Criteria of Authenticity are Unique to the Study of Jesus

[MrMacSon]

I dare say for a mythicist/atheist, the only criteria for proving the existence of Jesus is that it is not allowed. Hence, Jesus did not exist.

• This and subsequent posts by John T is pathetic sealioning. And more/worse.
  
  eta: Snap!

[ABuddhist]

I nearly forgot -- another source that is upcoming within a few days will be a little podcast by Tim and myself addressing that question of mythicism. Watch that space.

I hope that you will have a transcript available for people such as I am who do not listen to videos.

[neilgodfrey]

John T is done with this thread.

Good. I'm happy to be open and direct in my responses with anyone else in this thread.

[dbz]

Abstract
In common with history, all the social sciences crucially rely on descriptions of the past for their evidence. But when, if ever, is it reasonable to regard such descriptions as true? This book attempts to establish the conditions that warrant belief in historical descriptions. It does so in a non-technical way, analysing numerous illustrations of the different kinds of argument about the past employed by historians and others. 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. This central question has not been addressed in such a thorough and systematic manner before. It draws on recent philosophy of history and will interest philosophers. But the wealth of material and accessibility of the presentation will also make it very valuable for historians and other social scientists concerned with the logic of their disciplines.

---

McCullagh, Christopher Behan (1984). "Justifying Historical Descriptions". Cambridge University Press. @ https://philpapers.org/rec/MCCJHD-2

Contents

Preface ix
1 Introduction: Truth and justification 1
2 Justifying singular descriptions:
[INDENT]I Arguments to the best explanation 15[/INDENT]
3 Justifying singular descriptions:
[INDENT]Il Statistical inf 45[/INDENT]
4 Justifying singular descriptions:
[INDENT]Ill Arguments from criteria and arguments from analogy 74[/INDENT]
5 Some common inferences in history 91
6 Historical generalizations 129
7 Justifying singular causal judgements in history 171
8 Judgements of ‘the most significant cause’ in history 194
9 Epilogue: Truth and interpretation in history 231

Bibliography 237
Subject index 250
Name index 251

---

--McCullagh, C. Behan (25 October 1984). Justifying Historical Descriptions. CUP Archive. ISBN 978-0-521-31830-3.

[dbz]

• Board index ~~Nowhere in Particular~~

[HEADING=1]Polemic re Carrier Craig etc[/HEADING]

The problem Richard Carrier has is the same problem William Lane Craig, exposed back in 2009, during a debate on the resurrection of Jesus.

Carrier as an atheist, presupposes there is no real God therefore, there could not have been a real historical Jesus either, which is a non-sequitur argument. Sadly, historical facts are not something Carrier will allow to stand in the way of his own religious/atheist dogma and therefore he looses the debate in an epic fail.

Time and time again during the debate, Craig corrects Carrier on historical facts and customs during the time of Jesus. One can argue whether or not Jesus was resurrected from the dead but to argue against the actual historical/physical existence of Jesus due to historical ignorance is simply foolish.

The debate starts 7 minutes into the video and that is where Craig immediately goes into laying out the 4 historical facts that not only proves Jesus was real but was resurrected.

http://youtu.be/BaUd234Q3GU

Actually, I think the issue at hand is whether Carrier and/or Craig are correctly assessing the hypothesis that Jesus was in fact resurrected from the dead, not whether historical method is being employed properly.

As for [s]hysterical[/s] historical method, there has been a long standing practice among critics of all stripes to apply "special" rules of method, similar to but not the same as those used by "secular" historians, to analyze the evidence for early Christian origins. Despite the obvious methodological problem this poses, a great deal of true critical advances have come from the old fashioned "liberal" theologians who may not have believed in a literal resurrection but were all for the assumed psychological benefits that the Christian salvation scheme was giving to mankind. You can sense the goosebumps forming on their skin as they describe the beauty and ethical superiority of the Christian message over all challengers. <brrrrr>

As for hypothesis testing, McCullagh appears to be describing a scientific hypothesis, not a historical hypothesis. Issues regarding the formation of molecules from various elements or other molecules, and under various conditions, is what makes science alive. These ideas can be tested! Today we have produced millions of compounds that could never occur naturally, because we were able to experiment with temperatures, pressures, additives, steps.

You can't do that with historical data. Historical explanations are formed by selective choices of which bits of historical data to utilize, that is, separate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise. "Shouldn't there be consequences of each explanatory hypothesis which can be checked to confirm the hypothesis?" No, there may be grains of wheat still to be found in that pile of chaff, that was missed in forming the original hypothesis. There may also be pieces of chaff that look like grains of wheat as well. The best you can do is redefine what evidence is actually relevant, and modify the hypotheses accordingly. It is a refining process, not a testing process. Points of evidence by themselves does not prove, or disprove, anything. You can never test the historical hypothesis, ever.

DCH

[lclapshaw]

John T is done with this thread.

Good. I'm happy to be open and direct in my responses with anyone else in this thread.

Nah, he'll be back, it's his pattern.

[Chrissy Hansen]

We just need to stop even responding to him. He is fishing for reactions. If he gets none, he won't have anything left.

Anyways, aside from the world's most vacuous individual John T once again demonstrating he has the personality of a dilapidated crab on crystal meth, I would have to say that I am not currently aware of, from my reading, much of any usage of any "criteria of authenticity" in broader fields of research, and definitely not from leading historians.

Reading, for instance, from a lot of medieval history (especially of early England, the Barbarian invasions, and similar), we do not find "criterion of embarrassment" type nonsense virtually ever. The only times I see this come up is when an amateur writer like Edwin Pace attempts to justify and prove that the traditional narratives of the Anglo-Saxon invasion and King Arthur were historical. The criterion reveals its own speciousness in these times of course.

