that salvation was by faith, not by works, and historical research was merely a ‘work”
Who could perform this labyrinthine tangle of historical/ahistorical inquiry without faith and both be justified to boot?
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Stephanie Fisher Responds to Neil Godfrey | Unsettled Christianity says:
May 28, 2012 at 9:31 pm
[...] complains that I haven’t drawn attention to his main focus which he claims focuses mainly on the question of Christian origins. I am [...]
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The Three Brusque-Fakirs — The Jesus Process© Hits the Web « Vridar says:
May 29, 2012 at 9:36 am
[...] things first. I mustn’t forget my manners. Welcome new bloggers! Welcome Blogger Hoffmann, Blogger Fisher, and Blogger Casey! We extend our warmest wishes to the new blog, The Jesus Process©™®, and its [...]
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steph
May 29, 2012 at 1:11 pm
Completely incompetent, ludicrously malicious, drivel. Irrelevant.
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Ralph
May 29, 2012 at 1:57 pm
I was disappointed in the vindictiveness of this comment of yours.
“As a member of the Worldwide Church of God he could not cope with the Jewishness of Jesus, and when he converted to atheism this did not change. As N.T. Wrong astutely observed, ‘Once a fundie always a fundie. He’s just batting for the other side, now.”
I suggest you read this post of Neil’s, in which he describes in detail the experience of leaving the cult and how that taught him to continually question his own assumptions. What he describes is very different to your accusation.
’http://vridar.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/i-left-the-cult-and-met-the-enemy/
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steph
May 29, 2012 at 2:49 pm
Precisely Ralph. I think we’ve all read that account. Perhaps you don’t realise the implications of conversion experiences. And yes that claim is not uncommon and contradicts subsequent behaviour and the concept of the ‘Christ myth’.
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steph
May 29, 2012 at 2:51 pm
The claim that he continually questions his own assumptions, ie is constantly self critical.
Michael Wilson
May 29, 2012 at 3:13 pm
Ralph, Unfortunately questioning his own assumptions is not what Neil does, at least not rationally. His level of argumentation is so poor that have questioned his commitment to the ideas he champions, but that sort of twisting of evidence is the way things are done in the off brand religious sects, so it seems that their methods of twisted logic still suit Neil.
On Steph’s mention of the World Wide Church of God and Jewishness of Jesus, I think that the WWCG was one of the Christian sects like the 7th day Adventist that maintained that the Levitical laws applied to their adherents; they also thought that the English were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Neil’s support for holocaust “revisionist” and the anti-Semitic regimes of Iran and Syria seem to stem more from his far left world view than Drew’s disgust of Jewishness in Christianity. Of course on the issue of what to do with the Zionist entity the far right and far left have found themselves in agreement, even if for completely different motivations.
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Paul Regnier
May 29, 2012 at 4:18 pm
From the interaction I’ve had with Godfrey, he seems wholly unable to respond dispassionately to *other people* questioning his assumptions. So I seriously doubt that he has a little inner Socrates testing his every idea, whatever he might say on his blog.
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steph
May 29, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Vindictive presupposes an inclintation towards revenge. Now that’s a bit silly. I have read that account as have my colleagues. Perhaps you don’t realise the regrettable and inevitable implications of conversion experiences and the continuation of convictions, but different convictions. The claim to self criticism and continual questioning of assumptions is not an uncommon illusion among people who have left a situation like that but it does not reflect the reality of his subsequent behaviour, while the concept of the non Jewish ‘Christ myth’ is one of the consequences. This is not synonymous with anti semitism, but it is a reflection that the Jewish historical figure without the ‘Christ myth’ accretions’ has been denied.
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David Mills
May 29, 2012 at 7:01 pm
Couldn’t we have a little bit less of the ad hom approach? A man’s arguments are all that matter, surely? Not that I subscribe to his, you understand, I don’t, for the most part. But if we were to take the line that those who held or indeed still hold certain beliefs about supernatural this or that may have their thinking coloured, where would it end? It would leave us wide open to people saying, ‘well you’re a committed Christian, maybe that affects your approach and judgement’? Which a lot of critics do say about Bible scholars. Phrases involving the words goose, gander, hoist, petard, pot, black and kettle spring to mind. :)
rjosephhoffmann
May 29, 2012 at 9:46 pm
@David: it seems to me, you are the one who emphasizes Bayes. I thought this might be.,..instructive. It is hardly a name-calling exercise. You are welcome to deal with it at some deeper level; I can handle it.
steph
May 29, 2012 at 9:59 pm
Excuse me David Mills – to whom do you address your ‘advice’? Your comment is very unclear.
David Mills
May 29, 2012 at 3:00 pm
I see E. P. Sanders has got a mention, and that he is held in high regard.
From where I’m seeing things, it is quite the opposite of reassuring to hear that he has apparently said words to the effect that the evidence for Jesus is on a par with Alexander the Great and in fact may be considered better, since for the former we cannot explore what he thought.
I might even go as far as to say that this comment might neatly articulate some of my, er, misgivings about Bible Scholarship.
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steph
May 29, 2012 at 6:59 pm
David, he wrote that in 1993 in the book he wrote for a popular audience, The Historical Figure of Jesus, on page 4. He wrote that before the surge in interest in Christian origins which inspired an equivalent increase in amateur and especially internet-based speculation and attempts to promote mythicist arguments. Do you really think it reflects badly on his entire contribution to scholarship including his detailed research and published work on early Judaism and its sources, such as Judaism: Practice and Belief (1992) for example?
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David Mills
May 30, 2012 at 3:11 am
@ Steph.
No, I don’t think it reflects badly on his entire contribution.
Setting that aside, I’m not sure why it matters where he wrote it. It either is or isn’t an accurate thing to say.
@ Joseph
I have no idea where you think I emphasized Bayes.
Regarding the tone and unnecessary personalization of some (emphasis some) of the discussion, I can handle it too. I just wasn’t expecting it, here.
rjosephhoffmann
May 30, 2012 at 11:10 am
As most objections to Bayes are usually (as by Sober: “Likelihood and the Duhem/Quine Problem,” ) over its predictive accuracy, it would be interesting to hear your view on how predictive accuracy applies retrogressively to past events. With respect to Bayes, I would like to see a calculation of the likelihood that Jesus was the messiah based strictly and without interpretation on the messianic and apocalyptic texts of the period 167BCE through 135 CE. It seems to me that the probability is very high indeed–maybe .80?–that using the premises that can be constructed from occurrences, Jesus was indeed the messiah. And of course, this must mean he really existed.
rjosephhoffmann
May 30, 2012 at 12:50 pm
Hi David, No that was just a rumination–not in response. I take you at your word that you are not pushing Bayes T. Almost no one is.
steph
May 30, 2012 at 10:41 am
Of course it matters when he wrote it. Context is essential. And there is no ‘right or wrong’ answer in this case. It is a matter of interpretation within a social and historical context which has altered since he wrote.
David Mills
May 30, 2012 at 11:29 am
@ steph. Let me just get this straight. Are you actually suggesting there is a context in which it is or was in 1993 accurate to say that the evidence for Jesus is on a par with Alexander, indeed better, because we can’t explore what the former thought? Is that something you are willing to make a case for?
David Mills
May 30, 2012 at 11:29 am
Whoops. Meant to say latter, not former.
David Mills
May 30, 2012 at 11:51 am
@ Joseph
Regarding Bayes, it certainly could be a very interesting case, the one you would like to hear, and I might enjoy reading it too, but (for the second time) I’m not sure why you might think I’m the one to put that case, since I’ve not indicated any inclination to apply Bayes? I have tended in quite the opposite direction in regard to Bayes, on more than one occasion here.
David Mills
May 31, 2012 at 3:22 am
@ Joseph.
Ah. A rumination. I thought it might be, but wasn’t sure, and was reluctant to take up the offer, lest I be taken to be an advocate. :)
David Mills
May 31, 2012 at 5:55 am
@ Joseph
Now that I know we are just ruminating…..
I should first admit that if philosophy and mathematics and logic can in some fundamental way be described as (not unrelated) ‘languages’, my fluency in them could be described as pigeon, at best. ?
Regarding predictive accuracy being applied retrospectively, as I understand it, that is not a fundamental problem. In fact, it seems to me that BT is geared towards it, because it is not an attempt to predict a future event, but to go backwards to see how an hypothesis, or the conjunction part(s) of an hypothesis, fits with outcome evidence.
At this point, it might be briefly worth noting that BT is sometimes applied in a court of law, where again, the assessment analyses retrospectively, back to the crime scene. A court of law is not the same as the study of ancient history, of course, and although there are similarities, one could argue that there is more onus to make a call in the former than the latter. Those in favour of reducing the overcrowding in prisons might be pleased if courts had more leeway or inclination towards arriving at agnostic verdicts, but I suspect that indecision is more of an affordable luxury for both the historian and the general thinker (i.e. me). As an historian, you may disagree. I have heard historians argue that it is obtuse not to at least provisionally run with plausibility, but that is a slightly separate argument, and one which I have my own views on, speaking as a rational sceptic and not an historian. ?
Regarding your second point, about a possible calculation based on apocalyptic texts from 167BC-135CE, what you seem to be saying (quite reasonably, IMO) is that we could, if you like, use the very theorem that Carrier uses against historicity to make a case FOR historicity, and in principle, perhaps we could. In a nutshell, it seems to me that this approach is akin to what you and Steph have been saying about how Jesus can arguably be deemed likely to have been historical because of a very good fit with context, that is to say, he is plausible. Which I agree is not an insignificant matter (though IMO inconclusive, for reasons briefly given previously, not the least of which is that I am tempted to opine that him not having actually existed is not implausible either, IMO).
Interestingly, I think it is often suggested that his historicity is enhanced precisely because he was not the expected messiah, that is to say not the type of messiah that was expected, so I don’t know how that affects the calculation. ?
To finish a rather overlong post, I might end up by saying that the idea of a calculation of the sort you are suggesting seems to do more to confirm the idea that using BT is ropey in the circumstances, because of the subjective and arbitrary (i.e. non-mathematical) nature of many of the input probabilities, than it does to confirm the credibility of its usefulness in history. Perhaps that was your point, and you were being whimsical about suggesting its use? Anyhow, I would remain at my previous position, that while it may be intellectual fun, and possibly of some minor use, maths is not designed to resolve historical matters such as this, not least because the ‘crime scene’ in this case is so remote.
David Mills
May 31, 2012 at 6:00 am
Errata:
The smileys I copied and pasted from Microsoft works have morphed. Please read ? as a smiley in the above post.
Also, Joseph, if you could delete my double pasting while moderating I would be grateful. :)
Or not, as you prefer. I must, after all, take responsibility for my own technological shortcomings.
Grog
June 1, 2012 at 11:52 pm
“it would be interesting to hear your view on how predictive accuracy applies retrogressively to past events.”
Ahhh….a common creationist argument against Evolution. Almost word for word.
rjosephhoffmann
June 2, 2012 at 2:58 am
@Grog: No. It’s not: there is a virtually unbroken string of evidence that supports evolution making the theory plausible, and Bayes wasn’t used to arrive at it. What a silly analogy.
steph
May 30, 2012 at 2:34 pm
Dear David, I am relieved that you don’t think a claim made in 1993 reflects on his entire contribution to scholarship. That was however the implication I received from your association of Sanders being held in high regard with his statement articulating some of your ‘er’ misgivings about Bible Scholarship. It is essential to understand that what he wrote in 1993 he would not repeat now. In 1993 it was unnecessary to qualify such a claim, because his audience would have understood his qualifications as implicit. However since 1993 there has been a surge in interest in Christian origins which has inspired an uprise in amateur and especially internet-based speculation with attempts to promote mythicist arguments. Sanders would write something far more complicated to counteract precisely those sort of literal interpretations which make his words mean something different now.
Reply
David Mills
May 30, 2012 at 6:51 pm
Steph,
If I were to try to clarify how I could say that someone could write something which might summarize or typify some reservations I may have (whether they are justified or not is a separate issue, because I accept that they are essentially impressions) without it necessarily implying blanket criticism, it would simply be to say that anyone can have, er, if you’ll pardon my phrase, weaknesses and have strengths. In fact, most people I know have some of both. :)
I may, still, consider that observation to be an unjustifiable, particular thing to say, because I don’t yet understand the point you are making about the context at the time not requiring him to qualify it. In what way am I supposed to say, ‘oh well, in that case, it was a perfectly reasonable view to take’? But I would not presume to damn a person who as far as I can tell, ‘knows his onions’ in many other respects.
I Might add, incidentally, that I personally view Bart Ehrman’s recent expression of certainty in a somewhat similar light, that is to say, sounding very like the sort of thing someone might say when their objectivity is arguably wanting.
David Mills
May 30, 2012 at 6:59 pm
ps
…..their objectivity (arguably wanting) in one respect, or in one particular sense, not their objectivity generally. I can’t imagine that the latter would be a fair thing to say, given how many good scholars have demonstrated a willingness and a skill in explaining the texts with an admirable degree of rational criticism over the years. Rational sceptics like myself, especially those of us who declare agnosticism on this issue, probably have a great deal more in common with people like yourself and joseph, and sanders, than we have to differ about. :)
David Mills
May 29, 2012 at 3:01 pm
If he didn’t say that, I will eat my humble hat, or whatever the expression is. In all honesty, I can’t believe he did.
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steph
May 29, 2012 at 7:04 pm
Save your hat. I think it is ‘I’ll eat my hat’ and its the pie that’s humble.
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peadarmaccionaoith
June 10, 2012 at 8:48 am
SLJ: Notably incompetent are his discussions the “Criterion of Embarrassment.”
——————————————————————————————
Can you summarise Meier’s coherent and lengthy argument for the criterion which you say follows the comment quoted by Carrier? Having stated what Carrier quotes, Meier does seem to proceed immediately (p168) to examples of things he thinks the early Church was “stuck with”, not to a detailed justification of the criterion. If so, is it so unreasonable to describe Meier’s view on the CofE as an ‘assumption’? It is not clear from your essay that ‘it is not an assumption at all’, nor how/why it is “notably incompetent” to say it is.
The criterion does raise questions: do we know what would ‘embarrass’ all elements of ‘the early church’, and who they would be embarrassed in front of? Was ‘the early church’ homogenous, and would their audience also have been consistently and homogenously embarrassable by the same things? What is the depth of our field knowledge of ancient embarrassment, and particularly in the context of religious movements? What is the dynamic of evangelists/redactors being ‘stuck with’ a particular detail – what would happen if they denied an embarrassing element or were ‘economical with the truth’? Meier thinks that the early church was “stuck with” the baptism of Jesus by John, then states that John didn’t just ‘soften’ but simply “erased” the episode. If the evangelists and redactors were embarrassed that Jesus came from Nazareth, why did they have to own up to it? How would they have been called out on it if they’d elided or changed that detail?
Meier appears to recognise that there were different beliefs, and that even within the proto-orthodox ‘church’ the putative feeling of ‘embarrassment’ changed with time. Are there not inevitable incongruities between different thematic, symbolic, mystical and religious priorities, which complicate even further the difficulties of identifying ancient embarrassments?
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rjosephhoffmann
June 10, 2012 at 7:02 pm
M. calls it embarrassment; it is more properly called the dissimilarity principle: that is to say, if a belief recorded or traditioned through an aporia in the gospel differs substantially on the basis of reasonable assumptions to what the church would have wanted to propagate, that element may be regarded provisionally as earlier to the tradition. It has nothing to do with embarrassment as you are using the term, and frankly I think the term embarrassment is embarrassing; as a general principle in the evolution of texts, however it is quite sound. Disconfirming and challenging outcomes dictate editorial changes to primary traditions when these can be effected. Vid., Heremeneutics of suspicion.
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steph
June 10, 2012 at 9:28 pm
It is regrettable that Meier calls it ‘embarrassment’ which is a misleading term. It is appropriately called dissimilarity, as Joe has clarified. Meier discusses it, including its limitations, in his chapter 6 titled ‘Criteria’ from pp.167-95 in Volume One of his massive Four Volume “Marginal Jew”.
peadarmaccionaoith
June 14, 2012 at 4:46 am
Yes, Meier calls it ‘embarrassment’, but he also lists ‘dissimilarity’ (or ‘discontinuity’) as a separate criterion. While he does critique other criteria quite succinctly, he appears to deem the former limited mainly because there are few clear cases of “embarrassment”. Dissimilarity he sees as words or actions which are ‘discontinuous’ or ‘dissimilar’ in relation to 1st century ‘Judaism’ or ‘the early Church’ (e.g. the rejection of fasting). This seems to be a different notion to that of being ‘stuck with’ something ‘embarrassing’ (because of a well established MS tradition rather than necessarily because the ‘embarrassment’ is ‘true’?)
Meier points out the holes in his five primary criteria, but says if they are used in conjunction they represent reliable criteria of historicity. He does not appear to argue this closely, however – perhaps by some accumulation of indeterminate probabilities (?) – but it is not unambiguously clear that stacking sieves together will necessarily bring water from the historical well.
rjosephhoffmann
June 14, 2012 at 7:17 am
“Dissimilarity” is constructed from a range of probabilities built up from both external and internal constituents of the traditions. Many of these traditions are ideological and perspectival, notoriously difficult to pin down by region and date (there is reason scholars call this the early Christian “movement” after all) and depend on a pretty high degree of historical knowledge and technical skill to be useful at all. If I had another year of my life I could take you through several examples, but for example, the widespread rumour that Jesus was the illegitimate child of a Jewish girl impregnated by a Roman soldier (the external “ben Panthera” tradition) might lead to the counter-rumour that he was born of a virgin and narrative development as we find it in Matthew and Luke. The historicity of either story, for different reasons, must remain in doubt, but any tradition that seems to lack this polemical focus (e.g., Mt 12.47f) might be arguably older than a story that develops it. Dissimilarity is more familiar when assessing apocalyptic statements by Jesus and their modification over time. “Embarrassment” is a silly and unnecessary gloss of the same essential criterion. One caution however concerning the trend in these conversations to assume falsely that a criterion that employs intuition or subjectivity in its application is somehow “wrong.” It isn’t, and cannot be. The degree of “rightness” will always be an adjunct of the degree of sophistication with which the procedure is carried out. If you think science is the standard here, don’t think rocket science and the laws of physics as your way ahead–much less Bayes T. which doesn’t fear subjectivity at all–think surgery and skill. I think your analogy to sieves is–no pun intended–strained.
David Mills
June 14, 2012 at 7:38 am
@ peader
‘….but it is not unambiguously clear that stacking sieves together will necessarily bring water from the historical well.’
I have been scratching my head on many occasions to come up with an analogy to cover this, and that is the one I was looking for. :)
Of course, any response will revolve around the words ‘unambiguously clear’ and those who believe that Jesus existed will quite rightly point out that this is asking too much, and thus remain ‘as they were’.
Those of us who have a fondness for uncertainty will simply stop at ‘ambiguous’ and file under ‘unanswerable’.
Here is a question. What methodology allows us to tell the difference between a story and a cult which grew and was embellished around a non-historical figure from one which was embellished around a non-historical one?
If there is no clear answer to that one, what are we left with, other than a subjective choice about whether to approach the material with an attitude of trust or mistrust, both of which, or a combination of the two, are warranted, IMO.
rjosephhoffmann
June 14, 2012 at 7:53 am
“What methodology allows us to tell the difference between a story and a cult which grew and was embellished around a non-historical figure from one which was embellished around a non-historical one…” You to seem to think the answer is “none.” The answer, which will be wholly unsatisfying, is that while cults do in fact produce rituals, stories and adherents (just like political systems do), the gospels are sufficiently unlike these narratives to require the approaches that have been developed to understand them. It is simply not the case that the historical critical method is sieve-like: radical biblical criticism developed from the same root system as mainstream critical studies at the end of the 18th century and then got tangled up in self-contradiction and confusion. The idea therefore that we are confronted with the choice between knowing nothing or only believing what the fundamentalists believe strikes me as a medieval choice. In fact, I am wondering why apparently smart people want to paint themselves into that corner. And btw, knowing that Jesus did not exist is not something we know. The evidence (you can spare me a lecture on “evidence,” please) does not begin to prove it, and the mythtic view of it has not changed or improved in a century. I was amused at a responder yesterday who said something to the effect, “Yeah but we don’t have any coins with the face of Jesus on them, do we?” The obvious answer is, if we did, it would prove only the existence of the coin.
David Mills
June 14, 2012 at 8:05 am
I can concur on all fronts.
Having said that, I’d prefer if you’d reply to my agnosticism, and stop telling me of the shortcomings of mythicism. Are you (again) addressing mythicism via me, or what? J
I would not dream of giving you a lecture on ‘evidence’. Yes, that choice you gave is a medieval choice. I take your point about the coin. And yes, your answer to the question I posed is indeed unsatisfactory, to me personally, at this time, because I don’t agree that the sieve analogy is strained at all.
David Mills
June 14, 2012 at 8:34 am
@ Joseph
Addendum:
In addition to comparing the stories of Jesus to stories from other cults, should we not also compare it to stories of people who were once thought to exist but are now thought either not to have or possibly not to have?
I am not sure whether you will object (and if you do I may want to probe a bit further as to why) if I mention Betty Crocker, who, I believe, was voted the USA’s second most influential woman in a magazine article in 1947, without existing.
I think we can all agree that people can become thought of as if they have existed, when they may not have. Why not Jesus?
rjosephhoffmann
June 14, 2012 at 8:52 am
@David: You know that I will say these two cases are not symmetrical, though it is a valiant try if the point were simply to prove Mencken’s point (and Barnum’s) about the credulity of the American public or credulity in general.
David Mills
June 14, 2012 at 8:56 am
@ joseph.
Of course they are not symmetrical. I am not sure why they need to be. Nor, in defense of Americans, is Betty the only example I can think of, by a long way.
Hm. A comparison between the credulity of ancient Judeans and modern Americans. Now that might be an interesting pub discussion, if nothing else. :)
peadarmaccionaoith
June 10, 2012 at 8:57 am
SLF: This supposed contradiction depends on a traditional translation of µ? ?? t? ???t?, (Mk 14.2) as, e.g., ‘Not during the festival’ (NRSV). Jeremias long ago pointed out that the Greek heorte also means ‘festival crowd’, as standard secondary literature intermittently repeats
————————————————————————————
What examples of heorte meaning, clearly but implicitly (on its own), ‘festival crowd’ are cited by Jeremias (and what do you mean by the intermittent repetition of ‘secondary literature’)? Matthew/Mark refer first to he heorte and then separately to ho laos (likewise John 2:23, 4:45, 7:11 – as an elaboration, this could be read against as well as for such a meaning? It is difficult to read John 12:20 as referring to Greeks coming to worship in the festival crowd; likewise in the LXX, the phrase seems to clearly mean during the festival, with ‘in the festival crowd’ making little sense (it seems particularly unambiguous in its triple use for specific festivals in 2 Chronicles 8:13). So too with other prepositions/cases – Mark 15:6 seems to mean festival; Antiquities 18:90 seems to mean festival too. Further afield, there are unambiguous usages in Aristotle to mean ‘festival’.
The normal usage therefore seems to be ‘festival’. LJS gives Plotinus’ 6th Ennead as an instance where it means ‘assembled multitude at a festival’, though it seems to me that this is far from clear: Plotinus has the word in a list of words which includes ‘this’ and ‘what’ as well as army and crowd, and he goes on to repeat heorte and explicitly make the point that heorte means nothing apart from the people who are gathered at it. This suggests to me that he was quite deliberately proposing the meaning as part of his philosophical ruminations on monadic thought – how single things are in fact multiple in nature.
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steph
June 12, 2012 at 6:38 pm
Yes it meant festival which is how it came to also mean festival crown. Secondary literature refers to scholarship discussing primary texts.
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peadarmaccionaoith
June 14, 2012 at 4:53 am
But what are the chronologically appropriate instances of it clearly coming to mean that? The only one I could find was in Plotinus, as cited by LSJ. As I pointed out, though, this appears to be a self-conscious usage where Plotinus (in the 3rd century) is saying what is a festival if it’s not the festival crowd. What are your/Jeremias’ primary sources?
