The Best Case for Jesus

[Bertie]

Great article. I think Jesus existed. But I'm not as confident as people like Ehrman and Casey who seemingly do think it's a slam dunk. For me, I see lots of pointers in the direction of the existence of a historical Jesus. None are slam dunks, but it seems unlikely that all of them are flawed.

E.g. Mythicists love to insist that we can't be sure that Jospehus wrote anything about Jesus. And this is true. But we can't be sure that he didn't either. Same for Tacitus and his sources. Same for Paul's letters. Mythicists love to insist that we can't be sure that Paul really did meet brother James. And this is true. But we can't be sure that he didn't either. Same for the gospel traditions. Mythicists love to insist that we can't be sure of any story in the traditions. And this is true. But we can't be sure that none of them are either.

The DIFFERENCE then, for me, is that mythicist hypotheses basically require ALL of these potential pointers to be faulty, where as historicism only really requires one. As you said in your article, if Josephus did say something about a historical Jesus, then it's more or less a closed case. If Tacitus was simply repeating common knowledge (like if we made a passing reference to L. Ron Hubbard), then it's more or less a closed case. If Paul really did meet James (or refer to a known historical brother at least) then it's a closed case. If Paul did write 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 then it's more or less a closed case. If the gospels do contain some historical memory of a crucified cult leader (like Hubbard's $cientology.com biography), then it's more or less a closed case. I have my doubts about some of these pointers. But I doubt more so that all of my doubts fall on the side mythicism requires.

There is a good point to be made here, but to an extent the door swings both ways. One correct argument to the effect that Paul (or, really, any of the pre-Gospel Christians who believed in "Jesus Christ") did not have a historical Jesus in view, for example, could invalidate our explanation of a multitude of other references, given that our hypothesis has to account for all the acknowledged evidence. And it's a lot easier for any single tradition to turn out to be false somehow than it is for Christianity to forget that its unintentional "founder" was crucified by Pilate and deposited his teaching with his disciples during his life.

I think this is why I'm attracted to definitions of historicity that involve a "founder" aspect. The "based on" definition is much looser and allows that the biography of Jesus simply had a tidbit here or there "based on a true story," like a Hollywood movie.

Did he inadvertently cause the birth of Christianity, or did the birth of Christianity cause him? Along the lines of "God, if he did not exist, would have to be invented," was Jesus someone that had to be invented for the early Christians, or had they known him for a fact "in the beginning"?

Was it the Emmaus road experience of coming to understand from the scriptures that the risen Lord Jesus had indeed walked among them, or the Damascus road experience with the bolt of insight that this man was indeed their lord and resurrected messiah?

Let's restate this a little:

Toejam's argument is essentially that we have a decent number of passages that would kill mythicism if any one of them were evaluated as (say) being good witness and having a historicist interpretation and that even if the probability of any individual one of them being mythicism-killing were low, there are enough passages available that eventually one of them would turn up as mythicism-killing. For example, if 10 passages whose probability of being mythicism-killing were completely independent of each other and each one had only a 20% chance of being mythicism-killing, then there would still be about a 90% chance of mythicism being killed.

Mr. Kirby's counter-argument is essentially that the chance that a passage is mythicism-killing really isn't independent of the chance some other passage is mythicism-killing. For example, if one reference in Paul to James were judged an interpolation, then that may increase the chance that another passage in Paul referring to James were an interpolation as well. Any degree of non-independence among the mythicism-killing probabilities reduces the final probability of mythicism-killing having happened; for example, if there were 10 passages whose probability of being mythicism-killing were completely non-independent and each one had only a 20% chance of being mythicism-killing, then there's just a 20% chance of mythicism being killed.

My counter-counter argument, I guess, is that noting the possibility of non-independence among the passages doesn't turn off our ability to reason about that independence and how it affects the final result. This is, by the way, a totally valid and normal move in real statistics and formulae exist in that field for non-perfect independence (it so happens that Carrier's OHJ book doesn't go into them). Taking the Paul passages for example, I think that the only way you can get the "mythicism-killing independence" between them way down toward zero is under the total forgery hypothesis (in that case, they all evaluate together as having a low probability of being mythicism-killing). And the reasonableness of that hypothesis is something we can evaluate — and I personally don't evaluate it very highly. The independence between different authors is even harder to evaluate; I actually do think that Paul and Mark have an outsized role in creating Christianity, but stop short of thinking there are no traditions at all independent of them.

And so, I do tend to think that there are in some sense multiple roles of the dice here that mythicism has to "win" in order to be true, and that there's enough of those rolls combined with good cases against those rolls ("Brother of the Lord") to make Jesus's existence likely — but, yes, not a slam dunk.

