What counts as a historical Jesus?

[SpuriusMaximus]

Heh. Actually what I'm saying is that you're doing a silly argument from an analogy that can't distinguish between something reasonable (like criticizing homeopathy) and something unreasonable (like criticizing physics.) But even taking it your way, how would you know if it's reasonable or unreasonable? You just professed an utter lack of qualification to judge if such a comparison would be justified or not, so on WHAT do you base knowing it's unreasonable or that asking to play by a domain rules is justified or not?

Because not only you just professed to not know enough to not be qualified to judge the actual argument, but that makes you equally unqualified to judge the merits of such a comparison. I mean even to proclaim that the method of domain A works better than that on domain B, hence that a comparison would be unjustified, it seems to me like you kinda need to be qualified to judge what data it used and what results it produced. Otherwise you don't actually know if whatever you imagine as history's method actually works better than Feng Shui's method, and thus whether such a comparison is actually ludicrious And you just said you don't know enough to make such a judgment. So on what expertise do you base any kind of judgment about that comparison or about whether your request is reasonable, then?

At any rate, since your argument is just stringing together a bunch of textbook fallacies, I'm afraid I'll have to ignore it. Come back telling me what to do when you have something that's, you know, sound

 

[TimONeill2]

But, again, you don't get to dictate what discussion should I be having.

NO, but I do get to give you some kindly and gentle guidance as to whether your "discussion" (such as it is) will be taken remotely seriously by anyone with training in the study of ancient history, or regarded as naive over simplification at best or doctrinaire and biased pig-headed contrarianism at worst.

Same as a Feng Shui proponent doesn't get to tell me that either I go by whatever method they use there, or have another talk. If my interest is if whether it can be supported to a standard that anyone else should take seriously, he doesn't get to tell me that no, I can't discuss THAT.

So now the whole discipline of history is the equivalent of Feng Shui? That speaks volumes about your lack of training or basic understanding. No-one is holding you to any standards that are unreasonable or that don't apply in other disciplines where we try to determine what happened in the past based on fragmentary and uncertain evidence. Aspects of geology involve this. So does much of palaeontology.

You keep repeating a question about how we can "KNOW" which bits of the biased and often fanciful material we are forced to deal with are true and which aren't. The answer is that we can't "KNOW" this. And this is often the case in the study of any period of pre-modern history, due to the paucity of source material. I keep pointing this out to you and (at one point at least) you accepted that this question is no different to a vast number of other such historical questions. But then you keep coming back to this naive conclusion that, because of this, the whole enterprise is worthless and we can't and shouldn't make any kind of judgement about what is likely to happen. Historians disagree (in fact, they'd find that childishly silly). So keep responding that if this is what you think, then perahps the analysis of ancient history isn't for you.

But you won't accept that either, for some strange reason. Christ alone knows why. So around and around we go ...

And basically neither do you about Jesus. If my interest is whether Jesus can be supported to a decent degree of certitude, not what is the most personally plausible of several largely-unsupported guesses, you don't get to tell me that I should be having the latter talk instead of the former.

I think it should be obvious to you by now that, as with many questions of ancient history where we are relying on fragmentary, biased and fancifully embroidered evidence, this one can't be supported to the degree of certitude that you would like. Historians don't have your problem and have no difficulty with the lower degree of certainty that you find so unacceptable. But your question has been answered on the degree of certainty front, so what are you hanging around for?

Or is your intention to browbeat everyone who doesn't have your problem with the study of ancient history until they agree the whole discipline should be abandoned or something? Good luck with that.

The point is basically just that: you can't take an un-corroborated source as true until proven false.

Translation: "You can't study ancient history at all and the whole shebang should be packed up and everyone sent home." Which is absurd.

If we could only deal with "corroborated sources" then, given the paucity of any source material at all on most questions, we'd be left with virtually nothing. So the way it works is we make judgements (oh noes! subjectivity!) on the likelihood (ditto!) that a source can be trusted on a given point, given what we know about it and the context of what it is saying. All of which is qualitative and provisional of course. And endlessly debateable. That's how ancient history is studied, whether the subject is the existence of Jesus or the causes of the conversion of Constantine or the ethnic identifications of Ostrogothic nobles in Sixth Century Italy. Until the invention of time machines, that's simply how it will always be.

You seem uncomfortable with that. Fine - others, including all professional historians in these areas, are not.

Except, again, nobody said that it's either all true or all false. You can drop that strawman already. Just repeating it one more time won't make it true.

The question is: how confident you can be that the stuff that's not disproven, but also not corroborated by anything else, is true?

It seems you can't be very confident at all. Fine. Others are more comfortable with a much higher level of confidence in judgements about likelihood than you. Perhaps you need to just accept this and move on.

The fact is that even ancient sources are not all born equal.

Did I say they were. Note where I said above that we don't just accept anything and everything wholesale - we make judgements (subjectivity!) about the likelihood (again!) that an uncorroborated source is telling us something useful. Which is why Acts, for example needs to be handled with great scepticism. Or why what Paul says about himself can be taken more seriously than what Acts claims about him in an embroidered, hagiographical and polemical version several decades later. This is why an element in gMark with fits with the arguably likely (subjectivity!) biases and needs of the later First Century is less likely (ditto!) to be historical than one which doesn't fit those biases and needs but does fit a First Century Galilean apocalyptic Jewish context.

