Stop writing silly things. Or I might suspect that you are being less than honest, or amusing yourself at my expense. I say, you don't read anything you don't accept as evidence. You know perfectly well that I'm referring to NT evidence, and that unlike you modern scholarship doesn't dismiss this collection if works as fourth century fabrication, and is willing to examine it for possible traces of authentic information.
Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that show Jesus never existed
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David Mo
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What is a 'genuine' historian? Is a Marxist historian a 'genuine' historian?
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eight bits
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Jayson
We see this also in your characterizing my contributions (among others') to the thread as a "tangent," and your repeated use of "BT," an abbreviation for Bayes' Theorem, when you actually mean Bayesian methods for uncertain inference, creating a false appearance that while your way of doing things is a "method," your critics' way is a mere "tool."
I also don't advocate for Carrier. For one thing, he seems to have a concern with "reconciling" the subjective and frequentist interpretations of probability. That's an interesting quest, but it is a problem which daunts people with more preparation in probability theory than Carrier claims to have. I am unsurprised, then, that his solutions are not universally agreed with.
It is not chiefly a question, then, of whether the Buddha is better or worse attested, but of what is attested about the Buddha compared with Jesus.
For example, there is a woman whose name I do not know but I nevertheless believe she lived (more likely than not), who was engaged to the owner of the High Tor landmark in upstate New York, Elmer Van Orden. I believe that because one source, the wife of Hume Dixon, reports both seeing a ghost in her home, and asking the elderly Van Orden who he thought might have once lived in the house. Mrs. Dixon says she later confirmed the story about the fiancee with an employee of Van Orden.
That's the parallel to our inference problem, was Elmer Van Orden engaged to a woman who lived on South Mountain Road, New City, Rockland County, New York, a woman who died sometime late in the Nineteenth Century, before she and Van Orden were married? Our "Saint Paul" is Mrs. Dixon - not anybody who knew the woman, but somebody who thinks she saw the woman's ghost, and says she spoke with people who said they had known the woman.
I've never met Mrs Dixon. I rely on my "Saint Luke," one Alfred S. Shivers who tells the story as an incident in his book, The Life of Maxwell Anderson. I've never met Dr Shivers, either.
I didn't say anything about slander. I said that your choice of verbs repeatedly demeans the intellectual activity of those whose thoughts you disapprove. I don't think I've even asked you to stop. On the off chance that anybody is reading any of this, however, I'd like to raise awareness of that aspect of your rhetoric.
We see this also in your characterizing my contributions (among others') to the thread as a "tangent," and your repeated use of "BT," an abbreviation for Bayes' Theorem, when you actually mean Bayesian methods for uncertain inference, creating a false appearance that while your way of doing things is a "method," your critics' way is a mere "tool."
I can't speak for Carrier, but that sentence of yours does not depict a typical Bayesian stance. Data don't do anything, they are observed (which makes them data) and then they are analyzed. In the usual sort of Bayesian analysis (and what I have read from Carrier online looks fairly "usual"), one estimates how well what was observed fits within various possible words (the uncertain hypotheses). That does not require the text to "indicate" anything one way or the other.
I also don't advocate for Carrier. For one thing, he seems to have a concern with "reconciling" the subjective and frequentist interpretations of probability. That's an interesting quest, but it is a problem which daunts people with more preparation in probability theory than Carrier claims to have. I am unsurprised, then, that his solutions are not universally agreed with.
Not really. The Buddha is depicted as having personally established the monastic system which is a defining feature of instuituionalized Buddhism, performing overt temporal acts conducive for the founding of concrete monasteries. Jesus did nothing to establish the religion whose origins are the mystery we are trying to solve. Jesus may have done hardly anything distinctive during his life. Only after he (may have) died did he definitely achieve anything enduring. Assuming any sort of naturalism, then, the entirety of Jesus' palpable accomplishments are the accomplishments of other people, acting on their own authority, supposedly in his name, the name of a dead man.
It is not chiefly a question, then, of whether the Buddha is better or worse attested, but of what is attested about the Buddha compared with Jesus.
Nobody said you did. I asked you a question. So far as I can see from your answer, we are in agreement that no method accomplishes magical discernment. Unless there is such a method, Jayson, then Bayes displays no inferiority by not performing magical dsicernment.
