Evidence for Jesus

[eight bits]

The prevalence of all of these things doesn't lead me to think the stories are more likely to be true.

More likely than what? That a Mormon cleric was hit by a spaceship from the Andromeda galaxy? I don't know about you, but I think a Mormon cleric being hit by a bus is more credible story than that.

More to the point, I think that there is a possibility of fruitfully investigating the bus accident, so long as the speaker maintains that she is reporting something that happened, while there is nothing worth investigating (to me) in the other report. Although it is possible to distinguish the quality of "investigation-worthiness" from a quality of "uncertain credibility," and both can involve the use of evidence, I don't think that that distinction is really an issue here.

In religious terms, I wouldn't bother to investigate the Hercules stories as truth claims, because they are set in "mythological time and place," which at most is reminiscent of, and occasionally intersects, the real Earth. Ditto Genesis (except to note that the farther along in that book you get, the more its setting begins to resemble places on a plausible Earth).

It is a hoot that (much) later than the authors, some Christians conflate a facially mythological work and a facially historical work (in intention, not necessarily in performance, see earlier post for Luke's mission statement), and call the whole thing a conjunctive fact claim, and find all of it to be true. That some people do that, however, wouldn't seem to be our problem.

OK, then, the guy in clerical garb lying in the street wasn't hit by an intergalactic spaceship. So, is he a Mormon cleric and was he hit by a bus? That's our problem, and there is something to investigate. Let's get on it.

 

[Brainache]

Just a quick question, Brainache, please.
From what I can gather, Crossan's line of thought actually denies the divinity of Jesus.
Is that right or have I missed something?
As I mentioned, I'm limited to online reading here, so any sources to clear up any mistake of mine must have on-line sourcing.
Thanks!
...

I don't think so. Crossan is a Catholic. The books of his I've read assume some kind of divinity behind it all, but to me it seems unnecesary. I understand that any HJ would have been religious and would have preached what he preached because he believed it was true. I think he was fatally mistaken. It was extremely impractical and naive. Exactly the kind of stupid "let's all just be nice to each other" idea that Forrest Gump might have come up with.

Crossan seems to think Jesus was actually a Messiah sent by God to save the world through his teaching, not his suffering. In "Excavating Jesus" he calls the idea that Jesus was required by God to die a horrible death for human salvation, a "Theological obscenity". So he is Christian, but maybe not a mainstream Christian.

 

[pakeha]

Thanks!
Off to read more now.

 

[Last of the Fraggles]

More likely than what? That a Mormon cleric was hit by a spaceship from the Andromeda galaxy? I don't know about you, but I think a Mormon cleric being hit by a bus is more credible story than that.

More to the point, I think that there is a possibility of fruitfully investigating the bus accident, so long as the speaker maintains that she is reporting something that happened, while there is nothing worth investigating (to me) in the other report. Although it is possible to distinguish the quality of "investigation-worthiness" from a quality of "uncertain credibility," and both can involve the use of evidence, I don't think that that distinction is really an issue here.

In religious terms, I wouldn't bother to investigate the Hercules stories as truth claims, because they are set in "mythological time and place," which at most is reminiscent of, and occasionally intersects, the real Earth. Ditto Genesis (except to note that the farther along in that book you get, the more its setting begins to resemble places on a plausible Earth).

It is a hoot that (much) later than the authors, some Christians conflate a facially mythological work and a facially historical work (in intention, not necessarily in performance, see earlier post for Luke's mission statement), and call the whole thing a conjunctive fact claim, and find all of it to be true. That some people do that, however, wouldn't seem to be our problem.

OK, then, the guy in clerical garb lying in the street wasn't hit by an intergalactic spaceship. So, is he a Mormon cleric and was he hit by a bus? That's our problem, and there is something to investigate. Let's get on it.

Hmm, actually if the Jesus story was that he arrived to Earth on a spaceship from Andromeda then we actually WOULD have something worth investigating and would actually add some credibility to the idea that Jesus might be something special.

The more likely comment was in relation to the fact that any story set in a real place is no more likely to be true than it is to be made up. The fact the location is real provides us with no information on the veracity of the rest of the story. Which I think you agreed with in your earlier post.

 

[tkmikkelsen]

Well there's this:

http://israel21c.org/news/house-from-jesus-time-excavated/

Ok, that I did not know off and I am probably wrong in thinking that there is no evidence of Nazareth in the 1st century.