Again, you can listen to Ehrman saying that too, if you don't believe me:

Why do you think he's discussing that, if that doesn't mean you can disbelieve some of them because they're inaccurate?

See above. Ehrman is saying exactly the same things as I am.

The question is: how would you know, if you didn't have corroborating evidence?

How many more times do I need to explain to you that we can't KNOW and that if you want that level of certainty then you are wasting your time running in circles in pretty much ANY discussion of what happened in the pre-modern past due to the nature of our sources. Christ knows, endlessly trying to explain this to you certainly feels like you're wasting my time.

You want to KNOW, Hans? You want a high level of CERTAINTY? You're in the wrong discipline. Maths and physics are down the hall, first door on the right.

And does it even make sense to base anything on a text, if everything we can check or make some inferrence about is false?

If everything in the text we can check or make some inference about is false, then we can't base anything much on it at all. But, as I explained to you about Acts, even that clearly fanciful and highly unreliable text has a core of correspondences with what we can glean about Paul from his letters. So we can discern that it is embroidering a received tradition or traditions about the historical Paul and not making everything about him up wholesale. Few historians use Acts as anything more than a possible outline of some of the things that went on in the early Jesus sect in the 30s, 40s and 40s AD, but that core is one of the indications that we shouldn't simply throw it out. Which is good, because, as dubious as it is, it's all we have on this subject.

This is how it's done. If you genuinely can't deal with that (and I do have quite a bit of doubt if this is what is really driving you, but anyway) then that's fine. But I'm running out of ways to explain to you that this is simply how many or even most of the more uncertain questions in pre-modern history are analysed.

 

[TimONeill2]

I think there is no doubt by the people that are following this thread that you believe that there is a consensus of foremost experts about the existence of an HJ.

What do you base your view about that on? Have you done a survey of the foremost experts on what their views about an HJ are? Could you provide a list of the foremost experts that you used in your survey and how you selected them? Or perhaps you could reference a survey by a foremost expert on the views of foremost experts on the existence of an HJ?

Could you describe briefly the evidence that the foremost experts base their opinion on that an HJ existed?

Given that we can count the number of professional scholars who have expressed any level of acceptance of the idea that it's more likely a historical Jesus didn't exist on the fingers of one hand, it's easier to do it the other way around. There's Robert Price and there's Thomas Thompson. And ... well, that's about it for professional scholars.

Then there are the bloggers, self-published hobbyists and amateurs. They range from the well-qualified and historically trained (Richard Carrier) to the prolix but dubiously qualified (Earl Doherty). Then we get off into the silly (Atwill, Carotta), the kooky ("Acharya S") and the barking mad (Pete "mountainman" Brown).

That's about it.

 

[maximara]

I agree that real experts are usually the way to go on any kind of quest for truth.

This is the biggest misconception out there about science physcial or social and is borne from an obsolete way of looking at universe: Newtonian.

The Newtonian view that there was some universal truth other there that science was looking for died with the coming of Mach and Einstein. The reality that Science makes models of the universe and makes predictions. If those prediction don't pan out or turn out wrong those models are refined or replaced.

There is also the issue of which expert opinion to believe. There is a huge number of experts that you might pick from to use as the basis of your personal beliefs on this.

As I pointed out the one field that is needed to properly look at this, historical anthropology, is absent. The closest thing you have is what amounts to methods primitive even by the standards of 40 years ago.


"There is not a shred of evidence that a historical character Jesus lived, to give an example, and Christianity is based on narrative fiction of high literary and cathartic quality. On the other hand Christianity is concerned with the narration of things that actually take place in human life." (Fischer, Roland (1994) "On The Story-Telling Imperative That We Have In Mind" Anthropology of Consciousness. Dec 1994, Vol. 5, No. 4: 16-18.)

A peer reviewed journal article published by the American Anthropological Association said in 1994 there was " not a shred of evidence that a historical character Jesus lived" and as far as I can see nothing has been presented to change that conclusion.

 

[TimONeill2]

As I pointed out the one field that is needed to properly look at this, historical anthropology, is absent. The closest thing you have is what amounts to methods primitive even by the standards of 40 years ago.


"There is not a shred of evidence that a historical character Jesus lived, to give an example, and Christianity is based on narrative fiction of high literary and cathartic quality. On the other hand Christianity is concerned with the narration of things that actually take place in human life." (Fischer, Roland (1994) "On The Story-Telling Imperative That We Have In Mind" Anthropology of Consciousness. Dec 1994, Vol. 5, No. 4: 16-18.)

A peer reviewed journal article published by the American Anthropological Association said in 1994 there was " not a shred of evidence that a historical character Jesus lived" and as far as I can see nothing has been presented to change that conclusion.

Since I've never heard of this "Roland Fischer" and his contributions to this area of inquiry, perhaps you could detail his arguments that backed up that bold statement.

