What counts as a historical Jesus?

[HansMustermann]

Oh, of course, lack of proper evidence also isn't evidence of the opposite position. So, don't get me wrong, nobody can say that they've disproved a historical Jesus.

That said, however, well, as long as it's a positive claim and not sufficiently supported, one doesn't really need to disprove it. One can basically just not accept the claim. Same as I don't need to disprove that dowsing works, to fall back to the null hypothesis that, as far as I know, it doesn't.

However, please don't take what I've said as granting more than it does. I am willing to grant that the Historical Jesus hypothesis is plausible without any extra evidence, but that isn't much of a claim. It just means I can see it's believable, and, well, two billion people believing it does make that case pretty well. But plausibility doesn't really say much. Being plausible doesn't say it's more likely to be true, or anything.

If we're getting back into the domain of how everyone else needs to support their position, well, that's still a reversal of the burden of proof as long as the HJ hasn't been really supported by more than assumptions and conjectures in the first place. Nobody has to support anything to take the null hypothesis that a positive claim that's not been sufficiently supported, can be safely taken as false.

Not saying that MJ should make it into the school manuals or anything, mind you. I do get it that history pretty much works by arguing what sounds plausible. I have nothing against that, if that's the best it can do. But as an outsider, I don't have to take anything built on incredibly weak evidence and lots of assumptions as true either.

That said, on the specific points:

1. cosmic messiah: well, nobody actually says that mainstream Judaism actually had such an idea. But then neither did it have the idea of a Jewish messiah that saves the whole world at the expense of damning the Jews. It didn't stop the Christians from pulling just that stunt, did it?

The thing is, there were a LOT of gnostic heresies quite early, and some seem to have had quite the... unusual cosmic ideas. The question behind that particular flavour of MJ is really just: how early did that happen, and how mainstream was it? Could something like that be at least possible to be as early as Paul or thereabouts?

Mind you, I don't really subscribe to that hypothesis, but just saying what it's really about.

2. Paul not knowing an earthly Jesus. Well, he pretty much says himself that he didn't get his stuff from any human, and as far as anyone can tell, he never met an earthly Jesus. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's the mainstream theory that Paul actually never met Jesus. He WAS talking to some cosmic divine being in his visions.

Which leaves a whole lot of questions as to what exactly did he know or believe about Jesus in that aspect. Especially seeing him insisting on stuff like

A) he got his stuff from no man, and

B) he went and preached in Arabia for 3 years before even talking to any Christians, and

C) apparently so completely accurate was his vision, that the other apostles had nothing to add to his story. Even James, the brother of Jesus, and Peter, the chief apostle and designated successor of Jesus, apparently had nothing to add to Paul's story. Which is kinda unbelievable if you don't believe in miracles. And

D) again, it's weird that he doesn't quote Jesus in support of any of his doctrine points, although one would assume that he is at least trying to preach the kind of attitudes and behaviour that Jesus would like. So why not support it with a quote from the ultimate authority there? Did he actually learn much about Jesus and his opinions from those who supposedly actually knew Jesus?

So let's say that Paul is just refusing to learn anything from the apostles in Jerusalem. Fine, but then exactly what does he think he know about Jesus, really? Maybe he does believe in a mortal Jesus, but, really, does he even know what he's talking about? How would he know, while refusing to get any information from people?

It's not clear at all, I would say, WTH is exactly in Paul's head there.

3. Mark making it all up. Well, as I was saying, nobody argued that he made it ALL up, or that he was unconstrained. Like most early Christians, of course he would be constrained by the OT. Even the cosmic-Jesus flavour of mythicists say exactly that Paul and the gang found their Jesus in the OT, so I'm not sure how that comes across as its exact opposite

4. About the story keeping some basic elements... well, if you've read my large message at the start of this thread, this is kinda my point, actually: how much can it differ from the story, and still count as the same basic story or character?

My favourite example of what I mean is in a Radio Yerevan joke... err... I mean parable

Q: Is it true that comrade Ivan Ivanovich from Moskow has won a car in the state lottery?
A: It's perfectly true, except for two small details. First of all, it wasn't a car, it was a bycicle. Second, he didn't win it in the state lottery. It was stolen from him.​

Would you say that it actually refers to the same incident?

But really, even if I'm to settle on a substantially changed historical Jesus, the question remains: so which details are still true? And how can one actually support those?

Because otherwise if we agree on a historical Jesus, but don't know what he actually said or did, that's a bit vacuous, innit?

 

[tsig]

L Ron Hubbard didn't exist?



I'm sure TimONeill2 will answer this himself, but I just wanted to weigh in...

We know that there were people living in that time and place (1st Century Judea) who were preaching against the corruption of the Temple, about the coming of a Messiah and the End Times. We can read their own writings in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, (I don't want to side-track this again with talk about Eisenman's theories) I know there is no specific mention of anyone called "Jesus" in the DSS, but a lot of what is in there matches pretty closely with what the Bible says the first followers of Jesus said and did.

Is it really so hard to imagine a Jewish Preacher saying the same stuff as in those scrolls being the basis for the Jesus stories?

Hilited the weak point in your argument.

 

[grahbudd]

That said, on the specific points:

1. cosmic messiah: well, nobody actually says that mainstream Judaism actually had such an idea. But then neither did it have the idea of a Jewish messiah that saves the whole world at the expense of damning the Jews. It didn't stop the Christians from pulling just that stunt, did it?

The thing is, there were a LOT of gnostic heresies quite early, and some seem to have had quite the... unusual cosmic ideas. The question behind that particular flavour of MJ is really just: how early did that happen, and how mainstream was it? Could something like that be at least possible to be as early as Paul or thereabouts?

In a terrible hurry today so I'm afraid will have to give some very cursory answers...
Well of course anything is possible, but the point is surely that it is not evidenced, so we can't really base anything on it. It's true that Earl Docherty thinks it is evidenced (on the basis of Enoch) but in order to give this idea wings involved doing massive violence to the entire Neoplatonic tradition, again, and in his own words, to support the hypothesis rather than the other way round. This is a classic case of the interpretation of the data being forced by a driving hypothesis, it's all the wrong way round.

As for early Christians pulling that stunt: one of the nonobvious but when you think about it really striking aspects about the gospels is how tiny the interaction of Jesus with Gentiles is in them. Given that they were aimed at largely gentile audiences (one can see this by how they try to explain Jewish custom to an audience clearly unfamiliar with them), why aren't they full of Jesus being nice to Gentiles? This is part of a larger point which is how eye-poppingly Jewish they are, and the character of Jesus is in them, standing as he does in the classic prophetic tradition. With his insistence on the Law and rabbinic debates with the Pharisees, they are in many ways remarkably poor vehicles for selling the new religion to a gentile audience. This is one of several indicators that their provenance is squarely 1st century Judaism rather than later gentilism (which is what the church came largely to be). This is a point that has been brought out (for the benefit of Christianity I think) by modem critical analysis that has managed to peel away the centuries of non-Jewish (or even, tragically, anti-Jewish) spin that has been put on them.

2. Paul not knowing an earthly Jesus. Well, he pretty much says himself that he didn't get his stuff from any human, and as far as anyone can tell, he never met an earthly Jesus. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's the mainstream theory that Paul actually never met Jesus. He WAS talking to some cosmic divine being in his visions.

Which leaves a whole lot of questions as to what exactly did he know or believe about Jesus in that aspect. Especially seeing him insisting on stuff like

A) he got his stuff from no man, and

B) he went and preached in Arabia for 3 years before even talking to any Christians, and

C) apparently so completely accurate was his vision, that the other apostles had nothing to add to his story. Even James, the brother of Jesus, and Peter, the chief apostle and designated successor of Jesus, apparently had nothing to add to Paul's story. Which is kinda unbelievable if you don't believe in miracles. And

D) again, it's weird that he doesn't quote Jesus in support of any of his doctrine points, although one would assume that he is at least trying to preach the kind of attitudes and behaviour that Jesus would like. So why not support it with a quote from the ultimate authority there? Did he actually learn much about Jesus and his opinions from those who supposedly actually knew Jesus?

So let's say that Paul is just refusing to learn anything from the apostles in Jerusalem. Fine, but then exactly what does he think he know about Jesus, really? Maybe he does believe in a mortal Jesus, but, really, does he even know what he's talking about? How would he know, while refusing to get any information from people?

Paul didn't meet Jesus, that's correct (as far as we know).

What Paul said was that his 'gospel' came from no man, and of course that raises the question of what he means by this and what context it was said in. Elsewhere he passes on what is clearly traditional material, and if you look carefully he clearly did meet Christians. Afterwards he spent time in Jerusalem to check what he was preaching was square with the apostles there. And again, Paul seems to know quite a lot about the Jesus material (see the Dale Allison paper I referred to). One must recall that his letters have an occasional nature rather than being primary conduits of teaching material (he's writing to people he has already taught before). There's more to say here but time constraints being what they are...

3. Mark making it all up. Well, as I was saying, nobody argued that he made it ALL up, or that he was unconstrained. Like most early Christians, of course he would be constrained by the OT. Even the cosmic-Jesus flavour of mythicists say exactly that Paul and the gang found their Jesus in the OT, so I'm not sure how that comes across as its exact opposite

Mark of course leans heavily on the OT, as does the rest of the NT. but only certain aspects. In many ways the gospel story, interpreted as the story of the messiah (which clearly they want to do) does not sit easily with the Jewish image of the messiah, who when it comes down to it was going to be a bloke who was going to lead a huge army against the Gentiles and do them in. Hence their dwelling on passages in the psalms and deutero-Isaiah - a case, one might think, of the early Christians trying to construct a case out of the Jewish tradition to support a figure that was rather unlike the traditional messiah (eg especially the crucifixion). Why do these gymnastics, when they could simply have made up a more congenial figure? Answer: they were constrained by certain facts of history such as the crucifixion. Of course, the reason they came to see Jesus as the messiah was the belief they had that he rose from the dead.