No. Just because Jesus is unlike the Buddha doesn't make him unlike the many other people, at all times and places, who do hardly anything distinctive during their lives. Jesus was plucked from obscurity by being the object of a ghost story. Actually, we have quite a few of those.
For example, there is a woman whose name I do not know but I nevertheless believe she lived (more likely than not), who was engaged to the owner of the High Tor landmark in upstate New York, Elmer Van Orden. I believe that because one source, the wife of Hume Dixon, reports both seeing a ghost in her home, and asking the elderly Van Orden who he thought might have once lived in the house. Mrs. Dixon says she later confirmed the story about the fiancee with an employee of Van Orden.
That's the parallel to our inference problem, was Elmer Van Orden engaged to a woman who lived on South Mountain Road, New City, Rockland County, New York, a woman who died sometime late in the Nineteenth Century, before she and Van Orden were married? Our "Saint Paul" is Mrs. Dixon - not anybody who knew the woman, but somebody who thinks she saw the woman's ghost, and says she spoke with people who said they had known the woman.
I've never met Mrs Dixon. I rely on my "Saint Luke," one Alfred S. Shivers who tells the story as an incident in his book, The Life of Maxwell Anderson. I've never met Dr Shivers, either.
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Referring to the question from IanS, what other comparable figures are described, two Jewish miracle workers often cited in the literature are Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the Circle Drawer. Both carried out miracles, including rain making, (I think); both are included within the 'charismatic tradition of Jewish wonder-working prophets'. Ah, but what is the evidence for them? Rabbinic sources, I think, very dodgy. Genuine historians will hold their noses.
JaysonR
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Eight Bits,
Nevermind.
I do not know what I did to bother you, but I was not offering rhetoric or aiming at some belittlement by my terms.
Your other points are so confusing to me in direction of response that I really do not want to keep going; it would be pages before we finish, and it would be over nothing really.
Do what you need, you are on a different tangent (I am not insulting you with that word) than what I was addressing.
Cheers.
Nevermind.
I do not know what I did to bother you, but I was not offering rhetoric or aiming at some belittlement by my terms.
Your other points are so confusing to me in direction of response that I really do not want to keep going; it would be pages before we finish, and it would be over nothing really.
Do what you need, you are on a different tangent (I am not insulting you with that word) than what I was addressing.
Cheers.
You actually disbelieve that? You are contesting the claim that anonymous hearsay evidence is never allowed in a jury trial? And you want me to start looking back through all the decades of legal debate, trial proceedings and judicial reviews etc. from probably 100 years ago., to list chapter and verse of legalistic language about how and why they developed those rules?
Well, I could spend a few years doing that. But I don’t think that would be a sensible use of my time. And given the way these HJ threads have gone, I think it’s most likely that whatever I produced, no matter how unarguably conclusive, people would still continue to dispute the details.
Do you know of any jury trial in modern times where a judge has ever agreed to let a lawyer present evidence like that to influence the jury’s beliefs and decision?
You would be talking about a situation in which the lawyer stood up in court and told the judge that he/she wanted to read out “evidence” (ie testimony) to the jury that had come to the lawyer from someone he did not know, who could not be named, who could not be found ever to appear in the court, and who was not himself a witness to anything that would be said … and the lawyer would be requesting the judge to agree that this should be presented to the jury as credible evidence which they must consider in their verdict …
… and that’s before we get to the fact that the lawyer has to add that this anonymous witness testimony which talks of things the unknown witness never himself known except as hearsay, came from informants who were also anonymous, also unnamed and also unavailable to the court to confirm a single word of it either, and where they were only telling of things and people they never themselves knew or ever met either, but where they had heard (never explained how, why, when or from whom) that older legend had it that there was once a magical preacher ordained personally by God who did have human disciples who would have been with the preacher when the preacher walked on water and raised the dead etc., and that the anonymous unavailable witness who himself never knew any of this swears that this preacher really did walk on water and raise the dead etc. And one of the reasons that the anonymous witness knows this is because it was all foretold, so he believes, many centuries before in the ancient book of prophetic religious belief ….
… and you are seriously telling me that a Judge might agree to let a lawyer influence the jury by reading out something like that, saying it is a credible witness testimony and reliable enough that the Jury must consider it and use that “evidence“ alone and nothing else (because there is no other evidence here except the bible), and will thereby reach a safe and satisfactory conclusion?
Something very seriously wrong if you think any judge would allow that to go before any jury.
