At What Point Does 'Based on a Historical Character' Become Unhistorical?

[Secret Alias]

I saw a Tiktok video by someone I respect argue not only that Moses existed but hinted or coddled the idea that asking this question was by nature stupid and unworthy of serious scholarship. Really? People seriously question whether or not there was a historical Exodus at all but Moses's existence is an unassailable. How so? This person argued from Manetho that a real Moses must have existed because of the Egyptian records etc. But isn't that like saying that the singer in the Godfather is historical because it was based on Frank Sinatra? Surely there's a point if you keep watering down your liquor that it is no longer liquor.

So in Jesus's case maybe Mark or Peter or whomever heard or saw a prototype for Jesus. Maybe he was crucified. Maybe he wasn't. But this smug certainty that scholars have that Jesus was a 'historical person' falls somewhere between the gospel itself being an eyewitness account of 'Jesus' to outright fiction. It's within that range of possibilities rather than - as 'serious scholars' would have it the range starts from the gospel as 'verbatim history' to 'based on a historical character' like the singer in the Godfather.

I don't get why unhistorical or fiction isn't one of the possible starting points. The Godfather is admired because both Puzo and Coppola took bits of 'real life' and life experience (the Italian-American cultural scenes) and blended it with a fictitious story. I was watching a documentary where they admitted that Coppola 'romanticized' the mobsters but that art lives on a 'truer than truth' plane (sounding very much like Clement). Even Papias's testimony leaves open that the anecdotes that Mark used might have been like the bits and pieces Puzo and Coppola employed to make the Godfather, no?

[lclapshaw]

I agree. It all comes down to what a person wants/needs to believe.

I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that not only believe that the singer in the Godfather is real but that ALL of the Godfather is real. Ergo, the Bible.

[Paul the Uncertain]

Regarding the Godfather singer, you might say, in a saying "based on" Bertrand Russell's formulation of the historical Jesus problem:

It is quite possible that the singer never lived, and if he did, then we can know nothing about him.

At least not from the received text of the Godafther series. We do have a hypothesis that this character "refers to" a historical figure about whom much is known from other sources. On the other hand, we also know that real people can sue writers in the culture from which the Godfather emerged, and so there is no surprise that the "biography" of the fictional character may have intentionally been made to differ from the real person's.

[Paul the Uncertain]

If I may suggest an answer to your question.

In Neil's "How do we know X exited?" thread, one of his witnesses made the distinction betwen the "likeliness" of an explanation and its "loveliness," the witness' terms. Likeliness refers to the prospect for something uncertain to be true in the ordinary factual sense. Loveliness refers to the prospect of the something to be useful or otherwise attarctive to scholars.

Some trade-off between the two qualities is routine in many scholarly fields, not just history. It is easy to confuse the two because (1) both can be represented by ordinary two-valued logics, e.g. modal logic and (2) evidence can increase or decrease either value. There is the further complication that the actual practice of pursuing likeliness usually consists of seeking some approximation to the truth. The "quality" of an approximation is largely a matter of its usefulness, that is, its loveliness.

Suppose R is some representation (e.g. a fiction about a character) and P is some real person who actually lived. "Is R based upon P?" may sound like a question about the truth of the matter, but it is actually a matter of usefulness, something like "Does knowledge of P improve our understanding of R or vice versa or both?"

It seems fair to say that the real-life "worked example" of Frank Sinatra does help us understand how the pursuit of a career providing a completely legal service to the generally law-abiding public might involve traffic with illegal business enterprises. Conversely, the hypothetical career of the fictional singer may help us better understand the choices Sinatra made, and the risks he ran in choosing as he did.

There isn't necessarily any unique "point" that crisply divides "useful enough to interest historians" from its contrary, nor would such a point necessarily be reckoned the same by all people nor in all contexts. We might think about defining a term like acceptance, which was discussed for likeliness purposes in Neil's thread.

[mbuckley3]

A side light from a C2 writer, who shows some sophistication about the 'range of possibilities'.

For Dio Chrysostom, Diogenes the (Stoicised) Cynic, a real historical figure, was the ideal of the 'philosophic' life. Dio was, so to speak, a 'believer'.

