What counts as a historical Jesus?

[IanS]

The oldest texts of the New Testament are not contained in the oldest surviving copies of it. They are found in later copies of earlier and more faithful copies that are no longer extant.

Computer assisted philology has provided us with extremely good quality biblical texts, with all copying errors and the occasional mediaeval interpolations corrected and excised.

Well that sounds like complete mumbo jumbo to me ... you say something is found in later copies of earlier copies, that no longer exist??

You found something in things that no longer exist?

 

[IanS]

Contents of Ancient manuscripts are evidence of what they are describing in relation to Antiquity. The contents of Caesar's Gallic War are evidence of events described by Caesar in that work. The Bible does not exist in some sort of special magical category of "non-evidence" simply by virtue of your personal feelings regarding its contents.

Although the historical evidence for the existence of Julius Caesar is commonly introduced as a comparison in discussions like this, I think it’s quite obvious that the analogy is not actually valid. To explain ...

... something like Caesars Gallic War (I have not read it) would not of itself be evidence of whatever that writing claimed. What makes it worth treating as “evidence” can only come from external corroborating sources, such as archaeological evidence of battles, or coins and statues, or buildings etc. Or, less convincingly, other contemporary writing from independent authors giving first hand accounts of those same events.

However, none of that appears to be true in the case of the gospels.

On the contrary, it appears that the gospels were written by unknown authors who were not themselves witness to any of the events claimed for Jesus, and where they were merely repeating hearsay stories obtained from other unknown unnamed storytellers. That in itself could never be “evidence” of the truth of what those gospels say.

To make any of that reliable as “evidence”, the gospels would at the very least need either some corroborating archaeological material evidence (as is invariably the case with Roman Emperors), or else as second best, at least external non-religious writing from authors known to be contemporary with the lifetime of Jesus and who were giving their own first hand accounts of what they actually saw Jesus do, and where those witness claims could be corroborated by other more independent contemporary records such as legal and other official documents of the day.

But in the absence of anything like that, the gospels could never be evidence of their own claims (and especially not when they are all about a miracle worker who rises from the dead to ascend into heaven).

 

[catsmate]

Well, you'd need something bigger than a 12 gauge.

I used a .375 the last time I shot boar.

Yeah I don't have much hope he'll present actual evidence for his claims.
And be careful with that popcorn, you don't want too much salt.
Have a muffin instead, quintuple choc.

Now there's an agenda for you !!!

What, asking for evidence?

Please can you demonstrate the validity of your apparent claim that the New Testament is evidence-free.

Hmm, strawman, shifting the burden of proof, loaded question, a touch of tu quoque; this isn't a game of "how many logical fallacies can you stuff into a non-answer".

No -- nor have I claimed such.

Untrue.

 

[Resume]

I used a .375 the last time I shot boar.

That ain't gonna fly for one of them wing-ed pigs.

Unless you're a trick shot.

 

[Akri]

Contents of Ancient manuscripts are evidence of what they are describing in relation to Antiquity. The contents of Caesar's Gallic War are evidence of events described by Caesar in that work. The Bible does not exist in some sort of special magical category of "non-evidence" simply by virtue of your personal feelings regarding its contents.

You seem to have skipped over the part in Dinwar's post where he says we can't use the Bible as evidence because we know parts of it are false. He's not dismissing it because of his personal feelings, but because it can't be assumed reliable when we know parts of it are entirely made up. Using the Bible as evidence without independent verification is like using testimony from a known liar as your only piece of evidence in a trial.

 

[Dinwar]

You are confusing the nature of evidence in the Humanities with the nature of evidence in the material sciences.

No. You, sir, are ignoring the context of this discussion. We are not discussing the literary merit of the Good Book, but the utility of that book as an archaeological source. We are asking an archaeological question, and therefore are obliged to utilize archaeological protocols. I'm not an archaeologist, but I've done archaeological work, so I'm more than passingly familiar with the more basic tennants.

The Bible is, at best, a secondary source. That means that at best it's going to be incomplete. This is no insult to the Bible; it's impossible for a secondary source to be complete. Secondary sources are compiled for a reason, after all, and that act alone negates any possibility of including all data.

Second, the Bible was compiled for a specific non-archaeological reason. Key information is often lacking. Parts are demonstrably untrue (in the sense of reflecting actualy history; they may or may not be true in regards to theology, which is quite irrelevant here). Parts of it are clearly metaphorical and poetic--whole boosk of it ARE POETRY. Doesn't matter for its intended purpose (religious instruction), but that makes the book horribly unreliable for archaeological work. AT BEST the Bible, as with any story, can point to something interesting. It can NEVER prove it, period. No exceptions.