How, for example, did he analyse the mention of Jesus in Josephus, Antiquities, XX.9.1? Because most historians would count that as a "shred of evidence". Since a single mention of several other such Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants in Josephus (our sole source on these people) is enough to establish a reasonable acceptance of their existence for all the other such Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants of the First Century, how did Roland Fischer argue in detail that we shouldn't accept Jesus on this basis as well.

Lots of details on Roland Fischer's arguments about this please. (I do hope he didn't just assert this ...)

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

NO, but I do get to give you some kindly and gentle guidance as to whether your "discussion" (such as it is) will be taken remotely seriously by anyone with training in the study of ancient history, or regarded as naive over simplification at best or doctrinaire and biased pig-headed contrarianism at worst.

How I'll be taken is an argumentum ad baculum and as such irrelevant. In any case, thank you for your concern, but I'll take my chances about that, really

So now the whole discipline of history is the equivalent of Feng Shui? That speaks volumes about your lack of training or basic understanding.

Actually, not really. It's just an illustration of the fact that I don't have to play by any discipline-specific rules. Logic and statistics work the same on any domain just the same, whether it's physics or history or Feng Shui.

No-one is holding you to any standards that are unreasonable or that don't apply in other disciplines where we try to determine what happened in the past based on fragmentary and uncertain evidence. Aspects of geology involve this. So does much of palaeontology.

To some extent. But they also don't tell me that in spite of that, there are some loops I must jump through if I don't buy a very weakly supported conjecture.

You keep repeating a question about how we can "KNOW" which bits of the biased and often fanciful material we are forced to deal with are true and which aren't. The answer is that we can't "KNOW" this. And this is often the case in the study of any period of pre-modern history, due to the paucity of source material. I keep pointing this out to you and (at one point at least) you accepted that this question is no different to a vast number of other such historical questions. But then you keep coming back to this naive conclusion that, because of this, the whole enterprise is worthless and we can't and shouldn't make any kind of judgement about what is likely to happen. Historians disagree (in fact, they'd find that childishly silly). So keep responding that if this is what you think, then perahps the analysis of ancient history isn't for you.

Well, the question wasn't how (you think) ancient history works, but

A) (as per the OP) what would count as a historical Jesus? Actually answering that would help, because that's always the subject of much equivocation.

B) my own question: about what confidence can we have in that?

Because, see, it kinda matters. Especially if, as you say, it's not black and white, but probabilities (ok, "how likely it is"), then it kinda matters how likely IS that claim, and what is the approximate error margin. If it's 99% likely to be version A, and we're pretty certain of that, then ok, we can disregard possibilities B, C and D. But if for example the probabilities for A, B, C and D are respectively 40%, 30%, 20% and 10%, then actually it's very reasonable to consider B, C and D too and there is an objective reason to want to do so.

You already answered that it's not very well supportable, nor exact, nor objective... so I'm a bit at a loss what problem you see with me from that point on. Half the time you seem to be trying to tell me what question should I be asking, and what kind of questions I'm not supposed to have an interest in. E.g., apparently I shouldn't be here if my question is about degrees of confidence in a result, and how well DOES it clear the other possibilities. But, seriously, why would I need someone to tell me what questions I should be interested in?

I never said I'm interested strictly in what answers you came here to give. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean I should only be interested in nails

But you won't accept that either, for some strange reason. Christ alone knows why. So around and around we go ...

Actually I can accept that, and I already did. In fact it's kinda been my point since before you were even here.

What I don't accept is that from there one can tell me to simply accept something as an authoritative result, not just IN SPITE that it doesn't have good evidence and can't have good evidence, but BECAUSE it doesn't and can't have good evidence. That's what simply doesn't compute for me.

In just about any other discipline -- and actually most of the time for history too -- a result is almost never simply a point. It's an interval or a collection of probabilities. And it matters how big it is. E.g., if someone tells me the result is 15 with a SD of 1, then ok, there would be something wrong with asking "so what if in case X it were 5?", since, well, 10 SDs away is as good as zero probability. But if it's with a SD of 10, then there is actually a good chance it could be 5 or lower. And if it's with a SD of 100, then there's no real difference in how likely it is to be 15 instead of 5. In fact, there's a good probability of it even being negative. Before someone can tell me that I should just accept a value of 15 and there's something wrong with me if I even consider a "what if it was 5?", they have to support that degree of confidence.

And even in history, while nothing has 100% perfect information, not every conclusion is equal. Some things are pretty well supported, some things less so. E.g., we're pretty darn sure where Troy is, because we have a buttload of inscriptions and all, but we're a lot less sure where the heck Atlantis was, if it even existed at all. E.g., we can have some decent and adequately supportable idea of who Socrates was, but we're a lot less sure about the supposed philosopher Timaeus. E.g., we can have a pretty good idea who Constantine was, when he lived and when he did, we're a lot less certain about queen Tomyris. E.g., we can have a pretty adequate idea who the Huns were and where they were, but we can't be anywhere near as certain about the Amazons.

Just because two things can both can be the subject of imperfect considerations, doesn't mean they're both just the same. And in fact, it kinda matters exactly where on that scale a claim is, and how confident you can be of it.