I’m not sure it’s a matter of great import, just curious!
steph
June 14, 2012 at 7:05 pm
Yes it is fascinating. I’ve been held captive for days and days and weeks, a long time ago now, doing this sort of thing. Reading through texts, cataloguing references, making lists and lists and lists. I looked up sources a long time ago, some of which are in the British Library, and was convinced by them and haven’t kept a record. I suggest you do the same.
peadarmaccionaoith
June 10, 2012 at 9:02 am
SLF: At no point in such a process does a critical scholar throw his or her hands in the air and pronounce a fatwah on all preceding efforts.
——————————————————————————————
I am unsure what you intend by fatwa, but in other arts/humanities fields scholars do occasionally question pretty much all that has gone before (and sometimes create new paradigms and orthodoxies by doing so). It is not forbidden, and while controversy and dispute do arise, I am not sure they generate anything like the heat seen here. The expression of such controversy usually centres on the arguments and evidence rather than the people involved.
A case which may be interesting (or even pertinent) is that of what we might generally call literary studies: in the last century scholars increasingly widened the supposed ‘context’ of a literary work, and, some would say, removed literary criticism from the common (sense, people) and vocationalised it. Barriers of ‘training’ and technique appeared around the new criticism, which ironically appeared to seep into everything the more private and solipsistic it became: if life was short, art was getting longer, and one needed to make one’s living in an academic post to have a voice. Yet voices from within did protest and mounted what were seen as ‘attacks’ on academic scholarship itself – a scholarship which continued to centre around the University English Department teaching abstract theory and ‘methodology’ as the key to unlocking literary works (placing the theoretical cart firmly in front of the literary horse). In some quarters, the more incomprehensible the theory (qua Derrida?!) the greater the ‘technical’ expertise” that was required: the antithesis, it seems to me, of opening up a discipline.
Yet still, given the current economic climate for literary studies, papers from individuals who are not professional academics do appear in refereed journals in the study of literature. Possibly there is some private contempt for these ‘amateurs’ (who in many cases simply did not have the same life opportunities as the professionals), but I have never seen it expressed in disparaging comments about the individual’s credentials, personal background, and even their personal psychological profile. And I have seen the dominant scholarly norm dismissed wholesale as a “disciplinary fiction”.
I am curious therefore about the dynamic of the personal reaction to internet ‘mythicists’. I have been an academic for over 20 years now (not in the subject I might have preferred, but I count my blessings daily for the privilege), and cannot imagine either denigrating others for failing to gain access to our turris eburnea (“top tier” or otherwise) – or attaching the name of my institution (as student or lecturer) to some of the personal ‘heat’ in this essay. Isn’t exchanging libel-proof insults what internet anonymity is for?!
I understand the notion of expertise in subjects that are relevant to the study of the NT (Greek, palaeography, ancient history etc), but my experience/understanding of “technical expertise” is knowledge of mechanical techniques based on demonstrable scientific principles which (usually) produce physical results – and these lend themselves to ‘training’. The techniques might employ a range of tools (chosen in accordance with the method) but the results in any case can be scientifically tested and verified. What techniques/technologies does the phrase “technical expertise” in NT studies refer to? Is the use of the phrase metaphorical (perhaps harking back to an original Greek nuance?), or is it intended to denote scientific technique (which people can be ‘trained’ in) and demonstrable correctness? It seems to me that criteria such as that of ‘embarrassment’ (see previous post) don’t constitute formal methods in this sense: if they represent technique or science, it is a very inexact one. I have not come across these ‘methods’ in other areas of history or mythology: are they transferable to other areas (e.g. Homer, Malory and associated writings)? How does one know from the results whether this criterion has been applied correctly or incorrectly? And why, in this era of the ‘edgeless university’ and the institutional VLE, do these particular techniques not lend themselves to self-study?
Reply
steph
June 12, 2012 at 7:01 pm
I’m sorry my metaphor isn’t clear. Carrier has announced that New Testament studies is “f**ked” and historical method “invalid” which seems a bit to me as if he’s declaring a fatwa on an entire academic discipline. Banning it. All disciplines, including those of New Testament studies, Old Testament studies, and History of Religions, Classics, Modern History, etc, constantly discuss and debate and improve method and application in view of new evidence and argument. Carrier wasn’t making a concession for this or even acknowledging the existence of it in academic discussion. He seems oblivious to the existence of positive, constructive and ‘heated’ conversation in the discipline.
As far as claiming authority and expertise when one has no disciplined formal training, Proverbs 26.4-5 comes to mind. I am not rejecting the interest of amateurs, only those amateurs without training and critical skills who become ‘know-alls’.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 12, 2012 at 7:07 pm
@Steph: “f*cked” yet seems to believe that the messiah is at hand.
steph
June 12, 2012 at 7:12 pm
Amen. Maranatha. :)
WildBloom
June 16, 2012 at 4:48 am
Hi Stephanie and Joseph Hoffmann, thank you very much for having creating this interesting discussion. I’m an environmental scientist with a strong background in mathematics, which plaid a very important role in my PhD.
Why I find probability theory and Bayes’ theorem fascinating in their own right, I don’t believe their application to Jesus studies is going to avoid the subjectivity dominating many historical endeavors.
In order to evaluate the probability of an event E, for example, E = ( Mark wrote his gospel before 50 AC), given our background knowledge, is given by:
P (E|B) = P(B|E) * P(E) / P(B)
P(E|B) is the likelihood of E given our background knowledge B and is the quantity to be calculated.
P(B|E) is the probability of our background knowledge given the truth of the event.
P(E) and P(B) are the a priori probabilities of the event E and our background information.
In order to employ BT, one must first evaluate/estimate the quantity P(B|E), P(E) and P(B).
This is where subjectivity comes into play.
Let us consider P(E), most people in the field believe the gospels were written after the destruction of the second temple, so the number will be low. But why choose 0.04 instead of say 0.07, 0.01 or 0.03?
And if one gives some credence to the theory of Robinson „redating the gospel“ or James Crossley „The Date of Mark’s Gospel: Insight from the Law in Earliest Christianity“, the initial probability may very well vary between 0.4 and 0.8.
Evaluating P(B), if B designates all our background knowledge (like facts about second temple’s Judaism, about the Romans, the early church and so on and so forth.), evaluating its a priori probability will prove to be a tedious task. It is not surprising that different values will come from different authors with different biases.
The evaluation of P(B|E) will certainly be controversial. Folks who believe the mini-apocalypse of Mark to refer to the end of the second temple, and also believe that no supernatural prophecy can occur, will find very low values like 0.01, 0.005 or even lower. (despite the agreement towards low probabilities, the precise value is once again arbitrary.
However, people like James Crossley having developed other arguments will find high value like 0.7 or even 0.8.
As a conclusion, I believe the use of Bayes’ theorem might be useful in some cases for the study of the historical Jesus.
But one has to keep in mind that subjectivity and difference of interpretations of the evidence are still present in choosing the value of the input-probabilities.
To my mind, Carrier’s ambitious goal to use BT to avoid subjectivity and differences of interpretations altogether has failed.
A reminder: I’m not a biblical scholar, the example I gave may have inaccuracies, its only purpose was to illustrate the subjective nature of the use of BT in history and in biblical studies.
I would love to hear your opinion on that.
Regards, Hubert.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 16, 2012 at 8:50 am
I actually think the Bayes’s Theorem discussion has run its ridiculous course. It was a nice try on Richard Carrier’s part to garner attention and keep his fan base enthralled, but it has to be accounted a stillborn project. It is inapplicable mathematical razzle dazzle applied to ancient texts unwarranted by the questions it is is put forward to resolve–in fact silly questions ranging from was there or was there not an earthhquake on the afternoon of April 2, 33 AD to did Jesus exist. It is a debating strategy, not an assist to organic historical methods unless (as in archaeology) those methods have a real world (modal) evidence base that might benefit from various (not just BT) probability strategies.
The basic criterion or warrant for BT is that a problem presents itself in which an event has already happened such that the probability of another event is to be found. I can use it to argue for miracles. I can use it Humean style to argue against miracles. That’s how it works: It revises (reassigns) the probabilities of the events based on what is known beforehand (prior probabilities) and what can be calculated after information (A) is received as posterior probabilities of events. The real world conditions that wouold permit us to create the sample space for these mutually esclusive criteria are at issue. And thge conditions for the application of Baye’s formula is that prior events i.e. A1, A2, ……., An of the sample space are exhaustive and mutually exclusive i.e.
A1 U A2 U ……….. U An = S
and Ai n Aj = F j, i = 1, 2, …….. n and i ? j
But the claim that Bayes “works” is not a warrant for its applicabilty to something as greasy as the historical Jesus question. BT is a theorem; of course it works. You can feed it anything. If I want to make sausage because I don’tike the sausage people are making I can throw my old socks, a stray cat, the noisy kid from next door and some journal articles I haven’t read into the grinder. At the end of the line, I get sausage. That’s what the grinder makes. Bayes can make unarguable conclusions from absurd premises constructed from naive assumptions derived from subjectivity, bias and errors of fact and emit them in a casing of illusion of finality and improbable probabilities.
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Biblioblog Carnival “according to Mark” « Euangelion Kata Markon says:
July 3, 2012 at 8:15 pm
[...] about mythicism? After May’s launch of the Jesus Project (courtesy of Maurice Casey, Steph Fisher and R. Joseph Hoffman), Hoffman continued with posts about the arguments of Shirley Jackson [...]
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Seriös eller oseriös debatt? « Jesus granskad says:
July 14, 2012 at 3:00 pm
[...] sig Caseys forskarassistent Stephanie Louise Fisher i många av sina kommentarer. I inlägget AN EXHIBITION OF INCOMPETENCE: TRICKERY DICKERY BAYES håller hon sig väl ändå något till saken och Godfreys bemötande av hennes inlägg återfinns [...]
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Prove the Bible in One Paragraph | The Great Christian Debate says:
March 5, 2013 at 6:45 pm
[...] to be real and he is his own person. Some great articles I’ve been led to are here, here, and here. There are no sufficient arguments detailing that Jesus was mythical. The greatest argument of them [...]
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A Review of Proving History by Richard Carrier (Part IV) « Diglotting says:
May 4, 2013 at 5:15 pm
[...] especially if they wanted to risk a deadly skirmish. As Stephanie Louis Fisher points out in her review of Proving History, this sort of thing had occurred in the past during the time of Herod [...]
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Matt Gerrans
June 21, 2013 at 5:16 pm
“Critical biblical scholars have known for a long time that this story is not literally true.”
What does that mean? Is it “figuratively true?” If so, what does that mean? Or is it simply not true? Did this miracle not in fact occur?
Does this mean every statement in the Bible is true, but it is only a matter of deciding whether it is “figuratively true” or “literally true?”
Reply
steph
June 21, 2013 at 9:15 pm
No Matt. That it is not literally true does not mean it is figuratively true. No Matt. Miracles contradict the laws of nature and do not happen. No Matt. This does not mean that every statement in the Bible is true, figuratively or literally.
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Jesus Process: Maurice Casey
by rjosephhoffmann
Mythicism: A Story of Bias, Incompetence and Falsehood
Copyright (c) 2012, Maurice Casey
One of the most remarkable features of public discussion of Jesus of Nazareth in the twenty-first century has been a massive upsurge in the view that this important historical figure did not even exist. This view, unknown in the ancient world, became respectable during the formative period of critical scholarship in the nineteenth century, when it was no longer possible for recent Christian opinions to be taken for granted among educated European scholars. Because of its scholarly presentation, with as much evidence and argument as could reasonably be expected at that time, this view was much discussed by other learned people. In the later twentieth century, competent New Testament scholars believed that it had been decisively refuted in a small number of readily available books, supported in scholarly research by commentaries and many occasional comments in scholarly books.[1]
The presentation of this view has changed radically in recent years, led by hopelessly unlearned people. It has two major features. One is rebellion against traditional Christianity, especially in the form of fundamentalism. The second is the massive contribution of the internet. Unlike published scholarly work, the internet is uncontrolled and apparently uncontrollable. Two of the most influential writers of published work advocating the mythicist view, that is, the view that Jesus was not a historical figure, but rather a myth, appeal directly to an audience on the internet.
In Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, Earl Doherty, one of most influential of these mythicists, has commented:
The advent of the Internet has introduced an unprecedented “lay” element of scholarship to the field….the absence of peer pressure and constraints of academic tenure, has meant that the study of Christian origins is undergoing a quantum leap in the hands of a much wider constituency than traditional academia…
Commenting further on his website and his previous book, he added,
The primary purpose of both site and book was to reach the open-minded ‘lay’ audience…[2]
This is as inaccurate as possible. The internet audience is ‘lay’, but it is not open-minded. It has both ‘Christian apologists’, whom mythicists love to hate, and atheists who are determinedly anti-Christian. Both groups consist largely of people with closed minds who are impervious to evidence and argument, a quite different world from the critical scholars among whom I am happy to have spent most of my life, whether they were Christian, Jewish or irreligious. We were not concerned by ‘peer pressure’ or the ‘constraints of academic tenure’, except that we were united by an absolute determination to oppose any threat to the academic freedom of people in our universities, regardless of status, colour, race, religion or creed.
Doherty was born in Canada in 1941. He was brought up as a Catholic. He comments, ‘I became an atheist at the age of 19…’. Doherty claims to hold a B.A. with distinction in Ancient History and Classical Languages, but he does not say at what institution he obtained it, and his ability to read texts accurately seems very limited. When he has read any critical scholarship, Doherty is hopelessly out of date. For example he announces that Mark contains ‘many anachronisms. It is generally agreed, for example, that there is no evidence for synagogues (in which Jesus is regularly said to preach) in Galilee forty years prior to the Jewish War….’[3] This relies on out of date scholarship, which Sanders saw straight through, and which critical scholars no longer believer in.[4] By 2009, Doherty should have known better, including the archaeological remains of synagogues at Gamla, Herodium and Masada, and the Theodotus inscription (CIJ ii, 1404) which records the building of a synagogue in Jerusalem.
Doherty nonetheless repeatedly depends on later Christian traditions. For example, he comments firstly on the epistles, ‘important fundamentals of doctrine and background, which almost two millennia of Christian tradition would lead us to expect, are entirely missing.’[5] This ‘finding’ is clearly contrary to the nature of historical research. The last thing we should expect to find in first century documents is the deposit of centuries of later Christian tradition.
Doherty discusses passages which he cannot imagine Luke omitting if he knew them. The appropriate setting for this is not critical, as is obvious when Doherty quotes R. H. Stein, Senior Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:
Why would Luke have omitted such material as the coming of the wise men? Would not the presence of such Gentiles at the birth of Jesus have been meaningful for Luke’s Gentile-oriented Gospel? Why would he have omitted the flight to Egypt and return to Nazareth; the story of the guards at the tomb and their report; the unique Matthean material concerning the resurrection; and so on? Added to this is the observation that if Luke had before him Matthew’s birth account and genealogy, one wonders if he would not have sought in some way to ‘harmonize’ the one we have in his Gospel with the Matthean version.[6]
This is fundamentalism, or simply amateur forensics, not critical scholarship or historical research. Luke was a highly educated Greek Christian. He did not read about ‘wise men’ being ‘Gentiles’ at the birth of Jesus. He read about ‘magoi from the East’ (Mt. 2.1). From his point of view they were something like magicians or astrologers, and the notion that ‘we saw his star in the East’ (Mt. 2.2) probably seemed silly enough, before he got to ‘Behold, the star which they saw in the East, went before them, until it came and stood over the place where the child was’ (Mt. 2.9). Luke will have known perfectly well that not only did such things not happen, but magicians/astrologers told untrue stories in which such things did happen. He was writing for churches in the Greco-Roman world, and he will have known that starting like that would not have been attractive to the sort of people he knew well.
The most chronic comment is the last one. It is fundamentalists who ‘harmonize’ their sacred texts. Luke had good reason not to believe that an ‘angel of the Lord’ appeared to Joseph and not to Mary! What’s more, Joseph found out that she was pregnant and needed the vision to stop him divorcing her (Mt. 1.18-25). Matthew’s gospel was not scripture in a canonical New Testament and lacking such authority, why would the need for harmonisation have arisen at all? It was a Gospel written by one of ‘many (people)’ who ‘set their hand to compiling an orderly account concerning the events which have been fulfilled among us’ (Lk. 1.1), and one which was too Jewish for Luke. Why ‘harmonize’ it with anything? Why not prefer a different story or write his own? The result is infinitely better for educated Greek Christian readers. There are no astrologers, and no doubt by Joseph about Mary’s pregnancy, let alone a threat to divorce her. Instead, we have the birth of John the Baptist as well as Jesus, with the angel of the Lord appearing to John’s father as well as to Mary, the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis. Why harmonize that with Matthew when it is far better on its own!
Doherty uncritically follows Kloppenborg on what some scholars call ‘Q’. Some scholars now regard his view that this was a single Greek document as the dominant theory.[7] The mainstream version of this view has one general problem, namely that the disappearance of ‘Q’ is difficult to explain. Other scholars believe that the ‘Q’ material was not source material used independently by Matthew and Luke, but that Luke copied parts of Matthew, editing as he went along. This is the hypothesis of Goodacre and others which Doherty was so concerned to criticize, because it would leave him without a document from which major aspects of the life and teaching of Jesus were missing. A third view has been widespread among the very small proportion of New Testament scholars who can read Aramaic, the language which Jesus spoke. I call this a ‘chaotic’ hypothesis, because it supposes that the synoptic Gospels had several different sources, some of which were in Aramaic not Greek, and I carried it further myself in a book published in 2002.[8] Doherty shows no sign of having grappled with this work, which issues in results he cannot even contemplate, especially that some traditions in the synoptic Gospels are perfectly accurate. He therefore omits everything of this kind.
Doherty’s ‘original’ work on Paul is equally frightful. In accordance with a regrettable lack of information about conventional scholarship, he shows no knowledge of the fundamental work of the anthropologist E.T. Hall, who introduced the terms ‘high context culture’ and ‘low context culture’ into scholarship.[9] Paul’s epistles were written in a high context culture, which was homogeneous enough for people not to have to repeat everything all the time, whereas American, European and many other scholars belong to a low context culture, which gives them quite unrealistic expectations of what the authors of the epistles ought to have written. This is one basic reason why Paul says so little about the life and teaching of Jesus. To some extent, his Gentile Christians had been taught about Jesus already, so he could take such knowledge for granted. He therefore had no reason to mention places such as Nazareth, or the site of the crucifixion, nor to remind his congregations that Jesus was crucified on earth recently.
Doherty’s examples are especially chronic. One is ‘Calvary’. He makes up a fictional conversation between Paul and his converts. It includes a comment from ‘Julia’ who says how Paul had been to Jerusalem and ‘could stand on the very spot where Jesus was crucified’. He has Paul reply, ‘My dear lady, I’ve never been to Calvary…it’s only a little hill after all.’ Again, on the text of Gal. 4.4f, which is important for establishing that Paul knew perfectly well that Jesus was a historical not a mythical figure, he suggests that Paul somehow should have said ‘God sent his son to die on Calvary and rise from the tomb’.[10]
The English term ‘Calvary’ is a translation, or rather virtually a transliteration, of the Latin calvaria, and would therefore not have been used by Paul either in conversation with his Greek-speaking converts or in a Greek epistle. The Latin calvaria means ‘skull’, so Doherty has Paul say in effect, partly in the wrong language, ‘I’ve never been to Skull’, and supposes that he should have written, again partly in the wrong language, ‘God sent his son to die on Skull and rise from the tomb’. This illustrates how ignorant Doherty is. The Latin calvaria is first recorded as used as a translation of Golgotha by the Latin father Tertullian (Against Marcion, III, 198). Our oldest source says that they, probably a whole cohort, ‘took Jesus to the Golgotha place, which is in translation, “place of skull”’ (Mk 15.22). An Aramaic word of the approximate form golgoltha meant ‘skull’. The idea of it being ‘a little hill’ is not known until the Bordeaux pilgrim imagined it was the place she visited in 333 CE, so this would not be known to Paul either. It is likely to have been called ‘the golgoltha place’ because it was strewn with the skulls of executed people.[11] Why should Paul want to visit such a revolting place? If he went at the wrong time, such as Passover, he might well find not only a site of previous executions, but people screaming in pain as they were crucified too. Pilgrimages to such sites, and the idea they were sacred, appear to date from the time of Constantine onwards, when people were no longer crucified there.
Another astonishing example is Doherty imagining that Paul should have behaved like much later Christians seeking relics. He asks ‘What about the relics? Jesus’ clothes, the things he used in his everyday life, the things he touched?….If the Gospel accounts have any basis we would expect to find mention of all sorts of relics, genuine or fake: cups from the Last Supper, nails bearing Jesus’ flesh, thorns from the bloody crown, the centurion’s spear, pieces of cloth from the garments gambled for by the soldiers at the foot of the cross?indeed, just as we find a host of relics all through the Middle Ages…’[12] This is an extraordinary muddle which has just one point right: relics were characteristic of Christian piety much later. Otherwise, it seeks to impose upon Pauline Christianity the mediaeval Catholic religion which Doherty is supposed to have left.
Furthermore, Doherty cannot understand why relics of Jesus, pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and shrines there did not begin until the fourth century, and he declares, ‘The total absence of such things in the first hundred years of Christian correspondence is perhaps the single strongest argument for regarding the entire Gospel account of Jesus’ life and death as nothing but literary fabrication.’[13] Firstly, Doherty does not understand early Christian piety, which had no need of shrines or relics. Secondly, Doherty ignores the political situation. Until the fourth century, Christians were members of a persecuted religion, and neither major pilgrimages nor the foundation of shrines and churches in Israel were practical. In the fourth century, however, the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Then his mother, the empress Helena, made the first major Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she founded the first churches and shrines. It was she who guessed at what became the traditional sites of Golgotha and of Jesus’ tomb, and it was her son the emperor Constantine who ordered the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over both of them.
Doherty’s attempts to understand what Paul did say are equally incompetent. Jesus’ death by crucifixion was historically straightforward, in the sense that crucifixion was a very common penalty inflicted by Roman authorities on slaves and provincials. It was well known as a very cruel form of death. It was a regrettably well known Roman penalty in Palestine. For example, after Herod the Great’s death in 4 BCE, there were a lot of rebellious upsets in Israel, and Publius Quinctilius Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, brought three legions down to Israel. After sacking Sepphoris, he went on to Jerusalem, where he crucified no less than 2,000 people (Jos. War. II, 75//Ant. XVII, 295). It was obvious to everyone that these events took place on earth.
Following his arrest, Jesus was handed over to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilatus, who condemned him to death by this standard penalty of crucifixion. The titulus on his cross said he was ‘king of the Jews’, Pilate’s term for a bandit, and he was crucified between two other men whom Pilate also condemned to crucifixion as bandits.[14] This is the story which would be well known in the Pauline churches, and which Doherty is determined to omit when considering how to interpret Paul’s epistles. In its place, he has a story in which Jesus was mythically ‘crucified’ by evil powers in the sublunar realm.
For this story, Doherty draws on ideas some of which are found in some Neoplatonic texts, but not in the New Testament nor in the Judaism from which early Christianity emerged. For example, Xenocrates (ca. 396-314 B.C.) already divided the universe into the realm above the moon (the supra-lunar) and the realm below the moon (the sub-lunar), and he believed that the sub-lunar realm was occupied by daemons. Scholars generally consider the Middle Platonic period to have begun c. 90 BCE with the work of Antiochus of Ascalon (c. 125–68 BCE). Following Xenocrates, Antiochus also expressed a belief in daemons, which inhabit the sub-lunar realm (the supra-lunar realm being reserved for the divine celestial bodies). There is however no evidence that such ideas were known in Judaism in Israel, the main source of Paul’s ideas, or that they were widespread enough to be generally known to his Gentile converts. Accordingly, it is of central importance that at this point Doherty reverses one of his major points of method. Having argued up to this point that Paul did not believe anything that he does not mention, he imagines that he could take for granted this mythical realm and the quite unparalleled notion of a spiritual crucifixion up there, without mentioning anything of the kind.
