Evidence for Jesus

[HansMustermann]

I've got a bag of candy here, fruit crosses that come in three flavors. Apple, Peach and Lime.

I've just reached in and pulled out a single piece of candy at random, one of the three.

You have three possible hypotheses:

1) The piece I'm holding is Apple.
2) The piece I'm holding is Peach.
3) The piece I'm holding is Lime.

Now if you had access to information about the ratio of different flavors, wouldn't that affect your evaluation of the likelihood of any of those three claims?

Please, for just one moment, answer this question before launching into your opinion on how you think it may or may not apply to a historical Jesus.

If you actually had that information, including that those are the only choices, and if you then didn't try to use that as some kind of illogical divination to support a completely unrelated question like it's done for Jesus, then yes.

Bearing in mind that that example of yours has zero relevance to what I'm saying.

No, really, I have nothing against probabilities. I do have something against doing probabilities wrong, including just assuming something because it has a non-zero probability.

 

[Craig B]

No, really, I have nothing against probabilities. I do have something against doing probabilities wrong, including just assuming something because it has a non-zero probability.

Of course you are right, but to propose something with greater confidence because it appears to have a high probability is a sound procedure too. If there were lots of people called Jesus - as there were - and lots of peripatetic apocalypticists - then one can hypothesise an HJ with higher confidence than one could if that name and that vocation had been rare in ancient Palestine.

 

[HansMustermann]

Cavemonster:
Just to make it clear, actually Beelzebuddy explains perfectly what the problem is, but here is the longer version. You can't answer the question of whether my sister Maxine Mustermann gave away fruit-flavoured candy for Helloween, by handwaving extra elements like what are the odds that it was specifically Apple flavoured candy.

Those specific elements just carve the total probability that the event happened, into sub-slices. Any such specific case is just a slice of the total probability that Maxine gave away fruit-flavoured candy at all.

If
X = Maxine Mustermann gave away fruit-flavoured candy for Helloween
Y = and it was Apple flavoured candy

by necessity P(Y) is a sub-slice of P(X).

Even if you could establish that 99% of the fruit-flavoured candy sold in Germany is Apple-flavoured, you're still just arguing about P(Y|X), not about P(X). IF she gave away fruit flavoured candy -- and for that matter IF she even exists -- THEN it's probable it was Apple flavoured. But that doesn't tell you jack squat about P(X).

Just because Apple might be a popular brand doesn't tell you that there was any trick-or-treating there, or for that matter whether I actually have a sister at all.

In fact, I don't have a sister. No matter how far up you push the probability for for Apple flavoured candy, I still don't. You could even make it 1.0, as in, every single piece of candy manufactured was Apple-flavoured, or even if no human EVER made any other flavour candy, it still won't make Maxine any more real.

Do you understand how a 1.0 probability squares out with the fact that I don't have a sister and it never happened? Because it's a conditional probability about a different element of the story. It's a probability CONDITIONAL OF her existence and the event happening, not the probability of her existence.

 

[StankApe]

This is a fascinating thread. weird, frustrating to read at times, but fascinating. good work!

 

[HansMustermann]

Of course you are right, but to propose something with greater confidence because it appears to have a high probability is a sound procedure too. If there were lots of people called Jesus - as there were - and lots of peripatetic apocalypticists - then one can hypothesise an HJ with higher confidence than one could if that name and that vocation had been rare in ancient Palestine.

But that's a subset of the problem. As with the flavoured candy example, it's a sub-slice of the question of whether Paul and the gospel writers based it on a real person who actually preached any of that. You can argue that the conditional probability that IF such a person existed, one called Jesus is more likely than one called Abdul Al Hazred, but that still doesn't answer the bigger question.

Plus, if we're talking probabilities alone, then what you actually are arguing isn't a supportable HJ, but the probability to be right by random chance alone, rather than whether there's evidence or it's supported. Which, you know, was kinda the point of the thread.