[neilgodfrey]

Quite some years ago when I first encountered the suggestion that Jesus did not exist I plunged into a prolonged period of trying to understand and learn how it was that we know what we know about the remote past. (It was hard enough coming to disbelieve in god, but not to believe in Jesus at the time was surely a bridge too far!)

The reason the answer was not obvious was the simple fact that historians work with sources that they "take for granted" because they have inherited them on the basis that they are of known provenance, authorship, function, etc etc. They don't have to keep wondering "who wrote the treaty of Versailles and when?" "was it really Julius Caesar who wrote about the conquest of Gaul?" "how did Arrian know anything about Alexander the Great?" etc.

The answers to those questions are well established because, in the main, they have independent confirmation. Cicero knew Julius Caesar, Josephus Vespasian, and so on.

And historians are able on the basis of such independently confirmed sources as well as on the identification of their authors, their reasons for production, and so forth, -- on those grounds historians are able to use contemporary evidence to know what events happened, who participated, etc.

We don't get the whole picture but we get enough confirmed facts from which to reconstruct some narrative historical outline. No-one reads in their history books that Julius Caesar was probably assassinated, or "Alexander appears, on the basis of how we interpret the sources, conquered the Persian empire, with some good probability".

Where the probabilities enter is in our attempts to explain the known facts. What was it that led to the evolution of Athenian democracy or the fall of the Roman republic? What motivated Alexander to wage war against Persia? Those are not "fact" questions but attempts to understand processes with meagre evidence open to divergent interpretations.

Contrast historical Jesus studies. We have four gospels of unknown provenance and authorship, dated possibly anywhere between 70 and 140/170 CE, written for reasons open to divergent interpretations, to audiences we can only identify by means of educated guesses, and based on sources open to debate. Paul looks good until we remember that his works don't emerge on the scene until mid-second century in the midst of controversy over what he wrote and who was doctoring his words.

Historians in other fields simply don't base historical reconstructions on sources like those. (Someone will prove me wrong and point to an exception or two, and I would like to see them. But I think my point will stand.)

The historical reconstructions that claim to be based on the gospels, Acts and Paul are nothing but a reading of church and cultural dogma into them. The narratives in the gospels are assumed to be derived from real events via oral transmission, written by persons dedicated to honouring the historical memory of Jesus. The reconstructions are circular -- they know they are "probable" because the church believed they were sincere records of Jesus, etc. and they wouldn't have "lied" or had some other function or origin.

In other words, we simply don't have any sources to give us a handle on the historical Jesus. If historians conclude there was a historical Jesus who started it all then it will be because that explanation makes the most sense of the sources we have. It will not be because we know on the basis of contemporary sources of known provenance and authorship that Jesus existed. Jesus will instead by a hypothesis some might propose as the best explanation to the sources we have. Others may have a different hypothesis to explain them.

I've quoted other historians - in particular Akenson and Finley -- often enough with their critical remarks about the methods of bible scholars for reconstructing history. Criteria of authenticity are not how they go about determining the "facts" of the past. We have heard of "history wars". In Australia they have been about determining exactly what happened between Europeans and aboriginals here -- not what probably happened on the basis of criteria. One of our prime ministers gave an official apology to the aboriginals not for what our ancestors and even our own generation probably did to them but for what in fact they/we did do.

Historical Jesus scholars talk in terms of probability. All history is probabilistic, they say -- to justify their approach to Jesus studies. On the basis of imperfect "criteria". But they are alone in that respect by the standards of most historians in other fields. They do history differently from how non-biblical historians do it.

[Leucius Charinus]

What if I hold neither viewpoint but rather recognize IC XC as a literary creation. Not historical, just fiction.

Then you wouldn't be alone in such a recognition. But we are left trying to identify the social /literary group responsible for the literary creation. And which century the pious fraud was undertaken. For a pious fraud it is. Scholarship of the HJ and that of the MJ is all over the shop. Where's Colombo gone?

Historians in other fields simply don't base historical reconstructions on sources like those.

That is correct. Criteria of Authenticity in Biblical studies should be compared to the core principles for determining reliability in classical studies

Core principles for determining reliability (Classical Studies)

The following core principles of source criticism were formulated by two Scandinavian historians, Olden-Jørgensen (1998) and Thurén Torsten (1997):[4]

Human sources may be relics such as a fingerprint; or narratives such as a statement or a letter. Relics are more credible sources than narratives.

Any given source may be forged or corrupted. Strong indications of the originality of the source increase its reliability.

The closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an accurate historical description of what actually happened.

An eyewitness is more reliable than testimony at second hand, which is more reliable than hearsay at further remove, and so on.

If a number of independent sources contain the same message, the credibility of the message is strongly increased.

The tendency of a source is its motivation for providing some kind of bias. Tendencies should be minimized or supplemented with opposite motivations.

If it can be demonstrated that the witness or source has no direct interest in creating bias then the credibility of the message is increased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_method

[mlinssen]

If historians conclude there was a historical Jesus who started it all then it will be because that explanation makes the most sense of the sources we have. It will not be because we know on the basis of contemporary sources of known provenance and authorship that Jesus existed. Jesus will instead by a hypothesis some might propose as the best explanation to the sources we have. Others may have a different hypothesis to explain them.

... then they will clearly, objectively and quantifiably lay out, preferably via a few bullet points, why they come to that conclusion

It is typical of biblical academic to have e.g. a fairly proper analysis of data, only to be followed by a very predictable and [ETA: fixed formationdogmatic]Conclusion that has nothing to do with any of it.
Science doesn't do that (nor any proper writing, to be frank) because a conclusion may not introduce new data that hasn't been discussed prior: a conclusion is nothing but a summary of the paper with a binary outcome