[philvaz]

I notice a 'pattern' about those who dispute or doubt the historicity of Jesus. The pattern is start with the 'weaker' and 'later' evidence first, dismiss all of it as best you can, then move on to the 'stronger' and 'earlier' evidence, cast as much doubt as possible on it, hoping people won't notice it is any stronger or earlier....

Kirby's case is NOT the best case that can be made. The reply from GDon, Bernard M, and others present a better case....

To present the 'best case' for something from history (I am not a historian, tell me if I am wrong) you start with the STRONGEST and EARLIEST evidence, then move on to the weaker or later. So any 'best case' for Jesus should BEGIN with the 'genuine' letters of St. Paul accepted by all biblical scholars (dated to the 50's), move on to early non-Pauline writings (such as Hebrews, etc), on to the Gospels (late 60's and beyond) and 'later' NT or non-Pauline writings, then to the earliest Christian or non-Christian evidence (post 100 AD). So my order for 'best case for a historical Jesus' is present Paul first and everything we can gather about Jesus from him (which is quite a bit), other NT with Acts of the Apostles, then the Gospels, then non-Christian evidence, then Christian evidence outside the NT up to about 150 AD. I might have missed a few important texts, but here is my 'best case' :

http://www.biblicalcatholic.com/apologe ... orical.htm

To make this case any better would be to go through all those texts with a fine-toothed comb, showing why they indeed refer to a human being who lived and died recently (c. early first century AD), providing exegesis from the Greek, backing up the exegesis with a mass of scholarly biblical commentaries that corroborate your interpretations of the texts, etc. I assume Carrier's book attempts to do that, but I have the sneaking suspicion that when I get his book I will find most of his 'exegesis' would be against the 'norm' and provide some 'far out' interpretations trying to deny 'flesh' means 'flesh', deny 'human' means 'human', deny 'man' means 'man', that 'crucified' does not mean Roman crucifixion on earth, etc. I have already heard this from his several lectures on YouTube, etc.

I don't want to get involved in this board as it can consume a lot of time but I appreciate the scholarship and the skeptics in here at least wrestling with the question.

PhilVaz

[Peter Kirby]

This is me, summarizing the positive evidence for the historicity of Jesus:

http://peterkirby.com/the-best-case-for-jesus.html

Questions, comments... complaints?

Let's just post it below for ease of quotation...

Please excuse this short interruption.

Peter,

I didn't know you had your own web-cite.
Looks great!

Thank you!

Do you have anything about the ancient views on Logos?

Perhaps incidentally, but not really.

http://peterkirby.com/a-table-of-christ ... itles.html

[MrMacSon]

to Peter,

That's the thing. Rejecting a particular explanation of Christian origins or a particular interpretation of Paul (whether mythicist or not mythicist, it does not matter) with evidence against it does not constitute positive evidence of the historicity of Jesus. (At least, not unless you can show that the things disproved exhaust the possibility space...)

I gave evidence that Paul asserted or implied the past existence of Jesus as a earthly/human Jew.
I do not see why that should not be taken in account.

When looking for positive evidence of a historical Jesus, the first century originator kind, I found 1 Cor 15 and Gal 1 to be suitable based on their meaning.

But here, as I do, you are looking at the Pauline epistles as the reference for your points. I do not see why, when I do the same thing, that would count for nothing.

Cordially, Bernard

To present the 'best case' for something from history (I am not a historian, tell me if I am wrong) you start with the STRONGEST and EARLIEST evidence, then move on to the weaker or later. So any 'best case' for Jesus should BEGIN with the 'genuine' letters of St. Paul accepted by all biblical scholars (dated to the 50's), move on to early non-Pauline writings (such as Hebrews, etc), on to the Gospels (late 60's and beyond) and 'later' NT or non-Pauline writings, then to the earliest Christian or non-Christian evidence (post 100 AD).

Perhaps you gentlemen might read & consider a post in another thread here -

... it may simply be that Paul is inconsistent and illogical. I am aware that some scholars view him that way. But in the Vridar series of posts I am exploring an alternate explanation for the inconsistencies and peculiarities. I’m wondering if they may be due to an attempt by the proto-orthodox to rework the Pauline letters. There is reason to think that that kind of literary activity would not have been beneath them. And as you likely know, Marcion, the earliest known interpreter of the Paulines, contended that the letters in circulation in his day had been interpolated at some point before he came to know them. They had been interpolated, he claimed, by someone whose attachment to Judaism went beyond that of their original author. Now to me the letters do seem to vacillate on subjects about which early gnostics—whose attachment to Jewish teaching was minimal—disagreed with the proto-orthodox—whose Christianity retained more points of contact with Judaism. Both gnostics and the proto-orthodox appealed to Pauline passages to support, for instance, their very different positions regarding the Law of Moses, resurrection, and the status of the Jews.

