Is the argument from embarassment evidence for historical crucifixion?

[moses]

I am reading a discussion here

https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblic ... ?context=3

The christian apologist says:
Paul is pretty clear that the cross was seen as a stumbling block to the Jews .....

....


But was it seen as "stumbling block" to people like paul or the people who he said were preaching it?

Would it have been a stumbling block had it been accompanied with signs and miracles?

Is not defeat and humiliation of pauls messiah something celebrated in pauls writings?

"all of the Gospels clearly need to go out of there to explain why the Messiah had to be crucified. Such a death was not only shameful but also unexpected. Why would they create such a problem for themselves if they didn't have to? If they weren't constrained by reality, they wouldn't need to do that."


"Was not only shameful but also unexpected"

evidence?

[Giuseppe]

viewtopic.php?p=101924#p101924

[Paul the Uncertain]

"... Why would they create such a problem for themselves if they didn't have to? If they weren't constrained by reality, they wouldn't need to do that."

I think the question has an answer.

Cognitive dissonance theory proposes, on a pretty fair evidentiary corpus against (some people's) first-principles intuition, that a persuader should consider making it at least somewhat difficult for the persudee to adopt whatever the persuader is selling. The difficulty will dissuade some, even many, potential adherents, but these losses may be offset by lower attrition among adherents who've bought the whole bill of goods.

We shouldn't confuse having a name for something with understanding it (as Richard Feynman observed). The term cognitive dissonance is recent (20th Century), but the concept could easily be discovered and rediscovered empirically and transmitted as tradecraft at any time. A version of it might even be applied to domesticated animal training, and some of the non-obvious features of behaviorism's sporadic "reinforcement schedules" may also reflect aspects of the phenomenon.

We have that interesting phrase of Paul's, "milk before solid food" (1 Corinthians 3:2). He had some notion of a progressive graduated-difficulty presentation of his wares.

Maybe the tent maker knew how business is done.

Big picture, that's a huge inherent hitch with "criterion of embarrassment" reasoning: maybe the person whose behavior baffles the analyst knows something the analyst doesn't or values something differently than the analyst does. The analyst would have done things differently. Big whoop.

[neilgodfrey]

No historian uses a criterion of embarrassment to establish the historicity of an event. (Except in biblical studies!)

For Christians there was no preaching of the cross, period. That would have been an embarrassingly stupid thing to do. The crucifixion is always - always - part of the message of death AND resurrection. There is no embarrassment in dying and then defeating death by being resurrected.

Besides, Jewish circles clearly believed in the death of a messiah prior to Christian times. Pick any one of the thirty-odd posts linked at Pre-Christian Jewish Ideas of a Suffering and Dying Messiah. Jewish scholars are in the forefront of making that case, it should be noted.

[Paul the Uncertain]

No historian uses a criterion of embarrassment to establish the historicity of an event.

I think that's a fair observation, and this post ought not to be considered rebuttal.

If we accept that Bible scholars are not as a group trained historians, then we seem to need to accept that when Bible scholars say that they align with historians (e.g. by adopting "methodological" materialism, or approaching their craft with a "historian's perspective," ...), they may be telling the truth as they understand it. That is to say, they speak sincerely with an educated layman's understanding of what historians do.

I think the layman's understanding of "history" includes anything that falls within the umbrella of "principled inquiry into the human past." That includes genealogists for example. It also includes people who have earned doctorates (at least in the USA), but not in history (unless they have a second doctorate), for example, lawyers.

I have a lot of respect for lawyers' understanding of why their rules of evidence are what they are; not just in the United States and not just recently. We have recorded judicial decisions that go back a long way, back to the mother country and other countries with similar jusdicial arrangements.

To be sure, some of that record makes us wince today, but a lot of it doesn't. Lawyers as a group can be pretty fair hueristic reasoners under uncertainty.

And even the stuff that makes us wince? The profession has often since reformed itself. Scientists have their phlogiston, lawyers have their witches' teats. Both have come a long way since then.

The point? Lawyers would without apology try to reason about a person's behavior from their own estimate of typical human motivation, including "what if's." Theory of mind, if you want to call it that.

So, it may be a fact that academic historians don't use lightly grounded theory of mind principles in their reasoning about the human past. But lawyers seem willing to do so, and they're not stupid people.

That doesn't make the guild right, but it may help make their positions more readily comprehensible. That might come in handy if we're serious about encouraging better thinking about the Bible.

[mlinssen]

I am reading a discussion here

https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblic ... ?context=3

The christian apologist says:
Paul is pretty clear that the cross was seen as a stumbling block to the Jews .....

....


But was it seen as "stumbling block" to people like paul or the people who he said were preaching it?

Would it have been a stumbling block had it been accompanied with signs and miracles?

Is not defeat and humiliation of pauls messiah something celebrated in pauls writings?

"all of the Gospels clearly need to go out of there to explain why the Messiah had to be crucified. Such a death was not only shameful but also unexpected. Why would they create such a problem for themselves if they didn't have to? If they weren't constrained by reality, they wouldn't need to do that."


"Was not only shameful but also unexpected"

evidence?