In the preamble to his 4th Oration, he takes on the traditional tale [φασι-"they say"] of the meeting between Diogenes and Alexander the Great : "..there are many who speak and write of this..and so I should like on this occasion to tell what in all likelihood [ως δε εικος] was the nature of their conversation." There follows a long, engaged and engaging 'philosophic' dialogue.

Dio is quite explicit that he is writing a plausible fiction, yet remains a 'believer'; indeed the fiction is a function of that 'belief'.

Even more pointed is Or.72.11 : "And the masses still remember the sayings of Diogenes, some of which he may (!) [ισως] have spoken himself, though some too were composed [συνθεντων] by others."

Asserting the existence or non-existence of 'historical' figures was a minority sport in antiquity. Trypho in Justin's Dialogue ch.8 (χριστον εαυτοις τινα αναπλασσετε) is a rare example. Dio feels no need to prove Diogenes' historicity. But two things stand out :
1) for Dio, 'Diogenes' is a construct
2) he is utterly relaxed about this

[Secret Alias]

Always a pleasure to read. So erudite.

[rgprice]

Claiming that Moses was real because of Mantheo is just absurd. Of course the person probably has not read Gmirkin. Indeed the key argument is that Moses is not real because of Mantheo. What Gmirkin very successfully shows is that the Moses of the Jewish scriptures is derived from the work of Mantheo, which means that the Moses of the scriptures is a literary invention. The Jewish scriptures aren't an intendent account of the life of Moses that is corroborated by Mantheo, rather the Moses of the scriptures is a character based on the figure in Mantheo. At that point, even if the Mantheo account is 100% accurate, Moses still isn't real. It's essentially the same thing as claiming Pecos Bill was real.

Of course, when it comes to showing that Moses or Jesus "wasn't real", its not about "proving a negative" or finding evidence that they didn't exist, but rather showing how their story was created from literary or other sources. That's what Gmirkin does with Moses. The same has been done with Homer. We know Homer didn't exist because we can show that the body of work ascribed to Homer was written by different people, that the Iliad was not originally ascribed to Homer and that all of the biographical details about Homer's life are liter inventions.

Indeed I get into this a lot in the new book I'm working on. I first address many other legendary people from classical antiquity, such a Homer, Orpheus, the Sibyls, and other lesser known figures of literary invention, all of whom were believed to have been real people, but are now widely accepted as not having actually existed.

[Paul the Uncertain]

Of course, when it comes to showing that Moses or Jesus "wasn't real", its not about "proving a negative" or finding evidence that they didn't exist, but rather showing how their story was created from literary or other sources.

So, how do you distinguish between a "purely" literary creation and a real person celebrated after they've died with overstuffed literary borrowings?

Moses and Jesus are contrasting cases. I know there is some kind of internet trope that "you can't prove a negative," but that's what happened to Moses, in whatever sense of to prove is possible for any fact claim about the remote past. The principal achievements attributed to Moses, the Exodus and the sole authorship of the Torah, have been shown not to have happened. That his story has literary features is frosting on the cake, or at most the "third leg" of a sturdy stool.

There are no distinctive non-magical achievements attributed by Jesus that are situated during his natural life. In typical definitions of a "minimal" historical Jesus, he got baptized by John along with many others, he made a few friends among his fellow vagrants, he got killed by Pilate as many others were, and some of his friends survived him. Even if all that were known to be true, there's nothing distinctive there. Under uncertainty, there is no coherent "negative" to prove. If anything, there might easily be several people who fit the specifications.

If Jesus were a specific person who really lived, and the "minimal" specifications were all there was to him, then the only way we'd have heard of him all these centuries later is that the stories told about him were in some sense memorable and moving throughout secular time. No surprise, then, that those stories would resemble other literature that has similarly survived through secular time: myths, to use one syllable.

Anyway, I am sincerely interested if you have some methodological advice to share.

[rgprice]

Of course, when it comes to showing that Moses or Jesus "wasn't real", its not about "proving a negative" or finding evidence that they didn't exist, but rather showing how their story was created from literary or other sources.

So, how do you distinguish between a "purely" literary creation and a real person celebrated after they've died with overstuffed literary borrowings?

Moses and Jesus are contrasting cases. I know there is some kind of internet trope that "you can't prove a negative," but that's what happened to Moses, in whatever sense of to prove is possible for any fact claim about the remote past. The principal achievements attributed to Moses, the Exodus and the sole authorship of the Torah, have been shown not to have happened. That his story has literary features is frosting on the cake, or at most the "third leg" of a sturdy stool.