Doherty tries to produce evidence which he imagines makes the crucifixion of Jesus in the sublunar realm plausible. The first document which he mentions in this context is The Hypostasis of the Archons, a Gnostic work of the third century CE, which survives only in one Coptic ms from Nag Hammadi, though it is often assumed to have been originally written in Greek.[15] This refers to Paul as ‘the father of truth, the great apostle’, and at 87, 24 it does refer to the rulers (archontes). Doherty uses it to claim that ‘considering that the roots of Gnosticism go back before the establishment of an historical Jesus in the Gospels, we are once again witnessing an understanding of archontic rulers as spirit demons unassociated with any earthly princes, and thus a pointer to the older understanding in the time of Paul.’[16] This predating of selected parts of a text from the third century CE shows a total lack of historical sense. This document also has Adam created by ‘the rulers (archontes)’ (87, 25ff), and in typical late Gnostic fashion, it has the being who declared himself the one God be a blind being who was sinful, and it does not present the death of Jesus at all. It should be obvious that this source is too late and unPauline to be used to interpret the historical Paul.
Doherty correctly notes that evil spirits come into their own in the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. He correctly refers to 1 Enoch, which was written well before the time of Paul. Next he refers confidently to the ‘1st century Testament of Solomon’.[17] This is much too early a date. Schürer-Vermes-Millar, in a section primarily the responsibility of Vermes, note correctly that its ‘complex textual history naturally makes it difficult to date.’ There is however good reason to think that ‘it was current in some form around A. D. 400’; further, ‘the archetype of all the full versions (incorporating the demonology) cannot have been put together before the early third century A. D.’[18] This means that it is quite ludicrous of Doherty to conclude on the basis of this evidence that ‘by Paul’s time they [i.e. the demons] have become vast powers that infest the heavens.’[19] There is no such idea in 1 Enoch, and the Testament of Solomon shows only that such ideas were believed by some people some 200 years after Paul’s time.
In addition to the Testament of Solomon, Doherty turns to the Questions of Ezra (Recension B). This is an even later document. It survives only in Armenian. The earliest surviving ms is dated to 1208 CE. This has been labelled recension A, and Recension B is known only from the seventeenth century. Stone was unable to determine whether it was originally composed in Armenian, which would certainly mean a very late date, or translated into Armenian from another language.[20] It is not however known anywhere outside the Armenian church. It is evident that it was not written until centuries after Paul’s life and death, so once again this is the wrong cultural background for understanding anything that Paul wrote or might have believed.
The next document to which Doherty turns is the Ascension of Isaiah. This is a composite work. In its present form it is a Christian work, which appears to have been written in Greek, only fragments of which survive. It utilised an older Jewish work, The Martyrdom of Isaiah, which was still known to Origen and the Apostolic Constitutions, but which has not survived except as used in the Christian Ascension of Isaiah. The whole text of this composite work survives only in Ethiopic. This translation was probably made sometime in the 4th-6th centuries. The oldest ms is however from the 15th century. A similar textual tradition is found in the first Latin translation, which survives only in fragments. A different textual tradition is found in the second Latin translation and in the Slavonic version, which contain only chs 6–11, generally known as the Vision of Isaiah, so they attest to its independent existence. The second Latin translation was first published in 1522, on the basis of a ms which is no longer known. The Slavonic translation exists in two forms, of which the second is a shorter version of the first. The earliest ms of the first version dates from the 12th century, and the translation was apparently made in the tenth or eleventh century.
It should be obvious from this that the date of anything resembling the text of what we can now read is difficult to determine. Knibb makes the entirely reasonable suggestion that the Vision of Isaiah ‘comes from the second century CE’, and gives correct reasons for disputing attempts to date it any earlier. Schürer-Vermes-Millar, in a section primarily the responsibility of Vermes, likewise suggest that ‘the Vision of Isaiah belongs probably to the second century A.D.’, while Charlesworth puts it ‘around the end of the second century A.D.’.[21] This document too is therefore too late in date to form evidence of the cultural environment in which Paul wrote to his converts. Doherty, however, simply announces that a community wrote this ‘vision’ ‘probably towards the end of the 1st century CE’.[22] There is no excuse for dating it so early, and it would still be too late for Paul.
I hope it is clear from this brief account that Doherty, despite being thought of as one of the most important of the mythicists, is unqualified, incompetent and hopelessly biased.
Dorothy Murdock, who writes also under the name of Acharya Sanning, has a significant following too. As well as her books, she has a blog. This includes “Who is Acharya S?”.[23] Here, describing herself with typical mythicist modesty as ‘the coolest chick on the planet’, she claims to have a BA degree in Classics, Greek Civilization, from Franklin and Marshall College, after which she completed postgraduate studies at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Nonetheless, when she gets to dating the Gospels, Murdock declares that ‘all of the canonical gospels seem to emerge at the same time – first receiving their names and number by Irenaeus around 180 AD/CE….If the canonical texts as we have them existed anywhere previously, they were unknown, which makes it likely that they were not composed until that time or shortly before, based on earlier texts.’[24] The criterion of not being mentioned in other texts is an important mythicist weapon. It embodies the fundamentalist assumption that the Gospels should have become sacred texts immediately, and therefore quoted by all extant Christian authors as fundamentalists quote the New Testament.
Fundamentalist belief is expressed for example by someone who calls themselves Paul Timothy, ‘The Holy Spirit has given to us four witnesses to ‘The Holy Spirit has given to us four witnesses to the Life and teachings of Jesus: Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, the compilers and writers of the four Gospels. Each of the four Gospel writers lived while Jesus was on earth. Three of them knew him well, and Luke investigated the facts about Jesus (Luke 1:1-3). Thus, the four gospels are ‘eye-witness’ accounts, the strongest kind. All four writers included in their Gospel some of the same accounts about Jesus, and each one adds some accounts that the others left out. Yet all agree; the four Gospels form a single true story.’[25]
This is fundamentalist falsehood from beginning to end. The Gospels are not eyewitness accounts. Moreover, they are not quoted as such in the relatively few Christian documents surviving from before the time of Irenaeus, whereas the Old Testament is, from which mythicists draw their conclusion that the canonical Gospels were unknown. Justin Martyr, however, writing in the middle of the second century, refers not to the Gospel according to Mark, but to the apomnemoneumata of Peter. The Greek word apomnemoneumata is usually translated ‘memoirs’ in Justin, whether or not they are said to be ‘of Peter’, ‘of the apostles’, or ‘of his apostles and their followers’. It has however a somewhat wider range of meaning, and does not necessarily carry the connotation of the person having written the apomnemoneumata himself. One reference to Peter’s ‘memoirs’ has the sons of Zebedee called ‘Boanerges, which is “sons of thunder”’ (Dial. 106). The word ‘Boanerges’ is otherwise known only from Mk 3.17, where Mark says that Jesus gave Jacob and John, the sons of Zebedee, ‘the name “Boanerges”, which is “sons of thunder”’. This reference is not merely unique. The term ‘Boanerges’ is a mistaken attempt to transliterate into Greek letters the Aramaic words bene re‘em, which mean ‘sons of thunder’. The possibility that two independent sources made almost identical mistakes in the transliteration of these words is negligible. It follows that by ‘the memoirs of Peter’ Justin meant something at least very like what we call the Gospel of Mark.
Mythicists also presuppose that the attestation of the Gospels somehow ought to be similar to the attestation of modern documents written in cultures where writing is normal, and books are printed. This is why, as mythicists try to date the Gospels as late as possible, one of the reasons they use is the date of surviving manuscripts. In doing this, however, they show no understanding of the nature of ancient documents and their transmission, which was very different from the writing of books in the modern world.[26]
There are in fact far more copies of the Gospels surviving from relatively soon after they were written than is the case of most works from the Greco-Roman world, or ancient Judaism. The reasons why fewer survive than might have done in the stories which mythicists invent are twofold: relatively few copies were made of any writing before the invention of printing in the mediaeval period, and there were a number of disasters in the destruction of books when libraries were destroyed, and in the Christian case, in persecutions by the Roman state.
For example, Eusebius helped to build up an excellent library in Caesarea.[27] Eusebius had there a copy of the work of Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis in the early second century, An Exposition of the Lord’s Oracles (Logia), and he quotes important information from it (Eus., H.E. III, 39, 1-7, 14-17). The library was however destroyed. The last reliable mention of it is by Jerome, though it may not have been destroyed until the Arab invasion in the seventh century. In a world where there were not many copies of old books, this destruction was a major disaster, and there should be no doubt that many Christian books were lost in this way. We should contrast the creative fiction of Acharya, who comments on the disappearance of Papias’ work: ‘It is inexplicable that such a monumental work by an early Christian father was “lost”, except that it had to be destroyed because it revealed the Savior as absolutely non-historical.’[28] This comment has no connection with the reality of the ancient world, and Acharya’s ‘reason’ for its destruction is nothing better than malicious invention.
Another mythicist is Canadian journalist Tom Harpur (1929- ), who says with more mythicist modesty that his ‘books, videos and columns have made him a compelling spiritual leader for every generation and all faiths.’[29] He was brought up as a fundamentalist Christian, and ordained priest in the Anglican Church of Canada in 1956, in accordance with his father’s wishes and demands. As a journalist on the Toronto Star (1954-84), he did not have to verify everything as scholars do, and he has ended up never offering evidence for what he chooses to believe. He does however pay tribute to his main sources: Gerald Massey (1828-1907), and Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880-1963). Massey was a second-rate English poet who also became an amateur Egyptologist. Kuhn was a theosophist who therefore held large-scale false beliefs about the modern value of supposedly ancient traditions, many of which were not ancient at all.
Among his many mistakes, Harpur comments, ‘Significantly, both Massey and Kuhn – and other authorities–testify that the surface of the coffin lid of the mummified Osiris (every deceased person was referred to as the Osiris) constituted the table of the Egyptian’s cult’s Last Supper or Eucharist. It was the board on which the mortuary meals were served. The coffin bore the hieroglyphic equivalent for KRST. Massey connects KRST with the Greek word Christos, messiah, or Christ.He says, “Say what you will or believe what you may, there is no other origin for Christ the anointed than ‘Horus the Karast’, or ‘anointed son of God the Father.’” Nonetheless, he notes correctly that ‘Modern Egyptologists dispute this’, which was already true when he wrote it, and instead of giving a good reason for following a scholar who was incompetent when he wrote before the advent of modern critical scholarship and is now hopelessly out of date as well, HarpurHhh quotes his authority as if it were decisive, just like a fundamentalist Christian quoting scripture.[30] Nor is there any excuse for describing Massey and Kuhn as ‘authorities’.
The American Christian scholar Ward Gasque consulted a number of modern Egyptologists, and discovered that the Egyptian KRST is the word for “burial”, so it is a very appropriate word to turn up on Egyptian coffins, and has no connection with the Jewish and Christian term ‘Christ’.[31] This is another illustration of the complete incompetence of both Massey and Kuhn, and of Harpur’s total lack of any sense of reality in what he has taken over from them.
Harpur gives some indication of what he felt he had found in these writers when he comments, ‘Massey’s books and Kuhn’s four chief works….held me spellbound….the more I read, the more I was convinced that what these men were saying had the ring of truth…[32] This appears to be part of Harpur’s conversion process, since he gives nothing approaching evidence supported with argument. When he does quote someone with expertise, he ignores the date of the relevant sources. For example, he quotes the Egyptologist Eric Hornung for the Egyptian fathers, followed in due course by other Christians, taking over imagery of Isis, Osiris and Horus.[33] They did, but this was a real fact centuries after the time of the historical Jesus, not evidence that he did not exist in the first century CE.
This is only one of myriad examples of mythicists creating havoc with supposed ‘parallels’. Murdock put the central point in a nutshell without realising that from a scholarly point of view, it is not merely sinful, but a mortal sin rather than a peccadillo. Commenting on the notion that Horus was ‘baptised’ by Anup/Inpu, she notes that the comparison ‘between Anup and John has been extrapolated for a variety of reasons’, and adds that ‘“Christian” terminology has been utilized to describe what was found in the ancient Egyptian texts and monuments, as well as elsewhere around the Roman empire during the era.’[34] This is central to the way in which most of the so-called parallels to the life and teaching of Jesus have been manufactured by mythicists. In actuality, Horus was not thought to have been baptised by Anup/Inpu, who was supposed to have been a jackal-headed Egyptian deity, not a Jewish man, and Inpu was not beheaded either.
Murdock also discusses pre-Christian use of the Greek words bapto and baptizo. They both meant ‘dip’, but not in any meaningful sense ‘baptise’, as Murdock alleges. She quotes a passage of Nicander, which is about pickling vegetables, and has nothing to do with baptism, to which it is accordingly irrelevant. She even discusses ‘the act of baptizing the vegetable’ which is as ridiculous as any ‘parallel’ I have come across.[35] Then, as now, people did not baptize vegetables, but they did wash, boil, and immerse them. Nicander was really discussing boiling vegetables and then immersing them in vinegar, to do what we call ‘pickle’ them. This is a striking example of the inappropriate use of Christian terminology to describe all sorts of things, in spurious attempts to make them sound more alike.
The internet, for which these pseudo-scholars write, has become a home of mendacity, including many outpourings of hatred for scholars. One example is blogger Neil Godfrey, an Australian who was a baptised member of the Worldwide Church of God for 22 years, so he belonged to a hopelessly fundamentalist organisation which holds critical scholarship in contempt. He converted to ‘atheism’ later, so he has had two conversion experiences, and this means that his contempt for evidence and argument as means of reaching decisions about important matters is doubly central to his life.
Godfrey claims to have ‘a BA and post graduate Bachelor of Educational Studies, both at the University of Queensland, and a post graduate Diploma in Arts (Library and Information Science) from Charles Sturt University near Canberra, Australia’.[36] He has worked as a librarian. It is extraordinary, therefore, that he seems to be quite incapable of presenting information accurately. One of his statements followed on a shocking earthquake in New Zealand: ‘I’m a librarian, but I never see or touch a book’.[37] Perhaps this is why he seems incapable of gathering information available in books with any semblance of accuracy.
Godfrey condemns biblical scholars as no better than ‘silly detectives’. In a post headed ‘Biblical historians make detectives look silly’[38], he did not give proper references, and referred back later to his post like this: ‘Biblical historians who research the foundations of Christianity in the Gospels have sometimes compared their “historical research” work with that of detectives or criminal investigators….. Only by lazy assumptions about their sources can biblical “historians” declare Jesus’ crucifixion a “fact of history”….In other words, Paula Fredriksen is but one of a host of biblical “historians” who “do history” according to the analogy of the silly detectives in my earlier post’ [23rd November, 2010].
Godfrey’s earlier post said that Fredriksen ‘is one scholar who did “respond” to something Doherty had written, but her response demonstrated that she at no point attempted to read Doherty’s piece seriously. One might even compare her responses to those of a naughty schoolgirl who has no interest in the content of the lesson, believing the teacher to be a real dolt, and who accordingly seeks to impress her giggly “know-it-all” classmates by interjecting the teacher with smart alec rejoinders at any opportunity.’ Godfrey seems to have no idea that his gross personal rudeness is no substitute for a scholarly response, which is what anyone seriously interested in truth would have provided.
One blogger cited by both Doherty and Acharya is Steven Carr. Doherty cites him to dispose of the evidence that Josephus mentions Jesus at Ant. XX, 200, where he describes Jacob as ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ, Jacob his name’, which is as clear as could be. Mythicists, however, do not wish to believe this.[39] Similarly, Murdock noticed that the mss of the New Testament are not inerrant, as every critical scholar knows. Neither she nor Carr, however, offers a proper critical discussion.[40]
I am well known to some people for my work on Aramaic sources behind the synoptic Gospels, for careful scholarship, and for always telling the truth as I see it.[41] On the internet, however, I have been accused by Blogger Godfrey, Blogger Carr and others of total incompetence, omitting main points and telling lies. For example, Blogger Godfrey, in a blog entitled with his customary politesse, Roll over Maurice Casey: Latin, not Aramaic, explains Mark’s bad Greek, not only drew attention to a certain proportion of these ‘Latinisms’, which would have been reasonable, but also declared that they nullified the evidence of Aramaic influence on Mark.[42] This is quite incompetent, which is why, as far as I know, it had not previously been suggested. Nor is Greek which contains Latin loanwords for Roman objects ‘bad’ Greek, any more than we speak ‘bad’ English when we say we went to a restaurant. Mark’s Latinisms, including loanwords, in no way undermine the importance of Mark’s Aramaisms, which Blogger Godfrey is not learned enough to see, and determined to ignore.
Blogger Godfrey does not refer to any learned scholarship, but to an elementary piece from a second-rate and very conservative American Christian college, formerly Atlantic Baptist College, then (1996) Atlantic Baptist University, now named Crandall University. It does not have any outstanding New Testament scholars on its staff. This is yet another piece of evidence that Blogger Godfrey is quite incapable of leaving his fundamentalist Christian background behind, in spite of his conversion to an equally dogmatic form of atheism. The list of Latinisms provided by Crandall ‘University’ includes loanwords, by which standard it is incomplete, but otherwise satisfactory. They are all included in the more extensive list provided by Gundry in his standard conservative commentary.[43]
Blogger Godfrey does not mention that the Introduction from which he quotes also argues that Mark’s first language was Aramaic. Blogger Carr commented,
‘Casey, of course, knows perfectly well that there are Latin loan words in ‘Mark’….Naturally, he is a True Biblical Scholar so does not inform his readers that there are any Latin loan words in ‘Mark’…As it would detract from the idea that there were Aramaic sources for Greek, detectable by the bad Greek, Casey does not even mention the prescence (sic!) of Latin loan words….A real scholar mentions facts which might seem to other scholars to put his work into question, and attempts to answer those questions…This is what I am used to when I see scientists writing. I naively took it for granted that all scholars in all fields had the same sorts of standards as the lowliest scientific researcher into the memory of mice…. I now have entered a world where True Bible Scholars simply ignore whatever does not fit their ideas.’[44]
Everything is wrong with this. It is not true that I did not even mention the presence of Latin loanwords. I discussed the ones which I thought were of genuine historical significance, and I gave a significant amount of Roman background to some of these, where I thought this was of historical significance. I therefore discussed legion and Herodianoi at some length, as well as, more briefly, denarius, and centurion.[45]
Blogger Carr’s comments on scholarly practice are irrelevant too, apart from his crude and misleading use of the term ‘bad’ Greek. The idea that Mark’s Latinisms, understood broadly to include his Latin loanwords, somehow negate the evidence of his use of Aramaic sources is not a theory put forward by reputable scholars: it is a mistake by blogger Godfrey. Learned articles on the memory of mice or anything else do not discuss the outpourings of incompetent bloggers. Nor can they discuss anything suggested after their articles were published: blogger Godfrey’s notion that ‘Latin, not Aramaic, explains Mark’s bad Greek’ was not available to me when I wrote, precisely because no-one else had been incompetent and foolish enough to suggest it.
I hope this is sufficient to indicate that the mythicist view is based on ineducable ignorance, prejudice and absolute contempt for anything like learned scholarship.
The only reasonably qualified scholar to become a mythicist is Robert M. Price. Price was born in Mississippi in 1954. After early involvement in a fundamentalist Baptist church, he went on to become a leader in the Montclair State College chapter of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. He was trained at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. Its statement of faith includes the following: ‘The sixty-six canonical books of the Bible as originally written were inspired of God, hence free from error….’ Its Mission Statement begins, ‘To encourage students to become knowledgeable of God’s inerrant Word, competent in its interpretation, proclamation and application in the contemporary world.’
It follows that after a fundamentalist upbringing, Price was also processed in a fundamentalist institution where critical scholarship was held in contempt. He went on to do a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. This was awarded in 1981. He also read Ph.D. in New Testament at Drew University, which was awarded in 1993. He was listed as professor of theology and scriptural studies at Coleman Theological Seminary and professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, as well as a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion and the Jesus Seminar.
Price is alone among mythicists in that there is no doubt that he was a qualified New Testament scholar. He therefore bears a most heavy responsibility for the falsehoods which he has promoted. Perhaps his most important book is The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.[46] What is important about it is that it lends an assumption of scholarship to outpourings of falsehood. These include hopelessly late dates for the Gospels, with Mark being pushed into the second century. Price first declares that it must have been written after 70 CE, on the false assumption that apocalypses, which most of it is not, are always written after the events which they are supposed to predict. Mark’s predictions are not however accurate enough to have been written after the event.[47] Price subsequently relied on Detering, who, continuing with the assumption that there cannot be any predictions in the Gospels, noticed that Mark 13 is not accurate enough to have been a prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE after the event, and claimed that Hadrian setting up his statue in the Temple was the reason for the ‘prediction’ of the Abomination of Desolation (Matt. 24.15//Mk. 13.14).[48]
Price’s treatment of New Testament narratives has two other major features conventional among mythicists. One is to continue with conservative or even fundamentalist exegesis. For example, he discusses Mark 9.1: ‘Amen I say to you that there are some of those standing here who will not taste of death until they have seen the kingdom of God come in power.’ Price declares that ‘all interpreters admit that this prediction must have the Parousia in mind.’ All interpreters have not adopted this incorrect exegesis for the very good reason that the saying mentions the kingdom of God, an important feature of the teaching of Jesus, whereas belief in the Parousia was created by the early church after Jesus’ death.[49]
Another major feature of mythicism is to make fun of New Testament stories which they used to believe in, and still take literally. For example, Price discusses the story of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. On that occasion, Jesus heard a voice which he believed came from God, ‘You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased’ (Mk 1.11). Price follows the received text, ‘in whom’, rather than ‘in you’, which assimilated to Matthew, but which is not, as he claims, the reading of Luke. He then declares that it is ‘cobbled together from three Old Testament passages’, as if a major prophet could not imagine a heavenly voice speaking in scriptural terms. Price’s scriptural passages, however, are firstly Ps. 2.7, which says ‘My son thou’, the form in which Jesus would have known the text, translated into Greek in the LXX as ‘My son art thou’, as the text would have been known to anyone writing creatively in Greek. Price’s second passage is Isa. 42.1, which says ‘Behold, my servant, I uphold him, my chosen, my soul delights in him’, for which the LXX has ‘Jacob my servant, I come to his aid, Israel my chosen, my soul received him’. Price’s third passage is Gen. 22.12, which has nothing more than God referring to Isaac as ‘your son, your beloved’. He therefore heads firstly for LXX, which is on the same lines, and simply has God say to Abraham about Isaac, ‘You did not spare your beloved son because of me’. Price therefore heads for what he incompetently calls ‘the Targums’, according to which, when Isaac looked up into an open heaven, a voice said ‘Behold, two chosen ones’. Price does not however quote any Targums, but only an essay in English by Stegner![50]
Price then concludes that Mark’s voice is ‘not historical, unless one wishes to imagine God sitting with his Hebrew Psalter, Greek Septuagint, and Aramaic Targum in front of him, deciding what to crib. Only then does it come to seem ridiculous’. Indeed, but as I commented before, ‘It is Price who has manipulated it to make it seem ridiculous.’ He has not written serious scholarship at all.[51]
It follows that Price has not made good or reasonable use of the New Testament qualifications which he once obtained. The results of his work are no better than those of more obviously ignorant mythicists.
***
The third and last essay in this series has been written by Stephanie Louise Fisher. Steph came here as an outstanding mature student from the University of Victoria, New Zealand, where she obtained exceptionally brilliant first class degrees including study in history, anthropology, sociology, classics as well as music and other things reflecting her eclectic interests and lateral mind. She worked as a research fellow to Jim Veitch in the history of the Lloyd Geering heresy trial. While in my opinion there was never any question of her not obtaining one, she won the fiercely competitive overseas research scholarship and was offered the Commonwealth Scholarship twice. While she could have chosen to go to any first class independent university on earth, she chose to come to England because of her specialist focus on the Double Tradition. Thus James Crossley, Steph, and I have worked well together, and we have had many debates, while becoming genuine friends over the past few years.
While Steph has been here, she has effectively worked as my research assistant too, without being in any sense subordinate to me. She has been wonderful working both on my last book, Jesus of Nazareth, and on material about mythicists. She is, as the above comments indicate, a scholar with very broad interests, and she works on many projects simultaneously. We do have reputable publishers already interested in her work on the Double Tradition, so we look forward to this task being completed, because New Testament scholarship needs it so much, and she is the only person known to me who can complete it.
