Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

I make no apologies for pointing out the obvious-as-nose-on-one's-face characteristics of Tim O'Neill's manner of attack, belittling, insult -- he cares not one whit about whom he offends and hurts and even demonstrates a certain relish at any hint that others are harmed by what he has said and the way he has said it.

He is a bully, nothing less.

Add to that all the stereotypes that you normally associate with a bully and that's Tim O'Neill.

Bullying is a known cause of serious depression and even suicide. Quit being "fair and reasonable" about Tim O'Neill. He is a menace.

Quite frankly, it galls me to see anyone here defending the likes of Tim O'Neill.

Paul the Uncertain wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 6:01 pmPutting aside that I don't think it matters all that much what any individual's personal opinion might be on the question, I'd be looking for some explicit acknowledgment from O'Neill (or whomever) that the contrary opinion is rationally tenable before declaring victory.

In the first podcast I linked to in the OP, Tim said:


I think that's very fair. The fact that it's pretty much my own position may feed into that my evaluation. I liked how he equates "Jesus will come back one day!" with "mythicism will be accepted by the academy one day!" It'll be interesting to see which one comes in first.

GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 8:12 pm

Paul the Uncertain wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 6:01 pmPutting aside that I don't think it matters all that much what any individual's personal opinion might be on the question, I'd be looking for some explicit acknowledgment from O'Neill (or whomever) that the contrary opinion is rationally tenable before declaring victory.

In the first podcast I linked to in the OP, Tim said:

2:52 I don't care whether Jesus existed or not, and if someone presented me with -- I've said this many times -- if someone presented me with what I thought was a good coherent and parsimonious explanation of of how a Christianity arose that didn't involve a historical Jesus I'd be happy to embrace it

Rubbish. Of course he cares. He is also on record as saying that mythicism makes atheists look bad and he finds that embarrassing as an atheist.

Nice words quoted are followed by misrepresentation with one club for insult and another for ridicule.

GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 8:12 pm

Paul the Uncertain wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 6:01 pmPutting aside that I don't think it matters all that much what any individual's personal opinion might be on the question, I'd be looking for some explicit acknowledgment from O'Neill (or whomever) that the contrary opinion is rationally tenable before declaring victory.

In the first podcast I linked to in the OP, Tim said:

...

I think that's very fair. The fact that it's pretty much my own position may feed into that my evaluation. I liked how he equates "Jesus will come back one day!" with "mythicism will be accepted by the academy one day!" It'll be interesting to see which one comes in first.

I don't think that you and I are in desperate disagreement about the things O'Neill says. The items you quote from the transcript are very similar with remarks he's posted on his blog for years now.

Put aside the irony of resting the case for his own position upon the weak and notoriously subjective "Occam's Razor." "Entirely possible" is not in dispute, it is always entirely possible that human judgment errs. Meanwhile the case that he concedes could be mounted against his view is not very good in his estimation. He compares the chances that that case will ever develop successfully with the (entirely possible) hypothesis that Jesus is coming back.

We're a long way away from "all in my opinion, your mileage may differ."

All in my opinion, your mileage may differ.

ETA: My own quixotic hobby horse is to aspire to implement the advice a philosopher once gave me: argue against the best possible case that you are wrong, not (or at least not only) against the actual cases that people have made which have failed to convince you. In the real world, and even in much of the academy, people don't often argue that way, so this is not a specific knock on O'Neill.

However, if more people did argue that way, then I think that colleague @ABuddhist would have their victory. I simply don't think we readers get that from O'Neill.

Paul the Uncertain wrote: ↑Thu Mar 02, 2023 2:53 am
Put aside the irony of resting the case for his own position upon the weak and notoriously subjective "Occam's Razor."

Is there any other academic field in which "parsimony" is so frequently invoked? Might that happen because the sources are so problematic that the evidence simply doesn't point decisively in one direction or the other?

I have my doubts that parsimony is a good reason for declaring one historical theory to be more probable than another because the reasons for historical events are often incredibly complex. I am not aware of any compelling argument that parsimony is correlated with probability.

Nevertheless, I do believe that Occam's Razor is a useful tool in historical inquiry for reasons not strictly related to probability. I believe that the historian should start with the simplest explanation because that is the one that is going to be easiest to confirm or refute. If there is insufficient evidence to confirm or refute the simplest explanation, there probably isn't going to be sufficient evidence to confirm or refute more complex explanations, and the historian should admit this.

In my opinion, the simplest explanation for the rise of any religion (and a good starting point in any investigation) is that some borderline whack job (e.g., Paul) invented a bunch of crazy stories and convinced a gullible group of followers that he was getting messages from God. In the case of Christianity, I don't find the evidence sufficient to either confirm or refute this hypothesis. As a result, I remain agnostic about the existence of the historical Jesus.

GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 8:12 pm I liked how he equates "Jesus will come back one day!" with "mythicism will be accepted by the academy one day!" It'll be interesting to see which one comes in first.

The problem with that equation is that scholars of Jesus who, as believing Christians, are at some level believing that Jesus will come back one day are more accepted within mainstream biblical scholarship than scholars who, when considering all of the sources, are willing to believe either that Jesus was not a historical person or that such rewmains at least possible. One set of beliefs is based upon faith in miracles involving a crucified criminal who bought us for a price from an uncreated creator god, and the other set of beliefs is based upon dispassionate analysis of texts which any literate person can study - yet the ones who accept miracles with regard to Jesus are better respected within mainstream biblical scholarship than the ones engaging in dispassionate analysis of texts and coming to conclusions which, if true, would render non-docetistic Standard Christianity false. This is a problem. And I write this as a nonmythicist.

Paul the Uncertain wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 6:01 pm I'd be looking for some explicit acknowledgment from O'Neill (or whomever) that the contrary opinion is rationally tenable before declaring victory.

• Also that a range of opinions exist.

I prefer using a color coded taxonomy of viewpoints:

VinnyJH wrote: ↑Thu Mar 02, 2023 7:42 am I have my doubts that parsimony is a good reason for declaring one historical theory to be more probable than another because the reasons for historical events are often incredibly complex. I am not aware of any compelling argument that parsimony is correlated with probability.

Nevertheless, I do believe that Occam's Razor is a useful tool in historical inquiry for reasons not strictly related to probability. I believe that the historian should start with the simplest explanation because that is the one that is going to be easiest to confirm or refute. If there is insufficient evidence to confirm or refute the simplest explanation, there probably isn't going to be sufficient evidence to confirm or refute more complex explanations, and the historian should admit this.

In fields where there are formal models of natural phenomena, it is possible to measure the complexity of the modeling assumptions. That's when you can investigate probability versus complexity. Elsewhere, I agree with your analysis that Occam's Razor does provide a useful heuristic for designing an investigation.

But in Jesus studies? The two leading hypotheses are:


In what sense is the first more or less "complex" than the second?

To borrow Wolgang Pauli's famous dictum, applying Occam's Razor to decide between these hypotheses is "not even wrong."

lclapshaw wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 5:40 pm

Irish1975 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 5:08 pm Carrier vs O'Neill, UFC fight.

Guys. It's the only way to settle this.

Octagon!

THUNDERDOME!

perseusomega9 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 02, 2023 11:43 am

lclapshaw wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 5:40 pm

Irish1975 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 5:08 pm Carrier vs O'Neill, UFC fight.

Guys. It's the only way to settle this.

Octagon!

THUNDERDOME!

Now I want to watch Mad Max!