I mean, equally I could tell you that there was an ancient Egyptian princess called Satbast (Daughter Of Bast) who did this and that. Is there a probability of some random person named like that existing in the 3000 years of ancient Egyptian history? Sure. Does it mean I actually know jack squat about it? Not really.

Plus, at the point where it's just that some random preacher called Jesus existed, it's as useless as having Lovecraft's insane mom as the historical Abdul Al Hazred.

And sure enough, hardly anyone leaves it at just that some random apocalyptic preacher called Jesus existed. Invariably some more elements from the gospel are heaped on him. Like that he had some specific views, he had certain disciples, etc. You also need him to die in a specific way (e.g., being flung with a catapult won't do), and for it to be in a somewhat narrow time window, and so on.

Once you actually include those, actually I dare say the probability to be right by sheer chance alone goes down a lot.

 

[StankApe]

This all seems to me to be a case of an individual feeling that something is absolutely true "Jesus Christ existed as a real person" then attempting to reverse engineer "proof" via a convoluted and easily confusing method (probability).

Perhaps I am completely off base here, but I can't see how this could have started as a true hypothesis "Did Jesus the founder of Christianity really exist? Or was he merely a fictional person created by the authors of a book of stories? " and resulted in the probability method stated in the OP.

You can only get as far as a bad limerick using probability to prove a person right?" there was a guy named bill who lived somewhere next to a hill..." nope I'm wrong, even that gives us more information.

I will try again, proving there were people named Jesus living in a Jerusalem during the 1st century ,who happened to be a carpenter doesn't prove anything more than what it states. Like the poser "what is the likelyhood that there is a jewish lawyer named Daniel in NYC?" I would say it's a pretty good possiblity, but that doesn't make it true. and it surely doesn't mean that this Daniel is the same guy from the bible reincarnated.(which using the stated method is equally plausible)

 

[IanS]

The question was not, whether it made the claims more likely to be true, but whether it made more likely the proposition that they were made about a historical person. The answer to that is of course Yes. We know that there were many messianic or apocalyptic preachers. We know that there were many people named Jesus. We know of at least one person who was both - Jesus b. Ananias (Yeshua ben Hananiah) though he was not crucified, but killed by a Roman catapult shot during the siege of Jerusalem.

No, it doesn't make it more likely that dubious claims of a messiah (which is how the claims were being described), were always, or ever, describing a real person.

Here’s what Cavemonster actually wrote -

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?

In that quote Cavemonster is saying that people were constantly claiming different individuals to be the messiah every 5 mins. I assume he means “different” individuals because he says this about “new cults springing up quite frequently”. Therefore I assume he does not mean that all these different cults always named Jesus as that messiah, especially since those messiah predictions had been constant practice since at least 500BC when the prophecies were first written in the Jewish OT.

That does not make it (as you say) more likely that all these mistaken and untrue claims of a prophesised messiah were naming specific & real individuals as the messiah. They may or may not have done that.

But if they did name specific individuals as the messiah, it does not guarantee that the named person actually ever existed. Eg, as in the case of Jesus/Yehosua, they may well have named someone who was thought to have once lived at some unspecified time in the past, but who was actually unknown to any of those claiming the messiah story.

All that can be said from Cavemosters hypothetical (quoted above) is that, if untrue and unreliable messiah claims had constantly sprung up every 5 mins since the first prophesises of the OT circa. 500BC, then if anything, by the time of the Jesus claims circa. 100AD, that history of false and untrue claims makes it more likely that all parts of such claims were unreliable and likely to be untrue … inc. the element of whether any named individual (such as Jesus/Yehoshua) ever even existed.

 

[HansMustermann]

I'd also like to finally address some loose ends, while I'm at it:

1. The recurring idea that somehow doing the same to modern stories aren't relevant because the ancients didn't do recreational fiction much, or even at all. This especially dismays me because it's essentially a repackaged version of the fundie argument that the gospel writers wouldn't lie about this or that, and it's saddening to see it being repeated by smarter people than that. People who should know better.