Contents of Ancient manuscripts are evidence of what they are describing in relation to Antiquity.

Sometimes. Sometimes they're just made-up. I mean, do you REALLY think that Aesop saw a talking fox?

The contents of Caesar's Gallic War are evidence of events described by Caesar in that work. The Bible does not exist in some sort of special magical category of "non-evidence" simply by virtue of your personal feelings regarding its contents.

First, I don't know any competant archaeologist that would take Caeser's word for it--they usually go out and find the battlefield (your lack of interest in corroborating evidence is my best evidence of your incompetance in science; real scientists are obsessed with data). Second, you're right, my feelings on the Bible's contents are irrelevant--the fact that the Bible is a secondary source is what makes it not proof. Caeser's works would be a primary source. If you need me to explain the difference, please accept that you don't know what you're talking about; this is basic stuff.

I have specifically stated that it contains evidence, not "proof".

I detest word games and do not play them. You act as though the evidence you see in the Bible were proof.

This is a nonsensical statement -- the ONLY motivation for archaeological investigation in such a scenario is precisely that an Ancient manuscript is held to have provided evidence that the Archaeologist concludes that he should investigate.

You obviously know nothing about archaeologists. They're like me: they're field workers. If they can get someone to pay them to examine artifacts outside, they'll jump on the chance. And as often as not, the chance isn't to PROVE some manuscript, but to DISPROVE it. The History Channel and pop culture magazines don't advertise that fact, however. You have to actually research archaeology to learn it.

And I've no idea why you are gratuitously suggesting that my approach is somehow contrary to this principle. Are you reading your own notions into what I've written ?

You've made that accusation before, and it's always been false.

You want to use the Bible to support an idea (it's not worth calling a theory). THe Bible contains parts that are exagerated, parts that are obviously metaphorical, parts that are contradictory, and parts that are just flat-out WRONG. The Bible is also a secondary source at best, one which was compiled to serve a completely different purpose from archaeology, and which has been further edited, revised, and altered to suite political and theological agendas. Finally, if we ignore all that--and "all that" is so damning that no archaeologist would permit any other document that had "all that" going against it into a serious discussion, but you insist that we allow you to play by special rules--the Bible includes four documents of Jesus' life, three of which were derived from the same source; it therefore counts as a grand total of two documents, which often contradict one another.

The Bible is, by all objective measures, a poor source of archaeological evidence. At best it might inspire an archaeologist to look in some direction--but inspiration is not evidence, and even the most devoute archaeologist would immediately seek data corroborating the stories in the Bible.

Oh, I should also point out that even referring to "The Bible" as one book is a historical error. In the past, Bibles were sets of books--someone would copy, say, the Book of Genesis, along with commentary and prayers and other such addenda, and bind it into a book. Then someone else would copy, say, Leviticus, again along with much addenda. It wasn't until fairly recently that a Bible referred to a single bound book. So your historical source CANNOT be the Bible; it has to be some PART OF the Bible.

Oh yes, I agree. I was a bit sloppy in my writing and didn't mean to imply the didn't copy the Roman and Greek writers at all, just on a much more limited scale than that they copied the Bible.

No worries--I was being more than a little pedantic, mostly because I find that stuff very interesting. Mostly, I used you as an excuse.

To make any of that reliable as “evidence”, the gospels would at the very least need either some corroborating archaeological material evidence (as is invariably the case with Roman Emperors), or else as second best, at least external non-religious writing from authors known to be contemporary with the lifetime of Jesus and who were giving their own first hand accounts of what they actually saw Jesus do, and where those witness claims could be corroborated by other more independent contemporary records such as legal and other official documents of the day.

I'd be happy if it simply didn't make glarring historical errors, such as non-existent taxes and screwing up how crucifixians work.

 

[Lucian]

The oldest texts of the New Testament are not contained in the oldest surviving copies of it. They are found in later copies of earlier and more faithful copies that are no longer extant.

Computer assisted philology has provided us with extremely good quality biblical texts, with all copying errors and the occasional mediaeval interpolations corrected and excised.

Well that sounds like complete mumbo jumbo to me ... you say something is found in later copies of earlier copies, that no longer exist??

You found something in things that no longer exist?

JP's post is difficult to follow, but I think I understand what he's talking about, and he has a point. Kind of. I'm going to ignore the ancient/biblical context and leap to the Middle Ages, where I am more comfortable.