Just one question to this excavation though. How do they know it is a 1st century city called Nazareth they excavating?
As far as I know, no known official record from that time mentions Nazareth. So is this a case of making the archeological find fit a myth, without much evidence of it being the actual Nazareth that Jesus supposedly grew up in that is being excavated?

 

[OCaptain]

Hi

I heard an argument from a ex-catholic atheist who proposed that there is no physical evidence of Jesus's existance dated from around the time he was supposed to have been alive.

I was wondering if this is infact the case?

There is no physical evidence of the existence of most people from the first century CE.

What does that prove?

 

[eight bits]

Last of the Fraggles

Hmm, actually if the Jesus story was that he arrived to Earth on a spaceship from Andromeda then we actually WOULD have something worth investigating and would actually add some credibility to the idea that Jesus might be something special.

The historical claim is that he is a man who was born to a woman. Even the religious claim beyond that, if you went by the black-letter of Luke alone, is that God approved of the meeting of sperm and egg. Evidently, God approves of many such meetings.

Even if you try to reconcile Luke and Matthew (the only other canonical account of the circumstances of Jesus' arrival), which itself would overlook the (to me) plausible hypothesis that Luke is correcting his predecessor's error, then you hit a historical brick wall. There is no natural way that anybody would know Mary's sexual history generatations later. The only bases cited by the author for his report of her friutful virginity are her fiance's dream and the author's absurd misreading of a text which we can compare with what he says it said. It didn't say that.

Whatever historically apprehensible "specialness" Jesus had was for something other than the circumstances of his arrival. Luke seems to be our witness that this was a problem for some people, since John the Baptist, Jesus' early-career supervisor, apparently was said to have had a traditional Jewish miracle birth (the firstborn of a post-menopausal woman, which is socially verifiable, a handy feature from both a wonder-story and a historical perspective). Births to "virigns" were social problems, not miracles, then and now.

The fact the location is real provides us with no information on the veracity of the rest of the story. Which I think you agreed with in your earlier post.

Yes, I did.

 

[IanS]

Evidence doesn't necessarily show that anything MUST be true. Evidence is information that changes the level of confidence that we can have that any particular hypothesis is true.

There is evidence FOR positions that are actually false.

For instance, a scientific trial is very good evidence, but it's not ENOUGH evidence until it's been replicated numerous times. And even then there's a non-zero chance it will lead to a false conclusion.

I think there is a fundamental misconception here about what relevant evidence actually is.

Any information may be evidence of something. But that fact is both trivial and irrelevant. The only relevant factor is whether your information is evidence of what is actually being claimed.

The information which Darwin collected about the physical characteristics of different plants and animals is considered to be genuine evidence for evolution because it supports evolution as an explanation for the origin of different species.

Information about the latest cricket score from Pakistan, is not evidence for the correctness or otherwise of relativity theory.

Evidence of the existence of a place called Galilee, is not evidence that a biblical preacher named Jesus ever existed. It may be evidence of something else, such as various aspects of civilisation in that region. But in itself, it is not evidence of Jesus.

IOW - what counts as "evidence" is only relevant if it is genuinely evidence of the truth of whatever is being claimed.

 

[Recovering Agnostic]

No, while it's true. I don't think that's relevant to the discussion we were having. It was actually the thing I was trying to avoid.

I don't think its the argument that originally was being made and it certainly wasn't the counter argument I was trying to make.

You may be right. It seems to me that the entire thread's skirting around the issue, but that's my subjective impression, and I'm happy to admit that I could be wrong.

 

[Last of the Fraggles]

You may be right. It seems to me that the entire thread's skirting around the issue, but that's my subjective impression, and I'm happy to admit that I could be wrong.

I think its partly my fault as I was struggling to express my point and find the correct way to express what we are talking about.

I think the issue at hand is whether there is a difference between the probability that historical Jesus is true and the conditional probability that historical Jesus is true given that, for example, Jerusalem exists or that crucifixion is a real thing.

 

[HansMustermann]

OK, but given that all the Scholars I've read about this say the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke (the ones who mention Bethlehem) were invented to shoehorn Jesus into some old OT prophecy, I don't see how it's relevant to the question of a HJ.

Well, maybe not to HJ per se, but to the dishonesty of the apologies for him.

The fact is, I'm told that, basically, 'yeah, but if it involved a non-existent city, we'd know it's false, but since Jerusalem is real, Jesus is more likely'. Well, there we have a non-existent city, and you don't see them actually do that. And even without that, all the provably false elements in the story actually just get glossed over, and we're told that, basically, 'yeah, but everything else, which you haven't disproven, that's still true.'

