Historicity of Jesus - the Talking Points

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Peter Kirby
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Re: Historicity of Jesus - the Talking Points

Post by Peter Kirby »

This is a wonderful post, spin, with these two sentences being the least wonderful:
spin wrote:I think the basic logic of the o.p. is wrongheaded. It runs together two separate issues as though dealing with one will necessitate the other.
I'm glad that I've been able to be your muse, but the above wasn't my intent at all. Yes, I created a thread to document the arguments that have been proposed for the proposition P [the existence of a historical Jesus] and also for all varieties of propositions that entail ~P [the non-existence of a historical Jesus]. Like I said, a catalog of arguments. Because I'd find it handy, because there are only so many people in this world who are writing about this stuff, and I've never seen one of them try to bring it together in just such a way.

Is there a huge danger of maximalism? Is there a problem with assuming things to be true, just because you believe it's got a probability of 51% or greater? Absolutely. I'm guilty of it at times, and a lot of writers on this subject wallow in it. But I'm not trying to promote that with my catalog of arguments, so let me join you in trying to avoid it.
spin wrote:However, when talking about the historicity of Jesus, the necessity is to establish a case for that historicity, just as arguing for a mythical Jesus requires a case made for mythicism. Defaulting from one to the other is not a matter of evidence and best explanations don't mean right explanations. One needn't support some other explanation for the existence of the Jesus narrative to seriously question the historicity of Jesus. The case for historicity is made solely on the substantive evidence.
Agreed.
spin wrote:The situation that seems to dominate is a species of maximalism of the type that has so clearly been reduced to shreds in the context of the old testament. We accept everything until you can show it is wrong, merely says that we have faith in the veracity of the sources. We are happy to arbitrarily drop the odd bits, but the substance of the story is still intact. In fact we can drop 90% of the stuff and it will still be intact. Maximalism is quite elastic that way. It has nothing to do with history, but that doesn't matter.
I think you're right. This persists partly because the discussion of both the Old Testament and New Testament takes place primarily among academically-inclined Christians for whom minimalism can easily be worked into the former, with some accommodations, but not nearly as easily for the latter. If we were mostly Muslims, or mostly Jews, or mostly atheists, or mostly Gnostics, this might be different. Nobody wants to say anything so crass, of course.
spin wrote:No, really, what matters is epistemology. It's not what you know that is the end of it all, it's how you know.
This is what makes Carrier's approach so promising, of course. His first book proved his commitment to an epistemology of what he is doing.
spin wrote:We don't need to get into dying gods and sublunar mystic events here. We need to get into how you know that Jesus is historical.

...

So, the task for anyone who wants to deal with the historicity of Jesus is not to assume it by default. We cannot assume he existed. We have already shed so much material from the Jesus narrative that we find suspect at least from a scholarly perspective. There is no need for any of it to reflect a real figure. To support the historicity of Jesus, you have to establish sufficient historical indications based on solid evidence and forget about arguing against some other theory.
I don't intend to argue "by default," and I apologize if it came across that way.

Part of the trouble?

Knowledge itself. Probability. Historiography.

Our language has some terms that help us distinguish between "this is 99% likely to be true" and "this is 51% likely to be true" and "this is only 20% likely to be true, but it's better than any of the mutually exclusive alternatives." You'll find these terms peppered through any text on this subject: probably, presumably, possibly, plausibly, potentially, etc.

But all it takes is one person with a good book to say "possibly, maybe even probably, P" and suddenly two things happen:

(1) People who have no real interest in the subject quote the author "P!!!" because they find it convenient to their contemporary purposes.
(2) People who are also writing on the subject often get exhausted of searching out the evidence, or they just need to find something more exotic to talk about, or maybe they even do have an axe to grind, and they start writing things like "possibly, maybe even probably, Q [see P]."

And of course this cycle goes on, ad nauseam.

The only good thing you can say about this cycle is that it gives people hope (as I do have, maybe you too) that by being sufficiently dispassionate and critical they might actually cut through the crap and find out what we really do know about this stuff and that which we don't.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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MrMacSon
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Re: Historicity of Jesus - the Talking Points

Post by MrMacSon »

Re Argument from Silence - a conclusion based on the absence of information or statements [in historical documents].