Maurice Casey, Emeritus Professor of New Testament Studies, University of Nottingham.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] The major generally available books were S. J. Case, The Historicity of Jesus: A Criticism of the Contention that Jesus Never Lived, a Statement of the Evidence for His Existence, an Estimate of His Relation to Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1912; 2nd edn, 1928); M. Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History? (1925. Trans. F. Stevens. London/New York: Unwin/Appleton, 1926. With a new introduction by R. Joseph Hoffmann, Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 2006).
[2] E. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man: The Case for a Mythical Jesus (Ottawa: Age of Reason, 2009), pp. vii, viii, referring back to http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/Critiquesrefut1.htm, which I can no longer access, and E. Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? (Ottawa: Canadian Humanist Publications, 1999).
[3] Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man, p. 413.
[4] For a summary of the debate, with bibliography, e.g. J. S. Kloppenborg, ‘The Theodotos Synagogue Inscription and the Problem of First-Century Synagogue Buildings’ in J. H. Charlesworth (ed.), Jesus and Archaeology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 236-82; and for his immediate reaction, Sanders, Jewish Law From Jesus to the Mishnah, pp. 341-3, nn. 28-9.
[5] Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man, p. 15.
[6] Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man, pp. 316-7, quoting R. H. Stein, The Synoptic Problem: an Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1984), p. 102. I have not otherwise noted a copy published before 1987: there was a second edn. in 2001.
[7] J. S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q. Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987); J. S. Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q. The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis/Edinburgh: Fortress/T&T Clark, 2000).
[8] P. M. Casey, An Aramaic Approach to Q: Sources for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (SNTSMS 122. Cambridge: CUP, 2002).
[9] Hall, E.T. Beyond Culture (New York: Doubleday 1976).
[10] Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man, pp. 664, 198: cf. further below.
[11] Cf. now Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 445–6.
[12] Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man, pp. 80, 82 (my italics).
[13] Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man, p. 82.
[14] For a historical account for the general reader, see Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 425-48.
[15] For an English Translation by Bentley Layton, with a very brief introduction by R. A. Bullard, see J. M. Robinson (general ed.) and Members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California, The Nag Hammadi Library in English (4th edn. Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 161-9.
[16] Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p. 109.
[17] Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p. 109.
[18] Schürer-Vermes-Millar, vol. III.1, p. 373.
[19] Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p. 109.
[20] M.E. Stone, in Charlesworth (ed.), Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol I, p. 592.
[21] M.A. Knibb, in Charlesworth (ed.), Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol 2, pp. 149–50; Schürer-Vermes-Millar, vol. III.1, p. 338 n.8; Charlesworth, Pseudepigrapha and Modern Research, p. 125.
[22] Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p. 119.
[23] http://truthbeknown.com/author.htm
[24] Murdock, Who was Jesus? p. 82.
[25] http://www.paul-timothy.net/
[26] See especially H.Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale Univ., 1995); A. R. Millard, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000).
[27] See Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, pp. 155-60.
[28] Acharya, Christ Conspiracy, (Adventures Unlimited Press, 1999) p. 227.
[29] http://www.tomharpur.com/
[30] Harpur, Pagan Christ, (Thomas Allen and Son Ltd, 2005) p. 101, with p. 224, n.6, again without any proper detailed reference to the work of Massey: see the regrettable comments of Massey, Ancient Egypt, pp. 186-248. The quotation is from p. 219.
[31] http://hnn.us/articles/6641.html
[32] T. Harpur, Born Again: My Journey from Fundamentalism to Freedom (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2011), p. 214.
[33] Harpur, Born Again, p. 215.
[34] Murdock, Christ in Egypt, (Stellar House Publishing, 2009) p. 233.
[35] Murdock, Christ in Egypt, p. 245 n. 2.
[36] http://vridar.wordpress.com/about/
[37] http://vridar.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/oh-dear-what-half-a-million-books-thrown-on-the-floor-by-a-earthquake-look-like/
[38] http://vridar.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/biblical-historians-make-detectives-look-silly/
[39] Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man p. 571 with p. 771 n. 221, referring to Carr commenting on Josephus.
[40] D. M. Murdock, Who was Jesus?: Fingerprints of the Christ (Seattle: Stellar House Publishing, 2007), p. 224, with p. 268, referring to Carr, ‘Textual Reliability of the New Testament’, on Carr at http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/reli2.htm.
[41] Cf. James G. Crossley (ed.), Judaism, Jewish Identities and the Gospel Tradition: Essays in Honour of Maurice Casey, (London: Equinox, 2010).
[42] http://vridar.wordpress.com/2010.12/06/roll-over-maurice-casey-latin-not-aramaic-explains-marks-bad-greek/
[43] R.H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), pp. 1043-5.[1]
[44] http://vridar.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/roll-over-maurice-casey-latin-not-aramaic-explains-marks-bad-greek/#comment-13040
[45] Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 242-3, 341, 422-3, 450.
[46] R. M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?
(Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 2003).
[47] Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 69-71.
[48] H. Detering, ‘The Synoptic Apocalypse (Mark 13 par): A Document from the Time of Bar Kochba’, Journal of Higher Criticism 7 (2000), pp. 161-200: cf. Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 33-5.
[49] Price, Shrinking Son of Man, p. 32; see Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 34, 212-6, 219-21, 374-7, 384, 389, 484.
[50] Price, Shrinking Son of Man, p. 120-21; see Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 36-7.
[51] See further, Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 35-8.
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Published: May 22, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: amateurism in biblical studies : Aramaic : Biblical studies : Christianity : errors : Jesus of Nazareth : myth theory : mythicists : religion ..
236 Responses to “The Jesus Process: Maurice Casey”
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THE JESUS PROCESS (c) « The New Oxonian says:
May 22, 2012 at 7:32 am
[...] Maurice Casey, “Mythicism: A Story of Incomptence, Bias and Falsehood” [...]
Reply
Steven Carr
May 22, 2012 at 8:13 am
Maurice does indeed talk about Latin loanwords, claiming they were already in Mark’s Aramaic source (!) (Jesus of Nazareth , page 341)
So Maurice never lets his readers know that Mark might have used Latin loanwords himself, rather than copying them from these mythical Aramaic sources.
Instead, he claims that Latin loan words mean….. wait for it, an Aramaic source!
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 22, 2012 at 8:23 am
“mythical Aramaic sources” is a bit of a hoot: it goes to your contention that Mark was a stylist of such ingenuity that he could invent both a provenance and a few botched Aramaisms to lend his gospel a kind of Palestinian verisimilitude whilst betraying his real identity by leaving crumbs of Latin behind. A stunning idea!
Reply
Neil Godfrey
June 7, 2012 at 5:03 am
Oh my goodness! “Botched Aramaisms”? Or Aramaisms adapted for the Greek text? If you care to actually look at the posts Casey refers to you will see what I mean. But why bother to check on Casey’s sources? Casey is an honourable man and would never misrepresent (lie about) anyone’s argument even if it exposed the fatuousness of his own.
Palestinian verisimilitude? When his geographic knowledge of Galilee has more in common with Isaiah’s prophetic ramblings than with Pausanius it is a bit of a stretch to use any word prefixed with “veri” — especially when archaeological and other sources inform us that synagogues and abundance of Pharisees were anachronisms in this gospel.
There is a much, much simpler explanation, you know. But if anyone has locked himself in with Casey for the sake of spiting mythicists he has fallen out with personally, well, . . . .
Frans-Joris Fabri
June 7, 2012 at 10:31 am
Casey wrote:
blogger Godfrey’s notion that ‘Latin, not Aramaic, explains Mark’s bad Greek’ was not available to me when I wrote, precisely because no-one else had been incompetent and foolish enough to suggest it.
May I recommend P. L. Couchoud’s book: “L’Evangile de Marc a été écrit en Latin”(1930). The original French version, my German translation and an English summary are to be found on scholar Dr. Hermann Detering’s homepage ww.hermann-detering.de
Click on ‘Klassiker’ and scroll down.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 7, 2012 at 10:44 am
@ Fabri: Couchoud was roundly thrashed by Maurice Goguel in Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History; see my introd. to the reprint of the English (Stephens) translation. Goguel’s arguments remain the classic rebuttal of mythicism. As I recall, Couchoud had no qualifications in ancient Hebrew or Greek or Biblical studies but was a fair poet and also a physician. I can’t imagine what his work would contribute to discussion of Professor Casey’ expert evaluation. I am sure however that your German translation on Hermann Detering’s site is a fine one.
Earl Doherty
June 7, 2012 at 11:45 am
RJH: “Gouguel’s [sic] arguments remain the classic rebuttal of mythicism.”
I don’t think so. (And if nothing better than something written in the 1920s has since appeared, the historicist response has been anything but dynamic.) Let me quote from my website article “Alleged Refutations of Jesus Mythicism” which surveys that response across the 20th century (at . I suggest anyone here read that 3-part article to see what the pathetic state of rebuttals to mythicism has really been. (Note below Goguel’s personal ad hominem against mythicists which makes them out to have an agenda against religion.) And nothing has changed with Bart Ehrman’s new book….
Couchoud’s case, as excellently summarized by Goguel, makes eminent sense, and Goguel has a task ahead of him to discredit it. And yet at the outset, Goguel declares that he is not going to directly address it. He essentially labels [p.29] the mythicist case in general as “interpretations” upon “facts,” as though the record itself could be labeled the latter in the absence of any interpretation….Goguel proposes adopting the principle that
“we consent to admit as the first premises of every religious philosophy…that it is not the facts which must be adapted to our theories [i.e., religious beliefs], but rather it is our theories [beliefs] which must, if necessary, be corrected and rectified to put them in harmony with the facts.”
A worthy and ambitious principle indeed—essentially the adoption of the scientific method—and one which religion in general has rarely if ever followed. But will Goguel objectively evaluate the arguments and evidence of the mythicists?
“It is a question of fact which is before us: Are there historical proofs of value for the actual existence of Jesus? We shall therefore leave on one side the discussion of the more or less complicated theories offered to explain (other than by the existence and activity of Jesus) the appearance and development of Christianity. It would be easy to show how much there enters of the conjectural, of superficial resemblances, of debatable interpretation into the systems of the Drews, the Robertsons, the W. B. Smiths, the Couchouds, or the Stahls. We shall not linger on the way to do it. We shall not discuss theories which to a more or less extent are inspired by considerations depending neither on history nor on criticism, but upon religious philosophy.” [p.30-31]
Goguel simply makes a sweeping and disdainful dismissal of anything the mythicists have put forward. Discrediting them would be “easy,” but he won’t bother to do it. They are conjectural, motivated by prejudice, outside the pale of legitimate history and criticism. For him what matters—the “facts”—are the historical proofs for the existence of Jesus. He goes on to say that if these are shown to be “sufficient,” then any theory about the origins of Christianity “should accommodate itself to them.” He has prejudged the entire field of evidence, closed his mind to the possibility of contrary interpretations, and refused to address the mythicist case itself. (He does, as it turns out, address several elements of the mythicist position, particularly the “pre-Christian cult” proposal, but most of this is done within the presentation of his “sufficient proofs” for Jesus’ existence in the Christian and non-Christian record.)
Thus Goguel has made a mockery of his ideal principle of letting the facts govern his theories. Regrettably, little has changed since Goguel’s time.
(This constitutes a “classic rebuttal”? Actually, it does, if by classic one means the traditional approach. Goguel’s “rebuttal” is shot through with classic fallacy, bias, and questionable methodology.)
rjosephhoffmann
June 7, 2012 at 12:05 pm
@Earl Doherty: Thanks for catching the typo. So your adequate response to Goguel is to say he got it wrong whilst the poet got it right? The fact is, Goguel did not close his mind, as you suggest; he was part of a generation of skeptical critical scholars, with Loisy and Guignebert, who looked as impartially and squarely at evidence as any trained experts have ever done–and with piercing honesty. Why is it that when critical experts look at the evidence and come to a different conclusion the mythtics always appeal to fairness? I also think Goguel’s tone towards Couchoud was completely gentlemanly–as differences of opinion tended to be before the Internet food fest made reflection and due consideration impossible. I have deliberately refrained from discussing Ehrman’s book because I think it is essentially a commercial venture–doubtless a successful one, as his others have been. And I would welcome a truly first-class study on the mythicist position that does not simply rehash the familiar and discredited postures of the last century and a half. As someone who knows the field of myth studies and mainstream biblical and early church studies pretty well–I am shocked at what you are missing that might be exploited. But it’s not my job to show you how. I think it’s that task, and not this war-game of words with a little new, inapplicable algebra in the form of “Bayes’s Theorem”, that should occupy those of you who cling to the non-historicity thesis.
Frans-Joris Fabri
June 7, 2012 at 12:45 pm
“precisely because no-one else had been incompetent and foolish enough to suggest it” …
My posting was only about the above remark by M. Casey. Thrashed by Goguel or not, there had been someone who “had been incompetent and foolish enough to suggest it”. In my incompetent opinion, Couchoud showed quite a bit of knowledge of Greek and Latin, the most important languages needed to defend his thesis.
And since I’m not a scholar don’t ask me to prove or disprove it. If I can get a copy of Goguel’s I’ll certainly read it.
stevenbollinger
August 18, 2012 at 11:25 am
Febri:
“May I recommend P. L. Couchoud’s book: “L’Evangile de Marc a été écrit en Latin”(1930). The original French version, my German translation and an English summary are to be found on scholar Dr. Hermann Detering’s homepage ww.hermann-detering.de
Click on ‘Klassiker’ and scroll down.”
At first I assumed this was a joke, a la Umberto Eco. Apparently not.
Doherty:
“Goguel simply makes a sweeping and disdainful dismissal of anything the mythicists have put forward. Discrediting them would be “easy,” but he won’t bother to do it.”
It’s all very familiar, isn’t it?
Oh, and while I have your attention — possibly. I realize I’m chiming in after some time has passed — what do you, as a prominent mythicist, think of the term mythicist? Do you apply it to yourself? Would you not agree that it has been applied by historicists to many people simply because they wish to explore the question of Jesus’ historicity, and are not sufficiently ready humbly to accept the historicists’ disdain and dismissal nor attach the proper weight to historicist credentials? (As an autodidact I’m perhaps oversensitive on this subject of credentials.)
I definitely see two very distinct groups here. I just don’t know whether I agree that they should be called mythicists and historicists. The major difference I see is that one group wants to discuss Jesus’ historicty, and the other group wants them to shut up.
rjosephhoffmann
August 18, 2012 at 10:08 pm
As a term, it (mythicist) may be shorthand for “Christ myth theory,” but I do not regard its semantic lode dependent on when it was first used. It’s not very good as a substitute for the German word Mythiker which is used to refer to the proposal that evangelists were myth-writers during the Strauss dust up, because Strauss’s proposal was complex and wouldn’t cause the liberal German theology of Bultmann’s day to raise and eyebrow. “Historicist” is a silly term because its use outside this relatively limited controversy is so wide and well established in relation to postmodernism that it is bound to be misunderstood in relation to Jesus. I think a lot of theologians and NT scholars are “mythicists” if we mean, simply, Are the gospels a factual history of the life of Jesus? I’m happy to line up on the side of myth (two of my teachers were Bultmann’s pupils, Helmut Koester and Dieter Georgi, so I am beyond redemption anyway). But we are not “historicists” just because we say that the story probably does not originate in myth and is not reducible to any single or composite or analogous myth. I don’t know what “historicist credentials” would be. There is a meandering dog’s breakfast essay on the topic on WIKI at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory which cites my Jesus agnosticism in the 2009 essay “Threnody: Rethinking the Thinking behind The Jesus Project”, bibleinterp.com, October 2009, written at the abortive end of the Jesus project.
I call your attention however to what looks like a clear pattern of degradation in the theory, from its theoretical beginnings in the 19th century in Germany, Holland and France to its exploitation by “fans”, amateurs and conspiracy theorists in the late 20th and 21st. It seems to me there is a clear separation between radical NT criticism, which was a distinct movement in the academic study of the canon, and sensationalists, who are largely internet propogaters of uncontrolled speculation that suits their theological or atheological taste. I suggest they have made it far more difficult for the theory to get a fair hearing than any single group opposed to them. I have said repeatedly that the last learned champion of the myth theory is Geroge Wells. I will also say, just to throw a bit of kerosense on the fire, and now that I have had a chance to review it, that Bart Ehrman’s book on the historicity of Jesus is entirely inadequate as a defense. Both sides need to do much better, and I am still skeptical given the talent available on the issue, combined with an enormous indifference on the part of most bibliclal scholars, that they can. That is what the Jesus Process is all about.
ROO BOOKAROO
August 18, 2012 at 3:49 pm
To: Stevenbollinger
“Febri” is in fact Frans-Joris Fabri, the same “Fabri” who translated the French text of Couchoud’s book on the Mark Gospel. It’s rather ironic that you would recommend the book to the very guy who translated it.
I didn’t understand clearly what you meant by the use of the word “mythicist.”
It seems that “Mythicist” is an Imprecise and confusing journalistic label. It seems that A.D. Howell Smith and Archibald Robertson popularized the coinage “mythicist” in their books (1942 and 1946). Mythicism was later derived from that label and took off as a convenient, but imprecise journalistic concept of a fictitious “movement”.
For Arthur Drews, a professional philosopher, Jesus historicity was the thesis, always affirmed first, and Jesus historicity denial was the antithesis in a Hegelian sense, always coming in second position, after the positive thesis.
Same thing with Albert Schweitzer, who, in the rebuttals to the Christ Myth in the 2d edition of the Quest, only speaks of Bestreiter der Geschichtlikchkeit Jesu, or Verneiner i.e. challengers, or deniers of the historicity of Jesus.
“Mythicism”, as an abstraction, per se does not of course exist. Only individual “deniers” exist, each with different interpretations. The Denial of Jesus Historicity is not a Movement, nor a “party”.
Schweitzer never attacks an abstract anonymous doctrine. As an honest historian, he always addresses the arguments of targeted scholars and writers, avoiding weasel expressions and specifically “naming names”.
ROO BOOKAROO
August 18, 2012 at 4:18 pm
To Earl Doherty:
Maurice Goguel never speaks of “mythicism”. Neither in French nor in the English translation by Frederick Stephens. He only speaks of “the historical character of Jesus”, the “theory of Non-Historicity”, “Nonhistorical theories” or “thesis”.
The journalistic lingo which has now come into vogue was never used by any of the pioneers of the historicity versus non-historicity debate.
They all had their Ph.D.s and they all were versed in the traditional European classics of Greek and Latin. They were too high-minded grand-bourgeois Victorians to use journalists’ jargon. They all had what was called class and style.
stevenbollinger
August 19, 2012 at 10:06 am
@ rjosephhoffmann: Thank you for your reply, Dr Hoffmann. The term “dog’s breakfast” was new to me. I like it. And if you think that Wiki article was a long rambling mess, cast a shuddering gaze at this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Drews
If you like, you may strike the phrase “historicist credentials” and replace it with “the academic credentials of some of mythicism’s harshest critics.” (Let me take the opportunity to underscore that I am a layman, watching two sides argue about things like competency in fields in which I am not competent. I’m still just working on my Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, for example, and so I can’t judge for myself disputes about insights and mistakes alleged to have been made in interpreting many relevant texts. I’m just a tourist here, a humble farmer and Switzerland.) I don’t like it when I’m too hastily categorized, and I have no wish to do the same to others. Don’t call me a mythicist and I won’t call you an historicist. It seems you agree with me that both terms leave much to be desired.
“I call your attention however to what looks like a clear pattern of degradation in the theory, from its theoretical beginnings in the 19th century in Germany, Holland and France to its exploitation by “fans”, amateurs and conspiracy theorists in the late 20th and 21st.”
You certainly do, often, and emphatically. And I agree with you on certain topics, such as a currently-fashionable misuse of Bayes’ theorem, and a widespread us-or-them, point-scoring and point-counting mentality in some atheist communities. And I no longer confuse you, as many do, with those who call Jesus’ historicity certain — such as Ehrman, such as Crossan — although I continue to wonder whether you share with them an overly-hasty dismissal of non-academics weighing in on the topic. Surely you must see that there are reasons — justified or not — no: some justified, some not — for mistrust of Biblical scholars and theologians among people who are up-to-date in other fields such as meteorology and 20th-century history and biology. Layman who entertain doubts about Jesus’ historicity generally do not entertain doubts that man-made global warming is occurring, or that the Holocaust happened, or that biological organisms evolve. When theologians and Biblical scholars lump them all together as nuts and conspiracy theorists and so forth, it’s bound to alienate some people.
steph
August 19, 2012 at 12:31 pm
Steven,
The suggestion that the Christ myth theory today demonstrates “a clear pattern of degradation in the theory, from its theoretical beginnings in the 19th century in Germany, Holland and France to its exploitation by “fans”, amateurs and conspiracy theorists in the late 20th and 21st” is a general conclusion on the basis of many years of involvement and continuous research, critical assessment and discussion, following the debates. I don’t think it equates with “an overly-hasty dismissal of non-academics weighing in on the topic” such as that comparable to some non-academics who over hastily dismiss all biblical scholars, who are persuaded that the story probably does not originate in myth and is not reducible to any single or composite or analogous myth, as fundamentalists.
As I sit here at my desk stuck in the suburbs in the middle of a city too large and loud and a country too cluttered and claustraphobic, farming in Switzerland sounds perfectly idyllic!
stevenbollinger
August 19, 2012 at 2:53 pm
Hello steph. If all mythicists called everyone who disagreed with them a fundamentalist, then, indeed, that would be very bad. Implying that every mythicist after Wells is biased or incompetent, as Casey seems to do above, may not be quite as bad, but it’s not particularly good either, in my humble opinion.
Then again, to be perfectly honest, I’m new at this, and I haven’t yet read a book by a mythicist younger than Wells who really impressed me. (I haven’t read an entire book by Doherty or Price yet, and no offense meant to your mentor, but I don’t think I’ll make up my mind about either of them before I do.) And I find Wells’ theory of the creation of Jesus interesting, but not yet really convincing.
But Wells argues his case much better than those, such as Crossan and Ehrman, who state that it’s certain Jesus existed. And certainly much better than John Hick, as I recently said in this very annoyed and possibly slightly unfair blog post: http://thewrongmonkey.blogspot.com/2012/07/i-mean-this-in-friendliest-possible-way.html I’m neither an historicist nor a mythicist, and I find closedminded positions on either side quite unconvincing.
steph
August 19, 2012 at 3:37 pm
Steven,
My response to you was in regard to your suggestion to Joe that he might be dismissing the myth theory too quickly. Maurice Casey is not my ‘mentor’. He is a colleague and a friend, as is Joe Hoffmann, and we have worked together and independently on several different projects. I did not accuse ‘all mythicists’ of dismissing biblical scholars as fundamentalists. I implied that ‘some’ non-academics over hastily dismiss all biblical scholars, who are persuaded that the story probably does not originate in myth and is not reducible to any single or composite or analogous myth, as fundamentalists, in the same way that scholars like Ehrman dismiss things they have not properly researched. Neither I nor Casey nor Hoffmann are closed minded on matters of historical investigation and ‘historicist’ is a meaningless and silly term which is inappropriate and misleading.
.
Jim
May 22, 2012 at 10:28 am
nice work maurice.
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The Jesus Process on The New Oxonian | Ge??aµµ??a says:
May 22, 2012 at 12:08 pm
[...] Maurice Casey, “Mythicism: A Story of Incompetence, Bias and Falsehood.” [...]
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howard buchholz
May 22, 2012 at 1:07 pm
‘Incompetently called ‘the Targums”?
After a 10 second Internet search I found: “The Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan Ben Uzziel” at page:
http://targum.info/targumic-texts/pentateuchal-targumim/
Moreover, the Targum that Price mentions does seem to contain the material he says it contains as shown here (in essay form):
http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=48&chapid=292
And I might add that since Targum are not actually scripture, quoting them directly might be misleading since they were never considered the word of God.
What do you say to that?
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rjosephhoffmann
May 22, 2012 at 3:53 pm
What precisely is the point of your point: ?????, plural: targumim, lit. “translation, interpretation”–do you mean they are non-canonical? Everyone knows this; or are you talking about the use of the false plural (targums); I am not sure how this relates to Fisher’s wider point Price.
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Ananda
May 22, 2012 at 2:13 pm
The internet audience is ‘lay’, but it is not open-minded. It has both ‘Christian apologists’, whom mythicists love to hate, and atheists who are determinedly anti-Christian.