Even the actual criteria proposed for Jesus contain a pair that can't possibly make anything false. Namely:

- if something DOES fit pre-existing story and traditions, then it's probably not made up, but actually happened (e.g., hey, an apocalyptic rabbi is nothing special, why not accept him as true?)

- if something DOESN'T fit pre-existing story and traditions, then it's probably true too, because, hey, why would they make something like that up? (E.g., a Messiah that got himself killed to save anyone is not something that most Jews were doing or expecting, so why would Paul make that up?)

There's no way to run anything through that pair, all the way up to Cthulhu rising from R'lyeh, without getting one or the other to tell you it's not something Lovecraft would make up

 

[HansMustermann]

Absolutely, that's why I'm not talking about adding anything.

I think a lot of this thread is bogged down with the example of the city, which is a shame because it's clearly the weakest of the examples I dashed off at the beginning of this thread.

It would be a much better application of the principle of charity, and probably a little less apt to fall into (at least some of these particular) misunderstandings and tangents, if we were to discuss the prevalence of proclaimed messiahs or of crucifiction.

Except for the fact that you ARE adding stuff.

When I ask for example, if Paul actually knew anything about a pre-crucifixion Jesus, I am not putting any conditions of city, particular ideology, etc. He could be a Jesus from Rome for all I care. (I even speculated before about such a hypothetical Jesus Chrestus who lived in Rome and is the Chrestus that Suetonius mentions.) Just whether he knew anything about a live Jesus, period. Let's say that's P(X).

Especially since Paul doesn't exactly say much about such extra elements. Just because he claims some cultists in Jerusalem, doesn't necessarily mean that the whole ministry happened there. It may not be the most likely or plausible version, but a cult of Chrestus could have been expelled from Rome as Suetonius mentioned and decided to go back to their ancestral land, for lack of better ideas. Or they could have come from Galilee. Or whatever. I'm willing to just skip over that, and basically be OK with a Jesus from anywhere at all.

Introducing for example Jerusalem in the question, IS actually adding an extra element to handwave about. Now the question becomes: did Paul know anything about a Jesus AND was this Jesus from Jerusalem?

The most you can do with such a composite probability is get back to what it was before you introduced that element. If you can support that such a Jesus could ONLY come from Jerusalem, i.e., the second probability is 1.0, you're just back to the original question. It didn't raise the P(X) probability one iota.

What such elements can do is make it more improbable, not provide support for the actual question.

Yes, you could show for example that a Jesus from Jerusalem is more believable, and maybe even more probable, than a Jesus from R'lyeh, but both are subcases of the original question that didn't mention a city. You're just dividing the big cake into slices of different sized, and maybe even sorting those slices right, but that doesn't change the answer to the question of how big is that cake in the first place.

It's like if you asked me how much candy I gave my nephew and niece for Helloween, and I started to discuss how it makes more sense that the older and bigger nephew would eat more candy than his sister half his size. Sure, it may even be correct. I could make a pretty unequivocal case that probabilities are firmly in favour of his eating more candy than his little sister. But that doesn't answer the question of how much candy it was total.

 

[Cavemonster]

Except for the fact that you ARE adding stuff.

When I ask for example, if Paul actually knew anything about a pre-crucifixion Jesus, I am not putting any conditions of city, particular ideology, etc. He could be a Jesus from Rome for all I care. (I even speculated before about such a hypothetical Jesus Chrestus who lived in Rome and is the Chrestus that Suetonius mentions.) Just whether he knew anything about a live Jesus, period. Let's say that's P(X).

Especially since Paul doesn't exactly say much about such extra elements. Just because he claims some cultists in Jerusalem, doesn't necessarily mean that the whole ministry happened there. It may not be the most likely or plausible version, but a cult of Chrestus could have been expelled from Rome as Suetonius mentioned and decided to go back to their ancestral land, for lack of better ideas. Or they could have come from Galilee. Or whatever. I'm willing to just skip over that, and basically be OK with a Jesus from anywhere at all.

Introducing for example Jerusalem in the question, IS actually adding an extra element to handwave about. Now the question becomes: did Paul know anything about a Jesus AND was this Jesus from Jerusalem?

The most you can do with such a composite probability is get back to what it was before you introduced that element. If you can support that such a Jesus could ONLY come from Jerusalem, i.e., the second probability is 1.0, you're just back to the original question. It didn't raise the P(X) probability one iota.