Only here I'm apparently some kind of heretic if I'm even interested in how exact it is, and what confidence can one have to exclude the alternatives. But it's kinda important to know if those other possibilities are in fact too improbable to even consider, or it's really a toss-up.

I think it should be obvious to you by now that, as with many questions of ancient history where we are relying on fragmentary, biased and fancifully embroidered evidence, this one can't be supported to the degree of certitude that you would like. Historians don't have your problem and have no difficulty with the lower degree of certainty that you find so unacceptable. But your question has been answered on the degree of certainty front, so what are you hanging around for?

Again, it's been clear to me all along. But the incompatibility still exists between positions

A) oh, it's really just a semi-informed guess based on incomplete and rather poor evidence, and a lot of personal incredulity considerations, and

B) ... but you have to take it seriously, unless you go through loops X, Y and Z, and accept a suspension of the normal rules of logic and a reversal of the burden of proof to boot.

I have no problem with people doing a case of A, if that's the best that can be done.

I do have a problem that in all of these threads someone is always coming with some version of B, i.e., "but you can't even consider the other possibilities." Because that's just incompatible with A.

Or is your intention to browbeat everyone who doesn't have your problem with the study of ancient history until they agree the whole discipline should be abandoned or something? Good luck with that.

Well, your ad-hominem considerations are still irrelevant, thank you very much

Translation: "You can't study ancient history at all and the whole shebang should be packed up and everyone sent home." Which is absurd.

Well, considering that I never said that, what strawman you can translate it into is fully irrelevant.

If we could only deal with "corroborated sources" then, given the paucity of any source material at all on most questions, we'd be left with virtually nothing. So the way it works is we make judgements (oh noes! subjectivity!) on the likelihood (ditto!) that a source can be trusted on a given point, given what we know about it and the context of what it is saying. All of which is qualitative and provisional of course. And endlessly debateable. That's how ancient history is studied, whether the subject is the existence of Jesus or the causes of the conversion of Constantine or the ethnic identifications of Ostrogothic nobles in Sixth Century Italy. Until the invention of time machines, that's simply how it will always be.

Nobody said you can ONLY use corroborated sources, but one can at least be aware of how well or how weakly something is supported, and about how well are other possibilities excluded. If an event has lots of good, contemporary, impartial and corroborating evidence, then it is indeed unreasonable to doubt it. When it doesn't, well, the more it doesn't, the less objective it becomes that you can't even entertain thoughts about what other possibilities exist.

Exactly WHERE on that accuracy scale a particular claim is, is kinda important. It's less reasonable to doubt Julius Caesar, than it is to doubt the Hyksos king Sakir-Har. It's less reasonable to doubt the institution of the vestal virgins in Rome, than it is to doubt that Herodotus is actually right about every woman having to prostitute herself before marriage in Mesopotamia. It's less reasonable to doubt the campaigns of Trajan, than it is to doubt that Sun Tzu actually had anything to do with a particular campaign of Wu against Chu. Etc.

Just because they're all based on less than 100% perfect information, doesn't mean they're all equally supported. Some things are pretty darn well supported, some a lot less so. Which is which, kinda matters.

And when accusations fly around (not necessarily from you, but then we weren't having these threads just to talk to you) that one is some kind of conspiracy theorist if one doesn't take one version as the authoritative truth, it kinda matters if it's supported to the point where it actually does reasonably exclude everything else or not. It kinda matters if something is supported more like Julius Caesar or more like Sakir-Har. The former is fairly unreasonable to doubt, the latter isn't.

You seem uncomfortable with that. Fine - others, including all professional historians in these areas, are not.

Actually I think if I want to know what professional historians think, I'll just cut the middleman and ask one For now the question was just what can be supported and how well.

It seems you can't be very confident at all. Fine. Others are more comfortable with a much higher level of confidence in judgements about likelihood than you. Perhaps you need to just accept this and move on.

I think the question in both logic and statistics is more like how well something is SUPPORTED, than whether someone is comfortable having a high degree of confidence in something that hasn't been supported enough to warrant it. I mean, some people are comfortable with trusting their 8-ball, but that doesn't mean such confidence is actually supportable as justified

Did I say they were. Note where I said above that we don't just accept anything and everything wholesale - we make judgements (subjectivity!) about the likelihood (again!) that an uncorroborated source is telling us something useful. Which is why Acts, for example needs to be handled with great scepticism. Or why what Paul says about himself can be taken more seriously than what Acts claims about him in an embroidered, hagiographical and polemical version several decades later. This is why an element in gMark with fits with the arguably likely (subjectivity!) biases and needs of the later First Century is less likely (ditto!) to be historical than one which doesn't fit those biases and needs but does fit a First Century Galilean apocalyptic Jewish context.

Well, that's just it: I have nothing against something based on subjective considerations like that. But if it's SUBJECTIVE, I have a problem with then being told I have no OBJECTIVE reason to even entertain thoughts about other possibilities. I mean, seriously, either its excluding the other possibilities is subjective OR it's objective. I can't be told that objectively I need to accept it, if it hasn't actually been supported as objective.