There are more things between web sites and blogs, Maurice, Than are dreamed of in your story of bias, incompetence and falsehood………………..
Luke 11:52
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stephanie louise fisher
May 22, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Ananda: Casey is referring specifically to Doherty’s targeted internet audience in that contexts, not the whole world of internet users.
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tanya
May 22, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Maurice Casey wrote:
“One of the most remarkable features of public discussion of Jesus of Nazareth in the twenty-first century has been a massive upsurge in the view that this important historical figure did not even exist.”
Thank you Maurice. I am going to exchange one name, in this sentence, and ask if you have considered how intelligent, well educated people, living two thousand years ago, might have reacted, upon reading your same sentence, with this one substitution:
One of the most remarkable features of public discussion of Heracles, in the twenty-first century has been a massive upsurge in the view that this important historical figure did not even exist.
Now, unlike Jesus, Maurice, we know that Heracles was “an important historical figure”, because Philo of Alexandria describes his accomplishments, because of the enormous stone temples (for example, in Syria), constructed in honor of his numerous supernatural attributes, and because of the famous city in Italy, near Mount Vesuvius, site of the death of Pliny the Elder, who died in vain, as commander of the fleet, attempting to rescue those fleeing the volcanic eruption in 79CE. The library at Herculaneum was the foremost in the world, Maurice, when Vesuvius erupted. Why?
Why was the single most important intellectual resource in the world, named in honor of Heracles, Maurice? How is it possible that folks today have forgotten just how crucial the worship of Heracles was, in those days, a mere two thousand years ago?
So, Maurice, do those numerous temples, and the famous library in the city named for him, and the description of Heracles in Philo’s texts, provide the substrate necessary to conclude that Heracles was indeed a genuine human, son of an ordinary human mother, but with a supernatural deity, Zeus, providing the paternal DNA, precisely as written in the Byzantine version of Mark 1:1, Maurice?
If Heracles, Maurice, was not a real human person, but rather, simply a Greek fictional creation, a myth, in other words, then, so too, was jesus, or, as I would call him, Heracles, part deux.
You are barking up the wrong tree, Maurice. The cat is in the bushes, hiding in plain sight: Read about Heracles, and you will understand why the nonsense in the gospels is simply Greek literature.
tanya
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rjosephhoffmann
May 22, 2012 at 4:20 pm
@ Tanya: This is a silly comment. Maurice will doubtless speak for himself, but it’s clear that Tanya is not reading the full Monty. Herakles is one of the bead strung analogies that mythicizers have pointed to since before van Eysinga. The remedy for this is to go and read Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus (Furens) and then read the crucifixion story in Mark. See any differences? Similarities? What? This is just another bead strung analogy, not an argument–and you don’t need to reach into the realm of improbable heroes being “real” since founders, generals, and emperors had miraculous births and performed miracles. A casual browse shows that the Atheists of Silicon Valley and a number of freethought sites like the Hercules analogy, so I am guessing you got it from there and not from actually reading anything. Trust me: It is a terrible analogy.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 22, 2012 at 4:25 pm
One other thing @ Tanya: Not only is your comment off the mark, but Maurice’s point cautions precisely against using the artifacts of later periods to establish the significance of Jesus–indeed accuses Doherty of this kind of slipshod anachronism. Your critique therefore gets a D for reading comprehension as well as for logic.
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tanya
May 23, 2012 at 3:33 pm
Thank you professor Hoffman, for taking the time and trouble, to respond. I note your dissatisfaction, in the previous comment, and I share your low opinion of my contribution, it is indeed, as you have written, “a silly comment”.
You will forgive me, if I seem a bit slow, in comprehension, I note that on other forums, I do seem to be a day late and a dollar short, on certain topics.
I would like to sound a note of caution, however, in dismissing my criticism of Maurice Casey. You have noted, cher professor Hoffman, my garnering a “D for reading comprehension as well as for logic.”
I earned this D from you, (not my first in academia, as I am certain you will have anticipated), as a consequence of replying to Mr. Casey’s FIRST sentence, not his entire analysis. I was indeed, confining my remarks to that first sentence. So, I am not quite persuaded by your criticism of my effort, since it appears to me, that you have misunderstood the scope of my travail.
With regard to logic, a subject near and dear to my heart, may I humbly suggest that you endeavor to locate any sentence in my reply to Maurice Casey’s first sentence, which you find “illogical”. I will respond in kind to your criticism, by pointing out, what seems to me, to be an excellent illustration of your own illogical thinking:
“…Maurice’s point cautions precisely against using the artifacts of later periods….”
Later periods?
Which later periods would that be Professor Hoffman? My reply to Maurice focused on three points:
a. Temples constructed throughout the Roman Empire, before Constantine–and none, after his proclamation elevating Christianity to the status of the official religion of the Empire, in essence disembowling Hercules;
b. Philo’s writings, from before 50 CE;
c. Herculaneum, destroyed by eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79CE.
Which “later periods” are you referring to?
“This is a silly comment”. Really? What makes it “silly”? Here is something that I find “silly” :
“…so I am guessing you got it from there and not from actually reading anything.”
I have done a bit of reading in my life here on planet earth, and some of it is even pertinent to the discussion at hand….
I have, on the other hand, absolutely no idea of who is living in Silicon Valley, though I acknowledge having confronted Steve Wozniak in 1980, at a conference on 6502 programming…Does that count?
“A casual browse shows that the Atheists of Silicon Valley and a number of freethought sites like the Hercules analogy, so I am guessing you got it from there and not from actually reading anything. Trust me: It is a terrible analogy.”
I know of no such site, and would profit from your offering a link to them, so that I may search out kindred spirits….
I would like to trust you, or someone, but, problem is, I have a terrible relationship with authoritarian figures, who write:
“trust me…..” I explained it to Steve as well: it isn’t a 32 bit architecture, doesn’t matter how fast the central clock operates….
I don’t have faith. I need evidence. Do you have some evidence to share with me, to explain why Mark 1:1 is not related to the Hercules story, or do you simply wish to emphatically proclaim “the truth”, based upon your undoubted wisdom, superior academic preparation, agile linguistic facility, and supreme confidence as one who is nearly omniscient.
I don’t offer Heracles as “analogy”. It is Greek myth, and served, in my opinion, as progenitor of Mark’s description of the Jesus myth, another Greek fairy tale. What both stories share in common, is paternal DNA that is non-human, belonging to the most powerful deity. I deny that the Jesus story is analogous to the Heracles story. It is part deux of the trilogy…..(Mormonism)
tanya
rjosephhoffmann
May 23, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Tanya queries:
“I don’t have faith. I need evidence. Do you have some evidence to share with me, to explain why Mark 1:1 is not related to the Hercules story, or do you simply wish to emphatically proclaim “the truth”, based upon your undoubted wisdom, superior academic preparation, agile linguistic facility, and supreme confidence as one who is nearly omniscient.”
Let’s do this slowly, Tanya:
Why should anyone need to “prove” that Mark (?) is not related to Hercules? What version of the Hercules story do you have in mind? What other than a terribly vague resemblance between the “passions” of Herakles as narrated by Seneca (not even in Euripides) and Jesus would even suggest the comparison? How would Mark have known the drama? Not saying he didn’t; I am asking you how you think he did since there are no textual echoes or quotations of it in the gospel, any gospel. In Hercules on Oeta the dying Hercules declares (line 1472): Habet, peractum est, fata se nostra explicant. It is death, i.e. it has been completed, my fate unfolds itself. Seneca loved the word “peractum” as a kind of melodramatic flourish. No denying that there isn’t melodrama in the crucifixion, but even when translated into Latin from Greek in the Vulgate, the word of choice is not “peractum”. (Clytemnestra in a rage in Seneca’s Agamemnon grabs an axe and strikes at his neck exclaiming (line 901), Habet, peractum est–It [the blow] got him, it has been completed.) All this shows is that ancient writers liked to draw lines under conclusions in the same way classical composers liked conclusory finishes to their compositions. Ta da. Consummatum est.
The idea of the effects of Jesus’ death are standard in classical literature and not limited to Seneca and his Hercules on Oeta: Vergil in his Georgics (I 466-488)( just fyi: http://www.theoi.com/Text/VirgilGeorgics1.html) lists the portents that accompanied Caesar’s murder: the darkening of the sun, plunging the world into night;the sea and land are in turmoil, with Mt. Etna erupting and the Alps shaking; rivers halt and chasms form in the earth–ghosts appear; and finally, in temples “the ivory weeps in sorrow and bronzes sweat.” Sound familiar?–earthquakes normally happen when great men die. Except they probably don’t. And Julius Caesar was as far as we know historical, so the convention of earthquakes and disasters cannot be used to suggest that Jesus is simply an echo of the Herakles story.
You say you look for evidence not faith; then you ask specifically “why Mark 1.1 is not related to the Hercules story.” Here is some evidence for you: The Greek of Mark 1.1 is as follows:
???? t?? e?a??e???? ??s?? ???st?? [???? ?e??]. You will notice that the phrase “son of God” is in brackets. It is in brackets because while some texts of Mark 1:1 including the 4th-century Codex Vaticanus, have the text “son of God” the three most important manuscripts do not. Those three are: Codex Sinaiticus (01, ?; dated 4th century), Codex Koridethi (038, T; 9th century), and the text called Minuscule 28 (11th century). It is probable that the phrase “son of God” has been added to the titulus of the book at a later date, reflecting a compositor’s or copyists conclusion about Jesus. As if this is not enough physical evidence, it’s pretty clear that Mark internally steers clear of the phrase son of God, with the exception of some words assigned to a centurion om Mark 15.39. It’s often pointed out as well that the phrase at least in its Greek form requires the translation ‘a son of God” rather than “the” son of God, which is a circumlocution for “innocent.” The phrase is used more directly in the epiphany stories in Mark 1.11 and 9.17, and by demons who seem to recognize Jesus in 3.11 and 5.7. I see no echoes of the Herakles myth there either; but you only asked about 1.1 and not the other uses.
I don’t think any of this makes me omniscient. But it might suggestthat I try to go beyond vague notions and raw analogies to what you are invoking as “evidence.”
tanya
May 26, 2012 at 5:08 pm
RJosephHoffmann wrote: “Grog: your point seems to be an orphan. What do you think Tanya’s “point” is?”
Hmmm. Apparently, my message has been lost, perhaps the victim of too much accompanying verbiage.
Let me try again.
Maurice wrote, in his first sentence (and my comments address ONLY his first sentence, nothing more…)
“…a massive upsurge in the view that this important historical figure did not even exist….”
Maurice thus alerts the reader, in his very first sentence, that Jesus is an historical character.
I deny this notion.
I claim, contrarily that:
a. there is zero evidence that Jesus ever existed;
b. that contrarily there is evidence that Herakles did exist, though we know he did not;
c. the Jesus fable is simply another Greek myth, modeled after Herakles.
You, professor Hoffman, misunderstood my initial rejoinder on this forum, going off on a wild tangent about Silicon Valley, and writing nonsense about “…artifacts of later periods”, as if, I had written, in rebuttal to Maurice, something pointing to some aspect of human civilization occuring in latter centuries, i.e. long after Christianity had emerged as a force to be reckoned with, i.e. post Nicea.
I then sought, apparently unsuccessfully, to reiterate that my claim that the Jesus story is simply a rehash of the ancient story of Herakles, by challenging you, professor Hoffman, to demonstrate why Mark 1:1 should not be considered Herakles part deux. Your response, was, again, wide of the mark.
You quote, improperly, from Seneca. Why is that useless? Herakles was a GREEK, not a Roman hero. The Romans adopted him, yes, no doubt, but if you seek to demonstrate an error in my logic, as you have asserted, then, you need to cite a GREEK, not a Roman source from Antiquity. That source needs to DENY that Herakles was the son of a human mother, with a divine source of paternal DNA, not just any divine source, but the ultimate power among the Greek gods: Zeus.
My “point” then, is that like Herakles, the Jesus demigod, also had a human mother, with a paternal source of DNA coming from “god”, i.e. YHWH, the top deity in Judaism. There is nothing in Jewish lore, to explain this nonsense. There is, however, ample evidence of this tradition in Greek mythology.
Yes, I am very much aware of the distinction in the three versions of Mark 1:1. Codex Sinaiticus does not even use Iesous Christous, but rather, I.C.
Since you make a fuss, Professor Hoffmann, about “the” versus “a” son of God, allow me to include Mark 1:11 in this discussion, I hope this puts to rest that particular objection to my contention:
?a? f??? e?e?et? e? t?? ???a??? s? e? ? ???? µ?? ? a?ap?t?? e? ? e?d???sa
Do you see the little “o”, professor?
With regard to Philo’s contributions, I make two points:
a. He regards Herakles as having been a living, breathing, demigod, who had performed miracles, including saving mankind;
b. He writes bupkis about I.C.
Philo of Alexandria, circa 40CE
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book40.html
“And yet why, O Gaius! did you think yourself in need of spurious honours, such as the temples and statues of the beings above-mentioned are often filled with? You ought rather to have imitated their virtues. Hercules purified both the earth and the sea, performing labours of the greatest possible importance and of the highest benefit to all mankind, in order to eradicate all that was mischievous and calculated to injure the nature of each of the elements.”
I am going to repeat myself, here, for I believe that some folks don’t understand me:
I dispute the veracity of Dr. Casey’s first sentence. To me, he may as well be writing in favor of geocentrism.
His first sentence is absurd, nonsensical, unproven whimsical musings, not fit to be published, even on the internet.
You may wish to identify my statement here, as “silly”. I find his first sentence utterly banal, useless, and trivial.
That Jesus is not a genuine human is derived from the gospels which portray him, as with Herakles, as demigod, who will save, or who has already saved, mankind, just as Philo wrote about Herakles.
Tanya
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 6:19 pm
@ Tanya: I post this as Exhibit A: No response is necessary.
steph
May 26, 2012 at 7:07 pm
Tanya says “His first sentence is absurd, nonsensical, unproven whimsical musings, not fit to be published, even on the internet.”
Maurice Casey’s career has been devoted to detailed research, following the evidence and demonstrating the existence of a historical figure with cautious and careful argument and meticulous detail, culminating in the publication of meticulously and carefully argued monographs, conveniently summarised for general readers in a one volume ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ (T&T Clark, 2010). His first sentence is not “absurd, nonsensical, unproven whimsical musings, not fit to be published, even on the internet” – on the contrary – yours is Tanya.
Tanya says “I claim, contrarily that:
a. there is zero evidence that Jesus ever existed;
b. that contrarily there is evidence that Herakles did exist, though we know he did not;
c. the Jesus fable is simply another Greek myth, modeled after Herakles.”
You have expressed your own convictions without providing evidence. Your convictions are contrary to evidence and argument in published work and elsewhere. Your musings about Hercules are no more than anachronistic fantasy infected with parallellomania. Your musings are a regrettably familiar feature of the flood of meandering drivel emanating from others who like you, are overwhelmed with a burning desire to deny Jesus as a historical figure, and ignore inconvenient evidence and create their own fantasy.
tanya
May 27, 2012 at 5:54 am
Steph wrote:
“You have expressed your own convictions without providing evidence.”
I furnished both a web site with the English translation of Philo, and an excerpt from his tract.
Photographs of the huge stone temples constructed in dedication to Herakles can be observed on the internet by use of a search engine.
Regarding the tradition that Herakles paternal DNA was derived from Zeus, I do not think any evidence can be furnished….That his genetic inheritance was believed to have been from Zeus, is widely reported, even at Wikipedia.
Regarding Herculaneum, and its role as repository/gathering place for the loftiest intellectuals of that era, one can read about the newest computer imaging techniques employed to reveal the ink beneath the carbonized papyrus scrolls….
I have encountered nothing even remotely similar in the case of the supposed historical existence of Jesus. A fake letter from Tacitus, single copy, from an Italian monastery, containing an obvious forgery within it, doesn’t cut it. The supposed exchange between Seneca and “Paul”/Saul, is another fraud. Josephus’ TF, another fraud…..Pliny the younger’s two sentences about chrestians, isn’t a reference to Jesus. Irenaeus’ fake history, claiming Jesus was executed at age 50, sounds absurd.
There is no objective evidence for an historical Jesus. There is only conviction that he lived. Folks 2000 years ago, shared those same convictions about Herakles. Where are those convictions, today? Why does no one accept, today, the obvious fact, that Herakles had been a living breathing human, (“born in accordance with the law”)? Why do we reject Herakles’ historical existence, notwithstanding so much genuine evidence to the contrary?
The evidence for Herakle’s existence, although very thorough, detailed, adequately descriptive, and impressive–huge stone temples–nevertheless, fails to explain the central fact: divine paternal DNA is utter nonsense. So long as humans accept supernatural explanations, instead of rational, empirical elaborations, there can be no genuine understanding of history.
Tanya
rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2012 at 2:59 pm
@Tanya: “The evidence for Herakle’s [sicut] existence, although very thorough, detailed, adequately descriptive, and impressive–huge stone temples–nevertheless, fails to explain the central fact: divine paternal DNA is utter nonsense. So long as humans accept supernatural explanations, instead of rational, empirical elaborations, there can be no genuine understanding of history.” Can you name one instance where a Church is used as evidence for the historical Jesus? The two you are likeliest to point to–the Church of the Nativity and the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre were both built as tributes to legends during the shrine-building fever after the Edict of Milan; most contemporary Christians—-apart from a few retired evangelical teachers on bus tours–don’t take them seriously, and no biblical archaeologist would use them as “evidence” of anything. Your last sentence is more vexing: “So long as humans accept supernatural explanations, instead of rational, empirical elaborations, there can be no genuine understanding of history….” What is empirically unsatisfying about the idea that a preacher named Jesus (no surnames, no miracles–please) existed? Are you going to point to those darned temples and Herakles again? Why do you think your highly improbable analogies are empirical?
steph
May 27, 2012 at 7:55 pm
Tanya, I’m really impressed. Have you had your furnished site peer reviewed? Not that it matters these days and who would the peers be – everything flows. But we’re obviously barking at the wrong man – you’ve persuasively demonstrated with detailed objective argument and evidence, that the Jesus tradition is all lies, frauds, fakes and forgeries. Bother. But with the massive evidence for these temples, you may effectively save the Process if we can resurrect it and make an announcement “The Birth of the Hercules Process”. Would that make you happy?
tanya
May 30, 2012 at 5:23 am
R.Joseph Hoffman wrote:
“What is empirically unsatisfying about the idea that a preacher named Jesus (no surnames, no miracles–please) existed?”
Thank you for this well phrased question, which addresses, eloquently, the issue I sought, so unsuccessfully, to elaborate, in explaining why I disputed the first sentence of Maurice’s essay.
We have empirical data to support Aristarchus’ theory of helioocentrism, though we no longer possess any of his writings. We have evidence that those writings did exist in the beginning of the 16th century, when Copernicus saw them.
Today, we rely on faith, not empiricism, to explain how the head librarian in Alexandria, 2300 years ago, had been able to contradict Plato and Aristotle. Our faith is justified, because contemporary empirical data agree with our conviction about Aristarchus’ research, and our belief that his accomplishments were copied accurately, and those copies transported from Constantinople, in the mid fifteenth century, to Italy, where Columbus and Copernicus both saw them.
There is nothing comparable for Jesus, a preacher, living 2000 years ago. No written documents from him, no stone monuments, no contemporary accounts, no coins, no cities named in his honor.
Everything we possess today, about Jesus, is derived from documents written decades, or centuries, after this fictional character’s demise. Many of those documents are contradictory about his life, his origins, his death, and his accomplishments. Many of them demonstrate evidence of forgery, and fraud. Unlike Aristarchus, we have no single issue, upon which we can agree, to assert that a genuine human, not a character from a novel, taught doctrine xyz.
tanya
rjosephhoffmann
May 30, 2012 at 6:44 am
@Tanya: Some interesting points, and you have moved from Herakles (good choice) to Aristarchus and then the Library of Alexandria (how was that destroyed again, and by whom, and when?) and Columbus (was he really a Jew: a lot of Jews were escaping from Spain the day he sailed). The issue remains: one swallow does not make a spring. And not all biography is autobiography. And you aren’t showing that you have come to grips with the legend-riddled historiography of the ancient world. I’ll have to see if there are no towns or cities named after Jesus. Surely there must be an Emmanuel,Tennessee or something. I think there’s a Trinity, Texas. Will that count as 1/3rd of a proof. But I jest, and I wish you were as well.
Dustin Cooper
May 22, 2012 at 6:17 pm
There’s a world of difference between a figure who existed at a vaguely defined time in the past, before there was much writing, who wasn’t written about for centuries after his supposed death and one who was in a real historical place, is reported to have interacted with real people, lived at a specific, known time, during a period of relatively wide literacy, and who was written about within decades of his life. If you’re really going to follow this line of argument, please at least try to find a more relevant figure for comparison.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 22, 2012 at 10:19 pm
There’s a world of difference between a figure who existed at a vaguely defined time in the past, before there was much writing, who wasn’t written about for centuries after his supposed death
@ Dustin. Your premise is solid, but who in the world are you talking about, and have you ever taken a class in history?
Dustin Cooper
May 22, 2012 at 11:45 pm
Sorry, I put that rather poorly. Let me try this again:
Herakles is a figure who was said to have lived before the Trojan War, which was traditionally said to have happened centuries before the composition of the oldest literary reference to him that I’m aware of. There wasn’t even a writing system in Greece to have captured any early references to him until the 8th century (Linear B having died out in the 12 century and as far as I know, was never used for literary or historical purposes), so it’s not like anyone could have had any Greek written source with any connection to anyone who could have interacted with Herakles, even if he existed. For that reason alone, it seems absurd to lump him together with Jesus, a man who is said to have lived in a period where documentation was possible, interacted with confirmed historical figures like Pontius Pilate, and to have been written about within decades of his death.
Better?
Thom Stark
May 23, 2012 at 1:54 am
I believe Dustin was criticizing Tanya, and agreeing with you.
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Dustin Cooper
May 23, 2012 at 10:40 am
In case it wasn’t clear, yes, I was criticizing Tanya.
Grog
May 24, 2012 at 12:45 am
The mistake, though, on RJH’s part is understandable, though, and makes tanya’s point.
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 7:21 am
Grog: your point seems to be an orphan. What do you think Tanya’s “point” is?
voiceofreason467
May 22, 2012 at 5:18 pm
?”The primary purpose of both site and book was to reach the open-minded ‘lay’ audience…
This is as inaccurate as possible. The internet audience is ‘lay’, but it is not open-minded. It has both ‘Christian apologists’, whom mythicists love to hate, and atheists who are determinedly anti-Christian. Both groups consist largely of people with closed minds who are impervious to evidence and argument, a quite different world from the critical scholars among whom I am happy to have spent most of my life, whether they were Christian, Jewish or irreligious. We were not concerned by ‘peer pressure’ or the ‘constraints of academic tenure’, except that we were united by an absolute determination to oppose any threat to the academic freedom of people in our universities, regardless of status, colour, race, religion or creed.”
Talk about cognitive dissonance. Saying that you want to reach an “open-minded ‘lay’ audience” is somehow the same as saying that the “internet audience is… open-minded?” How the hell can you even read that sentence and make a declaration that is completely opposed to what you just wrote? As for Christian Apologists, well Hoffman, apparently you don’t remember that their are plenty of non-mythacists out there that despise Christian Apologists. In fact awhile back I decided to e-mail various academics in the field of Biblical Scholarship (not a single one of them were mythacists) on what they thought of Christian Apologetics and why. Almost all of them replied back stating they despised Christian Apologetics because their very writings and representation of the facts is at times a misrepresentation or a complete fabrication of evidence all to prop their faith. Anyone who seeks the truth learns to despise Christian Apologists very fast, at least those who are open minded and who research what they read. As for academic peer pressure being non-existent? What? Do you have selective memory or something? You do realize that awhile back Ehrman posted his Huffpost piece that did exactly this. Hell Carrier in his response basically stated that their were academics whom he talked to that confessed they were afraid to go against the grain of historical Jesus studies.