4. About the story keeping some basic elements... well, if you've read my large message at the start of this thread, this is kinda my point, actually: how much can it differ from the story, and still count as the same basic story or character?

Snip ( )

But really, even if I'm to settle on a substantially changed historical Jesus, the question remains: so which details are still true? And how can one actually support those?

Because otherwise if we agree on a historical Jesus, but don't know what he actually said or did, that's a bit vacuous, innit?[/QUOTE]

In the gospels, another striking feature is that although the evangelists were sometimes vigorous editors of their material, the words of Jesus are much more conservatively passed on. This squares with what the Swedish school like gerhardsson have pointed out about known methods of transmission of teaching of rabbis. The core of the teaching of Jesus as presented is not a random mishmash, but a coherent body of teaching that sits squarely in the prophetic tradition (eg the twelve 'minor prophets') of the OT. from Paul's quotations and allusions, it seems that he too was aware of collections of the sayings of Jesus. Rather than being later gentile inventions, this thus looks entirely authentic. As for deeds: when you look at especially Mark, once again the striking feature is that in the main the healings and exorcisms seem entirely consonant of what one might expect from a first century figure (who recall had a very different conception to us of what illness and healing comprised). There are of course exceptions, notably the socalled nature miracles, but that's perhaps for another time!

 

[grahbudd]

*Obvious displacement activity*

Here is what Paul writes in Galatians:

6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7 which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! 9 As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!

10 Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.

11 I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. 12 I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

Yet elsewhere he is keen to pass on what he learnt from others, e.g. in 1 Corinthians, using rather technical language used by rabbinic teaching:

3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

What is again interesting about this list is that it does not tally with the later accounts of the resurrection appearances - in particular, and most surprisingly, the appearance to "Cephas", and indeed James.

In the context of Galatians, a most grumpy letter without even any formal greetings at the beginning, Paul is horrified that the Galatians are trying to make Gentile converts conform to the Torah, in particular by submitting to circumcision. And it seems quite clear that Paul regarded the freedom of gentiles from the Torah as "his gospel":

But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased 16 to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. 17 I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.

Now its quite true here that Paul says he didn't consult any human being, and didn't see the other apostles in Jerusalem (who were apostles before he was, tellingly). He is trying to stress the idea that his "gospel" to the gentiles, of freedom from the Torah (presumably the only way really to sell it) is one that is irreformable, it came from God and not the apostles, and *thus* even he cannot be disobedient to its message. But of course, at the same time, Paul must have had some knowledge about the new religion as he was running around persecuting its new practitioners. And later on, even he admits he ran everything past the Jerusalem crew:

2 Then after fourteen years, I went up again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along also. 2 I went in response to a revelation and, meeting privately with those esteemed as leaders, I presented to them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. I wanted to be sure I was not running and had not been running my race in vain. 3 Yet not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek. 4 This matter arose because some false believers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves. 5 We did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.

6 As for those who were held in high esteem —whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism —they added nothing to my message. 7 On the contrary, they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised. 8 For God, who was at work in Peter as an apostle to the circumcised, was also at work in me as an apostle to the Gentiles. 9 James, Cephas and John, those esteemed as pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised. 10 All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along.

(my bold). In other words, despite this rhetorical flourishes, Paul is by no means a one man band, but feels the need to get his "circumcision free gospel to the gentiles" approved by the Jerusalem grandes fromages. So I don't think one can really draw the conclusion from Paul that just because he regards his specific revelation - *his* good news that the gentiles could be brought into the fold of the new church, as from God and not men - that he learnt everything about Christianity by direct revelation. If he did think that, he certainly does not stress it elsewhere apart from in Galatians, where he feels there is a specific need to.

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, the last part in #223 is actually a bit of a problem. If you have some sayings of some guy X that are entirely consistent with tradition Y and theories/documents/etc Z at the time, then basically anyone else could come up to the same conclusion too. It doesn't narrow it down to one single person.

E.g., if my messiah Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov from Moskow (you know, the one with the stolen bycicle) spewed a lot of stuff in my gospel that's consistent with the dialectic materialism that was the official Soviet school of thought at the time, does it really narrow it down to specifically Ivan Ivanovic Ivanov? Or could I have just watched a few Soviet-era movies for inspiration?

E.g., if I write a super-hero comic book where some guy called The Amazing Relativistic Guy spews stuff entirely consistent with relativity as it is taught today, does that narrow down to having to come through that guy, or could I have just picked up a book on relativity? Do we really need a middle-man there?

Same for Mark and Jesus, really. As I was saying, nobody denies that Mark and generally the early Christians were using the OT and minor prophets as a source. In fact, for most mythical Jesus flavours, the core claim is that those authors bypassed the middle man and relied more directly on those sources. So the question is, really, does it narrow it down to a specific middle-man?

 

[grahbudd]

Well, the last part in #223 is actually a bit of a problem. If you have some sayings of some guy X that are entirely consistent with tradition Y and theories/documents/etc Z at the time, then basically anyone else could come up to the same conclusion too. It doesn't narrow it down to one single person.

E.g., if my messiah Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov from Moskow (you know, the one with the stolen bycicle) spewed a lot of stuff in my gospel that's consistent with the dialectic materialism that was the official Soviet school of thought at the time, does it really narrow it down to specifically Ivan Ivanovic Ivanov? Or could I have just watched a few Soviet-era movies for inspiration?

E.g., if I write a super-hero comic book where some guy called The Amazing Relativistic Guy spews stuff entirely consistent with relativity as it is taught today, does that narrow down to having to come through that guy, or could I have just picked up a book on relativity? Do we really need a middle-man there?

Same for Mark and Jesus, really. As I was saying, nobody denies that Mark and generally the early Christians were using the OT and minor prophets as a source. In fact, for most mythical Jesus flavours, the core claim is that those authors bypassed the middle man and relied more directly on those sources. So the question is, really, does it narrow it down to a specific middle-man?

Of course you are right. But consider: there is a group of collected sayings that form a certain coherent group (ethical, apocalyptic, "option for the poor", prophetic, a call for a return to the spirit and not just the letter of the law etc). And we have another set of stories about a bloke wandering around in Galilee and ending up getting crucified in Jerusalem. And by the time Paul is writing, it seems (as he seems to know both strands of this), these two chunks were associated with the same person. And although one can place the Jesus material in the prophetic tradition, that does not mean that everything in the sayings was a copy of something in the prophets - far from it. The sayings material, found largely in Q, is really a novel block of material that came about and was collected and edited (as far as we can see) in the first century, already by the time of Paul but with no evidence for its existence before that.

Examples are:

No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a measuring bowl, but on a lampstand.
Whoever does not take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

The second of these is particularly interesting as it points to an understanding of the crucifixion in Q. In other words, as far back as we can trace any of this material (and in Paul that is within perhaps 10-15 years of the purported events) we see a close association of the life and words of a particular person.

Of course, it *might still be* that these traditions got fused, that someone made up (rather quickly, it seems) a body of teaching, someone else made up a story of someone's life, and they got fused; or someone got crucified, and they got a load of teaching (and healing etc) attached to their life story, etc. But I think that given what we know of the evidence, and the timeframe implied, all these seem unnecessarily complex. Why posit an (unevidenced) extra step in the middle, when you can much more easily see it at face value: a particular person said things somewhat like this, and had this life history? Again, isn't it the case here that one has to add an extra speculative step to the evidence we have in order to make this plausible, and if so, why do it? Do we have evidence, for example, of similar fittings out of coherent sayings that suddenly get attached to historical figures within a decade or so of their life, especially if the sayings are entirely consistent with the sort of person one understands that figure to be?

 

[HansMustermann]

*Obvious displacement activity*

Here is what Paul writes in Galatians:



Yet elsewhere he is keen to pass on what he learnt from others, e.g. in 1 Corinthians, using rather technical language used by rabbinic teaching:

There is at least some speculation that that kind of Peter primacy is a later interpolation. Not the least because just about any other verse used to support the primacy of Peter (Matthew 16:18-19, Luke 24:12, John 21:15-17) seems to be a later interpolation. Essentially it's additions that don't just happen to mention Peter, but support the primacy of the church in Rome.

But anyway, let's go with it. He still doesn't say that he learned anything there from Peter. In fact, as you just quoted, even after staying with Peter for two weeks, he still insists that he didn't get his gospel from a human. So what did he learn from Peter there? Did he learn anything at all?

And, again, he doesn't actually talk to Peter until after he gets his gospel from Jesus personally and after he spends 3 years preaching it in Arabia. So, really, WTH was he preaching there?

What is again interesting about this list is that it does not tally with the later accounts of the resurrection appearances - in particular, and most surprisingly, the appearance to "Cephas", and indeed James.

Interesting maybe, but it's not very surprising, considering that it's actually supporting the primacy of the church in Rome, and that three out of four gospels have interpolations that give Peter some extra credit or connection to the resurrection. Those guys were busy like (sons of) bees giving their church extra claim to be in charge

In the context of Galatians, a most grumpy letter without even any formal greetings at the beginning, Paul is horrified that the Galatians are trying to make Gentile converts conform to the Torah, in particular by submitting to circumcision. And it seems quite clear that Paul regarded the freedom of gentiles from the Torah as "his gospel":

Well, I'm not even going to disagree there, but that seems to be the problem, rather than a solution. Paul's idea of a "gospel" seems to be, yes, more like such personal ideas, rather than what we'd call today a "gospel", i.e., a narrative about the life of Jesus.

And it doesn't get us any closer to the idea that he knew much, or cared about, an earthly Jesus. If what he actually asked the apostles is just whether the gentiles can keep their dick uncut and whether they have to obey the Torah, then the missing thing there is still Jesus. He doesn't mention asking about that part.