This is similar in principle and application to argument from ignorance, where someone attempts to assert that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false (or vice versa) [where 'ignorance' stands for "lack of evidence to the contrary"].

Both these potentially fallacious forms of argument bring up issues of
  • * whether there really is 'evidence of absence';
    * testability; and,
    * deciding to accept, reject or not accept a hypothesis (all outcomes of hypothesis testing).
"Falsifiability" fits in there too; but, to my mind, is a confusing negative concept (essentially falsifiability means that if an assertion were false, then its falsehood should be able to be demonstrated).

Each should not be considered a dichotomy, either; otherwise each consideration may become a false dichotomy.

Moreover, asserting each is always a fallacy, may invoke a charge of a fallacy fallacy

This provides an interesting perspective-
Officially, the argument from silence is a fallacy. But, surprisingly, it doesn’t have to be. An argument from silence can be entirely valid, provided it is presented in the right way.

There are two ways an argument from silence can go. I’ll start with the more common one—at least, the one more commonly seen in heated debates:

“If a particular piece of evidence existed, it would prove a certain point. That piece of evidence doesn’t exist, so that point must be false.”

In terms of semi-formal logic, it looks like this:
    • If P, S
      Not-P
      ∴ Not-S
[snip]

.. the argument from silence has an uncanny intuitive appeal. It’s a method of advancing suspicion; we wonder why that particular piece of evidence is missing. As it turns out, this is where the valid version of the argument from silence comes in.

Let’s go back to the original comment above that spawned this whole post (paraphrased). “The Romans kept records of a lot of stuff, but they didn’t mention Jesus, so Jesus must not have existed (or at least not as the Gospels depict).” The problem here is obvious: just because the Romans didn’t mention someone doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. There’s no mention of Paul in Roman records (to my knowledge), but no one seriously advances the theory that Paul didn’t exist*. No sources (Roman or otherwise) mention the father of Pilate, but you don’t see anyone thereby concluding that Pilate was born of a virgin.

But the argument can be salvaged. Instead of saying:
  • If the Romans mentioned Jesus, he existed.
    The Romans didn’t mention Jesus.
    Therefore, Jesus didn’t exist
    .
we reverse the order of the major premise:
  • If Jesus existed, the Romans should have mentioned him.
    The Romans didn’t mention Jesus.
    Therefore, Jesus didn’t exist
    .
And, before your very eyes, we now have a valid syllogism! Just like magic.

This actually IS a valid syllogism:
    • If S, P
      Not-P
      ∴ Not-S
But our work isn’t done. Not yet. Making an argument from silence valid produces a new premise that has to be evaluated. In this case:
  • If Jesus really existed (as the gospels depict), should we expect the Romans to have mentioned him?
http://scienceandotherdrugs.wordpress.c ... m-silence/
* some do wonder if Paul did exist.
.
Last edited by MrMacSon on Sun Oct 06, 2013 2:34 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Peter Kirby
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Re: Historicity of Jesus - the Talking Points

Post by Peter Kirby »

I have floated the question of what arguments there are against the Historicity of Jesus over on JesusMysteries, the Yahoo! group, and I am indebted to the responses there for some more points of argument.

(9) Roger Parvus argues for a modified hypothesis where Jesus descends to earth briefly, as little as a matter of a few hours, for the crucifixion. He sees evidence of this in the Ascension of Isaiah. He believes the Pauline epistles are first century in origin but redacted for orthodoxy in the second century. (Thanks to Neil Godfrey for this.)

(10) Thomas Brodie attributes the authorship of the Pauline epistles to a "range of authors/schools in dialogue with one another." (Thanks to Neil Godfrey for this as well.) It'd be nice to see Brodie really flesh out his argument more than he has already.

(11) Sid Martin, who has replied to my thread both here and at the list, argues that "Mark is an allegory of the history of Israel from the Essenic point of view written in response to the fall of Jerusalem and designed to encourage the reader to keep the faith -- the Jewish, not Christian, faith. Jesus is the personification of divine salvation, which is what the name 'Jesus' means. Jesus stands for a series of savior figures, from Joshua on, and salvation events, from the Exodus to the war with Rome. There was not just one historical Jesus; there were many historical Jesuses. It is hard to find a role for a specific person named Jesus at the time and place of the narrative. There probably was no such person."
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Re: Historicity of Jesus - the Talking Points

Post by Kunigunde Kreuzerin »

Peter Kirby wrote:And so, without further ado, let's get into some of the basic talking points, trying to go over as many as possible briefly.