Nobody gets crucified in the NT, only stauro-sised: viewtopic.php?p=123920#p123920

Jesus gets executed by impaling, and dies within a 6 hour time frame, while being very lucid in the final moments: that's not a death from fatigue or blood loss after dozens of hours, that's sudden death - almost as if he got shot at that point

Obviously, that image did create some embarrassment for those who - much later - wanted to proudly portray their sacrificial lamb - and thence the twisting and turning starts, with Justin Martyr for example, trying to not only argue for him dying on something T-shaped but also alleging that such was predicted (naturally) in the Tanakh

They killed Jesus the Roman or Egyptian / Middle Eastern way, and it was supposed to be an agonising death: that is the story told by the gospels, whereas the Churchian story became something else entirely. But just like most of the gospels, the execution is a perfectly regular Roman one

Codex Bezae has very, very interesting variants there

[billd89]

The horrific speaks to the truth of it, I think. A man crucified alive, naked: the shivering horror! I hold the human reaction to murder (repugnance) as a universal, while admitting that many people (sociopaths: ~15% of population?) can be acculturated to approve extreme cruelty.

If that is not extraordinary, then what other SUCCESSFUL 'new' religions have had their founders murdered in a spectacular fashion AS THE CAUSE OF THEIR CELEBRATED STATUS (e.g. 'immortality'). I'm curious to examine the other persistent religions - if the Xtian example isn't truly extraordinary.

Every (new religion) cult founder/leader of history has died; that's irrelevant obviously. Even where violence was a factor, 'Immortalization' or 'Deification' are the criteria here. I cannot think of any cults in the 20th C. whose leaders/founders 'suffering' was the CAUSE of their success. In fact, all I see is Failure: Rajneeshpuram, Children of God, Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, Aum Shinrikyo, Order of the Solar Temple, Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, Manson Family, The People's Temple. Poof! All gone. The oldest example I recall, The Moorish Science Temple of America, was recently in the news. But Drew Ali died a natural death and wasn't divinized (I'm grasping for examples, obviously), so Not Applicable.

Of the 19th Century, I also wondered if the LDS (Mormons) claim Joseph Smith was 'immortalized' by the fact his lynching. Officially they do not. Joseph Smith was martyred for his belief, but I don't see that Fact as the Cause of Divinization (his "prophet" status has nothing to do with the murder, etc.) so that 'Best Example' also fails.
https://seanmcdowell.org/blog/was-joseph-smith-a-martyr

The Unification Church (nominally Xtian but plausibly 'new') still exists for now. Sun Myung Moon claimed divinity but certainly wasn't Immortalized by a socially cruel murder. Further afield, I imagine that within the last 200-300 years some new cults appeared in South America and Africa with horrific stories of their Founders' divinization ... but where in the world have any such cults persisted, for more than a few (+three) decades beyond (and 'by') the cruel martyrdom of the human Founder?

Any Nineteenth Century examples? Italian Martyr cults (all Failed.)
Any Eighteenth Century examples?
Any Seventeenth Century examples? Khlysts (plausibly a 'new faith'; survived until Soviet Revolution), ... ?
Any Sixteenth Century examples?
Any Fifteenth Century examples?
...

So what's the short-list of 'new' religions to compare to the Jesus Crucifixion example?

[Irish1975]

I am reading a discussion here

https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblic ... ?context=3

The christian apologist says:
Paul is pretty clear that the cross was seen as a stumbling block to the Jews .....

....


But was it seen as "stumbling block" to people like paul or the people who he said were preaching it?

Would it have been a stumbling block had it been accompanied with signs and miracles?

Is not defeat and humiliation of pauls messiah something celebrated in pauls writings?

"all of the Gospels clearly need to go out of there to explain why the Messiah had to be crucified. Such a death was not only shameful but also unexpected. Why would they create such a problem for themselves if they didn't have to? If they weren't constrained by reality, they wouldn't need to do that."


"Was not only shameful but also unexpected"

evidence?

Another post on Neil’s blog that is relevant to this question is part of Earl Doherty’s rebuttal of Bart Ehrman (a likely source for any claim on the subreddit you mentioned).

[mlinssen]

The horrific speaks to the truth of it, I think. A man crucified alive, naked: the shivering horror! I hold the human reaction to murder (repugnance) as a universal, while admitting that many people (sociopaths: ~15% of population?) can be acculturated to approve extreme cruelty.

Extreme cruelty, yes. But impaling always happened with living people, and they always were naked - nothing unusual about that in those days. Of crucifixion, nothing can be found - not even in Martin Hengel. Which is no small wonder as it is a ludicrous time and material intensive business with a very high chance of getting out alive

"The death penalty was carried out by impalement" - https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2016/01/c ... nic-egypt/

Or try https://www.jstor.org/stable/3632049

Even Josephus is full of it, by the hundreds. A piece of wood, guaranteed death, slow and agonising, and one could just continue going about his business. Brilliantly efficient and cruel and public. I've read some texts where they tried to prolong the event, for days. A stake along the spine caused the least damage, I won't get into more details

Fast forward to the Middle Ages and the Inquisition?

[neilgodfrey]

So, it may be a fact that academic historians don't use lightly grounded theory of mind principles in their reasoning about the human past. But lawyers seem willing to do so, and they're not stupid people.

That doesn't make the guild right, but it may help make their positions more readily comprehensible. That might come in handy if we're serious about encouraging better thinking about the Bible.

Embarrassment is part of human experience and I don't suggest historians are not aware of its significance in human behaviour and communications. Embarrassment comes into explaining motives, for example.

But to establish actual historical occurrence of a fact needs more than a criterion of embarrassment. There needs to be both testimony of some kind, for or against, and external, independent controls by which to assess that testimony.

When a scholar says that he knows for sure, that the one true fact of Christianity, happens to be the crucifixion because that is an embarrassment that would otherwise be hidden -- so its proclamation demonstrates its power to overcome embarrassment -- now that is simply not how historians assess what happened. Ever. That is unique to biblical studies and the crucifixion of Jesus. It is used to "verify" the "historicity" of gospel events and I know of its use nowhere else.