Now its quite true here that Paul says he didn't consult any human being, and didn't see the other apostles in Jerusalem (who were apostles before he was, tellingly). He is trying to stress the idea that his "gospel" to the gentiles, of freedom from the Torah (presumably the only way really to sell it) is one that is irreformable, it came from God and not the apostles, and *thus* even he cannot be disobedient to its message. But of course, at the same time, Paul must have had some knowledge about the new religion as he was running around persecuting its new practitioners. And later on, even he admits he ran everything past the Jerusalem crew:

1. It's doubtful that Paul would actually have the authority to persecute anyone much, if even the local authorities had to run everything by the Roman governor. (Much less the kind of authority ascribed to him in Acts.) He could probably foam at the mouth at those he perceived as heretics, but if he came anywhere near "laying waste to the church", he wouldn't even be making bail

2. Persecuting a perceived heresy doesn't necessarily mean knowing it in detail. In fact, if we look at later people who wrote about heresies or persecuted them, more often than not they were not interested at all in learning exactly what it says. Even from the early Christians we have such probable distortions as talking at length about the teachings of some heresiarch called Ebion, although nowadays we're pretty sure that that's not why the Ebionites were called Ebionites.

Which incidentally would also be an example of how such a persecutor could mis-understand a person as real, although that person never actually existed.

3. Well, yes, but very late and what he says is that those had nothing to add to his gospel. Which is weird, unless indeed his gospel was no more than some vague ideas like "gentiles don't have to get circumcised", or you believe in actual divine visions. Any actual information about Jesus, his deeds and his teachings, surely James, the brother of Jesus and apparently successor to the leadership of the church in Jerusalem, and Peter, chief apostle of Jesus and designated successor, would have SOMETHING to add to a version that came from a hallucination.

I mean, if someone came and started trying to confirm with me something about my brother Max that he got from a hallucination, I'm pretty sure it would take a miracle for it to be so correct that I'd have nothing to add to it.

(It could, however, work that way if Paul just found Jesus in some OT verses and so did they.)

(my bold). In other words, despite this rhetorical flourishes, Paul is by no means a one man band, but feels the need to get his "circumcision free gospel to the gentiles" approved by the Jerusalem grandes fromages. So I don't think one can really draw the conclusion from Paul that just because he regards his specific revelation - *his* good news that the gentiles could be brought into the fold of the new church, as from God and not men - that he learnt everything about Christianity by direct revelation. If he did think that, he certainly does not stress it elsewhere apart from in Galatians, where he feels there is a specific need to.

Well, yes, but as I was saying, then it doesn't say he confirmed anything else. In fact his insistence that those guys in Jerusalem had nothing to add, would be entirely consistent with the hypothesis that either (A) he didn't actually run past them anything specific to Jesus, or (B) he was after all just finding Jesus in some cryptic OT prophecies. Now I'm not saying it was B, but even A doesn't leave us with Paul knowing a whole lot about Jesus.

 

[TimONeill2]

But that's basically just my problem. If it's just a plausible conjecture and it's conditional on a whole lot of assumptions, then there is nothing unreasonable in just not believing it.

Can you show me where I said it was "unreasonable"? I have already said that not accepting the historical Jesus scenario as being the most likely one is valid and that other, alternative interpretations of the evidence are, of course, entirely possible. But if you hold that position you need to come up with an alternative scenario to account for the elements we have in the source material and argue why and how it does so more plausibly. This is how historical analysis works.

It being a plausible explanation is far from being the level of proof at which one can write a whole paragraph about what's wrong with those who don't believe it.

Why do you keep talking about "proof" and "certainty" when no-one is asking for anything more than an argument for what is most likely. And I can't speak for anyone else, but the only comments I've made about "what's wrong with those who don't believe it" concerns this frankly stupefying incapacity to grasp that once you reject one analysis on the grounds that it is not the most likely scenario then immediately the onus falls on you to present an argue for an alternative that you think is more likely. This is how historical analysis is done.

And frankly, that's the way it works for just about anyone but Jesus.

[snip]

Only for Jesus we have the contradicting whammy of basically at the same time

A) admitting that history doesn't work that way, and a high level of certitude isn't even posible, yet

B) nevertheless putting up an act that isn't in any way justified for something that doesn't actually have a high degree of certitude.

Wrong. No-one is doing that at all. Of course a high level of certitude isn't possible - this is often the case when it comes to the analysis of ancient history; it's a function of the fragmentary, sporadic, biased and sometimes less-then-comprehensible nature of our source materials.

But when something is a conjecture depending on several IFs and personal considerations about plausibility, then there isn't anything unreasonable in not buying it. As long as it hasn't been actually proven beyond reasonable doubt, there is pretty much by definition room for reasonable doubt.

Fine. And then, after arguing why you find one set of conclusions about the evidence is not convincing to you, you go back to the evidence and use it to present an alternative that you argue is more likely to be true. That's how historical analysis is done. You keep skipping that second bit, for some odd reason.

But, yes, if someone said it's just a conditional best guess, and didn't then escalate it one way or another into an implication that nevertheless there's something wrong with anyone who doesn't believe that guess, sure, I can live that.

Most analysis in ancient history can result in no more than an argument for what is most likely. Yes, it's not definitive and never can be and yes it's subjective and can never approach "proof", but it's the nature of the discipline. " Just a conditional best guess" is an oddly backhanded way of describing it, but it is what it is. The fact remains that if you say "that analysis of the source material available to us is not convincing as the most likely" then you are implying that there is a better interpretation that fits the source material better. So the onus is then on you to present that alternative and argue why it is more likely. As I keep trying to explain to you, this is what historians do.

For some reason you don't seem to grasp why it's required of you to present and argue for an alternative and why just waving around some possible alternatives is not sufficient. You need to argue for one and show, in detail and with reference to the source material, why it is more likely.

We call this "the analysis of history". Are you ready to finally start doing it on this particular question? Because I am, and it would be nice change from chasing you in ever decreasing circles while you throw rhetorical dust in the air and pretend you're going somewhere.

 

[HansMustermann]

Of course you are right. But consider: there is a group of collected sayings that form a certain coherent group (ethical, apocalyptic, "option for the poor", prophetic, a call for a return to the spirit and not just the letter of the law etc). And we have another set of stories about a bloke wandering around in Galilee and ending up getting crucified in Jerusalem. And by the time Paul is writing, it seems (as he seems to know both strands of this), these two chunks were associated with the same person. And although one can place the Jesus material in the prophetic tradition, that does not mean that everything in the sayings was a copy of something in the prophets - far from it. The sayings material, found largely in Q, is really a novel block of material that came about and was collected and edited (as far as we can see) in the first century, already by the time of Paul but with no evidence for its existence before that.

Examples are:

No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a measuring bowl, but on a lampstand.
Whoever does not take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

The second of these is particularly interesting as it points to an understanding of the crucifixion in Q. In other words, as far back as we can trace any of this material (and in Paul that is within perhaps 10-15 years of the purported events) we see a close association of the life and words of a particular person.

Of course, it *might still be* that these traditions got fused, that someone made up (rather quickly, it seems) a body of teaching, someone else made up a story of someone's life, and they got fused; or someone got crucified, and they got a load of teaching (and healing etc) attached to their life story, etc. But I think that given what we know of the evidence, and the timeframe implied, all these seem unnecessarily complex. Why posit an (unevidenced) extra step in the middle, when you can much more easily see it at face value: a particular person said things somewhat like this, and had this life history? Again, isn't it the case here that one has to add an extra speculative step to the evidence we have in order to make this plausible, and if so, why do it? Do we have evidence, for example, of similar fittings out of coherent sayings that suddenly get attached to historical figures within a decade or so of their life, especially if the sayings are entirely consistent with the sort of person one understands that figure to be?

Well, yes, we have basically the stuff that's from the OT and the stuff that isn't. Nobody says that it's ALL made up, so, yes, the former doesn't contradict MJ. But then neither does the latter, which COULD be made up or embellished on the given theme of a crucified Jesus.

I mean, same as in War And Peace, a lot is based on the actual Napoleonic wars, and not made up, but the stuff that Count Bezukhov says, is made up.

The thing is, a message that one has to "pick up the cross" and follow Jesus, is exactly the kind of metaphorical thing I'd expect a church to come up with, if they're trying to say you should convert to their religion.

 

[HansMustermann]

Can you show me where I said it was "unreasonable"?

Try the last paragraph in #160 where you speculate about how those entertaining such scenarios are not doing it for objective reasons, but emotional and ideological. I'm sorry, you don't get to do such speculations unless you have indeed supported your version to such an extent that makes such alternate hypotheses disproven beyond a reasonable doubt.

I have already said that not accepting the historical Jesus scenario as being the most likely one is valid and that other, alternative interpretations of the evidence are, of course, entirely possible. But if you hold that position you need to come up with an alternative scenario to account for the elements we have in the source material and argue why and how it does so more plausibly. This is how historical analysis works.

Who cares how it works on one domain? Logic isn't domain specific. If something is logically sound, it's logically sound, and if it isn't, it isn't. There is no such thing in the definition of a fallacy as 'but only unless it's about history.'

And, as I was saying, it's about 2500 years too late to argue whether sophistry and personal disbelief are enough of a substitute, or indeed can be made a mandatory substitute, for good logic. It's just not up for debate any more.

If your domain can't do enough evidence, then nobody has any obligation to believe anything from it that isn't well supported, nor to play by your rules instead of logic. You can present your data and reasoning, and I have all respect for that, but basically cut it out with the pretense that just because you can't do a sound argument, you're entitled to reverse the burden of proof. You're not.

I mean, heh, if we decided that each domain can just set its own rules for what is enough evidence and what you must do to entertain any different ideas, then for a start you couldn't contradict theology without running it past an ecumenical council.