 

[Stone]

Given that we can count the number of professional scholars who have expressed any level of acceptance of the idea that it's more likely a historical Jesus didn't exist on the fingers of one hand, it's easier to do it the other way around.

There is also a telling analogy in the world of evolutionary research. Is there any single book or article that it would be practical/legitimate for a creationist to demand citations from that would uniquely clinch the theory of evolution? Clearly, the amount of work done on evolution in the modern world is simply huge. So what kind of demand is that? "Tell us where evolution is proved once and for all!" Anyone on a rationalist forum recognizes just how idiotic and impractical that kind of creationist demand is!

It's the same with modern academic Palestinian scholarship, a discipline that is loathed by fundies, and that is duly sustained by many an atheist, many a Jew, many an agnostic and many other professional rigorously prepared scholars equally outside the Christian influence. Modern scholarship in ancient Palestine cannot be boiled down to one piece of writing or research any more than the huge written achievements of evolutionary science can be.

I've encountered creationists who demand where the proof for evolution is, in which book! Or "Show us chapter & verse of just how evolution has become the scientific consensus!" What a demand! I suppose that if one is going to show how the scientific consensus developed, one just has to buckle down and produce the entire reading catalogue of the biological sciences section in the Harvard library!!! Clearly, an absurd proposition.

And I see no difference between that and demanding that one produce every comma of every piece of writing coming from every member of the Jesus Seminar, of the Harvard history department, of the Oxford history department, of the Cambridge, of the Yale, etc., etc., etc.

But we know the real reason why ludicrous inquiries like this are lodged -- by creationists and other fringe "theorists" whose agendas always precede their "research": to kick up dust.

Stone

 

[not_so_new]

I don't give a rat's &#^ how many historians or biblical scholars believe something, that is an amazingly bad reason to believe in a historical Jesus (or really anything for that matter).

Evidence is evidence and I see very little of it for a single individual being a historical Jesus. All the "evidence" I see presented from the historical Jesus camp comes from a text that is filled with a seemingly unending number of falsehoods and contradictions. How can (and more importantly WHY SHOULD) a book that gets so so much else wrong be considered accurate in this one instance?

As was mentioned earlier in this thread, we have the same evidence for Robin Hood as we do for Jesus.

- For both Robin Hood and Jesus we have whole groups of people appearing in roughly the same time period that could fit the bill.

- Both myths COULD be built around single persons or multiple individuals. If they are in fact built on actual people it is almost guaranteed that the characters we know in the myths bear little to no resemblance to the real persons or individuals the myth is based on (enough of a difference that this in and of its self should be enough to invalidate the "root person" theory).

That said, neither the Jesus nor the Robin Hood myth REQUIRES a real individual for the myth to make it to us in it's present form.

- We don't have a documented account from any first person witnesses for either Jesus or Robin Hood. In both cases we have stories that appear to be passed down orally for generations before the first written accounts begin to coalesce into the myth we are familiar with today.

With all these similarities between myths, why do so many people start with the premise that Robin Hood is either wholly made up or based so loosely on multiple individuals so as there isn't a single root person behind the story but these same people start with the premise that Jesus was in fact a real person?

It seems to me that most Western scholars are brought up in a society where it is assumed that Jesus was real and they can't break out of their own bias. If that is the case then h*** YES we should be questioning this, rather loudly I feel.

 

[llwyd]

Heh. Actually what I'm saying is that you're doing a silly argument from an analogy that can't distinguish between something reasonable (like criticizing homeopathy) and something unreasonable (like criticizing physics.) But even taking it your way, how would you know if it's reasonable or unreasonable? You just professed an utter lack of qualification to judge if such a comparison would be justified or not, so on WHAT do you base knowing it's unreasonable or that asking to play by a domain rules is justified or not?

So, how do we distinguish between homeopathy and physics? The latter is an established discipline with great track record, it's findings are generally accepted to form the basis of our understanding of the way the universe works. Homeopathy, hmm, not so much. It is said though that top level physics can be genuinely understood by only a handful of people on the whole planet - so maybe those few people are charlatans and cheats, as you can't tell, HansMustermann. The study of history is also a well established and respected professional discipline. There is only a handful of people in the world who can genuinely read and interprete these ancient texts firsthand, and they have formed a consensus opinion. I'm sorry, I really will go with the experts - it's the rational position and one that respects the profession and discipline.

 

[Stone]

All the "evidence" I see presented from the historical Jesus camp comes from a text that is filled with a seemingly unending number of falsehoods and contradictions.

Now, that's just flat-out wrong. Scholars don't confine themselves to Biblical "woo" for the earliest sources on Jesus the human teacher. We have letters and chronicles from the likes of Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius, the Mishnah, Josephus, and so on, not a Christian among them. The most telling reference comes from Josephus in Chapter XX of his Antiquities. Josephus came from a Jewish priestly family of the first century, c.e. Chapter XX mentions, among other things, a stormy episode involving the same priestly circles that Josephus came from. He was actually living in Jerusalem, a man in his twenties, when this episode rocked his world.



