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.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.
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.
Agreed.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.
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: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.
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:No, really, what matters is epistemology. It's not what you know that is the end of it all, it's how you know.
I don't intend to argue "by default," and I apologize if it came across that way.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.
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.