Why do you keep talking about "proof" and "certainty" when no-one is asking for anything more than an argument for what is most likely. And I can't speak for anyone else, but the only comments I've made about "what's wrong with those who don't believe it" concerns this frankly stupefying incapacity to grasp that once you reject one analysis on the grounds that it is not the most likely scenario then immediately the onus falls on you to present an argue for an alternative that you think is more likely. This is how historical analysis is done.

"Likely" and "plausible" are different things. If you want to claim probabilities, you have to support probabilities. Please do, if you think you can.

If you just want to claim what's plausible to you, though, then you really don't have much. In fact what you have is a texbook argument from personal incredulity fallacy. In which case, no, I don't have anything special to do to reject it, other than note that it's a fallacy.

Wrong. No-one is doing that at all. Of course a high level of certitude isn't possible - this is often the case when it comes to the analysis of ancient history; it's a function of the fragmentary, sporadic, biased and sometimes less-then-comprehensible nature of our source materials.

Well, bingo. Then please do refrain from speculations about other people's emotional and ideological grounds to reject what you haven't actually supported to such a degree of certainty that their disbelief is indeed unreasonable.

Fine. And then, after arguing why you find one set of conclusions about the evidence is not convincing to you, you go back to the evidence and use it to present an alternative that you argue is more likely to be true. That's how historical analysis is done. You keep skipping that second bit, for some odd reason.

Because I have no obligation in LOGIC to accept such a reversal of the burden of proof, nor any other attempts at redefining how logic works.

If your domain works by other rules, fine, you can keep them, but be aware that it doesn't really mean much more than that you have a whole bunch of conclusions that are very weakly supported, and indeed nobody needs to do anything special to disbelieve them.

Most analysis in ancient history can result in no more than an argument for what is most likely. Yes, it's not definitive and never can be and yes it's subjective and can never approach "proof", but it's the nature of the discipline. " Just a conditional best guess" is an oddly backhanded way of describing it, but it is what it is. The fact remains that if you say "that analysis of the source material available to us is not convincing as the most likely" then you are implying that there is a better interpretation that fits the source material better. So the onus is then on you to present that alternative and argue why it is more likely. As I keep trying to explain to you, this is what historians do.

Again, "likely" and "plausible" are very different things, and I haven't seen anyone actually support anything even remotely resembling probabilities. It might constitute an obligation on my part if you actually did show that the probability of alternatives is lower, but if it's at the level of what sounds believable to you that it might have happened, it doesn't.

But generally, who cares what they do? I have no obligation to accept that redefinition of the burden of proof and generally of how logic works. I don't have to do my own best guesses to think that dowsing doesn't work, and I don't have to do that to disbelieve your conclusions either. If your domain can't do much more than a best guess, conditional on some assumptions, then the thing to do is be aware at that and basically leave it at that.

I'm not contesting your scholarship or the use in what you do, mind you, but just the idea that a guess based on some other guesses are enough to start brow-beating about what's wrong with those who don't buy it. You can present your data and reasons, but please do refrain from the idea that it's so authoritative that anyone needs any reason to disbelieve it or ignore it completely.

For some reason you don't seem to grasp why it's required of you to present and argue for an alternative and why just waving around some possible alternatives is not sufficient. You need to argue for one and show, in detail and with reference to the source material, why it is more likely.

The reason being that I'm not making the positive claim and thus have no burden of proof

We call this "the analysis of history". Are you ready to finally start doing it on this particular question? Because I am, and it would be nice change from chasing you in ever decreasing circles while you throw rhetorical dust in the air and pretend you're going somewhere.

But that's exactly where you fail. Epically. That "chasing in circles" just tells me you're treating it as a sophistry contest, when you were asked to use logic. You don't have to chase me down, you have to present some evidence for your positive claims, because it's your burden of proof. If you still want it to stay at the level of basically so well supported, that you can speculate about one's emotional motives if they don't buy your conclusion, that is.

OR admit that the whole thing is just a case of what sounds plausible to you, in which case it doesn't have to be what sounds plausible to me. Or to Price, or to Carrier, and so on. We can then discuss what your evidence and reasoning are, and I'd indeed find that interesting, but then there is no objective basis to speculate about how one needs some special reasons to disbelieve it.

 

[TimONeill2]

Try the last paragraph in #160 where you speculate about how those entertaining such scenarios are not doing it for objective reasons, but emotional and ideological. I'm sorry, you don't get to do such speculations unless you have indeed supported your version to such an extent that makes such alternate hypotheses disproven beyond a reasonable doubt.

I asked you to show me where I said it was unreasonable to not be convinced that a historical Jesus is the point of origin of the later stories. You just pointed me to a post where I was saying something else - that I have yet to see an objective reason for presenting one of the various myther/ahistorical Jesus alternatives. There may well be one, (eg some piece of evidence indicating a proto-Christianity that believed in some non-historical version of Jesus), but I've never seen a mytherist come up with that. It would be perfectly reasonable to be unconvinced about the historicist position so long as you did so for some objective reason - some evidence indicating an ahistorical origin for the stories - and then presented a case that argued this alternative was more likely.

Which is why I keep asking you to do just this. You keep failing to do so. Why is that?

Who cares how it works on one domain? Logic isn't domain specific.

Luckily for me I didn't say it only works "on one domain". I specified "this is how historical analysis is done" because I keep trying to bring this increasingly odd discussion back to some actual historical analysis, while you seem desperate - frantic even - to avoid this.

Regardless of the "domain", if someone says "I don't think that is the most likely explanation of the evidence", they are saying they think there is another explanation they do think is more likely. And by saying that, they imediately have an onus to back up their statement with an argument as to why. That's how it works in historical analysis, in palaeontology, in geology, in detective work and in all kinds of other forms of analysis where people can't be sure, but work from inference from the evidence to assess what is likely to have happened in the past.

If something is logically sound, it's logically sound, and if it isn't, it isn't.

Quite. See above. So if you don't think the historical Jesus scenario is the most likely explanation of the evidence we have, it's now over to you to present your case for the scenario you think more likely and to argue why. I keep offering you the chance to do this and you keep running away.

"Likely" and "plausible" are different things.

Whatever. I'm happy to stick with "likely".

If you want to claim probabilities, you have to support probabilities. Please do, if you think you can.

Fine. I can start with the fact that a scenario which is based on a pure supposition (eg "well, they believed in a mythic Messiah, so then they ...") is automatically going to be less likely than one that isn't. Unless you have finally unearthed some evidence of Second Temple Era Jews who did believe in this "mythic Messiah". Because we have plenty of evidence of Second Temple Era Jews who believed the Messiah was going to be a historical human being, so that alternative isn't based on a supposition at all. Have you come up with that evidence yet, or will you keep dodging and weaving to avoid that one as well?

 

[HansMustermann]

I asked you to show me where I said it was unreasonable to not be convinced that a historical Jesus is the point of origin of the later stories. You just pointed me to a post where I was saying something else - that I have yet to see an objective reason for presenting one of the various myther/ahistorical Jesus alternatives. There may well be one, (eg some piece of evidence indicating a proto-Christianity that believed in some non-historical version of Jesus), but I've never seen a mytherist come up with that. It would be perfectly reasonable to be unconvinced about the historicist position so long as you did so for some objective reason - some evidence indicating an ahistorical origin for the stories - and then presented a case that argued this alternative was more likely.

Which is why I keep asking you to do just this. You keep failing to do so. Why is that?

Well, if you had read what I already wrote even on this page, you would know: I have no rational reason to do something that amounts to accepting a reversal of the burden of proof, and for that matter accepting that it's ok to go by something else than good logic.

In fact, it's entirely reasonable to be unconvinced, as long as the evidence for a HJ consists solely of conjectures and assumptions, based on even weaker conjectures and assumptions. I don't even have to have a better theory. I just need to note that your positive claim is ridiculously weakly supported.

And MY position is just that: I keep getting told that I should believe the HJ version, or that I need to go through loops X, Y and Z to not believe in a historical Jesus, but logic says I don't. And it's getting ridiculous to be told that, no, see, there's something wrong with me if I stick to logic instead of playing by whatever other rules.

And, really, I don't need to play by any domain-specific rules. The rules of logic are the same for establishing whether Santa exists as for whether Jesus existed. The notion that if one domain can't have good evidence, then I should accept to play by whatever handwaving contest rules they make up, is patently ridiculous.

The rules of logic are an objective enough reason, basically, thank you very much.

Luckily for me I didn't say it only works "on one domain". I specified "this is how historical analysis is done" because I keep trying to bring this increasingly odd discussion back to some actual historical analysis, while you seem desperate - frantic even - to avoid this.

And I'm sure that a homeopath somewhere is trying to get the discussion of his trade to go by the standards of evidence they use, not by those used by science. Who cares? I don't have to accept that. If his domain can't produce good evidence, that's not a reason to accept to have the discussion on his illogical terms, but to conclude just that: it doesn't have good evidence.

Regardless of the "domain", if someone says "I don't think that is the most likely explanation of the evidence", they are saying they think there is another explanation they do think is more likely.

Well, that's just as well then that that's not really what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the HJ hypothesis hasn't come even close to meeting its burden of proof yet.

And by saying that, they imediately have an onus to back up their statement with an argument as to why. That's how it works in historical analysis, in palaeontology, in geology, in detective work and in all kinds of other forms of analysis where people can't be sure, but work from inference from the evidence to assess what is likely to have happened in the past.

Actually, no, it doesn't in most of those domains. I can tell you that in geology for example it actually works by the scientific method, not by having a sophistry contest about what it really means.

In fact in virtually any science out there, nobody needs to offer anything whatsoever, until you have disproven the null hypothesis yourself. Otherwise, no, nobody has to come up with something better, to disbelieve your unsupported stuff. They can simply fall back to the null hypothesis otherwise.