What such elements can do is make it more improbable, not provide support for the actual question.

Yes, you could show for example that a Jesus from Jerusalem is more believable, and maybe even more probable, than a Jesus from R'lyeh, but both are subcases of the original question that didn't mention a city. You're just dividing the big cake into slices of different sized, and maybe even sorting those slices right, but that doesn't change the answer to the question of how big is that cake in the first place.

It's like if you asked me how much candy I gave my nephew and niece for Helloween, and I started to discuss how it makes more sense that the older and bigger nephew would eat more candy than his sister half his size. Sure, it may even be correct. I could make a pretty unequivocal case that probabilities are firmly in favour of his eating more candy than his little sister. But that doesn't answer the question of how much candy it was total.

Honestly, the fact that you keep concentrating on the city, when I thought I made it clear in my last post that the city was just one in a quickly dashed off list of examples of my broader point about evidence, and clearly the weakest one, makes me think you are having an argument with someone else, not me.

 

[HansMustermann]

It's an example like any other of an extra element which can't raise the probability for the original question. No matter what the element Y is, P(X) = P(X|Y) * P(Y) + P(X|~Y) * P(~Y), so arguing which of P(X|Y) and P(X|~Y) are larger, or whether P(Y) or P(~Y) is higher, it's still fully irrelevant fluff when the question is P(X). Now Y could be the city, or it could be the occupation carpentry, or crucifixion as a method of execution, or whatever else, but the principle is the same.

I'm using the city as an example because it doesn't matter which. In fact it doesn't matter at all which one I use. The same applies to all that extra fluff.

But the same can be said about any of those too, in case you need it spelled out.

E.g., about the job: carpentry doesn't make Jesus more likely. Not any more than the profession of journalist makes Superman more likely. And not any more than the profession of fisherman makes the Lovecraft's Dagon cultists more likely.

E.g., about the way to die, crucifixion doesn't make Jesus more likely to be true, any more than death in a duel makes Obi Wan Kenobi more likely to be true. (And hey, we know that in the high and late middle ages MUCH more people died in duels than in warfare. So it's a very believable way to die, you know?)

 

[Cavemonster]

I think there is a fundamental misconception here about what relevant evidence actually is.

Any information may be evidence of something. But that fact is both trivial and irrelevant. The only relevant factor is whether your information is evidence of what is actually being claimed.

The information which Darwin collected about the physical characteristics of different plants and animals is considered to be genuine evidence for evolution because it supports evolution as an explanation for the origin of different species.

Information about the latest cricket score from Pakistan, is not evidence for the correctness or otherwise of relativity theory.

Evidence of the existence of a place called Galilee, is not evidence that a biblical preacher named Jesus ever existed. It may be evidence of something else, such as various aspects of civilisation in that region. But in itself, it is not evidence of Jesus.

IOW - what counts as "evidence" is only relevant if it is genuinely evidence of the truth of whatever is being claimed.

Again, I wish I hadn't mentioned the city, it's the weakest example from my quickly dashed off list and everyone wants to concentrate on it.

Let's take the prevalence of populist preachers in ancient Jerusalem.

Since we know that new cults sprang up rather frequently around those parts around those days, and that someone seemed to be pronouncing someone the messiah every five minutes, does that make a historical person as the basis for the Jesus myth more or less likely?

 

[HansMustermann]

Let's look at 20'th century western world.

We know that neo-paganist cults sprang all over the place, including some reinvented from an almost complete lack of information about the original (e.g., neo-druidism), and some were even invented from scratch and with just the trappings of old religions and a good helping of satanism trappings (e.g., Wicca.) So doesn't an actual cult of Dagon sound believable in Innsmouth? Some fishermen praying for lots of fish to an old Mesopotamian god who actually granted lots of fish to fishermen, even makes sense. Plus, I mean, it would at most mean we have to push back the date when we know such cults gained popularity in America by a couple of decades, though a minor secretive cult doesn't even need that.

Or we know that the last half of the 20'th century was rife with apocalypticism. Not just half the Christians in America keep praying that an ancient God comes and kills them, but even UFO cults expect to be taken away by an UFO, and people buy every book predicting that some comet or planet alignment destroys the Earth, and, even more crucially, even old pagan prophecies like the Mayan one for this year are dug out and get people awaiting a supposed prophesied end of the Earth. So if I tell you that those Lovecraftian carols are sung by actual cultists of Cthulhu, it's not something unusual for the period or anything, right? Yet another cult praying to an ancient god to come back from his city of god and end humanity is just an ordinary thing to accept, right?