Suppose we have two manuscripts of the same work. The manuscripts themselves can be dated fairly firmly: manuscript X is from the 12th century; manuscript Y is from the late fourteenth century. Neither manuscript is original; they are both copies, and their exemplars probably had exemplars. Despite its comparative youth, the evidence (philological, textual and contextual, for instance) suggests that manuscript Y is a more faithful copy than the older manuscript X. Therefore, it could be said that manuscript Y preserves an "older" version of the work, although its exemplar does not survive.

 

[Dinwar]

Except that all "[c]omputer assisted philology" can do is tell us which copy is best, NOT which copy is accurate (and even there, it's debatable). If ALL extant copies have been edited, such methods will not work.

It's the great tragedy fo any historical science: taphonomy. And unfortunately, that tragedy is an absolute tyrant. Once something's gone, it's gone, and cannot be retrieved.

Without an original copy, we cannot assume that we've gotten all the errors out of the texts. All we can do is say that what we have removed are errors (and even then, I want an original to compare them agianst).

That's the problem inherent in all statistical approaches to deriving previous forms. In fact, this is directly analogous to a cladogram drawn by a biologist. It's nice, but any paleontologist can tell you the errors (you can't know what you can't know, and biologists don't have fossil data most of the time). In both cases, a lot of data gets missed. Both are best considered a working hypothesis until substantiated by data supporting the hypothetisized object's nature.

 

[davefoc]

JP's post is difficult to follow, but I think I understand what he's talking about, and he has a point. Kind of. I'm going to ignore the ancient/biblical context and leap to the Middle Ages, where I am more comfortable.

Suppose we have two manuscripts of the same work. The manuscripts themselves can be dated fairly firmly: manuscript X is from the 12th century; manuscript Y is from the late fourteenth century. Neither manuscript is original; they are both copies, and their exemplars probably had exemplars. Despite its comparative youth, the evidence (philological, textual and contextual, for instance) suggests that manuscript Y is a more faithful copy than the older manuscript X. Therefore, it could be said that manuscript Y preserves an "older" version of the work, although its exemplar does not survive.

That is what I understood him to mean also, but I don't see the relevance to a discussion about the nature of a historical Jesus.
Would a copy of a biblical text that was an exact representation of what the original author wrote provide better evidence about the nature of the historical Jesus than what is available today?

Perhaps some of the unreliability of biblical texts with regard to their value as evidence of the nature of an historical Jesus is that they have been interpolated and copying errors have been introduced but there are far bigger problems with regard to there credibility:
1. They were written at least 40 years after the death of an HJ.
2. They were written by people who probably didn't speak the language of an HJ.
3. They were written by people who did not live in the area where the events surrounding a HJ allegedly took place.
4. The authors were not of the same culture as they hypothetical HJ.
5. They contain stories which are clearly false.
6. They are self contradictory in places.
7. They contain representations of dialog where there is no possibility that the writer could have been present.
8. They do not represent the work of independent authors. The bulk of the plausible part of the Jesus narrative is contained in Mark and copied by the authors of Luke and Matthew.
9. Extra biblical evidence to corroborate the Jesus narrative is almost non-existent and not strong. No works that were written in the time of an HJ are known today and it is difficult to explain why this would be if an HJ existed.
10. The authors of the Gospels clearly intended their works to promote a religion. This is an obvious bias on the part of the writers that substantially reduces the credibility of the Gospels as a source of factual history.

 

[Lucian]

Except that all "[c]omputer assisted philology" can do is tell us which copy is best, NOT which copy is accurate (and even there, it's debatable). If ALL extant copies have been edited, such methods will not work.

It's the great tragedy fo any historical science: taphonomy. And unfortunately, that tragedy is an absolute tyrant. Once something's gone, it's gone, and cannot be retrieved.

Without an original copy, we cannot assume that we've gotten all the errors out of the texts. All we can do is say that what we have removed are errors (and even then, I want an original to compare them agianst).

That's the problem inherent in all statistical approaches to deriving previous forms. In fact, this is directly analogous to a cladogram drawn by a biologist. It's nice, but any paleontologist can tell you the errors (you can't know what you can't know, and biologists don't have fossil data most of the time). In both cases, a lot of data gets missed. Both are best considered a working hypothesis until substantiated by data supporting the hypothetisized object's nature.

What do you mean by "accurate"? Do you mean historically accurate, as in a fully faithful account of what actually happened? Because, just to be clear, I was not addressing that aspect at all. Do you mean an accurate version of the text, one that is absolutely faithful to the text? I have to say that that is not something I worry about excessively. In the case of biblical texts, even if we had completely accurate copies of the originals, the stories still wouldn't be historically accurate (the Gospels would still contradict each other, for instance).