Actually, recreational fiction was widespread in the ancient world. WTH does anyone think most of the Greek and Roman plays were? And even fiction about historical events is at least as old as the Egyptian Wenamun novel (2nd millennium BCE), and it had pretty much exploded as a genre in the Hellenistic world around the middle of the 1st millennium BCE.

But that's actually a red herring. What is more relevant to the NT is that the following genres existed, and they can be damn well supported even for Judaea:

- propaganda fiction (including religious propaganda)

- symbolic fiction

- moralizing fiction

I mean, heck, half of the OT is at least one of those. And more crucially, about 90% of the gospels are that. E.g., all the miracles are religious propaganda fiction. They're invented to establish why their God is better, and the real one. And I don't mean specifically invented by Mark, but SOMEONE had to make them up if they didn't actually happen.

In fact, some of those genres are a constant of humans, rather than something which is specific to a culture or another. Even the most primitive tribes we found all over the world tell moralizing stories.

2. Much as they wouldn't mean anything anyway, some of the elements argued about a Jesus make it nearly impossible to falsify the story anyway. I mean, not only they're irrelevant, but they're nearly always true regardless of whether something is true or false. Hence they're useless as criteria.

E.g., the job has been mentioned a lot, and maybe I should have picked on that instead of the city, because it's one of these elements.

The thing is, even the vast majority of fiction uses real occupations. People may invent cities as settings for their fiction, but almost everyone in the story has a real world occupation. Soldier, knight, preacher, peasant, herder, etc. Unless the whole point of the story is explaining the fictive job Xnorg, you pick a real profession for your characters.

Even in the rare cases when some variation is invented for flavour, it's a minor variation of a RL job. E.g., a Jedi is basically a chivalric ideal knight with SF props, and a padawan is what IRL was called a squire. E.g., a Witcher is a sanitized and OOC version of the renaissance witch-hunter. Etc.

But most don't even do that.

E.g., Superman is a reporter. Batman and Ironman are industrialists. The guy extracting Little Red Riding Hood unharmed from the wolf is a woodsman. Han Solo is a smuggler. Jabba is a crime lord. The Dagon cultists are fishermen. Mario is a plumber. Harry Potter is a schoolboy. Ulfric Stormcloak is a medieval Norse-style Jarl. Etc.

So, really, that Jesus's supposed profession of carpenter is real... as opposed to WHAT? The probability of a story using a real profession is nearly 1 for both true and fictive stories.

 

[Last of the Fraggles]

I've got a bag of candy here, fruit crosses that come in three flavors. Apple, Peach and Lime.

I've just reached in and pulled out a single piece of candy at random, one of the three.

You have three possible hypotheses:

1) The piece I'm holding is Apple.
2) The piece I'm holding is Peach.
3) The piece I'm holding is Lime.

Now if you had access to information about the ratio of different flavors, wouldn't that affect your evaluation of the likelihood of any of those three claims?

Please, for just one moment, answer this question before launching into your opinion on how you think it may or may not apply to a historical Jesus.

Yes your example is correct but not analagous to what we are discussing.

For example, if you allow for the fact that you may not be holding a candy at all but may simply be lying then your probabilities based on populations become largely irrelevant.

Or try another example.... given that I am holding a green candy what is the probability that it is an apple candy selected from your bag which is 33% apple candies? (Bear in mind I could get the candy from anywhere, not only your bag)

If your bag was 60% apple candies what effect would that have on this probability?

 

[eight bits]

If there were lots of people called Jesus - as there were - and lots of peripatetic apocalypticists - then one can hypothesise an HJ with higher confidence than one could if that name and that vocation had been rare in ancient Palestine.

Not necessarily. You also ought to consider how the two contrasting circumstances go with each of the competing hypotheses, not just how well the circumstances go with one hypothesis.

"Realistic" incidental details are expected in lies, too. Typicality may have been directly chosen for its own sake if the Gospels were like Daniel, apocalyptic works in the sense of carrying a "veiled" message. In that case, the author would want the reader to identify the character readily as an instance of his type, without having to break genre to explain who he is.