Quite. See above. So if you don't think the historical Jesus scenario is the most likely explanation of the evidence we have, it's now over to you to present your case for the scenario you think more likely and to argue why. I keep offering you the chance to do this and you keep running away.

No. Your being unable to understand logic, does not constitute an obligation on my part to accept any new rules for how it should go.

And the above is just a fancy way to try to handwave in the argument from ignorance fallacy. The implication is that either I accept your unsupported nonsense, or accept the burden of proof for proving the negative. But that idea that unless I disprove something, it must be true, is just the textbook form of the argument from ignorance fallacy. I.e., far from being something I have to accept, it's something I can summarily reject because it's a fallacy, i.e., broken logic.

It's no different when the supposed duty to prove the negative or accept something is on the domain of history, than it is for the existence of Santa, or for the existence of God, or for homeopathy working. It just doesn't exist that way, and such an obligation doesn't exist. If the positive claim hasn't been supported enough, the other party really doesn't have anything else to do than point out the holes in the argument.

Whatever. I'm happy to stick with "likely".

All right, finally someone who actually wants to do probabilities. I'm all for that, really. Let the probabilities begin

Fine. I can start with the fact that a scenario which is based on a pure supposition (eg "well, they believed in a mythic Messiah, so then they ...") is automatically going to be less likely than one that isn't. Unless you have finally unearthed some evidence of Second Temple Era Jews who did believe in this "mythic Messiah". Because we have plenty of evidence of Second Temple Era Jews who believed the Messiah was going to be a historical human being, so that alternative isn't based on a supposition at all. Have you come up with that evidence yet, or will you keep dodging and weaving to avoid that one as well?

Err, wait, wait... arguing probabilities is ok, but you still need some support there. Postulating unsupported stuff doesn't become OK if you just used the magic word "likely". You still have to support that stuff.

The biggest hole there is that obviously any new religion has to have SOME new elements, or it wouldn't be a new one. If Christianity didn't change some elements from Judaism, it would still be Judaism. And they obviously had to SOMEHOW argue that the Jewish messiah had come and done his job, although he didn't meet the conditions the Jews were expecting. So, you know, go on. Show why is it unlikely that, given that they DID have to break the mainstream conditions, specifically that one would not be something they'd break. And by how much, if we're talking probabilities?

But, ok, I never was sold much on the cosmical-Jesus flavour -- other than granting it the status of a possibility -- so let's say I even grant that a bunch of guys in the 1st century CE were BELIEVING in a historical Jesus. I can go with that. Now what? How do you connect BELIEF in a historical earthly Jesus with the actual existence of such a Jesus, and with the idea that at least some of the stuff ascribed to him in the gospels has to be true. (Because otherwise if he did nothing similar to what he does in the gospels, I don't see how it counts as the historical Jesus any more than a random journalist counts as the historical Superman.)

As Darat repeatedly said, actually probabilities work against you for that part. Because if we distinguish between (A) the guys preaching a new religion, and (B) the heroes of their religious stories, the track record for recent religions is pretty bleak. While some people in category A necessarily had to exist, the characters of their religious stories didn't. E.g., while there must have been SOMEONE who came up with the stuff in the Quran, and we might as well call him Muhammad, the archangel dictating those stories to him didn't exist. E.g., while there was a guy called Joseph Smith coming up with the Book Of Mormon, we're pretty sure that the ancient Christian tribes in the book didn't actually exist. E.g., while L. Ron Hubbard did exist, we're pretty sure that the Thetans didn't. Etc.

So,. you know, go on. How do you get from belief to actual existence? What probabilities are you using there?

The second and probably bigger hole is that it's a complete mathematical nonsense to postulate that just the first step alone in some induction chains is what determines the final score of whether one is more probable than the other. Just moving from logic to maths -- because statistics ARE maths -- doesn't make nonsense any more acceptable. Mathematical nonsense isn't any more OK than logical nonsense.

The fact is that any final probability will be the product of the probabilities at each step, for simple induction. Which is another objective reason to not take seriously something based on long chains of guesses. (E.g., IF a word in Mark comes from Aramaic, and IF it's about Jesus, and so on.)

To illustrate what's wrong with using induction -- even when you have good numbers, not just mistaking personal plausibility considerations for actual probabilities -- let's take a hypothetical conclusion A that depends on assumptions B, C, D and E. Let's now say that for each of those, we can be about 80% sure that they're correct. It may seem like we can be pretty confident of the conclusion if we're that confident about each of the assumptions involved, but actually the maths works funnily there. For the whole chain to be correct, all 4 need to be correct, so basically you have to multiply probabilities. So you have 0.8*0.8*0.8*0.8=0.41. In spite of all four assumptions being pretty darned reasonable and decently supportable, the whole chain is only 41% likely to be correct, i.e., almost 50% more likely to be wrong than to be right.

But anyway, if you have two inductive reasonings that go over steps X1, Y1 and Z1 and respectively X2, Y2 and Z2, the final probability for both will be P(X1)P(Y1)P(Z1) and respectively P(X2)P(Y2)P(Z2). Pretending that one of them is more likely on the whole just because P(X1) > P(X2) is mathematical nonsense. You can't handwave the other factors away and pretend that just the first one matters. And doubly so when you just postulated that P(X1) > P(X2), but haven't actually shown that it is so.

And that was just for simple induction.

The more correct way to do it would be Bayes, where... yeah, it's an even bigger nonsense to argue that basically just the baseline probability for two conditions dictates which final result is bigger than which.

 

[TimONeill2]

Well, if you had read what I already wrote even on this page, you would know: I have no rational reason to do something that amounts to accepting a reversal of the burden of proof, and for that matter accepting that it's ok to go by something else than good logic.

So you keep saying. But you can calm yourself - no-one is asking you to do anything like that.

In fact, it's entirely reasonable to be unconvinced, as long as the evidence for a HJ consists solely of conjectures and assumptions, based on even weaker conjectures and assumptions. I don't even have to have a better theory. I just need to note that your positive claim is ridiculously weakly supported.

Yes, you keep saying that as well. Unfortunately, the nature of the study of ancient history means that a lot of the analysis has to be what you so breezily dismiss as "conjectures and assumptions". The way it works, of course, is that these have to be well-supported conjectures based on the evidence and reasonable assumptions given the context and what we can know with any degree of assurance. And yes, "well-supported" and "reasonable" are subjective measures. As I keep telling you, if you want maths or physics you're in the wrong discussion.

I'm currently reading a book on Flavius Aetius, the Fifth Century commander of forces in the Western Roman Empire who defeated Attila the Hun in 451 AD. In the light of your objection to historical analysis done on the basis of "conjectures and assumptions", I started counting how many times the author used phrases like " ... it is likely that ... " or " ... thus we can assume ... " or " ... so it seems reasonable to conclude that ... " and so on. He uses these phrases about six or seven times a page. That's because the nature of our source material for Fifth Century Italy and Gaul is so fragmentary, uncertain and often downright misleading that just piecing together a sequence for key events is a maddening detective process or like trying to understand a jigsaw picture when almost all the pieces are missing.

Since I've been reading this kind of analysis of obscure corners of ancient history for 25+ years, these phrases have never jumped out at me - it's just how ancient history is studied and will be until we invent time machines. And I've never had a hypersceptical contrarian come along when I'm discussing, say, Aetius' relief of the Visigothic siege of Arles in 425 AD and shout that what I'm saying is all mere "conjectures and assumptions".

Of course when I say "Aetius' relief of the Visigothic siege of Arles in 425 AD" I could say ""Aetius' relief of the Visigothic siege of Arles in 427 AD", since one source places it in 425 AD and another dates it to two years later. Given that these are the only two sources that mention the relief of the siege of Arles, this presents a bit of a puzzle. You see, ancient historical sources do things like that all the time and historians have to try to tease out and make a case for what is likely to have happened. The author of my book, therefore, sets out several paragraphs drawing on other evidence about when Aetius took up his military post in Gaul and on how long it would have taken him to raise sufficient troops and then march to Arles and how long a negotiated treaty would have taken to have been settled, given Aetius didn't have the imperial authority to ratify it. He concludes that "it is likely" (there's that word again) that he arrived in Gaul in 425, didn't get his army to Arles until early 426 and that the final treaty with King Theodoric didn't get settled until 427, thus the discrepencies in our sources.

All "(well-supported) conjectures and (solidly-based) assumptions" of course. A steadfast nitpicker with an agenda could conjure up all kinds of reasons he found it unconvincing. Of course, few hypersceptical contrarians have much reason to bother doing that with obscure sieges in early Fifth Century Gaul, so historians of the later Roman Empire are left to do what they do in peace and to discuss the relatively likelihoods of these events undisturbed. It's only when scholars start doing exactly the same thing with the equally uncertain question of the origins of Christianity that we get highly motivated unqualified contrarians with no grasp of the material and big axes to grind explaining to us, in many, many words, that the way history has been studied for several centuries now simply won't do at all.

Given that the nature of the study of ancient history almost always consists of piecing together strings of "(well-supported) conjectures and (solidly-based) assumptions" and then making a case that they are the best evidential fit, anyone could, given sufficient motivation, declare themselves "unconvinced" of a given conclusion. And that would still leave us with the (fragmentary) evidence and a question to answer. Of course, you can choose to fold your arms and smugly declare (as you have) "I don't have to have a better theory", but given how virtually anyone (however ignorant of the material) could declare themselves unconvinced of a hypothesis that is by necessity constructed from induction and fragmentary evidence, simply declaring yourself "unconvinced" is not very impressive.