“This is fundamentalism, or simply amateur forensics, not critical scholarship or historical research. Luke was a highly educated Greek Christian. He did not read about ‘wise men’ being ‘Gentiles’ at the birth of Jesus. He read about ‘magoi from the East’ (Mt. 2.1). From his point of view they were something like magicians or astrologers, and the notion that ‘we saw his star in the East’ (Mt. 2.2) probably seemed silly enough, before he got to ‘Behold, the star which they saw in the East, went before them, until it came and stood over the place where the child was’ (Mt. 2.9). Luke will have known perfectly well that not only did such things not happen, but magicians/astrologers told untrue stories in which such things did happen. He was writing for churches in the Greco-Roman world, and he will have known that starting like that would not have been attractive to the sort of people he knew well.”
Um… what? By the very context you give that Luke is writing for a Christian audience in in the Greco-Roman world, you are disqualifying your own polemic. The Greco-Roman world was just as obsessed with the phenomenon of stars and and prophecies as the rest of the world. I’d advise you to actually pick up a damn book on Greco-Roman astrology before making that claim. Also, saying Luke would have known anything explains absolutely nothing. You have to have enough background about the author, information about his life, correspondents and the attitudes he held to certain groups in order to make such a distinction about the knowledge of an author for whom we know absolutely nothing about other than what he wrote as a Gospel, and this hardly tells us anything. I mean just because he omits something found in another Gospel, does not indicate he was prejudice against the Gospel. Their are time constraints when writing a book, especially in the ancient world and you cannot include everything you want to because of the audience and time-span you are writing. Also, it could be argued with much more evidence than you have given (which is zero evidence) that Luke omitted it because it was already widely known and so why write about something that was already known by Christians of the time and probably accepted by the group he was writing it for. I mean he does mention other accounts doesn’t he?
“The most chronic comment is the last one. It is fundamentalists who ‘harmonize’ their sacred texts. Luke had good reason not to believe that an ‘angel of the Lord’ appeared to Joseph and not to Mary!”
Really? And that reasoning being… wait a second, you don’t give any evidence for this and you move onto the next issue… so I guess I can equally dismiss your claim without evidence as you give none. Also, somehow the reference towards modern day Christian extremists is applicable to the Gospel writers? How the hell do you even make that leap in logic?
That is all I really have to say in this post. Suffice it to say though, you do open up areas of scholarship that I think are very fascinating and I can find convincing depending on the evidence they present and the arguments therein, however; most of your article just seems more like an Apologetic piece than one of an actual scholar.
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Mike Wilson
May 23, 2012 at 2:17 am
I took a class few semesters ago about pseudo-science and other bizarre beliefs and I thought I was gipped. He spent most of the class on logic puzzles, like if x therefore y and that sort of thing. I didn’t think those would be that helpful for the questions that our text addressed, like why do people believe in UFO’s and 9/11 conspiracies. As Steph discusses with Bayes theorem, history is too complex for these sorts of equations to work. Noam Chomsky had a good insight on this when he said that there is a progression of complexity in sciences with physicist studying the simplest systems and historians the most complex. The physicist has like a handful of particles and forces, the chemist thousands of combinations of those particles, the biologist even more, then the psychiatrist, and finally the historian who is studying the actions of billions of minds made of countless chemical reactions and so on
Here Doherty and “Voice of Reason” would like us to turn our backs on reliable and reasonable ways of discerning good ideas from bad and just believe them on faith. Voice of reason believes that we should employ in our institutions of higher learning people whose ideas are considered hogwash by all accredited scholars in relevant fields. This is good news for creation “scientist” and racist. Perhaps he feels that teaching positions should be given out by lottery or trial by combat. People of course complain that liberals are keeping conservatives out of the humanities departments, but there are Republicans teaching literature. A fellow that was mentioned favorably in the articles here, Morton Smith, hypothesized that Jesus corn-holed the apostles, and yet he is still well regarded and was allowed to keep on teaching. Yet mythicist would have us believe that it is Christian conspiracy that keeps all these alleged supporters of Jesus myth in the closet and Price and Carrier working the carnival circuit.
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Earl Doherty
May 22, 2012 at 6:29 pm
I see Casey’s basic ‘arguments’ against mythicism, and me in particular, as:
- More unworkable reasoning to justify why Paul and all the other epistle writers have nothing to say about an historical Jesus. Casey thinks we should not expect to find “later Christian tradition” in the writings of Paul, ‘later tradition’ like the fact that Jesus was crucified on earth, by Pilate, that he taught anything about loving one another or any of the ethical teachings of the Gospel (not even inauthentic ones), that he performed miracles, prophesied the End-time, and so on. Boy, what an HJ that leaves to champion! Imagine devoting one’s professional life to protecting the existence of such an undetectable mundane figure, no matter what the cost in surrendering one’s scholarly principles!
- Of course, in a “high context culture” no one, not a single writer of the non-Gospel/Acts New Testament and several non-canonical ones, felt the slightest urge to mention anything that was said or done by Jesus on earth, even in support of key arguments and debates they were engaged in, even when describing the genesis and ongoing forces within their movement. They so lacked such an urge that they routinely speak of that genesis and ongoing force in ways which exclude such a figure. All their readership and audience were so “high context” that they never expected, let alone demanded, any reference to the words and deeds of the historical figure they believed in and regarded as Deity incarnate. I guess mythicists, in their misguided expectations, are all of us “low culture” idiots.
- Absolutely everything in the Gospels (even the titulus on the cross!) was so thoroughly known to all of Paul’s and other epistle writers’ readers, in every corner from Galatia to Rome, that it would have been a sin and an insult to even mention a single one of them.
- Doherty uses documents to bolster his ‘heavenly Christ’ theory whose manuscripts are very late (apparently the dating of the extant manuscript is paramount) or whose dating has been placed by some scholars (the competent ones, of course) as too late to reflect Paul’s views. (I wonder why Casey didn’t appeal to Yonge’s dating of the Similitudes of Enoch to the late 2nd century as an example of lasting competence. If the once highly regarded Yonge is now out of date, what guarantee is there that the most recent views represent eternal reliability?) Casey allows no consideration about the actual content of the text, or its layered nature, to indicate an alignment with earlier periods, such as I provide, for example, in regard to the Apocalypse of Elijah and the Vision of Isaiah. (For the latter, Casey admits dating “is difficult to determine,” yet Knibb’s dating in the 2nd century is “reasonable” whereas my dating to “the end of the first century” is not, even though I do indeed give reasons for so doing and dispute Knibb’s arguments for not so doing.)
- Casey also admits that the Platonic division of the universe and its related characteristics were known centuries before Christianity, yet somehow such things remained unfamiliar in Jewish society (despite being for centuries under the yolk of Hellenistic cultures, and despite several Jewish sectarian writings which reflect such a familiarity and adoption for their own purposes. If Casey doesn’t like my dating of the Ascension of Isaiah, how about the Wisdom of Solomon for an example of Jewish absorption of pagan philosophy? Is he going to date that into the 2nd or 3rd century? Or Philo?). Moreover, such ideas were unfamiliar to Paul’s gentile readers! What convenient (if ludicrous) isolationism, making every epistle writer’s readership needing the repeated spelling out of where Christ had been crucified or by whom. (But wait, Paul actually does tell them in 1 Cor. 2:8 that it was the demon spirits, which ancient commentators–no doubt now to be regarded as out of date by modern scholars like Casey–interpreted as such.)
- Casey also fails to perceive any difference between needing to repeat to a congregation that the Jesus myth (like the myths of the mystery cults) took place in a mythical setting: between that and feeling an urge to call upon the words and deeds of Jesus to (a) reflect their faith and interest in such a person and his doings, (b) to support the points they were arguing and promoting, and (c) to avoid putting things in such a way that they conveyed the very opposite: that there was no HJ in their own movement’s background. (Casey, of course, did not take the trouble to try to discredit any argument in that direction based on the texts themselves.)
- A woeful lack of a sense of humor which leads Casey to seriously criticize every word I used in my intentionally light and humorous conversation between Paul and some new converts. What a fraud Doherty is, since Paul would never have used the word “Calvary/Golgotha” in conversation since it means “skull”! Let’s give a round of applause for that profound piece of scholarship and discreditation!
- Casey shows a very unsympathetic personal attitude toward the existence of “what some scholars call Q” (obviously those as incompetent as myself) and thus my entire case falls apart since it is partly based on an analysis of Q. He includes a very dubious defence of why Luke would not have taken anything from Matthew’s Nativity story if he was using Matthew. Shades of Goodacre, and no more effective or free of problematic claims. And Casey’s knock-down argument against Q and those like Kloppenborg who support it is that “the disappearance of Q is difficult to explain”? That’s nonsense, and I’ve given very reasonable explanations for such a situation.
- In his defence of Paula Fredriksen, Casey falls into her same illogicality. We don’t see any interest in things like relics of Jesus, or in visiting the sites of salvation, because those interests did not arise until the 4th century! Hmmm, I wonder why. Apparently Casey, like Fredriksen, does NOT wonder why. Oh yes, they couldn’t bring themselves to visit the site of their Lord’s death because other screams were in the air! Talk about weak constitutions! Funny, there were no screams at the tomb, but Christians show no sign of wanting to visit that either. And if it was supposedly too dangerous to visit such sites en masse, or too impractical to create cultic occasions there while being persecuted, could Paul at least not have snuck off to the “Skull” on his own to absorb his Lord’s recent presence there? Could not a single epistle writer even have referred to such sites as the earthly setting for the death of their Lord? No danger there. And were Christians so weak-kneed–didn’t they avoid martyrdom at all costs?–that they could not bring themselves to visit such sites surreptitiously or even view them from afar? (This sort of argumentation by Casey is far more lame and ridiculous that anything mythicists have been accused of being guilty of.)
- Oh yes, I forgot. Casey says that “early Christian piety did not require shrines or relics.” How do we know this? Obviously, because the early Christian documents do not show an interest in shrines or relics. This is clearly not because they didn’t know of such things, but knowing them, had no interest in them. Why? Because that was the nature of early Christian piety. Am I the only one getting dizzy from such ‘scholarly’ circular argumentation? This points up Casey’s competence as against mythicist incompetence?
- And I am further incompetent because I have not “grappled with” Casey’s own work on the rich Aramaic sources of the Gospels, something for which he enjoys less support from his own ranks than I do for my own work?
Oh, my! This is a demolition of mythicism? Of me? This justifies the extreme vitriol and smug conviction of his own superiority over an ignoramus like myself? Nothing has changed, boys. This is the traditional attitude of historicist scholarship toward mythicism since time immemorial, and it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. It’s a scandal in any discipline claiming to be scholarly and open-minded. But I am not going to lose any sleep over it, and I will continue to defend myself and mythicism against it. (Right now, the bulk of my attention and energy is being devoted to my detailed rebuttal to Ehrman’s new book, being serialized on the Vridar blog.)
By the way, note that one of Casey’s main arguments against us is our lack of proper credentials, which explains why we get everything so woefully wrong. But wait. Robert Price is the one mythicist in Casey’s view who does possess the proper credentials and background. But wait. He’s as wrong-headed as the rest of us. So I guess credentials really have nothing to do with it. The bottom line is that mythicism itself is regarded as so reprehensible, so wacko an idea, that anyone championing it, from the heydey of mythicists like J.M. Robertson to that quack Earl Doherty, has to be suffering from either dementia or an anti-Christian agenda blindly devoted to destroying Christianity (which evidently Casey, Ehrman & Co. do not even claim membership in).
The other bottom line for Casey (as with Ehrman) is that the Internet is a hotbed of anti-Christian terrorists. How dare I say that I’m writing for “open-minded laypeople” reachable through the web? None of them are even remotely open-minded–as compared, say, to the open-minded establishment academia represented by Casey and Ehrman (and Hoffmann), who preface all their rants against mythicism by pointing out that we are inherently morons and charlatans, advocating a theory which is as obviously ridiculous as solar-centrism and the movement of tectonic plates…. Oh, wait….
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David Marshall
May 23, 2012 at 12:33 am
Doherty: You’re not a “moron,” just out of your depth. Treat yourself to a little skepticism of your own skepticism, and you’d be miles ahead.
You mention the alleged fact that outside of “The Gospels / Acts:”
“Not a single writer of the non-Gospel/Acts New Testament and several non-canonical ones, felt the slightest urge to mention anything that was said or done by Jesus on earth.”
This is, of course, not true, if I follow what you mean, here. (The syntax could be clearer — to which side of the / does “and several non-canonical ones” refer?) Thomas, for instance, mentions many things Jesus said, citing the genuine gospels. Paul seems to cite quite a bit of Jesus’ teaching, as has frequently been argued.
But the odd thing is that you seem to include Acts in with the Gospels. Why is that? They are the only historical narratives in the NT, most of the rest of the NT is letters. Yet actually, there is very little about Jesus’ life in Acts, either. Why is that? Is it because Luke didn’t know much about Jesus’ life? Obviously not — he’d just written a book on the subject. Rather, it’s because he knew how to stick to his subject. Your Argument from Silence is useless, if people in the ancient world had that capacity.
To give another example, how often does Aristotle mention the life and works of his great teacher, Plato, in his main didactic writings? Surprisingly seldom. Is that because Plato was another historical mirage? A few handy quotes from Plato might be very persuasive! Or anecdotes about Socrates?
So I don’t see that your mainstay “argument from silence” carries any weight at all.
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invisibledummy
May 23, 2012 at 11:25 am
Sorry, but nowhere does Paul gives us a teaching of Jesus on earth. Those paltry little directives in 1 Cor. 7 & 9 are regarded even by many mainstream scholars as communications he believes he has received from Christ in heaven (his “words of the Lord”), and the language bears them out. Even 1 Cor. 11:23 is introduced by Paul saying that this is something he has “received from the Lord” which alerts us that this is by personal revelation.
Historicist scholars can knock themselves out ‘identifying’ all the “echoes” of Jesus’ teachings found in Paul, but they still can’t point to a single identification of such teachings as the product of Jesus on earth. I guess they have to be put in the same pot as all the “echoes” of Jesus’ teachings in, say, the epistle of James, not one of which is identified as coming from Jesus, whether earthly or heavenly.
But wait. Silly me. These are yet other examples of the “high context” situation. Everyone already knew that every single one of these was the product of Jesus, so neither Paul nor James had to specify, and didn’t dare choose to do so anyway.
Gee, then I wonder why Paul in 1 Thess. 4:9 says: “You are taught by God to love one another”? Come to think of it, I wonder why the epistle of Barnabas, in his Two Ways section, gives us a pile of Jesus’-sounding teachings and then says (2:1) that these are the product of God? I wonder why Hebrews can say that in the present time God is speaking through the Son and then fail to give us not a single word of Jesus spoken on earth, not even when he wants to demonstrate that Jesus regards his believers as brothers, but simply quotes the ‘voice of the Son’ in scripture? And on and on.
Sorry, David, I don’t feel out of my depth at all. The problem is, you and others like you here have failed to plumb the depths of the texts themselves in anything but the most superficial manner, entirely governed by your importation of the Gospels into them. This is scholarship?
I’m reminded of one commentator I read many years ago–darn, my memory fails me as to her name–who after analyzing the epistle of James gave the reader this nugget: The epistle of James demonstrates another way of preserving the teachings of Jesus, by placing them without identification in the common body of moral maxims of the time! (Or words to that effect–digging them out of my notes from many years ago would be a chore.) What is this? Preservation by burial?!! It is a prime example of the double-think which historicist scholars regularly engage in to keep their heads above water. Casey and yourself are only doing more of the same.
Now back to Ehrman…
Earl Doherty
Earl Doherty
rjosephhoffmann
May 23, 2012 at 11:40 am
“Sorry, but nowhere does Paul gives us a teaching of Jesus on earth.” This may be true. How do you construe it?
rjosephhoffmann
May 23, 2012 at 11:50 am
It is clear that ED has read Casey’s article. Equally clear that he has not read mine, which is effectively about why Paul’s silence betokens nothing about the historical Jesus but does try to account for the silence. I am not the least interested about pratter concerning echoes of the historical Jesus in Paul. I am interested in trying to understand why a Paul who does seem to have regarded Jesus as some sort of “event” in history does not say very much, if anything about him. In the long run, this is not about authority but what you read, how you read, and what you make of what you have read. My worry about Doherty’s response is that it doesn’t speak very highly for his curiosity, and something a scholar must be–especially in this area– is curious.
invisibledummy
May 23, 2012 at 12:02 pm
You’ll have to be a little clearer. I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
Ananda
May 23, 2012 at 11:53 am
Hi David,
Are you familiar with nomina sacra especially concerning the above reference to Jesus name in The Gospel of Thomas which will make historical bridging troublesome especially considering Gnostic use of mystery teaching in gematria?
David Marshall
May 24, 2012 at 12:43 pm
Earl: I believe you when you say you don’t feel out of your depth, though hardly find that subjective report conclusive. Why don’t you get a doctorate in this subject? If you think you can make an earth-shaking case for the ahistoricity of Jesus that will stand up, why prattle on in popular books or on the Web, when you can put your argument in a dissertation, and underscore your competence and perspecuity? Carrier and Price look pretty lonely right now, I imagine they’d welcome the company.
You ignore all my points but one, and interpret that in a somewhat off-center manner. I know you don’t think Paul mentioned or cited the historical Jesus. Lots of scholars think he did, repeatedly, as do I. But even supposing he didn’t much — one can’t really pretend he didn’t at all — there remains the question of why that is supposed to matter as much as the price of kumquats in Argentina. I’ve given several reasons why it shouldn’t, which you have ignored.
earldoherty1
May 24, 2012 at 3:12 pm
At 70 years old, David, I’m not about to embark on a Doctorate. But this sort of thing is beside the point. It wouldn’t matter what my education was, all that matters is the quality of my argumentation. Whether I had a PhD after my name or not, you wouldn’t give my case the time of day. So let’s let that red herring go, shall we?
I responded to the main thrust of your posting, that Paul cited Jesus frequently, and included examples from similar claims about other epistles, and showed that the claim was all wet. How about YOU responding to my counter-arguments in that regard?
Let me cover a couple of other of your points: You say “Thomas, for instance, mentions many things Jesus said, citing the genuine gospels.” So a document you suggest is dependent on the Gospels constitutes some kind of independent proof of the authenticity of those sayings and the one alleged to have said them? Some logical deficiency there. Besides, do you actually subscribe to the view that Thomas is dependent on the Gospels, rather than constituting an alleged independent source (in its “wisdom” stratum)? Most critical scholars disagree. (Personally, and some agree with me, I see those sayings in Thomas as dependent on an early form of Q.)
Do you honestly think that the mere appearance of “Jesus said”s attached to each of the sayings is ironclad proof that we can be sure that these sayings really go back to a Jesus, especially when the earliest date that scholars have placed the surviving version (from the 4th c) is acknowledged to be the mid-2nd century, especially when we have early documents showing all sorts of teachings (such as in the epistle of James or all those unattributed “echoes” of Jesus in Paul) which only later show up in Jesus’ mouth in the Gospels? I’d call that naive. I’d call that *extremely* naive. And I’d call it naive to even think of saying that in public. I’d say you were out of your depth, David.
And I’m glad you pointed out that Acts knew how to stick to its subject, namely the account of the development of the early Christian movement supposedly following the death of Jesus, with a focus on Paul. And in what way would that subject lead us to expect discussion of the life of Jesus? This, I would vehture to say, is why we see very little about that life in Acts–though it is undeniable that we find all over the place references TO the life recently lived by an historical man and his death.
Whereas the epistles of Paul and others have as their subject, in very great part, the gospel they are preaching ABOUT the Christ. As well, we find the subject of various disputes and urgings toward behavior which appeals to the life, teachings and deeds of the man they supposedly worship would very much be helpful and a propos. Yet we do not find such references, not even the basic reference found in Acts that he was a recent historical man who lived and died on earth.
If you can’t see how the epistles are a very different animal from Acts, and how the argument from silence applies to them in quite different ways, then you REALLY are out of your depth.
Earl Doherty
David Marshall
May 24, 2012 at 3:41 pm
Earl: I did give your argument the time of day. I bought, and read, your book, The Jesus Puzzle. Having given it the time of day, I explained why I found it unconvincing, in an Amazon review, many years ago. Have you done as much, with any of my books? To give you credit, at least you’re not Acharya S, or even Freke & Gandy: you seem sincere, and genial enough.
I didn’t say Thomas is an independent source for Jesus. I cited Thomas to rebut your apparent claim that there is no such material outside of 4G + Acts, that’s all. (Q dependency is also highly dubious, but that’s another issue.)
It’s too bad that you spend so much time attacking a position I didn’t take, and then cite that straw man to say I’m “out of my depth.”
Your after-the-fact attempt to explain away why Acts doesn’t say much about Jesus’ life, is unconvincing. One can be sure that if we didn’t have Luke, you’d use Acts to make the same argument. Of course there are many times the preachers in Acts could have mentioned details about Jesus’ life, and chose not to, and one could make hay of them all, as you do with Paul’s writings. It’s a silly game. You’re not the only one to play it, so I’m not saying that makes you a silly person. But it seems entirely subjective, speculative, and almost auto-hypnotic,
My own view lies towards the other side of the spectrum. I think Ehrman, Pagels, and the Jesus Seminar are far too skeptical of the Gospels, explaining why, in Why the Jesus Seminar can’t find Jesus, then again in The Truth about Jesus and the “Lost Gospels.” I may have missed it, but I don’t see that any of the mythicists even engage with most of the evidence in the Gospels I and others describe, for the essential historicity of the earliest Christian records. Thus the title of my Amazon review of your book, “Twelve Infallible Proofs that the Moon is Square.”
If it’s any consolation, of the hundreds of Amazon reviews I’ve posted, that one has among the most negative reviews. Obviously you have a lot of fans.
Best wishes.
earldoherty1
May 24, 2012 at 4:49 pm
And you missed my basic point. You implied that the Gospel of Thomas was dependent on the Gospels (you said something like it “cited the genuine gospels”). Did I misinterpret that? If a document cites the Gospels then they are in the Gospels & Acts camp because they are derived from them. I would have thought my point was clear, that any source outside the Gospels & Acts, and not dependent on them, fails to back up the Gospel presentation of sayings by Jesus on earth.
The trouble with Thomas is that it is simply a collection of sayings, which could have been imputed to anyone originally, or to a ‘no-body’ like personified Wisdom or a general Cynic source. In it we don’t have the voice of a writer telling us a story or writing about his faith movement in which we could judge whether we are getting references to an HJ or not in that kind of context. So it cannot rank with the Gospels/Acts or the epistles. By the way, I do address the ‘silence’ in Acts in my new book Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. You should have a look at it. Lots of new material over The Jesus Puzzle.
Actually, I don’t remember your Amazon review. There have been 117 of them, most by reviewers who *were* persuaded by my arguments. Sorry that you weren’t.
Earl Doherty
Mike Wilson
May 23, 2012 at 2:16 am
“By the way, note that one of Casey’s main arguments against us is our lack of proper credentials, which explains why we get everything so woefully wrong. But wait. Robert Price is the one mythicist in Casey’s view who does possess the proper credentials and background. But wait. He’s as wrong-headed as the rest of us. So I guess credentials really have nothing to do with it.”
Doherty feels that that the main argument made against him is his lack of credentials. I don’t see that to be the case nor does it seem that that Ehrman, Casey or Hoffman prefaces their arguments with his being inherently a moron. In fact Ehrman had nice things to say about Doherty, and really it is his argument that is moronic, as they have shown and as I have seen. It should be relevant though to those who are not experts (experts can weigh Doherty’s case on its merits and they overwhelmingly reject it) that Doherty has no credentials to qualify him to speak on the subject so his opinion on should matter less than someone who has some sort of relevant training. If you take Doherty at his word that he understands history and Greek better than the collective credentialed scholarly community then how could you reject any ones opinion? What if I said butter makes a good foundation for a house against the objection of masons and engineers? If you believe Doherty you would be terribly simple and closed minded to believe them over me without at least building a butter house.
Regarding Price, again, the argument is not that everyone with the right credentials makes is right or does good work. Don’t be foolish Doherty, price’s arguments and all other mythicist have been shown to be baseless on account of the evidence,. You can pretend that you haven’t’ seen it but most people aren’t as dull as Steve Carr or Godfrey and for that reason your idea will never catch on even when all the world has forgotten about Christianity.