Citing Daniel may be too exalted. On literary grounds, a lot of people think there was a stand-alone Passion narrative before any of the Gospels or even Paul. What is the Passion narrative? Looks to me like anti-Sadducee propaganda: the Temple authorities are in bed with the Romans, and together they kill some innocent guy who happened to be in town for Passover, who had lost it over what a bunch of crooks the Temple gang's money changers are.

Plenty good reason to tell a ghost story, seems to me. No "veiled" message, unlike Daniel, but neither the intention to deceive nor to be believed as an actual event, either. Just B&M about the PTB, told in a reliably entertaining way. Maybe somebody bought the teller a drink.

Anyway, to increase confidence in some chosen hypothesis, the evidence would need to go better with that possibility than it goes, "on average" (in a sense that could made rigorous if you use probability as a formal belief representation), with the suite of competing alternatives.

Maybe it does, and if it does for you, then that's swell. But it might not for the next person, and obviously, for many people here, it doesn't. The matter cannot be decided normatively, but some ways of approaching the problem may be better than others, without dictating the "right" conclusions.

 

[catsmate]

Actually as the John Frum and similar Cargo cults show this kind of movement can spring up without a clear founder.

Indeed. Any diligent student of mythology sees this, my favourite examples are the legends of people like John Henry,

You only have to watch James Burke's Connections series to see that the Great Moment hypothesis is more valid then the Great Man one.

That is a distortion of Burke's work and his hypotheses about the development of technology.

Who here knows of Nicolas Appert whose discovery that heat sterilized food netted him 12,000 francs prize in 1809?

Pretty much anyone who'd studied biology I hope.

How about Thomas Newcomen's steam engine used extensively from 1710 to 1765 when Watt improved the design?

Not that extensively (<80 units) , it was a poor design and very inefficient. Nor was it the first "fire engine" by far.

How about the Arc light (first electric light) demonstrated by Sir Humphry Davy in 1802?

That date is questionable, further Davy's "arch lamp" was nothing more than a curiousity until improvements were made, which took decades of work by others;.

How about British scientist Warren de la Rue who put a filament in a vacuum tube in 1840 long before Edison's more famous 1878 bulb?

He was indeed one of the first. Alas because his design wasn't commercially practicable he gets a footnote.

How about Louis Pasteur's 1877 discovery that a mold known as Penicillium notatum inhibited anthrax? In fact this discovery is indirectly referenced in Paul de Kruif's 1926 Microbe Hunters with the statement "Pasteur gravely announced, "there are high hopes for the cure of disease from this experiment," but that is last you hear of it, for Pasteur was never a man to give the world of science the benefit of studying his failures." More over there was a 1875 paper by John Tyndall to the Royal Society regarding the mold's antibacterial properties.

Actually the idea of using fungi to kill bacteria dates back to at least Parkington in 1640. Lister also describes the process. However it would take years of work, even after Fleming, for this process to become useful.

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, maybe, but religious stories are not written by those who have studied science and its history. In the case of Christianity at least, we have Paul's own word that his followers were not counted among the wise, but that's apparently ok, because his god deliberately wanted to make his story seem idiotic to the wise to confound them. And later early Christians were among the most rabid and vocal anti-intellectuals ever. Even those who did have a scientific education, dismissed it as something useful only for when you have to argue a philosopher.

So maybe among a few careful historians of the time, indeed they would know the who and when of great moments, like those you mention. But among the mass of Paulines, again, in his words, not counted among the wise, who were involved in that oral tradition, it seems to me like Maximara's conjecture has merit. Those wouldn't check who did what, or who did originate a certain idea, or which hero was first credited with some deed. but just invent, confabulate, repeat and embellish rumours about an event.

 

[maximara]

That is a distortion of Burke's work and his hypotheses about the development of technology.

I don't see how Great Moment (as opposed to Great Man) is a distortion of what Burke put forth in Connections. Carl Sagan talked about the Discovery of America around 1500 as being a Great Moment in Cosmos

Once can argue without Paul and those who wrote the Gospels, Christianity would have been just another doomsday cult quickly forgotten in the larger scheme of things.