Since you like analogies (even if you are quite hopeless at constructing valid ones) try this:

An expensive sports car is stolen from a quiet street one night and Detectives Smith and Jones are assigned to the case. Unfortunately the evidence is pretty thin. No-one was around at the time, no-one heard the car being driven off and there was a four hour window in which the vehicle could have been stolen. After questioning several nearby residents who were on the street in the relevant period, Smith and Jones do get several reports of two men loitering on the street before the car was noticed to be missing. More questioning about these men produce descriptions of one of the men which match a known criminal wanted for car theft. A finger-print found at the scene also matches that of a known associate of a local gangster in jail for organising a series of robberies.

SMITH: I think we should bring these guys in for questioning.
JONES: Really? Why?
SMITH: Well, they're obviously the most likely suspects.
JONES: But you don't know they stole the car.
SMITH: Of course I don't know that. But we have a fingerprint that says one of them was on the scene, a description that matches the other, one of them is a known car theif and the other is associated with organised crime. It's highly likely they stole it.
JONES: That's just a string of conjectures and assumptions.
SMITH: It's reasonable induction from the evidence. Given what we do know, it's likely they stole the car.
JONES: "Likely"? Can you determine that probability mathematically?
SMITH: What the hell is wrong with you? Anyone can see what I am saying makes sense.
JONES: (folds arms) Well, I'm unconvinced.
SMITH: Okay, so what's your theory?
JONES: Oh, I don't need an alternative explanation - I'm just unconvinced about yours.
SMITH: We still have the case to solve and we still have this evidence putting two known criminals on the scene. The car was stolen by someone, so do you have some other way to put the evidence together?
JONES: I don't have to.
SMITH: Then I suggest you get a new frigging job.

Of course in this analogy, Jones' job does mean he has to come up with an alternative hypothesis, but the point remains. Many times over the years I've come across people trying the same gambit - nitpicking at the basis for a historical Jesus, dismissing it as "conjectures and assumptions" (ie much like all analysis of ancient history) and then using acrobatic levels of dodging and weaving avoid presenting any alternative (thus sparing themselves from having to defend an alternative, inevitably based on exactly the same kind of evidence, conjecture and assumption).

In other words, it's simply a small-target tactic and one usually played by people who don't actually have a good grasp of the material who want to look as though they have something intelligent to say on this question. It was amusing to watch you try to nitpick at grahbudd's contributions above though. You demonstrated that your understanding of the history of the period is virtually non-existent, given some of the howlers you stumbled into. I can see why you are so desperate to keep avoiding presenting any alternative explanation for how the Jesus stories arose: the results would not be pretty.

 

[HansMustermann]

So you keep saying. But you can calm yourself - no-one is asking you to do anything like that.

You keep saying that. Yet at the same time, message after message you insisted that someone has to argue the opposite. That's not how the burden of proof works.

Yes, you keep saying that as well. Unfortunately, the nature of the study of ancient history means that a lot of the analysis has to be what you so breezily dismiss as "conjectures and assumptions".

That much I understand, and you've made it plenty clear in any case. What I don't understand is why then some people seem to think that means anyone else should take such weakly supported things seriously.

Yes, I get it. You can't possibly do more in this case than essentially argue that something sounds believable, if you read the texts in a certain way, and try to figure out what sounds believable. In fact, not only I get it, it's been clear to me from the start. We can quickly agree there.

But at the same time, that means it all still adds up quite short of adequately supporting the idea that he DID exist, by bog standard standards of evidence in almost any other domain. By necessity, in fact. I understand that. But, you know, that's just the problem, rather than an excuse.

In the end, it just means it's at a level that's better than nothing, for sating one's curiosity. Which is good, too, don't get me wrong.

Now if the purpose were just to compare what semi-informed guess (and I don't mean semi-informed as any kind of insult to your knowledge, but just saying there aren't enough good sources for anything near a properly informed one) sounds more believable because we have to put a chapter in a schoolbook, I'd even agree with what you're proposing, namely dropping the whole burden of proof thing and just starting arguing what sounds more believable. Just because, you know, we'd have to put something there.

But, at least for me, that's not the question. The question is whether we can have any reasonable degree of confidence of whether there actually was a guy at the beginning of it all, resembling at all the guy in the gospels, to basically give a damn about him. You know, some guy who we can have some degree of confidence that he said or did ANY of the stuff in the gospels. And then: WHICH of that stuff, and how do we know that?

For some the mere existence of some crucified guy that triggered Paul's psychosis is enough, and I'll even grant that it's not particularly unlikely. If one sets the bar low enough that even the existence of a crucified guy named Jesus, sure, even by sheer numbers alone, there were probably hundreds of crucified Jesuses.

But the claim never stops there. Invariably even those who profess that kind of a low bar, then come and pretend that that means he was a rabbi, had disciples, preached a certain philosophy, etc. Not saying YOU specifically, but just to show where I'm coming from.

And I can't even blame them, because really that's what makes such a Jesus be worth giving a damn about in the first place. Some guy who just had that name, but shared no other attributes, is not very interesting, innit?

But at any rate, as I was saying in that long message on page 1, that's what the question of a historical Jesus is about for me. Can I actually know, with any reasonable degree of confidence, that there was a progressive rabbi, as opposed to, say, a bandit, or an ultra-conservative Sadducee or Essene, or any of the other best guesses? Is there a reasonable amount of evidence to pin down any of those with any degree of certainty?

And basically you're telling me that, no, something like that isn't even possible. And really, that answered my question right there.

What more is there to discuss then? Would arguing which scenario that DOESN'T add up to pinning down such a Jesus with any degree certainty is more plausible, really change anything there?

The way it works, of course, is that these have to be well-supported conjectures based on the evidence and reasonable assumptions given the context and what we can know with any degree of assurance. And yes, "well-supported" and "reasonable" are subjective measures. As I keep telling you, if you want maths or physics you're in the wrong discussion.

Well, no, not really. It seems to me like it's exactly the right discussion, given the kind of discussions we've been having around here for the last year or so. It's not even that long ago that a thread was still raging that flat out proclaimed that everyone who disagrees with a HJ is some kind of conspiracy theorist.

The fact that, no, there is no way to get anywhere NEAR such a degree of certainty is actually pretty much my point all along.

I'm currently reading a book on Flavius Aetius, the Fifth Century commander of forces in the Western Roman Empire who defeated Attila the Hun in 451 AD. In the light of your objection to historical analysis done on the basis of "conjectures and assumptions", I started counting how many times the author used phrases like " ... it is likely that ... " or " ... thus we can assume ... " or " ... so it seems reasonable to conclude that ... " and so on. He uses these phrases about six or seven times a page. That's because the nature of our source material for Fifth Century Italy and Gaul is so fragmentary, uncertain and often downright misleading that just piecing together a sequence for key events is a maddening detective process or like trying to understand a jigsaw picture when almost all the pieces are missing.

As I was saying, I understand that. But that really means that if any point actually hinged on the accuracy of that -- as unfortunately a lot of stuff depends on Jesus having said it -- then it would be IMHO more than reasonable to start by asking, basically, "well, how sure can we be that the guy even existed? How sure can we be that he actually said that?" And if by the very nature of the beast we CAN'T have more than best guesses and plausibility consideration, then that's a no go as a premise for anything outside the field of history. The fact that we can't have much of a certitude is exactly what I've been getting at.

Since I've been reading this kind of analysis of obscure corners of ancient history for 25+ years, these phrases have never jumped out at me - it's just how ancient history is studied and will be until we invent time machines. And I've never had a hypersceptical contrarian come along when I'm discussing, say, Aetius' relief of the Visigothic siege of Arles in 425 AD and shout that what I'm saying is all mere "conjectures and assumptions".

Mostly because it doesn't really matter. There are no important points that hinge on Aetius's having said something at that particular siege, nor anyone starting threads flat out stating that I'd have to be some kind of CT-er to doubt Aetius. So basically it doesn't matter.

Essentially, the reason I'm not arguing why I shouldn't take Aetius seriously is that I already don't, and wasn't given a reason to.

Basically: for the purpose of sating my curiosity as to WTH was with the Huns there, sure, a best semi-informed guess is good enough.

But rest assured that, yes, I don't think Aetius's life and campaigns are an exact science either

Mind you, in other countries, they still use history and often pseudo-history to rattle sabres at other countries. In which case, yes, it kinda matters again whether there's any degree of certitude that crusader X did Y, and reason enough to note that it's FAR from the point where anyone needs to take it as a fact that said crusader even existed, if the sources for him are anywhere near as weak as those for Jesus.

Of course when I say "Aetius' relief of the Visigothic siege of Arles in 425 AD" I could say ""Aetius' relief of the Visigothic siege of Arles in 427 AD", since one source places it in 425 AD and another dates it to two years later. Given that these are the only two sources that mention the relief of the siege of Arles, this presents a bit of a puzzle. You see, ancient historical sources do things like that all the time and historians have to try to tease out and make a case for what is likely to have happened. The author of my book, therefore, sets out several paragraphs drawing on other evidence about when Aetius took up his military post in Gaul and on how long it would have taken him to raise sufficient troops and then march to Arles and how long a negotiated treaty would have taken to have been settled, given Aetius didn't have the imperial authority to ratify it. He concludes that "it is likely" (there's that word again) that he arrived in Gaul in 425, didn't get his army to Arles until early 426 and that the final treaty with King Theodoric didn't get settled until 427, thus the discrepencies in our sources.

All "(well-supported) conjectures and (solidly-based) assumptions" of course. A steadfast nitpicker with an agenda could conjure up all kinds of reasons he found it unconvincing. Of course, few hypersceptical contrarians have much reason to bother doing that with obscure sieges in early Fifth Century Gaul, so historians of the later Roman Empire are left to do what they do in peace and to discuss the relatively likelihoods of these events undisturbed. It's only when scholars start doing exactly the same thing with the equally uncertain question of the origins of Christianity that we get highly motivated unqualified contrarians with no grasp of the material and big axes to grind explaining to us, in many, many words, that the way history has been studied for several centuries now simply won't do at all.