For the Historicity of Jesus

(3) In the synoptics (Mark 9:1 etc.) and John (the 21st chapter), as well as in similar more-developed echoes in 2 Peter, there is reference to whether Jesus announced that the end of the world would come within the lifetimes of some of the people in earshot. If we understand the situation in life of these references as belonging to communities where people were dying off who had heard the words of Jesus, prompting such concern, this would be easily accounted for if there were some Jesus to have been heard.
Please Peter, let the great Mark out of this stupid game. I swear you :D that he refers only to the world inside in his gospel and not to the "real world" outside
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Re: Historicity of Jesus - the Talking Points

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Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote:
Peter Kirby wrote:And so, without further ado, let's get into some of the basic talking points, trying to go over as many as possible briefly.

For the Historicity of Jesus

(3) In the synoptics (Mark 9:1 etc.) and John (the 21st chapter), as well as in similar more-developed echoes in 2 Peter, there is reference to whether Jesus announced that the end of the world would come within the lifetimes of some of the people in earshot. If we understand the situation in life of these references as belonging to communities where people were dying off who had heard the words of Jesus, prompting such concern, this would be easily accounted for if there were some Jesus to have been heard.
Please Peter, let the great Mark out of this stupid game. I swear you :D that he refers only to the world inside in his gospel and not to the "real world" outside
Maybe. But the Gospel of Mark was written in the 1st/2nd AD and refers to Pilate, a figure of the 1st AD. It may still be a work removed from the description of the real world even then, but it is in that case a good question why it would choose to refer to the end coming in the lives of some of those standing there given its purely fictive setting. It didn't have to make that kind of prediction in the text, but it did, so it's our job to try to understand why.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Re: Historicity of Jesus - the Talking Points

Post by Kunigunde Kreuzerin »

Peter Kirby wrote:But the Gospel of Mark was written in the 1st/2nd AD and refers to Pilate, a figure of the 1st AD. It may still be a work removed from the description of the real world even then, but it is in that case a good question why it would choose to refer to the end coming in the lives of some of those standing there given its purely fictive setting. It didn't have to make that kind of prediction in the text, but it did, so it's our job to try to understand why.
cause to develop the right :mrgreen: spiritual understanding that the kingdom of god in Mark 1.15 is near and comes around the corner one verse later in Galilee. Metanoia and believe in the gospel
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Re: Historicity of Jesus - the Talking Points

Post by Peter Kirby »

Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote:
Peter Kirby wrote:But the Gospel of Mark was written in the 1st/2nd AD and refers to Pilate, a figure of the 1st AD. It may still be a work removed from the description of the real world even then, but it is in that case a good question why it would choose to refer to the end coming in the lives of some of those standing there given its purely fictive setting. It didn't have to make that kind of prediction in the text, but it did, so it's our job to try to understand why.
cause to develop the right :mrgreen: spiritual understanding that the kingdom of god in Mark 1.15 is near and comes around the corner one verse later in Galilee. Metanoia and believe in the gospel
Yes, an interpretation that involves "realized eschatology" is one explanation. Good point.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Re: Historicity of Jesus - the Talking Points

Post by Blood »

When even high skeptics like Doherty and Carrier fully accept nonsense from the Corpus Paulinum as if it were undisputed historical fact, that alone tells you what a Herculean task is at hand deconstructing anything about Christianity. People just cannot get their head around the realization that ancient theologians invent things: saviors, events, miracles, apostles, deaths, letters, scriptures, anything and everything.
“The only sensible response to fragmented, slowly but randomly accruing evidence is radical open-mindedness. A single, simple explanation for a historical event is generally a failure of imagination, not a triumph of induction.” William H.C. Propp
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Peter Kirby
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Re: Historicity of Jesus - the Talking Points

Post by Peter Kirby »

Herculean task, you say? Sounds like fun. ;)
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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