Moreover, the earliest proto-orthodox heresy hunters do concede that there was a significant Christian gnostic who was a contemporary of the pillars: Simon of Samaria. And from the bits of information they let fall about his teaching it does bear some curious resemblances to that of Marcion’s Paul. Simon too, like Paul, came into conflict with Peter. And Simon, like Paul, supposedly ended up in Rome. These then are a few of the reasons (for others see the first post in the series) that led me to think it might be worthwhile to inspect the Pauline letters from a Simonian angle: Could the original letters have been written by Simon the Great One and—in the case of the deuterocanonicals—by Menander, his successor? And did a proto-orthodox interpolator rework the letters and thereby turn the original authors into a doctrinally acceptable Little One (Paul)? There are scholars who have argued along other lines that the letters were systematically reworked but, to my knowledge, no one has yet tried this particular approach. So this amateur decided to give it a try. (I was a Catholic priest back in the 1980s. My training was just a standard Catholic seminary education. Nothing beyond that.)

.... He evidently decided the stamp of approval from this leadership group for his missions among the Gentiles, from the traditional heart of Judaism, was worth the risk to any perceived compromise to his own importance.” I’m not sure Paul was willing to risk that. It may be a proto-orthodox interpolator who, just as in Acts of the Apostles, was willing to compromise the Apostle’s importance by making him get the stamp of approval from the Jerusalem church.

http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 042#p28042

[outhouse]

If Jesus is not a slam dunk, do we then assume neither is John the Baptist?

If John is historical, does that lend credibility? or not? that Jesus is historical?

Is John's historicity, evidence for Jesus historicity?

[Peter Kirby]

I notice a 'pattern' about those who dispute or doubt the historicity of Jesus. The pattern is start with the 'weaker' and 'later' evidence first, dismiss all of it as best you can, then move on to the 'stronger' and 'earlier' evidence, cast as much doubt as possible on it, hoping people won't notice it is any stronger or earlier....

Kirby's case is NOT the best case that can be made. The reply from GDon, Bernard M, and others present a better case....

To present the 'best case' for something from history (I am not a historian, tell me if I am wrong) you start with the STRONGEST and EARLIEST evidence, then move on to the weaker or later. So any 'best case' for Jesus should BEGIN with the 'genuine' letters of St. Paul

I expected to see objections, but I did not expect to see one of them as the idea that I moved through texts in the wrong order....

Anyway I appreciate you drawing attention to your essay. I'd like to take a look at it sometime.

I think it's funny that people are saying that I could have done a much better job, then point out that I should have made a case... that looks very much like the one that I actually did make. Except that I should have gone around in a different order. Or should have made some completely spurious leap of logic. Or should have bowed more deeply in the direction of the unquestionable historicity of Jesus (which I think is really the obvious sticking point for these people!)...

[Peter Kirby]

If Jesus is not a slam dunk, do we then assume neither is John the Baptist?

For consistency and for honesty before the evidence that we have, neither is John the Baptist, IMO, a "slam dunk."

But this is only to speak of the positive evidence for historicity, which is only half a picture.

[MrMacSon]

If Jesus is not a slam dunk, do we then assume neither is John the Baptist?

If John is historical, does that lend credibility? or not? that Jesus is historical?

Is John's historicity, evidence for Jesus historicity?

Baptism was a pre-Christian thing: Baptism was 'borrowed' from a pre-Christian religion.

[outhouse]

Perhaps you gentlemen might read & consider a post in another thread here -

Why?

It looks like an obscure opinion, that from my perspective, possibly fails to take into account the Pauline epistles were a community effort, and not just Paul's work himself.


Modern scholars don't even touch how much or how little is actually Pauls own opinion, and the they flat tell you they don't know how much a percentage they can even attribute to Paul himself.


How much was Tims mind, through Pauls hand?

Was Paul the writer at all?

What of the others named in the epistles header?



I think Parvus did fine addressing possibilities, but his work has settled nothing at all here.

[outhouse]

If Jesus is not a slam dunk, do we then assume neither is John the Baptist?

If John is historical, does that lend credibility? or not? that Jesus is historical?

Is John's historicity, evidence for Jesus historicity?

Baptism was a pre-Christian thing: Baptism was 'borrowed' from a pre-Christian religion.

Was well known in Judaism.

Jesus was a Jew.


John was a Jew.