 

[catsmate]

I don't see how Great Moment (as opposed to Great Man) is a distortion of what Burke put forth in Connections. Carl Sagan talked about the Discovery of America around 1500 as being a Great Moment in Cosmos

Burke's main contention (hence the subtitle of the series, "Alternative View of Change") was that the modern world was the result of unpredictable interaction between a vast number of independent factors and events. These were the results of individuals and groups acting for their own reasons, utterly unconnected to others.
In fact, it'd be closer to say that Burke in Connections does promulgate the Great Man theory, or a variant of it, with individuals or small groups acting for their own interests and with limited knowledge.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Burke's main contention (hence the subtitle of the series, "Alternative View of Change") was that the modern world was the result of unpredictable interaction between a vast number of independent factors and events. These were the results of individuals and groups acting for their own reasons, utterly unconnected to others.

That's the Great Moment idea in a nutshell, isn't it?

It isn't that the world sees occasional ubermensch who breathe inspiration and crap brilliance, but that things come together often and chaotically enough that sometimes everything just lines up well enough for whoever's in the room at the time to take one small, intuitive leap. Often enough it happens nearly simultaneously in otherwise independent circumstances. That's how we got Newton and Leibniz. Bell and Gray. Humorous pairing I can't think of at the moment in some field unrelated to the sciences, but upon reflection would totally fit the description.

 

[Fudbucker]

To address this too:

Except you just made my point. Adding a city or whatever DOESN'T and CAN'T make the probability of the actual claim go UP.

What is the probability that someone making the claim they're a lawyer is right? Well, P(X). What is the probability they're ALSO Jewish? Well, assuming they're independent, i.e., we're not stereotyping Jews as having more lawyers than the gentiles do, it's P(X)*P(Y). If not, well, it's simply P(X)* P(Y|X). I.e., now it went down. What's the probability that they're also a lawyer? It went down too. What's the probability that they're also in New York? Yep, it went down too.

If the question is whether that guy is really a lawyer, mixing such other elements in the mix can't make the probability go up, because the other probabilities you multiply with MUST be 1.0 or less. There's no way to multiply with a 2.0 probability for the extra elements.

Ditto for Jesus. It's nigh impossible to make the question of a HJ have a higher probability, by also mixing the city or whatever into the question. Best case scenario, you multiply by 1.0.

If a story contains some highly improbable element, like that Daniel Boone is a lawyer in R'lyeh, the probability goes down. But no matter how high a probability you multiply with, you can't push it higher than it was.

Well, not entirely. If you have some truly remarkable circumstances in some place and you know the condition to be true, that can differ from the baseline. E.g., if you knew that Jesus WAS crucified in Jerusalem, and that mostly rabbis got crucified in Jerusalem, that would push up your probability that he was a rabbi. But that still basically means you know that one of the probabilities you multiply with is 1.0, so you can take just the conditional part.

Sure it can.

"A cab driver was robbed on Tuesday in Alexander, Arkansas (pop 636)".
Probably not true.

"A cab driver was robbed on Tuesday in New York."
Probably true.

 

[maximara]

That's the Great Moment idea in a nutshell, isn't it?

It isn't that the world sees occasional ubermensch who breathe inspiration and crap brilliance, but that things come together often and chaotically enough that sometimes everything just lines up well enough for whoever's in the room at the time to take one small, intuitive leap. Often enough it happens nearly simultaneously in otherwise independent circumstances. That's how we got Newton and Leibniz. Bell and Gray. Humorous pairing I can't think of at the moment in some field unrelated to the sciences, but upon reflection would totally fit the description.

In the last episode "Yesterday, Tomorrow and You" Burke is quite blunt about it, talking about how the inventions discussed and many others "act as a network with each part interdependent on every other part".

The Day the Universe Changed did the same thing that Connections and the later books-programs like Knowledge Web (Connections 2) The Pinball Effect (Connections 3) and Twin Tracks did only it did it with the way we view the world.