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Earl Doherty
May 23, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Well, I know it won’t catch on with you, Mike. But it’s nice to see you again. However, I don’t think you’re any more amenable to reasoned argument now than you were when we tangled on the Matrix, so you’ll pardon me if I pass by your postings, particularly when they have nothing substantive to say by way of counter-argument to anything.
And when did I say that I understood history and Greek better than collective academia? What I have pointed out is that the latter’s understanding of the origins of Christianity and its reading of certain Greek passages can sometimes be erroneous, whether through using faulty methodology or bringing favored assumptions to them. Don’t members of that august community regularly say things like that of their own fellow-members? Or have I missed the all the consensus exegesis put forward over the years.
‘Agreeing that Jesus existed’ may be a consensus of sorts, but it’s hardly based on a consensus of exegesis, let alone a demonstrated scholarly discrediting of the mythicist case. Bart Ehrman’s latest book is proof of that. By the way, have you checked out my rebuttal series to him on Vridar? Some interesting material currently being discussed, namely the NT epistles and others like Ignatius and 1 Clement, Papias and Barnabas. Coming up: don’t miss my two installments on the Epistle to the Hebrews (my favorite!), and the two smoking guns in it (8:4 and 10:37). No “high context” stuff there!
Earl Doherty
sweetteaandoranges
May 23, 2012 at 3:47 am
Change the subject to creationism and you might see how silly this rant sounds
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sweetteaandoranges
May 23, 2012 at 3:50 am
substitute this argument for creationism and you might see how silly you look Earl
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Paul R
May 23, 2012 at 7:08 am
Earl rightly points out that sometimes very good theories are overlooked or criticised by the academic community. Unfortunately, he neglects to mention that utterly ridiculous theories are also overlooked and criticised by the academic community, for very good reasons. The problem is how we tell the difference.
Can Earl give me a good reason to think that Historical Jesus Denial is more like plate tectonics than it is like – say – young earth creationism?
From an non-academic’s perspective, HJDers look much more like creationists (i.e. a bunch of people drawn from a very narrow range of theological perspectives, who mostly lack advanced qualifications relevant to the topics they write about and who would struggle to get their work published via recognised academic channels) than they do the developers of plate tectonics, who were highly qualified scientists who largely worked from within the academic community.
Do any of the current crop of Historical Jesus Deniers have the kind of academic credentials of figures like Holmes, Wegener, or Hess? I think not.
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invisibledummy
May 23, 2012 at 10:57 am
So it all boils down to an appeal to authority. Only those with proper credentials need apply. The most pathetic thing about this is that you don’t even recognize how pathetic it is. And how unscholarly. But I realize it is par for the course in historicist circles.
Earl Doherty
Paul Regnier
May 23, 2012 at 3:57 pm
Hello Earl,
If you’re going to draw grandiose comparisons between Historical Jesus Denial and plate tectonics, don’t be too surprised if others point out that your analogy has a few problems with it. If you have a serious argument to make as to why I should treast HJD differently from fringe positions such as Young Earth Creationism, then please make it. But please spare me the stroppy teenage histrionics.
By the way, pointing out that the consensus position of appropriately qualified experts is that a historical Jesus existed, and that Historical Jesus Denial is largely proposed by an ideologically homogenous group lacking relevant training or qualifications is *not* a fallacious appeal to authority OK? It’s just not.
It’s no more a appeal to authority than pointing out the similar distinction that exists between the experts and amateurs who respectively support and deny evolution or HIV as a cause of AIDS. And of course, just because evolution or HIV deniers lack the academic qualifications or specialist training of those they oppose that doesn’t *necessarily* mean that their views are wrong. But it does give us a pretty good indication of where and why they might have gone wrong.
Of course, if you disagree, then next time you need dental work done why not give me a call? I’ve got no relevant training whatever, but hey what’s a piece of paper? I know you won’t be all “appeally to authority” about it.
Paul Regnier
May 23, 2012 at 6:09 pm
PS – Reading that back, there should really be a comma after the first ‘evolution’ in paragraph three. At the minute it reads a bit like I’m saying that experts are divided as to whether it’s HIV or belief in evolution that causes AIDS. Possibly the view of a few on the religious right, but not quite what I meant!
m casey
May 24, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Doherty’s first point has all the malice and spite now to be expected of mythicists. According to him, I think we should not expect to find ‘later Christian tradition’ in the writings of Paul. What I actually wrote was, ‘The last thing we should expect to find in first century documents is the deposit of centuries of later Christian tradition.’ In the context of Doherty’s book as a whole, ‘centuries of’ is important, but Doherty replaces this with ‘”later tradition” like the fact that Jesus was crucified on earth as crucified on earth, by Pilate, that he taught anything about loving one another or any of the ethical teachings of the Gospel (not even inauthentic ones), that he performed miracles, prophesied the End-time, and so on. Boy, what an HJ that leaves to champion! Imagine devoting one’s professional life to protecting the existence of such an undetectable mundane figure, no matter what the cost in surrendering one’s scholarly principles!
There are two central points wrong here. One is the replacement of everything I have written with this incompetent summary. I defended the historicity of parts of Mark’s passion narrative in a scholarly work which Doherty is not learned enough to read (Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel CUP, 1998, summarised for the general reader in Jesus of Nazareth T & T Clark/Continuum, 2010, pp. 429-53), I discussed what are often called ‘miracles’ in the light of the most recent and competent secondary literature (Jesus of Nazareth, ch.7), and I wrote about his ethics as well (Jesus of Nazareth, ch 8). I have not for one moment suggested that this is ‘later tradition’, let alone ‘centuries of later tradition’. But the misrepresentation, malice and spite reach a climax in the final sentence. I have not proposed that Jesus was an ‘undetectable mundane figure’, and ‘no matter what the cost in surrendering one’s scholarly principles!’ is a quite mendacious attack on my scholarly integrity, which no-one properly familiar with me or my work has made.
Doherty then misrepresents the effects of my comments on ‘high context’ and ‘low context’ cultures. He interprets this to mean that ‘no one….felt the slightest urge to mention anything that was said or done by Jesus on earth.’ This misses all the main points, one of which is that some people, including Paul, did mention what they needed (e.g. the death, burial and Resurrection of Jesus at 1 Cor 15.3-8). The second is that they did not need the main points of the historic ministry of Jesus to be constantly repeated in the writing of occasional letters which were basically about problems in the Pauline churches. Despite grave temptation, I have never described mythicists as ‘“low culture” idiots’, but I did make the important point that they all belong to a low context culture, and consequently have unrealistic expectations of what Paul needed to mention in his epistles. I also noted that these problems will have been exacerbated by the problems of writing at all, which Doherty does not mention.
Another major point is the late date of documents used by Doherty. He refers without reference to the dating of the Similitudes of Enoch by ‘the once highly regarded Yonge’. However, in accordance with his customary lack of learning, he gives no reference. Does he really mean C.D. Yonge (1821-91), who translated the works of Philo in the middle of the nineteenth century, on the basis of a pre-critical text? Of course all such works are now long out of date.
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neodecaussade
May 22, 2012 at 10:18 pm
Reblogged this on Neodecaussade’s Weblog and commented:
Very insightful
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giu73
May 23, 2012 at 1:53 am
What audience is this essay supposed to be written for?
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Neil Godfrey’s response 1 to Maurice Casey and Stephanie Fisher « Vridar says:
May 23, 2012 at 2:06 am
[...] of gathering information available in books with any semblance of accuracy. (Maurice Casey, Mythicism: A Story of Bias, Incompetence and Falsehood, accessed 23/5/2012 – I like the rhetorical touch Casey uses to introduce what he is about to [...]
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Ben Schuldt
May 23, 2012 at 2:34 am
Subscribing.
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ROO BOOKAROO
May 23, 2012 at 3:30 am
Anyway, the most striking passage, for me, remains the neat invocation of the distinction between “high context culture” and “low context culture”, as “anthropological” constructs that are given force of a law of nature. And the high-handed decision that the Roman Empire universe was a “high context culture”.
Key is the “ knowledge of the fundamental work of the anthropologist E.T. Hall, who introduced the terms ‘high context culture’ and ‘low context culture’ into scholarship.[9] Paul’s epistles were written in a high context culture, which was homogeneous enough for people not to have to repeat everything all the time, whereas American, European and many other scholars belong to a low context culture, which gives them quite unrealistic expectations of what the authors of the epistles ought to have written. This is one basic reason why Paul says so little about the life and teaching of Jesus. To some extent, his Gentile Christians had been taught about Jesus already, so he could take such knowledge for granted. He therefore had no reason to mention places such as Nazareth, or the site of the crucifixion, nor to remind his congregations that Jesus was crucified on earth recently.”
Nothing is more problematic and questionable than the rationalization of facts taken from ancient or primitive cultures into the neat abstract concepts formulated in modern English by anthropologists. There is an inherent deception in the use of abstract concepts to explain social events, especially of distant and less know cultures, ancient or primitive. Anthropologists are eager to ferret out abstract principles to bring order to a variety of facts and incidents (translated from poorly understood primitive or distant languages), but such concepts, neat and tidy, too often sound like their personal inventions aiming at providing an air of profundity and universality to their classifications.
This “anthropological” distinction of ‘high context culture’ versus ‘low context culture’ is then used by Casey as the tool to dismiss all the silence in Paul’s epistles as just routine for the times of the first and early second centuries, and perfectly reasonable. And certainly not worth all the hullabaloo made by the long line of scholars who have seen in Paul’s silence about Jesus’s biographical details (miracles, preaching, incidents, trial, Pilate, etc…) a fundamental problem in the NT.
All the facts of Jesus’s biography are thus supposed to have already circulated all around the Mediterranean, at a time when most ordinary people were illiterate, and means of transportation excruciatingly slow and dangerous, and communication required the dispatching of personal messengers by land or boat.
How then was this communication of such vital biographical details about Jesus broadcast over such an immense territory, to so many separated communities and cities, in such a narrow time? It is simply miraculous and unexplained, and the invocation of “high context culture” does nothing to explain it.
The fundamental conclusion remains that Paul knew nothing of the Gospels, and that they were created quite a while after Paul’s epistles were disseminated. No amount of linguistic “explanations”, with or without “anthropological” concepts, can finesse this basic conundrum.
The assumption that the wide diversity of cultures in the Greco-Roman world was so “homogeneous” that a basic knowledge of the Jesus drama was already in place, universally known and taken for granted, strikes many scholars as not in the realm of probability and a product of pure fiction.
Using such ad hoc “anthropological” concepts as if they described an inherent structural law of the Roman Empire world, just to explain a most mysterious phenomenon, is pure legerdemain by Casey. His assumption is improbable and unbelievable. And no additional language by Casey will make it less so.
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Chris
May 23, 2012 at 11:52 am
This criticism strikes me as extremely relevant. Early Christians were proselytizing to Jews and Gentiles who would have had a quite disparate knowledge of the story of Jesus’s life – in some cases they would have known nothing or next to nothing, in other cases they would have known the broad details but with varying inaccuracies, in other cases (the rarest?) they would have pretty well informed (excepting their ‘noobs’ or prospects for conversion). This seems like an inescapable fact of life – people have different levels of knowledge about all subjects, so the earliest (*especially* the earliest?) Christian community can’t possibly have been all equally well-informed and educated about the highly important ‘historical’ aspects of Jesus’s life – highly important because these aspects all have theological meaning (or did they have no theological aspect back then, and only acquire it later?).
Plus, it seems contradictory to apply this ‘high-context culture’ thought-tool in order to clean up the mess here, and yet not to apply it when denying that there is any significant Hellenistic influence on the early Christian community, despite the fact that many (?) early Christian converts would have been Greek themselves. Is there a particular historical basis for this? There doesn’t appear to be a logical one, and it appears to provide an illustration of the criticism that NT scholarship lacks or falls short of sound logical principles/methodology. But I am admittedly confused. (The more I follow this HJ/MJ debate, the more I see that, for a nonexpert such as myself, the field of biblical studies is a minefield overlaid onto a morass.)
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David Marshall
May 23, 2012 at 10:33 am
Roo: You overlook both the facts I mentioned to Doherty. First, in fact Paul does mention some things about Jesus’ life, and seems to recapitulate much of his teaching contained in the later gospels.
And second, in fact ancient authors often did just what you claim is so improbable. You can search long stretches of the works of Aristotle, without finding biographical descriptions of Plato, Aristotle’s esteemed teacher, or even of Socrates, guru to the ancient world. I would venture to say, much longer than all the writings of Paul and Hebrews together.
Plus, Acts is historical narrative, like the Gospels, yet contains almost nothing about Jesus’ earthly life. Is that because Luke didn’t know about it? But he had just written the Gospel of Luke.
It is not just invalid, it is rather absurd, to argue from the relative silence of Paul’s letters, to the ahistoricity of Jesus.
Especially in the face of a wealth of positive evidence, as I describe in Why the Jesus Seminar can’t find Jesus.
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ROO BOOKAROO
May 24, 2012 at 2:32 am
The distinction used by Casey as a major axiom is borrowed from the 1976 book “Beyond Culture” by Edward T. Hall, especially ch. 6, 7, and 8. http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Culture-Edward-T-Hall/
A good overview of Hall’s fascinating career and production can be seen athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_T._Hall
No pages from the relevant chapters are shown on the Amazon display of the book, but quite a few pages from the first chapters, enough to get an idea of the way these ideas are presented: as insightful and valuable generalizations of specific experiences, but in no way as absolute natural laws of civilizations. Hall was too conscious of the tentative character of any anthropological generalizations to be fooled by his own ideas.
The dogmatic use made by Casey of Hall’s concepts is unwarranted, and unscientific. I was willing to give an open ear to his argumentation, but when he pulled these rabbits out of his hat to solve one of the fundamental problems of the NT, pretending to see in those phenomenological concepts an inherent law of the Roman Empire civilization, I lost all my trust in his honesty.
Casey may be reliable and trustworthy in some specific aspects of his research (his vaunted fluency in Aramaic?), but when he starts waving such “anthropological” concepts, which are no more than interesting, but hypothetical, phenomenological, distinctions, as universal laws of such an immense and complex word as the Roman Empire, one is forced to conclude that he is abusing his reputation in areas where he is no authority whatsoever.
Same unjustified extended use of reputation is practiced by many experts. For example, by Wallis Budge in Egyptology, when he used his skills as a translator of hieroglyphs to start proposing far-flung theories on Egyptian religion and its sources. It is too easy for an acknowledged expert in one area to start sounding off like a pundit in other fields, making high-sounding pronouncements which are at best personal guesses. Casey is certainly a victim of this self-delusion when it comes to his use of “anthropological” tools.
An utter joke. Again, as John McEnroe used to scream at Wimbledon, “You cannot be serious!”
Comment by ROO BOOKAROO — 2012/05/24
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David Marshall
May 25, 2012 at 9:22 am
John McEnroe was a spoiled brat. Best not take him as our role model.
Casey seems to me a sidelight. The central point is that the Argument From Silence does not work here. Both Luke and Aristotle plainly do what Doherty assumes ancient writers would not do: go on for chapter after chapter, in which anecdotes from their guru’s life might come in handy, without relating those anecdotes.
rjosephhoffmann
May 25, 2012 at 9:45 am
@David: Thank you David. A very sane and well placed comment.
Miguel Conner
May 23, 2012 at 12:17 pm
“Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual would believe them”
George Orwell
You are more than welcome to come on Aeon Byte for a rebuttal. I have had all the main mythicists of today, and even the honor of having Dr. Ehrman and even Dr. Peter Jones, the fundamentalist exemplar and enemy of any secular or Gnostic narrative. All guests are treated with the utmost courtesy and without any confrontation. The floor is theirs. Richard Carrier comes on in two weeks. It would certainly be another honor to have someone of your caliber on. The quote was simply my tongue and cheek way to say we shouldn’t dismiss those outside of academia, although I usually defer to anyone with a PHD. You paid your dues, you have the meta-cognition, and you often are what keeps freedom alive in our culture. But dialogue is our God, whether lay or scholarly.
http://www.aeonbytegnosticradio.com/
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Earl Doherty
May 23, 2012 at 12:53 pm
I’m not sure why some messages here don’t have a Reply function at the end.
RJH suggested I was not “curious.” He speaks of an apparent view by Paul about Jesus as an “historical event” which governs his own curiosity and search for an explanation for things like Paul’s silence on teachings of Jesus on earth.
But this is adopting an unnecessary assumption which I do not. I see virtually nothing in Paul that requires he have an historical event in mind. I see quite the opposite. This means I do not have to ‘explain’ (i.e., explain away) the silence. And not just silence, but his description of so much which implicitly or explicitly excludes an historical Jesus. These things are there in the texts because for him and other epistle writers there is no historical Jesus or event. In other words, I don’t have to invent all sorts of counters to what the text says or does not say, I don’t have to twist meanings, I don’t have to indulge in the vast ‘reading into’ exercise which historicist scholars do. Life becomes much simpler.
My “curiosity” is directed at why historicism claims to have such a solid case in the face of so much evidence to the contrary.
“Brother of the Lord”? Despite Ehrman, there is absolutely no necessity to take this as meaning sibling.
“Of David’s seed”? Paul tells us right there he got this from scripture. He is simply applying prophetic passages about the Messiah to his own spiritual Messiah. And he uses “seed” elsewhere in a mystical, non-physical sense, so why not here, especially given a mythicist context..
“Born of woman, born under the Law”? This is the only potentially problematic passage in the entire epistolary literature, and even this is not insurmountable, thanks in some part to Bart Ehrman who showed us that this phrase was the object of much alteration, suggesting it could have been inserted in the first place for the same sort of reason, and that it does not show up in Marcion’s version, to judge by Tertullian. I devote an entire chapter to discussing it from both the authentic and inauthentic points of view in my Jesus; Neither God Nor Man. If anyone here expects me to discuss it, you’ll first have to read that chapter. Otherwise, I’m not going to bother wasting time.
In the face of everything in the epistles which points away from an historical Jesus, to place all one’s historicist eggs in one (or even two) frail baskets is just asking for broken eggs.
Earl Doherty
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Blood
May 23, 2012 at 9:37 pm
“It follows that Price has not made good or reasonable use of the New Testament qualifications which he once obtained. The results of his work are no better than those of more obviously ignorant mythicists.”
So New Testament PhD credentials aren’t relevant after all; that is, if they stray too far from the Status Quo. Price has written a couple of thousand pages exploring the vicissitudes of the Christ Myth theory. If you think you can dismiss that huge and significant body of work in two or three paragraphs, I can dispatch yours with even less effort.
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The Jesus myth wars heat up | Is there a god? says:
May 24, 2012 at 2:09 am
[...] the historians’ side, some genuine academics (Maurice Casey, James McGrath) and some enthusiastic amateurs, though no less qualified than most mythicists, [...]
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Steven Carr
May 24, 2012 at 3:37 am
Why is it ‘ludicrous’ of Doherty to put Testament Solomon in 1st century AD?
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity/rt/otp/guestlectures/harding/
‘He comments that ‘the lingering suspicion that the Testament might be medieval is no longer tenable’, and that ‘there is general agreement that much of the testament reflects first-century Judaism in Palestine’ (Duling, APOT I p.942).’
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rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 11:41 am
@Carr: You point to Harding, who writes, “Thus when the relevant material is taken into account, and when the various extant MSS and papyri have been considered, a sixth century date for the Ur-Text of the Testament would seem to make good sense. However, to say that such a date makes sense is not to say that the Testament of Solomon was written in any form in the sixth century. This does seem to be the most likely date, but our evidence is ambiguous enough to preclude any possibility of certainty.” Of those who who have looked at the material, only Conybeare is cited as contemplating a 1st century date, and his reasons for thinking so are usually thought to be risible, especially looking at the MS tradition.
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earldoherty1
May 24, 2012 at 2:38 pm
I agree with Carr. Duling’s discussion of the dating of the Testament of Solomon in Charlesworth’s Old Test. Pseud. I, 940f, sounds anything but risible to me. Duling tells us that the Testament in some kind of developed form has a ‘consensus’ dating of early 3rd century (not the 6th), but a lot of strata are involved in this particular document. He summarizes (as partly quoted by Carr already, to which you made no response):
“An exception to this trend [dating to 3rd c.] is the recognized authority on the magical papyri, K. Preisendanz, who suggested that the original was from the first or second century A.D. Whether one follows McCown’s early third-century dating or Preisendanz’s earlier one, there is general agreement that much of the testament reflects first-century Judaism in Palestine.”
Nothing to laugh about I can see there in claiming evidence in the ToS for views about demons in the first century.
Anyway, this whole objection to my use of the ToS on yours and Casey’s part is a red herring. I used it to back up my contention about belief in demons in the time of Paul. But we really don’t need any more than the witness of the Gospels to tell us that demons were seen as a force to be reckoned with, and let’s not overlook Ephesians 6:12 from the later first century to see that there was a fixation with “our fight …against cosmic powers, against the authorities and potentates of this dark world, against the superhuman forces of evil in the heavens.” What else do you need?
Bringing up my alleged ‘illegitimate’ dating of ToS as a supposed discrediting of Paul & Co.’s belief in demons without acknowledging that we have all the evidence we need right in the Gospels and epistles (which surely neither of you are ignorant of) is typical historicist misleading tactics. Ehrman indulges in them too, which covers none of you with honor.
Earl Doherty
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 3:10 pm
I love this preposterous pejorative use of the word “historicist” Apparently its opposite is someone who can reject historical and physical evidence out of hand, rely on expert opinion that has been discredited when convenient and reject it as an appeal to authority otherwise. In any case, I quite agree that ToS is irrelevant. The clearest reference to demons in “Paul” is in Ephesians anyway and he didn’t write it.
earldoherty1
May 24, 2012 at 3:20 pm
So suddenly, only a decade or so after Paul’s death, the Pauline school developed a new and unprecedented belief in and fear of demons, one which Paul did not share in. Even though “rulers of this age” points very much in that direction, clearly or not.
The word “historicist” was not in itself pejorative. The word “misleading” was. Historicist simply identified the scholars who are being misleading. What other “preposterous” way would you have me identify them? Are you not “historicists”?
And talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
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rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 3:35 pm
No one is arguing against the belief in demons are they? Jesus would have been out of a job if they hadn’t existed; I’m not getting the point.
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earldoherty1
May 24, 2012 at 4:28 pm
I guess, then, that you must have missed Casey’s point:
“There is however good reason to think that ‘it [Test. of Solomon] was current in some form around A. D. 400’; further, ‘the archetype of all the full versions (incorporating the demonology) cannot have been put together before the early third century A. D.’[18] This means that it is quite ludicrous of Doherty to conclude on the basis of this evidence that ‘by Paul’s time they [i.e. the demons] have become vast powers that infest the heavens.’[19] There is no such idea in 1 Enoch, and the Testament of Solomon shows only that such ideas were believed by some people some 200 years after Paul’s time.”
So Casey is denying (at least, it comes across that way) that in Paul’s time the demons were any concern for Christians or people in general, and implies I’m an idiot for calling on the Test. of Solomon to back that bogus claim. Steven Carr was pointing out that some scholars date the ToS as possibly as early as the late 1st c. and that in any case it probably reflects views in first century Judaism. You threw cold water over that, on what basis I’m not quite sure I understood, and I merely backed up Carr and the OTPseud source he used.
Considering that, IIRC, you backed up Casey, how can you now say
“No one is arguing against the belief in demons, are they?”
when that is exactly how all this started, with both you a Casey ignoring the clear evidence in Gospels and epistles, making the contorted fuss over ToS irrelevant and misleading (as often indulged in by historicists).
Is that how you conduct your debates?