There are no distinctive non-magical achievements attributed by Jesus that are situated during his natural life. In typical definitions of a "minimal" historical Jesus, he got baptized by John along with many others, he made a few friends among his fellow vagrants, he got killed by Pilate as many others were, and some of his friends survived him. Even if all that were known to be true, there's nothing distinctive there. Under uncertainty, there is no coherent "negative" to prove. If anything, there might easily be several people who fit the specifications.

If Jesus were a specific person who really lived, and the "minimal" specifications were all there was to him, then the only way we'd have heard of him all these centuries later is that the stories told about him were in some sense memorable and moving throughout secular time. No surprise, then, that those stories would resemble other literature that has similarly survived through secular time: myths, to use one syllable.

Anyway, I am sincerely interested if you have some methodological advice to share.

Well, I have presumed to take on this issue of course, given that the title of my first book is (controversially) "Deciphering the Gospels Proves that Jesus Never Existed". Granted, this book actually barely scratches the surface of this topic, but I do believe that I did enough to in fact do what the title claims. Some will of course dispute that, but I think many also agree.

The general theory of most Jesus scholars, including Bart Ehrman and other non-Christians, is that the "reason the Gospels were written" was to record the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The thesis I put forward in the book is that the "reason" the first Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was written was reaction to the First Jewish-Roman War. I contend that the Gospel of Mark is a fictional allegory, and the writer knew that Jesus was not a real person.

I will concede that I don't actually definitively prove those points, but I do think I establish enough to show that the Gospels are not in any way based on the life of a real person, and that the purpose of their writing was not to record the life and deeds of a real person.

So first, I think we have to tackle whether or not certain scenes in the Gospels are records of actual events. I provide an example of how I address that here: http://www.decipheringthegospels.com/examples.html

In that example, I compare the claims of scholars like Bart Ehrman and J. P. Meier regarding the Cleansing of the Temple to a literary assessment of the Temple cleaning scene. I think from this literary assessment we can conclude that the Temple cleansing scene is not in any way based on real events, rather it is an entirely fictional literary invention.

So, for me, step one is showing that the only accounts of the like of this we have, the Gospels, are not simply unreliable, but that we can in fact establish that they are not based on accounts of a person, rather they are fictional literary inventions that are derived from literary sources. This shows that there was no attempt to record anything about a real person. What I do in Deciphering the Gospels is show that practically every single scene in the Gospel of Mark is derived from literary sources and that the overall narrative of the story is allegorical in nature, not historical.

I also show that the second century debates on the nature of Jesus, whether he be "of the flesh" or purely spiritual, relied entirely on interpretation of the Gospels and other scriptures. At that time there was a significant need to "prove" that Jesus was a real human being, not, as Marcion claimed, a spiritual being who had descended, unborn, from heaven. It is significant that all of the arguments put forward to establish the humanity of Jesus relied entirely on scriptural interpretation. At no point was any real evidence ever put forward, this roughly 100 years after his supposed life.

I further argue that the belief that Jesus was a real person was established in the second century entirely for theological reasons, precisely because many of the so-called Christian heretics at that time did not believe that he was a real person.

So, the primary theory of Jesus historicists has always been that the writing of the Gospels was inspired by the life and deeds of the real person Jesus. So, what I seek to demonstrate is that this is not the case, and we can prove that it is not the case. Once we prove that the Gospels we not written in order to record the life and deeds of a person, but rather they are motivated by other factors, this, IMO, proves that Jesus never existed at all, certainly we can say that the Jesus of the Gospels never existed. At that point, trying to claim that the Gospels were inspired by the life of a real person, even if that person in way way resembled the person described in the Gospels, is somewhat of a fool's errand.

[mlinssen]

Many already have arrived at a minimal HJ, clinging by the fingernail of their left pinky

The thesis I put forward in the book is that the "reason" the first Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was written was reaction to the First Jewish-Roman War

I should have saved myself the trouble to initially take you seriously on your Mark-Marcion priority try out.
And you should have done likewise

There is no way to prove non existence, scientifically speaking. You can argue and reason, that's all. Reasonable doubt is the best we can get