I'm used to working with poetry that was originally orally composed: there was never a single accurate version. The poem would be different each time it was told, and that fluidity remained after the poems began to be written down. It remained even after they began to be composed in writing. So, my concept of accuracy may be more...elastic than yours.

At any rate, assuming you were responding to me, I wasn't really talking about accuracy in the way I think you mean it. i was just trying to explain what I think JabbaPappa was saying.

 

[Lucian]

That is what I understood him to mean also, but I don't see the relevance to a discussion about the nature of a historical Jesus.
Would a copy of a biblical text that was an exact representation of what the original author wrote provide better evidence about the nature of the historical Jesus than what is available today?

Perhaps some of the unreliability of biblical texts with regard to their value as evidence of the nature of an historical Jesus is that they have been interpolated and copying errors have been introduced but there are far bigger problems with regard to there credibility:
1. They were written at least 40 years after the death of an HJ.
2. They were written by people who probably didn't speak the language of an HJ.
3. They were written by people who did not live in the area where the events surrounding a HJ allegedly took place.
4. The authors were not of the same culture as they hypothetical HJ.
5. They contain stories which are clearly false.
6. They are self contradictory in places.
7. They contain representations of dialog where there is no possibility that the writer could have been present.
8. They do not represent the work of independent authors. The bulk of the plausible part of the Jesus narrative is contained in Mark and copied by the authors of Luke and Matthew.
9. Extra biblical evidence to corroborate the Jesus narrative is almost non-existent and not strong. No works that were written in the time of an HJ are known today and it is difficult to explain why this would be if an HJ existed.
10. The authors of the Gospels clearly intended their works to promote a religion. This is an obvious bias on the part of the writers that substantially reduces the credibility of the Gospels as a source of factual history.

Oh, it has no real relevance to a historical Jesus, as far as I can tell.

 

[Dinwar]

What do you mean by "accurate"? Do you mean historically accurate, as in a fully faithful account of what actually happened? Because, just to be clear, I was not addressing that aspect at all.

No, of course not. I was using the term to mean "a faithful representation of the original text".

Do you mean an accurate version of the text, one that is absolutely faithful to the text? I have to say that that is not something I worry about excessively. In the case of biblical texts, even if we had completely accurate copies of the originals, the stories still wouldn't be historically accurate (the Gospels would still contradict each other, for instance).

Well, I'm not sure what other value these techniques can have in terms of this conversation. I agree that even the original text of the Bible isn't proof or evidence (it's a secondary source at best, and obviously somewhat sensationalized).

At any rate, assuming you were responding to me, I wasn't really talking about accuracy in the way I think you mean it. i was just trying to explain what I think JabbaPappa was saying.

Understandable. You and I are coming at this from different angles: you from a more literary angle, and me from an archaeological one. That will cause differences in what we view as accurate. I was more commenting on the utuility of these techniques in regards to answering archaeological questions. From an archaeological prespective, they can only offer a hypothesis of what the original Bible looked like, and they certainly cannot offer any information about the characters in the book.

 

[IanS]

Suppose we have two manuscripts of the same work. The manuscripts themselves can be dated fairly firmly: manuscript X is from the 12th century; manuscript Y is from the late fourteenth century. Neither manuscript is original; they are both copies, and their exemplars probably had exemplars. Despite its comparative youth, the evidence (philological, textual and contextual, for instance) suggests that manuscript Y is a more faithful copy than the older manuscript X. Therefore, it could be said that manuscript Y preserves an "older" version of the work, although its exemplar does not survive.

OK, so Y is thought (for some reason) to be a more faithful copy of .... what?

What did the non-existent "original" thing say?


Lets' try this again - You have a copy (Y) which you say is "more faithful" to an original, which says .... err, you don’t know what any original said, because it apparently does not exist?

Summary - if this supposed “original” does not even exist, then how can you possibly know what it actually said?

 

[Dinwar]

Think of it this way: If you and I both copy a book, the odds of us making the same error are very low. You can therefore use our two copies to see what are errors. If there's a third person, the odds of them copying our errors is relatively small. Thus, you can use the three copies to figure out what the older version said, even if we don't have the older version.

Then there are linguistic things you can do--if there's a word that doesn't fit, but one that's just one or two letters off that does, you can draw some conclusions. For example, if someone writes "of" instead of "off", it's linguistically very obvious. Looking at other copies can help figure out how to fix it.

 

[JabbaPapa]

Well that sounds like complete mumbo jumbo to me ... you say something is found in later copies of earlier copies, that no longer exist??

You found something in things that no longer exist?

???

It's not mumbo-jumbo. It's simple.