Mostly because there is also a lack of people overstating how accurately or surely we can know Aetius was in one place or did something. So, you know, there is not much point in arguing that it ain't, as long as nobody say that it is.

As for the rest of your jabs there, in a nutshell:

1. Nobody is telling you that you have to do history otherwise. What is said is that if history can't support a certain character better than that, then basically there is no reason to take him or his existence too seriously.

And, really, the same goes for Aetius. Most of us already don't take him all that seriously either. There's just no reason to state the obvious.

2. "Uninformed"... well, one doesn't have a Ph.D. in homeopathy to note that its claims aren't particularly supported. Nor in acupuncture, nor in dowsing, nor in anything else. Essentially if an argument presented is invalid you don't really need to have more expertise than to know what's the fallacy involved. Getting into whether the premises are true WOULD take some expertise, but fortunately it's superfluous, because if an argument is invalid, by definition it can't be sound. If it WERE valid, then one would need the expertise to look at the premises, because that would be the only way to argue it as unsound. But if it's invalid, it gets to be unsound too automatically.

Given that the nature of the study of ancient history almost always consists of piecing together strings of "(well-supported) conjectures and (solidly-based) assumptions" and then making a case that they are the best evidential fit, anyone could, given sufficient motivation, declare themselves "unconvinced" of a given conclusion. And that would still leave us with the (fragmentary) evidence and a question to answer. Of course, you can choose to fold your arms and smugly declare (as you have) "I don't have to have a better theory", but given how virtually anyone (however ignorant of the material) could declare themselves unconvinced of a hypothesis that is by necessity constructed from induction and fragmentary evidence, simply declaring yourself "unconvinced" is not very impressive.

That rests on the assumption that it's better to have any information at all, no matter how flawed or unsupported, than admit to not know something.

But see, that's exactly what's been counter-productive and the number one source of woowoo for most of human history, if applied to anything more than just sating one's curiosity. There have been plenty of people, and there still are, who for example think it's better to read some horoscope than live with not knowing what tomorrow will bring. There have been people who thought it's better to consult the omens than live with the uncertainty of an upcoming battle. Sometimes with quite disastrous results. (See, Maxentius.) There have been plenty of people who preferred some speculation about what would Jesus think about witchcraft, than "folding their arms" and admitting that they don't really know. There have been, and there still are, plenty of people who prefer to pay good money to a dowser than admit they don't know whether there's water or oil there until they actually dig a well. There have been plenty of people who preferred to have some explanation of dreams and for most human history even allow it in court as evidence, than admit they don't really know it means anything whatsoever, or respectively who-dun-it. Etc.

It's really unsupportable that it's better to trust someone's guess, or to take an own wild guess, than just admit lack of knowledge.

Basically I'm with Socrates on that one

Don't get me wrong, curiosity is good and all, and I do appreciate a good work on history. I don't see any reason to take it TOO seriously unless it actually has enough good evidence. On some things it actually does. On the things it doesn't, it just doesn't.

Since you like analogies (even if you are quite hopeless at constructing valid ones) try this:

An expensive sports car is stolen from a quiet street one night and Detectives Smith and Jones are assigned to the case. Unfortunately the evidence is pretty thin. No-one was around at the time, no-one heard the car being driven off and there was a four hour window in which the vehicle could have been stolen. After questioning several nearby residents who were on the street in the relevant period, Smith and Jones do get several reports of two men loitering on the street before the car was noticed to be missing. More questioning about these men produce descriptions of one of the men which match a known criminal wanted for car theft. A finger-print found at the scene also matches that of a known associate of a local gangster in jail for organising a series of robberies.

SMITH: I think we should bring these guys in for questioning.
JONES: Really? Why?
SMITH: Well, they're obviously the most likely suspects.
JONES: But you don't know they stole the car.
SMITH: Of course I don't know that. But we have a fingerprint that says one of them was on the scene, a description that matches the other, one of them is a known car theif and the other is associated with organised crime. It's highly likely they stole it.
JONES: That's just a string of conjectures and assumptions.
SMITH: It's reasonable induction from the evidence. Given what we do know, it's likely they stole the car.
JONES: "Likely"? Can you determine that probability mathematically?
SMITH: What the hell is wrong with you? Anyone can see what I am saying makes sense.
JONES: (folds arms) Well, I'm unconvinced.
SMITH: Okay, so what's your theory?
JONES: Oh, I don't need an alternative explanation - I'm just unconvinced about yours.
SMITH: We still have the case to solve and we still have this evidence putting two known criminals on the scene. The car was stolen by someone, so do you have some other way to put the evidence together?
JONES: I don't have to.
SMITH: Then I suggest you get a new frigging job.

Of course in this analogy, Jones' job does mean he has to come up with an alternative hypothesis, but the point remains. Many times over the years I've come across people trying the same gambit - nitpicking at the basis for a historical Jesus, dismissing it as "conjectures and assumptions" (ie much like all analysis of ancient history) and then using acrobatic levels of dodging and weaving avoid presenting any alternative (thus sparing themselves from having to defend an alternative, inevitably based on exactly the same kind of evidence, conjecture and assumption).

Well, for someone who complains about the quality of analogies, yours fails too on several counts:

1. The evidence there is actually a LOT better than what we have for Jesus. A fingerprint for example is unique, out of the millions we compared, and can pretty authoritatively place someone at the scene. If it's in a stolen car, then that's pretty strong evidence. We DON'T actually have anything of the kind for Jesus, nor for any of his supposed associates. Heck, we don't even know exactly who most of his associates were, much less where did they go.

We'd love to have something as strong as the fingerprint in your analogy, but the real problem is that we don't.

I.e., your analogy is very skewed and paints a wrong image.

2. A basic principle of modern justice is precisely that something has to be proven (or let's say, "supported") beyond reasonable doubt in criminal justice. It does NOT go by which mostly-unsupported version sounds more believable. If the case connecting someone to a crime were as weak as that for Jesus, then turning it into a case of what weak conjecture sounds more believable would be, as a matter of principle, the wrong thing to do. The correct thing to do would be exactly to "fold one's arms" and conclude that there is not enough information to prosecute.

I.e., for an analogy, it actually points the polar opposite way than what you seem to argue. Not a very good analogy, to say the least.

3. A problem with most justice analogies is that they introduce an equivocation. "Evidence" in justice means something different from "evidence" in logic. Related, but different. In justice everything that gets allowed in court, no matter how irrelevant or false or misleading, is called "evidence". In logic, however, "evidence" means that which actually supports a conclusion. If there is no sound inference from it to a conclusion, then it's not "evidence" at all.

And that equivocation is a pretty unfortunate one, because it invariably is the reason why some people think that just dumping a bunch of nonsense into a thread is the same as presenting their "evidence", and start acting insulted when you tell them it isn't, in fact, evidence at all.

In other words, it's simply a small-target tactic and one usually played by people who don't actually have a good grasp of the material who want to look as though they have something intelligent to say on this question. It was amusing to watch you try to nitpick at grahbudd's contributions above though. You demonstrated that your understanding of the history of the period is virtually non-existent, given some of the howlers you stumbled into. I can see why you are so desperate to keep avoiding presenting any alternative explanation for how the Jesus stories arose: the results would not be pretty.

Look, no matter what you think is wrong with me, logic is still not something we can bargain about. If I can point out why something is a fallacy, I really don't need more qualifications than that. For that matter, nobody else does. Someone could be even the village idiot, and still be correct that you've used a fallacy. Broken clock, twice a day, and all that.

 

[ddt]

Sorry for not replying earlier, and I will get back to your earlier replies shortly.

I'm currently reading a book on Flavius Aetius, the Fifth Century commander of forces in the Western Roman Empire who defeated Attila the Hun in 451 AD. In the light of your objection to historical analysis done on the basis of "conjectures and assumptions", I started counting how many times the author used phrases like " ... it is likely that ... " or " ... thus we can assume ... " or " ... so it seems reasonable to conclude that ... " and so on. He uses these phrases about six or seven times a page. That's because the nature of our source material for Fifth Century Italy and Gaul is so fragmentary, uncertain and often downright misleading that just piecing together a sequence for key events is a maddening detective process or like trying to understand a jigsaw picture when almost all the pieces are missing.

Since I've been reading this kind of analysis of obscure corners of ancient history for 25+ years, these phrases have never jumped out at me - it's just how ancient history is studied and will be until we invent time machines. And I've never had a hypersceptical contrarian come along when I'm discussing, say, Aetius' relief of the Visigothic siege of Arles in 425 AD and shout that what I'm saying is all mere "conjectures and assumptions".

Of course when I say "Aetius' relief of the Visigothic siege of Arles in 425 AD" I could say ""Aetius' relief of the Visigothic siege of Arles in 427 AD", since one source places it in 425 AD and another dates it to two years later. Given that these are the only two sources that mention the relief of the siege of Arles, this presents a bit of a puzzle. You see, ancient historical sources do things like that all the time and historians have to try to tease out and make a case for what is likely to have happened.

But what is the nature of those two sources? Chronicles? Histories? Or did the writer use the Nibelungenlied and the Thidrekssaga as his two sources? Because that is, essentially what you do when you take the NT books as the sources to argue that Jesus existed. As to the Gospels: they're meant to convey Jesus' teachings, and are full of miraculous events we can throw by the wayside immediately, just as the dwarfs and giants and dragons from those Germanic myths.

The historic backdrop of the gospels is wafer-thin, as argued before. Pontius Pilate and the Sanhedrin are well-attested, but they feature in Jesus' arrest and crucifixion in a story that is unbelievable too in the way it went. Then we have John the Baptist, who for the rest is mentioned in only one paragraph in Josephus. The two Nativity stories of Matthew and Luke mention two Herods and Quirinius, but they're obviously later made up, and they contradict each other in every aspect.

Paul, or other letters, don't give us biographical insight into Jesus' life - not that they should, but I just mention it for completeness' sake.

