A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.
We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks.
But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong; what will happen? e individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.
How and why does such a response to contradictory evidence come about? ....
Let us begin by stating the conditions under which we would expect to observe increased fervor following the dis-confirmation of a belief. There are five such conditions.
1. A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.
2. The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
3. The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
4. Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
The first two of these conditions specify the circumstances that will make the belief resistant to change. The third and fourth conditions together, on the other hand, point to factors that would exert powerful pressure on a believer to discard his belief. It is, of course, possible that an individual, even though deeply convinced of a belief, may discard it in the face of unequivocal disconfirmation. We must, therefore, state a fifth condition specifying the circumstances under which the belief will be discarded and those under which it will be maintained with new fervor.
5. The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.
These five conditions specify the circumstances under which increased proselyting would be expected to follow disconfirmation.
The authors go on to briefly recount several historical examples, including that of the Millerites: their original prediction that Christ would return in 1843–1844, their having to recalibrate after that range of dates fell through, and their eventual dissipation as a millennial sect (followed by their reintegration as various Adventist churches), and of course all five of the conditions listed above are fulfilled in that movement. The result is clear:
It seems apparent to me that all five conditions are also fulfilled in the sectarian Judaism from which sprang Christianity. I think in this connection of the generational prophecy, the ambiguous oracle, the 70 weeks, and the 10 jubilees, not to mention the impetus provided by the destruction of the temple in 70.
Among the Millerites, unfulfilled predictions led, not to an abatement of fervor, but rather to an augmentation of commitment both to proselytizing and to recalculating the times and the seasons; I think we find things to be much the same among the earliest Christians. Some of the Millerites eventually claimed that something did happen in 1844, but it was in heaven, not on earth. I think some of the earliest Christians, too, engaged in various kinds of "realized eschatology." At some point the disillusioned Millerites solidified into the far less prophetically charged and far more stable Adventist denominations. The earliest Christians, too, traded in their apostles, prophets, and teachers for bishops and deacons and their ecstatic utterances in the spirit for sound doctrine and dogma.
In short, I think that the unfulfilled predictions I have been investigating might well be more than just a hurdle the nascent faith had to overcome; it may rather be a powerful engine in the very formation of early Christianity. Failed prophecies often increase faith rather than decrease it, as sketched out by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter. The parallels with other eschatological or messianic movements are many and strong. And a lot of the diversity found in earliest Christianity can at least to some extent be explained as different kinds of reactions to the failed predictions. These possibilities are especially viable given the complexity of the Jewish eschatological beliefs expressed in the scriptures and in related texts; there would have been a lot of different ways at one's disposal to adjust one's expectations or explain what must have happened to thwart them.
The mythicohistorical approach that I once floated on this forum proposed as Christianity's "engine," so to speak, the coincidence in name and mode of death between a crucified revolutionary and a dying and rising deity from a Jewish mystery religion. One main weakness of that proposal, I think, is that I basically had to invent the Jewish mystery religion; I did my best, and it may have existed, but all of the evidence is circumstantial and potential. I have recently been working on ways to replace that purely hypothetical religion with something more concrete, and what has drawn my attention is the known and studied range of Jewish eschatological beliefs. And it turns out that the chronological aspects of that set of beliefs (the 70 weeks, the 10 jubilees, and the ambiguous oracle) come with some fairly potent varieties of explanatory power, for reasons spelled out in the book excerpted above. The urge to reinterpret a failed prediction can be mighty indeed. I am hoping it may be possible to formulate a theory of Christian origins which leverages that explanatory power in a way that makes ancient Jewish trajectories into Christianity just as understandable (and even predictable) as modern Millerite trajectories into Adventism.
I am going on vacation for about a week, starting tomorrow, so I may not be able to respond to critiques (if anyone wishes to venture any, given the unelaborated status of the case so far) in a very timely fashion. But I will catch up in due time.
Ben.