If you have, say, two copies of The Hobbit, one first edition and one second edition.

In 1990, you make a photocopy of the second edition, then sell the book.

In 2005, you make a photocopy of the first edition, then sell the book.

Your earlier copy contains the later text, your later copy contains the earlier one -- and you no longer have either of the books in your possession.

 

[Dinwar]

And as everyone knows, only modern copying methods introduce errors.

 

[JabbaPapa]

You seem to have skipped over the part in Dinwar's post where he says we can't use the Bible as evidence because we know parts of it are false. He's not dismissing it because of his personal feelings, but because it can't be assumed reliable when we know parts of it are entirely made up. Using the Bible as evidence without independent verification is like using testimony from a known liar as your only piece of evidence in a trial.

The only logical conclusion to a position like that would be that this discussion is without any object.

Nevertheless, it would also necessarily lead you into a position of a priori rejection of any contrary claims.

From which -- what would be the point of discussing such claims with you ?

None at all, it would seem.

 

[IanS]

Think of it this way: If you and I both copy a book, the odds of us making the same error are very low.

OK, thanks for the explanation. Though I still fail to see how any such explanation can possibly work if you do not know what the original book said.

You could remove from your two copies all passages which are different from one-another. But that will still have no bearing at all on what any supposed original may or may not have ever said.

Indeed, if for example the claimed “original” did not even ever exist at all, then it would not have said anything that was contained in any claimed copies from a later date!


IOW - what you are describing appears to assume that the “copies” are indeed very close to what was written in this non-existent original. But if you don’t have the “original” then that assumption is completely unjustified in the first place.

 

[Akri]

The only logical conclusion to a position like that would be that this discussion is without any object.

No, the logical conclusion is that the evidence from somewhere other than the Bible is needed before we can accept anything in the Bible as true, including the existence of Jesus. Do you disagree with this notion? If so I'd like to see your reasoning.

Nevertheless, it would also necessarily lead you into a position of a priori rejection of any contrary claims.

I don't understand this statement. Could you clarify?

From which -- what would be the point of discussing such claims with you ?

None at all, it would seem.

If you're not interested in discussing the historical evidence for Jesus then you're in the wrong thread.

 

[Dinwar]

The only logical conclusion to a position like that would be that this discussion is without any object.

You should learn what words mean. And what science is. You fail at both.

The central question here is "What are we looking for when we look for Jesus Christ in the historical record?" We're asking what sort of evidence we need to look for. We're not accepting or rejecting any aspect of Jesus; we're examining the relative merits of various types of evidence.

The fact that you are only discussing a single line of evidence (the Bible) and we're questioning the validity of that line (because it is at best without value to this question, and at worst detrimental to any attempts to answer it), in no way mean that we've concluded that Jesus never existed.

In fact, I'm somewhat of a heretic on this forum: I'm more than willing to grant that at least some of the stories in the Bible were based, however loosely, on some apocolyptical preacher named Yeshua ("Jesus" is a Greek version of the name, and not what the man himself would have been called). I'm actually biased IN YOUR FAVOR. But I am obliged, because this is a discussion of archaeology, to limit the evidence I can accept to that which can be found to be true--meaning that with evidentiary support in the archaeological record. The Bible lacks that, so I ignore it (I do not reject it, in regards to this question; it does not rise to the level of needing to be rejected).

This implies that there are OTHER lines of evidence. And there are. First, as Pilot said in "Jesus Christ: Superstar" "You Jews produce messiahs by the sackfull!" There were a lot of these people running around, and people discussed them just like we discuss the insane apocolyptic preachers of our time. Second, Yeshua was a common name. Third, I know from experiences in the SCA that stories grow with the telling--not infrequently to the point where the people in the stories do not recognize them. That's in one lifetime; imagine the changes in a few centuries. And remember, the Bible isn't about historic fact (Robert Bakker makes that argument quite effectively [he's a rather well-known, but insufferably arrogant and standoff-ish, paleontologist]). The bardic rule of thumb is "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story"; meaning, the truth in stories is the moral lesson, while the facts are merely there to move the story forward.

My point is, I--and others--do not accept the Bible as evidence not because we reject the historical existence of Yeshua, but rather based solely on the merits of that line of evidence. The Bible is not valid, for sound archaeological reasons.

If you cannot comprehend how to discuss the merits of a line of evidence with someone, you are incompetant when it comes to rhetoric and science. There's simply no other word for it. And I have the strong feeling that you're looking for excuses to get around the fact that your "evidence" is exceedingly poor. There's few other reasons for demanding that you be obliged to only speak with those who agree with you, after all, and that's what this little rant amounts to.