Arguing who Jesus was from the Gospels is very much like trying to argue who the historical Siegfried from the Nibelungenlied was, on the basis of the identification of Etzel = Attila and Dietrich von Bern = Theodoric the Great, even though Theodoric was born after Attila died.

And yes, I'm well aware that the Theodoric you mentioned was another one - but at least a contemporary of Attila, and someone who battled him (at the Catalaunian Plains) - would be a better fit for Dietrich on that count.

 

[davefoc]

Sorry for not replying earlier, and I will get back to your earlier replies shortly.



But what is the nature of those two sources? Chronicles? Histories? Or did the writer use the Nibelungenlied and the Thidrekssaga as his two sources? Because that is, essentially what you do when you take the NT books as the sources to argue that Jesus existed. As to the Gospels: they're meant to convey Jesus' teachings, and are full of miraculous events we can throw by the wayside immediately, just as the dwarfs and giants and dragons from those Germanic myths.

The historic backdrop of the gospels is wafer-thin, as argued before. Pontius Pilate and the Sanhedrin are well-attested, but they feature in Jesus' arrest and crucifixion in a story that is unbelievable too in the way it went. Then we have John the Baptist, who for the rest is mentioned in only one paragraph in Josephus. The two Nativity stories of Matthew and Luke mention two Herods and Quirinius, but they're obviously later made up, and they contradict each other in every aspect.

Paul, or other letters, don't give us biographical insight into Jesus' life - not that they should, but I just mention it for completeness' sake.

Arguing who Jesus was from the Gospels is very much like trying to argue who the historical Siegfried from the Nibelungenlied was, on the basis of the identification of Etzel = Attila and Dietrich von Bern = Theodoric the Great, even though Theodoric was born after Attila died.

And yes, I'm well aware that the Theodoric you mentioned was another one - but at least a contemporary of Attila, and someone who battled him (at the Catalaunian Plains) - would be a better fit for Dietrich on that count.

Perhaps I didn't understand what you meant but John the baptist was mentioned several times by Josephus in passages that don't seem to have been questioned. It turns out there is a dating conflict between the date of JTB's death provided by Josephus and the date of the death of Jesus. that I didn't know about until I saw this comparison of JTB in the NT and by Josephus:
http://www.josephus.org/JohnTBaptist.htm

There is a description of an argument by an author in the article I linked to to reconcile Josephus with the NT in the link I provided. Either way here is another example of where the credibility of a NT account is challenged.

And of course, the credibility of gLuke is challenged by the fact that it appears that the gLuke author relied on Josephus for quite a few of his historical details.

 

[HansMustermann]

Dave, please do a search for "john" on that page. Actually he's mentioned in two short consecutive paragraphs -- the second one is a one sentence coda to the first one -- though basically still one episode. So I suppose technically DDT is in error, but really not by much. That page is padded with lots of stuff that's actually from the gospels, or they just consider related in some way, or is their own commentary. It doesn't mean that all of those are mentions of John in Josephus.

 

[ddt]

Perhaps I didn't understand what you meant but John the baptist was mentioned several times by Josephus in passages that don't seem to have been questioned. It turns out there is a dating conflict between the date of JTB's death provided by Josephus and the date of the death of Jesus. that I didn't know about until I saw this comparison of JTB in the NT and by Josephus:
http://www.josephus.org/JohnTBaptist.htm

There is a description of an argument by an author in the article I linked to to reconcile Josephus with the NT in the link I provided. Either way here is another example of where the credibility of a NT account is challenged.

And of course, the credibility of gLuke is challenged by the fact that it appears that the gLuke author relied on Josephus for quite a few of his historical details.

I had not the intention to doubt JtB. The mentioning several times is in the single 18.5.2 116-119 passage that your article quotes, BTW.

My general gist was that the historical backdrop of the Gospels is thin: only John the Baptist and the instances involved in the trial & execution - but the proceedings of the trial & execution then, again, is way off of how those really happened. And thus, as to documents from which to infer historical facts, the Gospels are closer to the Nibelungenlied than, say, to Tacitus, Josephus, or the Annales Regni Francorum.

 

[ddt]

I can give you several examples. The text of gMark contains some linguistic and grammatical oddities that have long since been noted. In fact, some of them were noted even back in the First Century, since the writers of gLuke and gMatt noticed them when using gMark as one of their sources and they tended to amend them or avoid them in their versions of the same story. And early scribes of gMark also noticed them and many of them did the same, creating variant readings at these points in the text of gMark in many manuscripts.

For example, in Mark 12:4 there is a parable where a vineyard's tenants beat up the servants sent to collect their rent:

"Then he sent another servant to them; they struck this man on the head and treated him shamefully."

The odd bit here is the Greek word translated above as "struck (him) on the head". In the text of gMark it is ἐκεφαλίωσαν which is a strange word which is found nowhere else in the NT and found nowhere else in any Greek text of the time. It is clearly constructed from the Greek word for "head" (κεφαλή) and it seems from the context to mean something like "to strike the head", but the word is unique and so sticks out to anyone fluent in Greek.

As I noted, it certainly stuck out for the later writers of gMatt and gLuke, since both avoided using this weird word when they retell this story, even though other linguistic correspondences show they were both using gMark as their source. Many early scribes copying this part of gMark also found it strange and either replaced it with something more familiar or added something to try and make it more explicable.

So why did the writer of gMark use this word, which seems to have been one he made up? It seems to be because he was working from a source of his own and one written in Aramaic. There is a (rare) Aramaic verb r'shīn which means "to pound, to beat, to grind", usually used in reference to milling grain, but which could be used figuratively in the context of a physical assault. If the writer of gMark did not recognise this word in his Aramaic source, it makes sense that he might mistake it as a verb based on the common Aramaic word for "head" which is r'sh. Thus his coining of a new word also based on the equivalent Greek word for "head" but which is found nowhere else in Greek.

Another example is found in a strange element in Mark 1:14; one that has often given Christians grief. Here a leper asks Jesus to heal him and Jesus does so, but beforehand the text has Jesus react to the request with anger (ὀργισθείς - "(he) became angry"), which doesn't seem to make much sense. Again, it didn't make sense to the writers of gMatt and gLuke who used this story in gMark as their source but left this odd element out completely. Some of the early scribes of gMark also couldn't reconcile this "anger" with the rest of the story, and so replaced ὀργισθείς with a more contextually explicable σπλαγχνισθεὶς ("[he] had compassion").

So where did the weird "(he) became angry" element come from? Again, from an Aramaic word - regaz, which had a broad range of meanings from "to be moved, to tremble (with emotion)" through to "to become enraged". The writer of gMark's Aramaic source clearly meant the first meaning, but the gMark author didn't understand the range of meaning and so used a narrower Greek work which only means "to become angry".

These are two examples of strange elements in gMark which are not found in their cognates in gMatt and gLuke and which make sense when we consider the difficulty of translating from a Semitic language like Aramaic into an Indo-European one like Greek. This is part of a mass of material that indicates that at least some of gMark is based on a written Aramaic source that pre-dates this "first" gospel. So the idea that "the writer of Mark just made it all up" doesn't fly - the writer of gMark was working from an earlier source and one which was in the language we'd expect of any historical Jesus and his earliest followers.

For convenience, I split my replies to your posts per argument.

Above, you basically argue that the Greek of the Gospel of Mark clearly contains Aramaic influences.

Why, then, should the conclusion be that Mark was working from an earlier Aramaic text? Why couldn't Mark himself simply have Aramaic as his native tongue, and use Greek as a second language? I think you'll find plenty of examples on this forum of an analogue, that people use expressions from their native tongue literally translated into English, or use the wrong translation of a word from their own language.

That assumption - Mark being a native Aramaic - is the simpler one, and thus preferable, according to Occam. I haven't seen you (yet) make an argument against that.

 

[ddt]

"Could well be"? Really? There's yet another one of these assertions that I see mythicist fans glibly parroting, yet what is it based on? To back this claim up, you would need to find demonstrable examples of Paul using τὸν ἀδελφὸν τοῦ κυρίου ("the brother of the Lord") or οἱ ἀδελφοὶ τοῦ κυρίου ("the brothers of the Lord") figuratively. If you can't do that (and you can't), you'll need to make a solid argument that they mean something figurative in the places where we find them used: Galatians 1:19 and 1Cor 9:5.

The problem here is that in both these passages Paul mentions this "brother of the Lord" and these "brothers of the Lord" in contexts where he also mentions other believers. So clearly there is something that differentiates them from other believers and makes them distinctive and worth mentioning in a way that separates them from other followers or disciples (eg Cephas). So to try to dismiss these as references to some figurative usages that simply means "a believer" or "a disciple" doesn't work.

Did I say it wasn't used in other ways and wasn't used figuratively? I didn't. Did I even say Paul didn't use it figuratively in places? No, because he clearly does. What I said was that when he uses it figuratively he uses a different grammatical form (ἀδελφῶν ἐν κυρίῳ - "brothers IN the Lord" - not ἀδελφοὶ τοῦ κυρίου - "brothers OF the Lord"). If you want to argue the differing usage in Galatians 1:19 and 1Cor 9:5 is also figurative, you need to actually do so. Make your case. In detail please.

I do appreciate the difference. And FTR, I do read Greek, so please don't come to me with the charge I wouldn't know what I'm talking about. However, I can't seem to find your quote ἀδελφῶν ἐν κυρίῳ. I checked Strong's concordance of all occurrences of κυρίῳ, but the only occurrence of that sequence of words is in 1 Philippians 1:14. However, that is a completely different grammatical construction: it speaks of brothers, trusting in the Lord. So, could you help me with finding a legitimate example of your claim? Because thus far, I'm not convinced your construction actually exists.

After that, we can go on with discussing whether Κυριος here actually means the Father or the Son.