Earl Doherty
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 5:11 pm
ED: I think MC’s point goes to the heart of what is genetically wrong with the mythtic position. Why would anyone use a–let’s call it 4th century, or possibly 6th-certainly not 1st century!!–source to sketch in the details of an early to mid-first century Anatolian belief that probably resembled more the “archontic” hierarchy of the gnostics, or was close to it, in Paul’s case. Does Paul name demons? Are you thinking of the very vague “spiritual warfare” of Romans 8.38? Are you sure those are the same critters that are named in ToS? I can’t see the echo.The deuteropauline tradition salutes them at Eph. 6:12 & Col. 1:16; but still, not a good parallel. Does Paul establish named hierarchies in the demon infested heavens? True, Acts 19 talks about demons (no names) being cast out in the name of Jesus–and Paul!, but that doesn’t tell us very much about the heavenly conspiracy against the elect, does it, and it isn’t even good history. Or do you want to construe his silence in a way more congenial to your suppositions? Those principalities and powers, those princes of the powers of the air had evolving personalities; why would you stretch to ToS when gnostic sources, more proximate to Paul, make the case far better? I happen to think the ToS is very late indeed; that it oozes strong Christian (read: scribal) influences & is totally useless for understanding it as a help or a guide to anything Paul might have thought that its use in connection to him, or as amplification of anything Paul himself thought about the archons is simply wrong. Maurice is getting it right; this is a growling, hulk of an anachronism. It is the kind of thing we find in the mythtic position again and again. You are using a category called “demons” and then piling anything you can find into it as an aid to interpretation. IMHO as bloggers like to say, this is the kind of thing that we would give a graduate student in Christian origins a C for coming up with.
Further thought: I regard the suggestion that ToS reflects the views of first century Judaism concerning Judaism as insupportable. Except for the fake Jewish overlay, where is the Judaism? What about it can confidently be said to reflect 1st century Jewish demonology?
earldoherty1
May 24, 2012 at 6:47 pm
Does it matter whether Paul named demons? Does it matter that the full demonology of ToS doesn’t go back to the first century? Do we have to identify Paul’s concept of demon “rulers of this age” as fully in keeping with all the particulars of Jewish demonology? The Vision of Isaiah speaks of the descending Son’s hanging on a tree by Satan and his minions in the firmament. That’s Jewish sectarian enough, though the Platonic ingredient is also pretty clear in that document, and it’s far from anywhere near late as the 6th century.
And I didn’t “stretch” to the Testament of Solomon. I accepted some perfectly legitimate scholarly opinions that some of the ideas in it reached back into the first century. Just because you would like to dismiss those opinions as unfavorable to your anti-mythicist zealotry doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, or that I am a wretched graduate student for adding them to the pile (though thanks for not giving me a failing grade).
The only “pile” here is your red herrings which amount to no more than bluster to cover up the fact that you are unable to discount the Gospels and Ephesians 6:12 alone (with 1 Cor. 2:8 as a strong indicator) as giving us enough to postulate the concept of demon forces in the first century as guilty of the crucifixion of Christ in the heavens. The Vision of Isaiah provides an actual picture of that concept. As for its date, what group, even Jewish-Christian, is going to present a picture like that at a time after the Gospels have disseminated their own picture of the incarnated Son being crucified on earth by Pilate? Even the ‘Gospel’ interpolation of chapter 11 is so crude and undeveloped that the Vision can’t possibly be dated later than the early 2nd century. It’s ridiculously primitive Nativity scene cannot possibly postdate Matthew or Luke. The interpolator can’t even bring himself to identify the ‘ruler’ who killed the Son on earth as Pilate. (Of course, Knibb is good enough to supply us with his identity, courtesy of the Gospels.)
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 7:03 pm
This is pure muddle. “Does it matter whether Paul named demons? Does it matter that the full demonology of ToS doesn’t go back to the first century? Do we have to identify Paul’s concept of demon “rulers of this age” as fully in keeping with all the particulars of Jewish demonology? The Vision of Isaiah speaks of the descending Son’s hanging on a tree by Satan and his minions in the firmament. That’s Jewish sectarian enough, though the Platonic ingredient is also pretty clear in that document, and it’s far from anywhere near late as the 6th century.” I cannot supply the classes that would have saved you from these errors anymore than I can give young earth creationists a boost in the error of their ways. OF COURSE it matters that Paul does not name demons if a putatively later source is far more explicit and medieval in tone and Christian specificity than an early source. This is pure pretense: How can you develop the chronology apart from the indicators???? If you go by MS eviden alone, as I do not: it is a 6th century document of unarguably (Carrier’s favourite word) Christian provenance. If you cannot answer this query, I see no reason why you should be party to the conversation.
Mike Wilson
May 24, 2012 at 6:10 pm
I think there is some difference between “by Paul’s time they [i.e. the demons] have become vast powers that infest the heavens” and “in Paul’s time the demons were any concern for Christians or people in general” just as there is between “Brother of the Lord”? Despite Ehrman, there is absolutely no necessity to take this as meaning sibling” and the position that it is likely that a relation other than sibling is meant. This reminds me of the Therefore Aliens joke that has been going around http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ancient-aliens
There is also quite a jump between some people believing in some sort of grand demonologies to assuming Paul did to assuming Paul’s Christ was a spirit being crucified by demons in in some spirit world. Casey is quite correct in his observation, “Having argued up to this point that Paul did not believe anything that he does not mention, he imagines that he could take for granted this mythical realm and the quite unparalleled notion of a spiritual crucifixion up there, without mentioning anything of the kind.” Doherty’s theory isn’t impossible; there just isn’t any evidence to support it.
Neil Godfrey
May 24, 2012 at 6:26 pm
I don’t understand how an incidental reference to a document whose earliest layers some scholars assess as as indicative of first century beliefs can be interpreted as “using a category called “demons” and then piling anything you can find into it as an aid to interpretation.”
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 10:12 pm
@Godfrey: Precisely–you do not understand. Moreover, this is not primarily about Doherty’s single wowser of a poor choice of source but about rather larger issues. Why not deal with those? They are cumulative and form a pattern. Persuade me that mythicists have a case, outside the club, based on methods that competent scholars recognize.
Neil Godfrey
May 24, 2012 at 7:54 pm
RJT: I would like to see you address the key point that has been repeatedly made (and that you have repeatedly avoided), and most recently found worded thus:
“I accepted some perfectly legitimate scholarly opinions that some of the ideas in it reached back into the first century. Just because you would like to dismiss those opinions as unfavorable to your anti-mythicist zealotry doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, or that I am a wretched graduate student for adding them to the pile. . .”
Or can you explain why you don’t think this point is worth addressing?
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 8:30 pm
I have no anti-mythicist zealotry to start. I think most people know that. I would love to see a case made competently by someone who knew the literature well enough to avoid the nonsense that charactererises this position at the present time. The fact that you “accepted some perfectly legitimate scholarly opinions that some of the ideas in it reached back into the first century” nags at the question of what opinion you relied on. I think even Conybeare admitted he was stretching when he said 100 CE, and he was seduced by the idea that it might have contained some authentically Jewish elements. No one of any importance thinks that any longer.
It is truly amazing to me that you want to see a document as obviously spurious as this as somehow authentic to your purposes and the gospels as a tissue of myth and falsehood. If you want to know what 1st entury Palestine Jews thought about demons, look at the gospel of Mark and Jesus the exorcist. Your entire line of inquiry shows repeatedly a lack of perception and a glaring deficiency in the skills that would entitle you to choose between sources. But my central point you do not come near to: It isn’t me avoiding it is you asserting: WHAT POSSIBLE RELEVANCE DOES A 4th-6Th century document have for deciding what Paul may or may not have thought about demons? A word, btw he does not use except in connection with idolatry and their influence (1 Cor 8.4-6; 10.20f?). He thinks their reign is at an end (a conclusion he probably derives from the narrative tradition about Jesus). I suggest you spend more time trying to grapple with the totality of Paul’s thought in its historical context and less time trying to cherry pick passages that you imagine are useful for your theory.
Neil Godfrey
June 5, 2012 at 3:13 am
Hi RJT,
I am catching up with your response made on 24th May to a comment of mine the same day.
You appear to have misread my query. Note that I was quoting another commenter’s question that had been posed to you several times and asking why you had failed to address it.
Your reply was primarily directed at what you mistakenly presumed were my own thoughts and methods and state of knowledge instead of at answering the question as asked.
The point is surely clear enough (is this the problem for you?) and you appear to be doing all you can to avoid it. The point is this:
We have several strands of information that testify to an understanding X in time period Y. One of those several strands is a document that a number of scholars believe includes information that points to an understanding X in time period Y. Is it by definition illegitimate to mention this document as one of a number of strands of information that testifies to our particular point?
Just shouting out in caps that many scholars believe that the document itself is not from that period Y does not address that point.
rjosephhoffmann
June 5, 2012 at 12:21 pm
@Godfrey: Did I shout in caps? I am so SORRY!
Neil Godfrey
June 7, 2012 at 5:43 am
Oh my, Ahrrr Joe, so it’s come to this? You simply exert your power to deny my comments the light of day when your massive brain threatening to break through its shiny pink forehead is piqued? So, I guess I will have to expose your ways on another web/blogsite instead, yes?
The Jesus Process: Maurice Casey: Mythicism: A Story of Bias, Incompetence and Falsehood « Ratio Christi-At The Ohio State University says:
May 24, 2012 at 7:08 pm
[...] This one is a good read. Maurice Casey is by no means a major evangelical writer. He has some very good points here for Jesus mythers. Like this:LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]
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Antonio Jerez
May 25, 2012 at 3:10 pm
Don´t know where you got the idea that Maurice Casey is an “evangelical writer”. He not a Christian. I think he would dub himself an atheist or agnostic.
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steph
May 25, 2012 at 11:46 pm
Ha – you saw that too. He certainly isn’t a Christian! He drifted away from the church in 1962 during his first degree in theology at Durham. He would have joined the BHA in the 80s but decided against it because there were too many aggressive atheists. Although the late great Michael Goulder, a friend and colleague, belonged, but he carefully described himself as “a non aggressive atheist”. Maurice would not define himself as an atheist or agnostic, but rather as ‘not Christian’. He prefers humanist. He’s just unbelieved what he believed.
Marc Regier
May 24, 2012 at 8:54 pm
Maurice Casey says:
“Another astonishing example is Doherty imagining that Paul should have behaved like much later Christians seeking relics. He asks ‘What about the relics? Jesus’ clothes, the things he used in his everyday life, the things he touched?….If the Gospel accounts have any basis we would expect to find mention of all sorts of relics, genuine or fake: cups from the Last Supper, nails bearing Jesus’ flesh, thorns from the bloody crown, the centurion’s spear, pieces of cloth from the garments gambled for by the soldiers at the foot of the cross?indeed, just as we find a host of relics all through the Middle Ages…’[12] This is an extraordinary muddle which has just one point right: relics were characteristic of Christian piety much later. Otherwise, it seeks to impose upon Pauline Christianity the mediaeval Catholic religion which Doherty is supposed to have left.”
While it is certainly preposterous to EXPECT of the early Christians a basic veneration of relics as a criterion for their belief in the historicity of the man Jesus, it seems a little extreme to allocate the concept of “relic” and the veneration thereof to the Medieval era and then accuse those who use said concept for earlier time periods of anachronism.
How do we explain texts like Acts 19:11-12 or Mk.5:27, both of which convey the idea that the power of men of God can be transferred to their personal possessions and re-discovered by faith? Is this not, essentially, the very germ of the idea of a relic? And do we not have far more complex examples of this germ further back in Jewish history, such as the case of the bronze snake becoming an idol, the bones of Elisha bringing life to a dead man (2 Kgs.13:21), not to mention a whole host of cases of articles belonging to prophets seeming to carry a supernatural power of their own?
It would be edifying to conduct an intense historical survey of Medieval relic-enthusiasm, anatomically separating its grandiose complexity and function in juxtaposition to earlier periods of time. My hunch, following Casey, is that we may read too much Medieval relicism into the texts I just cited. But I also suspect that the very nature of the Medieval relic owes much of its nature to having conducted an honest read of “the scriptures,” discovering in them the raison d’etre for what later became an economy of sensationalism.
At any rate, this was a marvelous essay to read! The upholding of the mythicist project is by no means the reason for my post.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Marc: Maurice will doubtless answer, but the general point is to do with Jewish aversion to corpses, the dead and squeamishness about anything to do with bodily parts and bones in the 1st century CE. It was associated with foreign sorcery and Egyptian magic by the time of Jesus–it’s often been pointed out for example that the ritual for burial described in Mark 16.1 is out of keeping with Jewish custom and may reflect a doublet of the pre-anointing at Bethany in Mk 14. Whatever the case, the aversion was real enough. The veneration of bones arises specifically in connection with the cult of the martyrs and miracles attributed to their “intercession,” and this funereal focus is actually why the great churches of Christendom 9think St peter’s and St Paul’s outside the Vatican walls) are named after gravesites associated with burial places. as always, Maurice is being true to the data we know.
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Mike Wilson
May 25, 2012 at 5:12 am
Correct me if im wrong but there doesn’t seem to be any interest in relics not only in the New Testament period, but also the early church fathers, whom we know clearly thought Jesus was a historical person as per the Gospels. The desire for relics does not seem to be universally important concern of religions. It seems so out of step with Paul’s focus and message to expect him to address some curious disciples desire to see Jesus’ sandals or to write instructions on how to get to Jerusalem.
rjosephhoffmann
May 25, 2012 at 9:15 am
@ Mike: Maurice was making a point counter to a question posed by Doherty regarding another e silentio sort of case against Jesus: If Jesus existed (etc.) why not an interest in preserving cups, thorns, robes, nails, and objects associated with his historical existence. I think there are two answers to this: one is as I already said, the Jewish aversion to corpses and bones which is so pronounced. Relics of the “first class” as the church would later define them were essentially body parts, especially bones of the martyrs, but in the case of Jesus (for obvious reasons) relics of this type would have been embarrassing. That leaves 2nd and 3rd class relics–things belonging to or touched by a martyr. Relics were not prized as evidence but for healing power; while not very early, Acts 19 refers to a cloth used by Paul as having healing power, and the earliest clear refernce to an interest in relics as objects of veneration is the martyrdom of Polycarp from about 160 or so CE. By the late second century, the earlier aversion to bones and graves seems to have been supplanted by the belief that imitating Christ through death made objects associated with martyrs especially important. No surprise then that the interest in “especially venerable” objects–the “true cross,” “Veronica’s Veil” — the hand of John the Baptist(!), the nails of the cross, finally the shroud, become a sort of cottage industry of the early medieval period. This I take to be Casey’s point contra Doherty: the aversion to such objects was gradually overcome by the perqs of the cult of the martyrs and saints, and the physical growth of the church, such that by 787 the second council of Nicaea decreed that every Christian house of worship must possess a relic (of the saints). Clearly as well, the “objects” associated with Jesus from the fourth cnetury onward were far too late to have any evidentiary significance. And the answer to the mythtics is that with typical anachronistic aplomb they are assuming as an incredible lack of evidence what could not have arisen as evidence. And by the way: 2 Kings 13.20f is about a posthumous miracle performed by Elijah, not about a century Jewish burial practice!
steph
May 24, 2012 at 10:37 pm
Why does earl call himself an invisible dummy – or is that a rhetorical question? Maybe he’s been referred to Carrier’s motto.
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Marc Regier
May 25, 2012 at 12:25 am
Thank you for your reply Mr. Hoffman,
What you have said would certainly furnish strong counter-evidence against Mr. Doherty’s demand for the preservation of relics centering around Jesus’ death (with respct to 1st century jewish christians, at least). However, as per the quote in my prevous post, Mr. Doherty does not limit himself to Jesus’ death, but asks after relics pertaining to “his everyday life including “clothing” and things that Jesus touched.
I am not convinced that it is a construct of “later Christian piety,” particularly that of “the Medieval catholic religion” which would have us conceive of 1st century Christians esteeming both as precious and supernaturally powerful items belonging to Jesus or his disciples.
I do agree, though, that this question is beside the point in considering Jesus’ historical existence.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 25, 2012 at 9:43 am
! Marc: I answer this question above in reply to another relic inquiry, but the bottom line is that the growth in interest and use of relics is not based on an interest in evidence but the popularity of miracles and increases dramatically during sporadic periods of persecution. Thus the Jewish prohibitions would have been decisive until these periods erupted in a more systematic way in the late second century, which as it happens is our first clear evidence that bone relics were used (about 160)CE. As to second class relics, these become popular much later and Casey is right that most of them are very late ancient and medieval in provenance: everything from the “chalice” to the nails of the cross, doubtless all manufactured–but not as evidence, as objects of veneration associated with miraculous healings. But let me give you an axiom of church history as that’s what I do–church history, not axioms :) — History does not answer questions about why something did not or does not happen except in very indirect ways. It tries to discover what did happen and the reasons for it. The corrollary is that what did not happen cannot be used “adjudicatively” to determine what did. The reason why we have no first class relics of the scenes of the gospel stories, from a time when they might have “proved” the existence of Jesus– e.g.. the “Last Supper”– is probably as ordinary as why you you don’t own the cup your grandfather took his last sip from and why we don’t own the cradle rocked by Alexander’s (the Great’s) nurse. In other words, you are retrojecting the significance of a long period of interpretation into events “as they happened” and then asking why these events were not recognized as earth shattering at the moment they occurred. Second: Most relics are frauds and forgeries. But not all history is fraudelent.
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Jacob Aliet
May 25, 2012 at 5:58 am
I found the following comments from another poster interesting and M. Casey may be interested in responding to them:
“…the so-called transliteration that is ß?a?e??e? argues against the gospel writer’s knowledge of the language[Aramaic]. Casey just doesn’t handle the indicator meaningfully, for he has no way of explaining the diphthong in the first syllable.
…invent[ing] excuses for why ß?a?e??e? was not the work of the writer of the gospel, .. is …ad hoc and untestable. Casey’s case is flimsy at best and his inability to make sense of ß?a?e??e? in his scheme simply undercuts him. He doesn’t pay any attention to the Latinisms in Mark because he is falling all over himself to sell his Aramaic story. Your trick is to farm out the explanations for a Latin Greek audience is to shove them off to a scribe or some other later hand. Convenient, but uninspiring.
There has to be some Aramaic connection, given that the religion is based on a perversion of the Jewish religion and a strong knowledge of that religion is evinced in the gospel, but there is no evidence that the writer of the gospel knows Aramaic. ß?a?e??e? points against it. His only Aramaic transliterations are so trivial that they appear to be abracadabra words, ie giving a sense of genuineness of obscurity to an ignorant audience, trivialities “little girl, get up” and “be opened” or cultic words like “corban”. The translation of talitha kumi is actually given in the Greek as “little girl, I say to you, get up”, but what that “I say to you” is doing there has nothing to do with the Aramaic and suggests that the writer wasn’t working from Aramaic at all, but like ß?a?e??e? he got it from a chain of transmission that garbled it. His lack of geographical understanding speaks against his being from Judea/Galilee and thus not being directly familiar with its languages.
In short, no-one is doubting an Aramaic connection with Mark, but Casey is unable explain the evidence meaningfully. In fact the evidence suggests that the writing wasn’t by any native speaker of Aramaic. This is only strengthened by the Latinisms through the text (“but they were by a late hand” is your shot in the dark), not the loanwords so much as the loan translations and grammatical structures. And these Casey is totally silent about. In fact one of Casey’s Aramaic explanations is seen by others as a Latin loan translation (?d?? p??e?? in 2:23, iter facere). If you got this far, you can now happily ignore the above as has been your wont.
“
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steph
May 25, 2012 at 1:55 pm
This ignores most of what Casey has written. In Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel, he gave abundant evidence that Mark knew Aramaic, but that he was a bilingual translator who made the sort of mistakes which are typical of bilingual translators. This commenter ignores all such features, which include ‘I say to you’, which is the sort of thing which bilingual translators do sometimes put in. We know the Aramaic for ‘sons of thunder’. What Mark was not very good at was transliteration, a normal fault in bilingual translators who have no modern training. It is very regrettable that Casey’s massive arguments of cumulative weight for Mark not only knowing Aramaic, but making large numbers of comments which reflect Aramaic sources, keep being ignored by people who are not Aramaists and have convictions that Mark was not using any Aramaic sources, and who consequently ignore arguments to the contrary. It is not true that Casey ignored features of Latin: he discussed legion, centurion, Herodianoi and denarion, probably the most important from a historical perspective.
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Antonio Jerez
May 25, 2012 at 3:12 pm
I wonder what credentials Jacob Aliet has in aramaic?
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steph
May 25, 2012 at 3:57 pm
I wonder what the person he found so interesting has too. Although I’m not sure whether it was himself he found interesting or an anonymous somebody else because his quote marks never ended and it was all a bit muddled.
Thom Stark
May 25, 2012 at 5:25 pm
His quotation marks did end. See underneath the last line of text.
rjosephhoffmann
May 25, 2012 at 9:54 pm
@Thom: Not soon enough.
steph
May 25, 2012 at 11:29 pm
O. Thank you for your helpful correction Thom. What a lot of difference to everything a line makes.
spin
May 26, 2012 at 7:14 pm
Steph, you can say anything that you didn’t find mentioned in the excerpt of my response to someone else “ignores most of what Casey has written”, but that is just your unfounded assumption, based on the excerpt.
Casey is probably correct about his Aramaic source for ‘sons of thunder’, given that it is basically what is given in the Peshitta. But we do know that ß?a????e? is unexplainable as a transliteration. Try it: explain how one could get from an Aramaic source to the diphthong /?a/ in the one step of transliteration. It’s as much a transliteration as “compound” is from Malay kampa?, ie it is not. It is distanced from its source by a chain of transmission, for either the user of ß?a????e? knew enough about the source language he was using and therefore would have been unlikely to have made such a blunder or he didn’t know the language. The diphthong in ß?a????e? argues against Casey’s thesis.
My original post contained these sentences regarding Casey:
“He then attacks the Latin influence on the gospel of Mark, content to package the issue merely as loanwords, when obviously he should know better. The loanwords are merely the easiest indicators to point to, though more persuasive are the loan translations and the Latin syntactic forms”.
Individual lexical items can be brushed aside as Casey does, though his treatment of Herodianoi is worth noting:
“We should infer that it was used in the Aramaic source as well, hence ????????, because this explains the behaviour of the translator.”
ie it fulfills Casey’s presupposition. He doesn’t deal with it significantly at all. And incidentally the Peshitta translator knew nothing of Casey’s conjectured Aramaic source, preferring to use ??? ?????, the “house of Herod”. (Try to posit a reasonable context in which a Latin suffix, such as -ian-, is used to construct a neologism outside a Latin speaking context, when there are ordinary resources in the target language that do the same thing.) The best thing about Casey’s ???????? is that it is unfalsifiable.
However, it is the other Latin influences that are omitted in Casey’s work. Consider for example the Latinism ? est??, used like the Latin hoc est, to give an explanation, though not usual in Greek. (And some of those explanations are aimed specifically toward a Roman audience, “two lepta, that is a quadrans” or “a hall, that is a praetorium”.) While it is transparent enough to see Latin as a source, but what about Aramaic? The Peshitta gives a declined form depending on that being explained (3:17, 12:42, 15:42). Latin is the most likely source for this use of ? est??. There are issues of Latin favoured syntax with accusatives and datives before the verb, or the use of ??a with verbs of speaking, comparable with a similar use of ut in Latin. (Details on request.) And why are there so many Latin idioms found translated in Mark?
A Semitic influence is easy enough to understand given the source of the traditions used in Mark, but there are very few ways to explain the weight of Latin influence in the Greek text of Mark. The most convincing is that the text was written in a Latin speaking context with Greek as a lingua franca, probably Rome, which would supply the Latin substratum for the Greek. This gives a meaningful linguistic context for constructions such as ???d?a??? and s???f????ssa (7:26)–this latter implying a Roman perspective which saw both Syrophoenicians and Libophoenicians, ie Carthaginians. Does anyone have a more function explanation for all the Latin influence?
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rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 10:18 pm
@Spin: “A Semitic influence is easy enough to understand given the source of the traditions used in Mark, but there are very few ways to explain the weight of Latin influence in the Greek text of Mark.” Interesting; I am sure Maurice will reply to this!
Marc Regier
May 25, 2012 at 5:39 pm
Mr. Hoffman,
My point was only that the idea of a relic seems perfectly intelligible for the 1st century world and earlier, Jewish or otherwise. It makes no difference to me whether there is documentation of any in the case of Jesus, for the very reasons you described. I’m not taking doherty’s side here. Thank you nonetheless.
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rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 12:53 am
“the idea of a relic seems perfectly intelligible for the 1st century world and earlier, Jewish or otherwise/” –Except the way you have generalized this, it doesn’t make sense at all, especially in Judaism.
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