I mean, right?

The question is how well something can be supported, not whether someone's unsupported flights of fantasy are about mundane things.

 

[HansMustermann]

Just to make it clear, I'm not asking you to accept the miraculous parts of The Shadow Over Innsmouth or whatever. Why, clearly, people being the sons of their gods is clearly a metaphor. I'm not asking you to believe that the deep ones actually slept with human women. And going to live eternally underwater as the chosen people of an underwater god is a common afterlife belief of ancient sailors and fishermen and such, as a comforting thought about those drowning at work, not some transformation that happened while one was still alive. So, clearly, the oral tradition must have distorted those into actual practices of the good people of Innsmouth

But just a basic neo-pagan cult of Dagon is not that hard to accept, is it?

 

[Cavemonster]

Just to make it clear, I'm not asking you to accept the miraculous parts of The Shadow Over Innsmouth or whatever. Why, clearly, people being the sons of their gods is clearly a metaphor. I'm not asking you to believe that the deep ones actually slept with human women. And going to live eternally underwater as the chosen people of an underwater god is a common afterlife belief of ancient sailors and fishermen and such, as a comforting thought about those drowning at work, not some transformation that happened while one was still alive. So, clearly, the oral tradition must have distorted those into actual practices of the good people of Innsmouth

But just a basic neo-pagan cult of Dagon is not that hard to accept, is it?

The reason we know Lovecraft's characters are not real is that we have tons of direct evidence about how these stories came to be written, we know how they fit into the tradition of modern fiction writing.

Imagine that Lovecraft lived 2000 years ago, in a culture removed from our own in which written recreational fiction did not exist as a form as far as we know.

Imagine we didn't have any of Lovecraft's actual writings, but we had other people's transcriptions of the stories from 100's of years later.

How would we know if the cult of Dagon were real, what things would we consider when making our guesses and assigning probability?

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, that's kinda my point. Lacking the information that something is (probably/plausibly/whatever) false, is not the same thing as having information that it is (probaly/plausibly/whatever) true. If you lack anything that would prove the story false, it's not the same as supported, it just means it's at a not-disproven stage.

And just because something is mundane, doesn't mean it's supported or actually even reasonable to assume.

Now don't get me wrong, I can see why you'd want to put everything that doesn't ring alarm bells in a history book. If nothing else because otherwise you'd have lots of empty pages. I'm just saying that having some background elements that aren't disproven isn't the same as having evidence of the main story.

If you found an ancient horror story about a cult of Dagon in some obscure village, say, near Corinth, I can see how you might take some information at least provisionally from there. E.g., that, hmm, the cult of Dagon seems to have lasted longer than we previously thought.

All I'm saying is that then:

1. all the other elements in there, like that indeed the village existed, and it had plenty of fishermen, and so on, aren't really evidence that the rest of the story is true too. E.g., the actual existence of that cult of Dagon. They're extra elements which could lower the probability if they were false, but they can't raise it. At the end of the day you'd still take the information from there just for not being disproven, not for having support.

2. something being mundane doesn't mean it's supported. E.g., a cult of Dagon somewhere in ancient Greece isn't anything incredible, but it's not corroborated either. You may be generous or just pragmatic with your time, and not waste your time with chasing such mundane claims, but it still doesn't make it supported.

 

[eight bits]

Imagine that Lovecraft lived 2000 years ago, in a culture removed from our own in which written recreational fiction did not exist as a form as far as we know.

But that's the problem. We know that people in that time and place did write about their visionary experience as if the apparition was a real person, because that's what the epistles of Paul are. Pliny the Younger told a ghost story, more or less when the Gospels appear, about a real person, Athenodorus, encountering the ghost of a purportedly real person who, like Jesus, had some irregularity in his own burial arrangements, about which he wished to speak with somebody living. We also know that religious fiction featuring the pseudobiography of a charismatic preacher was a known genre, because we have the canonical Old Testament book, Daniel, which was written a few generations before Paul.

So, the inclusion of realistic place names, historical figures, occupations and police procedures allow us to narrow the plausible candidate genres of the literature that reaches us, but offers no discrimination among the genres remaining as viable, all of which demand ancillary realism. In some of those genres, Jesus would be a real person. In other genres, Jesus wouldn't.

Within the range of genres available to us in the actual problem, then, the evidence of "realism" doesn't discriminate between a real Jesus and an unreal Jesus.