"And now Caesar, upon hearing the death of Festus, sent Albinus into Judea, as procurator. But the king deprived Joseph of the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to that dignity on the son of Ananus, who was also himself called Ananus. Since Ananus was that kind of person, and because he perceived an opportunity with Festus having died and Albinus not yet arrived, he called a meeting of the Sanhedrin and brought James, the brother of Jesus called 'Messiah', along with some others. He accused them of transgressing the law, and handed them over for stoning."



Here is a virtual eyewitness account by a contemporary of an event involving a member of Jesus's family, in which the writer, as a non-Christian, has no aim in mind of spotlighting Jesus or his family, centering his account on Ananus instead, who, as the new priest, was of much greater interest to Josephus. In fact, Ananus was ultimately removed because of community objections to his high-handedness in this episode.

Not only are there no textual variants in any of the Antiquities mss. for this passage, we even have this Josephan reference attested by Origen, who was writing at a time before Christianity had any chance to come out of the shadows, before the time of Constantine.

With an eyewitness reference of this kind to a member of Jesus's family from a writer who has no sympathy with Christianity, it is absurd to say "All the "evidence" . . . comes from a text . . . filled with . . . unending . . . falsehoods and contradictions". That's certainly how many today describe the NT; but that does not describe an historic chronicle from a priestly Jew!

Stone

 

[maximara]

Since I've never heard of this "Roland Fischer" and his contributions to this area of inquiry, perhaps you could detail his arguments that backed up that bold statement.

It doesn't matter if you have heard of Roland Fischer, given your comments I doubt you know who Dunnel and Binford are either.

The fact of the matter is that Roland Fischer published this conclusion not only in main text of the article in question but in the abstract as well.

"There is not a shred of evidence that a historical character Jesus lived, to give an example, and Christianity is based on narrative fiction of high literary and cathartic quality." (Fischer, Roland (1994) "On The Story-Telling Imperative That We Have In Mind" Anthropology of Consciousness. Dec 1994, Vol. 5, No. 4: 16-18.)

Show us the scholar that refute his conclusion; please note these refutes must cite the article.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

So, how do we distinguish between homeopathy and physics? The latter is an established discipline with great track record, it's findings are generally accepted to form the basis of our understanding of the way the universe works. Homeopathy, hmm, not so much. It is said though that top level physics can be genuinely understood by only a handful of people on the whole planet - so maybe those few people are charlatans and cheats, as you can't tell, HansMustermann. The study of history is also a well established and respected professional discipline. There is only a handful of people in the world who can genuinely read and interprete these ancient texts firsthand, and they have formed a consensus opinion. I'm sorry, I really will go with the experts - it's the rational position and one that respects the profession and discipline.

As I've said, deciding FOR YOURSELF that you're going to just skip the verifying the results part, and trust the guy whose credentials look all right, that's sane. Telling someone else that they can't check the evidence themselves, because the guys in funny hats said so, and actually based on NOT knowing what you're talking about, however, is as nonsense for physics as it is for history or homeopathy.

 

[Stone]

It doesn't matter if you have heard of Roland Fischer, given your comments I doubt you know who Dunnel and Binford are either.

The fact of the matter is that Roland Fischer published this conclusion not only in main text of the article in question but in the abstract as well.

"There is not a shred of evidence that a historical character Jesus lived, to give an example, and Christianity is based on narrative fiction of high literary and cathartic quality." (Fischer, Roland (1994)

It's tackled on a Wikipedia page. I can't supply URLs yet, but under the heading "Other things", in a page headlined User:Ari89/cmt,we have this --



"Fischer, Roland (1994) "On The Story-Telling Imperative That We Have In Mind" Anthropology of Consciousness Volume 5. Issue 4. December 1994 (Pages 16 - 18)
Not a historian, etc.
Makes basic assertions no scholar agrees with. E.g. claims no evidence for Jesus, oddly enough missing all the sources except one of the two mentions on Josephus.
Josephus' TF was a forgery because Hubert van Gtfifen b.1534 said so
In the footnote, Fischer thanks Michael Whitefield as the source for this theory on the origins of Christianity. Like Fischer, Whitefield was not a historian etc but a mystic and mathematician.
Is this Fischer admitting that there is a historical Jesus?
"Who was then "Jesus the Jew". Was he a fiction that became flesh or was he of flesh and bones to become narrative fiction. Jesus, the Galilean Jew, was independent minded, unscholarly (compared with Jerusalem Pharisees), "charismatic," a hasid, exorcist, healer, popular teacher—in short, a remarkable and in many ways admirable representative of a known type of first century Judaism. It was a type not much approved of by official Judaism, and totally ignored by subsequent Christian dogmatism" (p.17)