In essence Burke is using what is known as system theory which is at the heart of the Great Moment concept. In fact, in the episodes "Distant Voices" and "Thunder in the Skies" we get two people who, if events had gone slightly differently would have been the "inventors" of the telephone (Elisha Gray) and the airplane (Wilhelm Kress).

 

[Brainache]

In the last episode "Yesterday, Tomorrow and You" Burke is quite blunt about it, talking about how the inventions discussed and many others "act as a network with each part interdependent on every other part".

The Day the Universe Changed did the same thing that Connections and the later books-programs like Knowledge Web (Connections 2) The Pinball Effect (Connections 3) and Twin Tracks did only it did it with the way we view the world.

In essence Burke is using what is known as system theory which is at the heart of the Great Moment concept. In fact, in the episodes "Distant Voices" and "Thunder in the Skies" we get two people who, if events had gone slightly differently would have been the "inventors" of the telephone (Elisha Gray) and the airplane (Wilhelm Kress).

OK, but this "Great Moment" concept still requires particular people to arrticulate the ideas. If it hadn't been Newton it might have been Leibniz, if not Columbus, then some other European Sailor and so on... The time was right, the general ideas were floating around, but someone still had to voice them.

Similarly, first century Roman Palestine (Or whatever we are calling the place this week) was an occupied territory with various levels of resistance happening all at once. Nobody is claiming that Judas The Galilean or Simon Bar Kochba were myths because no one who met them wrote eyewitness accounts of them, but I guess there might be, if there was a modern religion based on stories about those guys.

 

[HansMustermann]

Sure it can.

"A cab driver was robbed on Tuesday in Alexander, Arkansas (pop 636)".
Probably not true.

"A cab driver was robbed on Tuesday in New York."
Probably true.

Sure it can't, because you don't understand what I was saying. What I was saying is that the core claim, equivalent to the Jesus question, is "A cab driver was robbed". Adding "Tuesday" and "New York" narrows it down to a more specific claim, with a lower probability. Even for New York it's lower than WITHOUT constraining it to any particular place in the world.

Now "a cab driver was robbed" is a high probability event, so there is not much reason to doubt that it happened SOMEWHERE. In fact lots of them did, worldwide, on any given day.

But something like "Great Cthulhu rose from deep R'lyeh" is something so improbable, given all you know about the world and the Cthulhu myths, that you can have serious doubts that it actually happened. If nothing else, you'd probably have heard about it if a whole tectonic plate rose to bring R'lyeh up to sea level, causing all the earthquakes and tsunamis you'd expect, and a giant monster started the apocalypse.

Adding such details as whether it was on a Monday or a Tuesday, or whether it was in the Pacific or in the Mediterranean, can't make the core claim more probable. You can't, basically, go, "oh, there's more room for a sunken city in the Pacific, so he probably did rise." Adding a constraint like exactly WHERE the Great Old One awoke, can't raise the probability that he awoke.

No matter how many real world details you pile up on it, it can't make it more probable that Cthulhu rose at all.

 

[HansMustermann]

Also, again, a criterion or test isn't worth anything if it can't say "no". If it's a case of 'heads I win, tails it doesn't count' then that's just worthless BS. If it can't falsify a claim, then it can't confirm it either.

I COULD at least theoretically accept such criteria as "but the city is real" or any other detail being real, if people were also prepared to say, 'ok, detail X is false, therefore no Jesus'.

But that's not how it works, is it? The details that are false are discarded, and everything else is taken as still true. E.g., no such requirement to go to a different vassal country for a census? No problem, we'll just take it for example as Jesus being actually born at home in Nazareth. (There ARE bible studies professors who argue just that.)

Any detail that would make the story false is itself discarded and the story lives on, no matter how many of its limbs you had to lop off.

Now I'm not saying it's necessarily a good thing to discard the whole story for the sake of one detail or two dozen details being false. But then let's not act as if some detail being true makes the core story more true. If it can't falsify the core story -- and it clearly can't -- then it can't confirm it either.