I am not sure that Fischer rejects the historicity of Jesus. It is simply an odd and confused article. For example, his arguments against Josephus are quite elementary (he is not even aware that there are two refs in Josephus to Jesus!) and he references obscure sources. For example, his arguments against the TF includes citing the opinion of "Hubert van Gtfifen (Giphanius), a Protestant scholar (born 1534)", Tanaquil Faber (1655) and Emil Schurer (1890). When it comes to modern sources, he cites book reviews of them (Times Literary Supplement and New York Review of Books). I would say 500 years behind modern scholarship is a bit of a lag.
It is just as dubious when we note Fischer's source for the information about Christian origins in the article. It is informal unpublished information, the acknowledgement reading: "I am deeply indebted to Professor Michael Whiteman, friend, scholar, and practising mystic, University of Capetown, South Africa, for sharing with me his superb pluridisciplinary knowledge about the origins of Christianity." I believe Whiteman was professor in the field of mathematics at the time.
Fischer does seem to talk of a historical Jesus: ""Who was then "Jesus the Jew". Was he a fiction that became flesh or was he of flesh and bones to become narrative fiction. Jesus, the Galilean Jew, was independent minded, unscholarly (compared with Jerusalem Pharisees), "charismatic," a hasid, exorcist, healer, popular teacher—in short, a remarkable and in many ways admirable representative of a known type of first century Judaism. It was a type not much approved of by official Judaism, and totally ignored by subsequent Christian dogmatism" (p.17)--Ari (talk) 13:21, 31 July 2010 (UTC)"



There's probably more elsewhere throughout the Web. <shrug>

Stone

 

[maximara]

Now, that's just flat-out wrong. Scholars don't confine themselves to Biblical "woo" for the earliest sources on Jesus the human teacher. We have letters and chronicles from the likes of Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius, the Mishnah, Josephus, and so on, not a Christian among them.

The problems is these sources are not as apologists present them.
Scott M. Oser gives a quick over view of all the "usual suspects" that the apologists trout out with all the pomp Don Quixote did regarding his "magnificent steed" in Historicity Of Jesus FAQ (1994).

Mishnah (sometimes called the Talmud) Jesus

The Mishnah Jesus has numinous problems apart from the fact that while it was was codified by Rabbi Jehudah ha-Nasi c200 CE is was not actually committed to writing until the fifth century. So at best we are talking about a document from 401 CE. G. R. S. Mead pointed out in Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.? (1902) that the story of this Talmud Jesus has several temporal markers in the story that place him in the 1st century BCE ie 100 hundred years before the Gospel Jesus was even born!

Suetonius

"Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus [Emperor Claudius in 49 CE] expelled them from Rome." (Claudius 5.25.4 of Lives of the Twelve Caesars).

Now we known from this same work in Nero 16 that Suetonius knew enough to note the difference between Jews and Christians. Also "Chrestus" was a common Greek slave name meaning "good" or "useful". It is a stretch to say that this refers to Jesus in any way shape or form.
Pliny the Younger

Pliny the Younger simply says he has having problems with some people that revere and "sing a hymn to Christ, as to a god". First, "Christ" was a title meaning anointed one and there were plenty of would be Christs running around promising to free the Jewish people from Roman rule (generally with disastrous results). Second, one key idea in many versions in Christ Myth theory is that the story was earlier then the 1st century CE ie before the Gospels Jesus lived. Finally, there is no mention that this Christ was ever a human being or any name connected to the title.

Josephus and Tacitus

Of these only Josephus and Tacitus point to something similar to the Gospels Jesus and here again we have the issues that they are so late c97 CE and c110 CE respectively .

Based on Tacitus getting the title of Pontius Pilate wrong and what he says about Christians he seems to at best repeating what he has heard rather than doing any research. This makes him useless.


Literally reams of works on the problems with the Testimonium Flavianum exist but in essence we know this part of Josephus has been tampered with and as such none of it is usable because there is no way to tell what he wrote and what was put in later. More over in Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (1912) Arthur Drews stated

In the edition of Origen published by the Benedictines it is said that there was no mention of Jesus at all in Josephus before the time of Eusebius [c. 300 ce]. Moreover, in the sixteenth century Vossius had a manuscript of the text of Josephus in which there was not a word about Jesus. It seems, therefore, that the passage must have been an interpolation, whether it was subsequently modified or not.

This leaves us with the James brother of Jesus passage. By the various temporal markers Josephus has in the entire passage we know this James died c64 CE by stoning. Problem is by Hegesippus, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Early Christian tradition ie basically everybody else the James brother of the Gospels Jesus died c70CE by being thrown from a battlement, stoned, and finally clubbed to death by passing laundrymen. (again, insert your own tasteless clean death joke)

More over, "(t)he Bible uses the term "christ" or "messiah" for a variety of figures, including all of the high priests and kings of ancient Israel" (Wright, Stuart A. (1995) Armageddon in Waco University of Chicago Press pg 296) and "In a characteristic typological reading he asserts that Moses himself was the first to recognize the glory of the name of Christ because he applied this title (in Greek as in the Hebrew, mashiah means simply "the anointed one") to the High Priest" (Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim (1993) Freud's Moses Yale University Press pg 91)

The entire passage end with "Whereupon Albinus complied with what they said, and wrote in anger to Ananus, and threatened that he would bring him to punishment for what he had done; on which king Agrippa took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made Jesus, the son of Damneus, high priest."

To be made high priest Jesus, the son of Damneus would have had to have been anointed ie he could have literally been nicknamed christ (with a little 'c') meaning this passage could be totally genuine and not have one thing to do with the Gospels Jesus!
So at the end of the day you have wishful thinking and either ignorance or purposeful ignoring of relevant facts in all the supposed supporting evidence.

 

[llwyd]

As I've said, deciding FOR YOURSELF that you're going to just skip the verifying the results part, and trust the guy whose credentials look all right, that's sane. Telling someone else that they can't check the evidence themselves, because the guys in funny hats said so, and actually based on NOT knowing what you're talking about, however, is as nonsense for physics as it is for history or homeopathy.

No, you can try and verify, so how were those languages and your training? In the meanwhile I could go verify the string theory, or do you want positive proof for the multiverse? There's no limit to what us amateurs can do!

The ID people know that: they have single handedly proven the evolution theory wrong - and all this without much experience in the evolutionary studies at all. And, apropos, I know a couple of demented engineers that could teach Bazant a thing or two about controlled demolitions and thermite.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, indeed, you could go and actually verify anything whatsoever, if you want to actually contribute anything. Or you could shut up, if you don't have anything to contribute. Otherwise just being the guy who barks for right gang, but doesn't actually know why, and bases it on no more than that it sounds to him kinda like what creationists do, is still as much failing critical thinking as what the CT-ers do. Epically, in fact.

ETA: plus, again, the same dismissive argument you make can be applied to anything else. E.g., who is Randi to think he can doubt people with tens of years of training and experience in dowsing, and that without being a dowser himself? E.g., who did Houdini think he is, to doubt and think he can publically expose as frauds people with tens of years of training and experience in spiritism? Etc. That alone should give you pause for thought. Unless you actually understand why some authority is right -- be it on dowsing or thermite -- or why the other guy's argument is wrong, frankly you have nothing to contribute and don't belong in a discussion about who is right.

 

[llwyd]

Well, indeed, you could go and actually verify anything whatsoever, if you want to actually contribute anything. Or you could shut up, if you don't have anything to contribute. Otherwise just being the guy who barks for right gang, but doesn't actually know why, and bases it on no more than that it sounds to him kinda like what creationists do, is still as much failing critical thinking as what the CT-ers do. Epically, in fact.

I think I already explained to you what is the difference between physics and homeopathy. Anyway, can you read those manuscripts and do you have the skills and experience of a professional historian? I would think that your heroic verification effort should start from that. If you rely only on second hand sources and interpretations, it really cannot be seen as historiography at all, so it might satisfy your good self, but probably the actual historians might be somewhat disdainful. Anyway, all the best for you in your lonely heroic quest to set this thing right!

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Actually, if you had actually read what I wrote, instead of just jumping in to be seen valliantly barking at the supposed CT-er, you would have seen that, yes, on numerous occasions I did refer to what the words or constructs are in Greek. In fact, a bunch of arguments hinge on the nuances of what some NT text says in Greek. Plus, translations of the relevant texts are not exactly hard to find, and I've linked to such texts several times. Nor are concordance lists for the words, in case I might have missed some nuance of a Greek word. Plus, we have other people around who can read Greek even better than me, e.g., ddt for a start, so the pretense that somehow we're all operating in some complete darkness is utter nonsense.

So, again, please base your objections on what you know, even if it's about what you think is wrong with me, not just on NOT knowing what you're talking about and imagining whatever makes your self-confessed ignorance be equally good.

 

[maximara]

I think I already explained to you what is the difference between physics and homeopathy.

Homeopathy has a plausible counter explanation for why it "works": the placebo effect.

The problem with a social science (like history) is that things are not the yes or no they are in the physical science (like Newtonian physics) the are more probabilities seen in quantum physics where matter can spontaneously appear and even pass through itself. These events are not impossible but they are unlikely.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Homeopathy has a plausible counter explanation for why it "works": the placebo effect.

Indeed. But what I was trying to tell him is that one needs to know at least that, to actually counter a homeopath. What actually 'disproves' homeopathy is precisely that it doesn't clear the null hypothesis, i.e., can't show that it works better than a placebo.

Just jumping in with some version of 'OMG, I don't understand any of that, but I tell you that you can't distrust the establishment' isn't even going to help much, because 'people are just mindlessly following the establishment for no good reason' is actually the #1 argument that alternative medicine and other crackpot theories are using. Even when siding with the 'right' gang, offering oneself as the living embodiment of that strawman is actually counter-productive IMHO. Yet it's surprising how many people think they're a part of the cool critical-thinking gang if they just jump in and go, 'nooo, you're not worthy of questioning the establishment'

The problem with a social science (like history) is that things are not the yes or no they are in the physical science (like Newtonian physics) the are more probabilities seen in quantum physics where matter can spontaneously appear and even pass through itself. These events are not impossible but they are unlikely.

Personally I tend to stay away from comparison to quantum stuff, because that's SUCH a darling of all kinds of crackpots, that IMHO it's better to just not create the association, even when you are right with the analogy

But, yes, you are correct, social sciences as practiced today are a matter of statistics. In fact, sociology is pretty-much a sub-discipline of statistics. Things are never just a matter of just saying 'it's black' or 'it's white', and never just 'because it makes sense to me', but is a matter of correlation factors, standard deviations and what confidence can one support in an interval. Exactly what room for deviating from the given result is actually a requirement for even giving such a result.