And also something hugely wrong when HJ people here think that “evidence” like that (the only available evidence), is reliable enough to decide that Jesus probably existed (eg saying “60-40” or whatever figure).
What you should conclude from “evidence” like the bible, is that it’s far far short of what is required even to be consider as any form or credible or reliable evidence at all. It certainly would never be allowed in any democratic jury trial, and certainly would never be allowed in any proper objective academic research subject … except, apparently, religious studies!
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Belz...
Fiend God
How about you answer mine ?
I've raised Honi before. The human sub stratum of the gospel Jesus (if it is authentic) falls into this domain. If stories about Honi had become part of the basis of a gentile religion, more elaborate myths would have attached themselves to him too.
He was indeed a rain maker. Jesus was an exorcist and food extender. These were also common enough. Best OT examples are Messrs Elijah and Elisha who did all manner of exciting stuff. See http://www.bcbsr.com/survey/eli.html Here's a sample.
He did resurrections of the dead too. See vv 32-37 same chapter. Versatile fellow.
None of that is in any way actual evidence of a living Jesus though is it.
Just because biblical writers, none of whom ever knew Jesus in any way at all, believed from earlier religious legend that he had been crucified as a symbolic guarantee that those who agreed with the faith (but not others) would be saved and taken up to a wonderous life in heaven when the certain and now every imminent day of Gods final judgement happened, that is not evidence at all that their beliefs about any such thing were true … is it!
There is no evidence of any such execution, is there. And the very people who said they believed it had once happened, also said that the executed person returned from the dead 3 days later. They also knew verbatim the conversations he had whilst he was nailed to the cross! How credible do you think informants like that are?
Nor is it any kind of evidence at all that certain early Christians were said to have a messianic secret. I don’t even know why we would bother to keep talking about such things as evidence of Jesus. It’s plainly not evidence of any Jesus.
And the fact that Paul may have said something about women in the church, is again no sort of evidence at all that Paul knew anything about anyone called Jesus. Is it!
Well in this case we are talking about whether such anonymous hearsay is credible or reliable evidence to be used to show that Jesus may have been a real person. Is that sort of biblical evidence a reliable basis upon which to conclude that this unknown person existed?
This is entirely different from all the other figures you may be thinking of in ancient history. Why is it different? OK, well I explained that before using the example of Julius Caesar who has in the past often been quoted as an example by HJ supporters themselves! The point about Caesar is this - it does not matter if Julius Caesar actually existed or not! What matters is that a Roman ruler certainly did exist at that time, whether his name was Julius Caesar or not! And that leader certainly did leave all sorts of evidence of the things he did, eg sending his troops into all sorts of battles all over Europe, building all sorts of monuments all over Italy and the rest of Europe etc ., etc. And there are literally hundreds if not thousands of museums all around the world packed full of the actual original physical and written evidence for that. So there is absolutely no doubt that there was indeed a Roman Ruler in those times who did do all of those things.
So what? OK, well the point is - the reason Caesar is important, and known to us at all, is because of the things he can be proved to have done, whatever his correct name was. His importance is not that he really was a person named Caesar, but that the ruler of that time most definitely did do all those things and leave all of that vast mass of evidential remains. So what is important about Caesar is what he did.
The same applies to the example of Pythagoras who someone here insisted on comparing to Jesus. Pythagoras is certainly so far back in ancient history, c.500BC, that we have no real evidence of whether he existed or not. He certainly may not have done. But what is quite “certain” (if anything is ever certain) is that a philosopher of that time, who came to be called “Pythagoras” spawned a movement of religious and mathematical philosophers called “Pythagoreans” who gave us their religious theories and their mathematical theories such as Pythagoras Theorem. IOW - whether there was ever a real individual named “Pythagoras” who was truly responsible for all those things, does not matter to us at all. What matters is only that we do have abundant evidence that those philosophical and mathematical ideas were produced and used at an early date beginning roughly from about 500BC or somewhat later.
None of those figures themselves matter. What matters is only what was left as their philosophical ideas, their early mathematical and astronomical ideas, their military conquests and buildings, the laws their courtiers and armies produced and under which their people lived etc etc.
But that is absolutely NOT the case for Jesus.
In his case, his actual personal existence is the crucial factor.
Nobody here (or anywhere) is arguing that Christianity never existed from an early date somewhere around the 1st century. Nobody here is arguing that books such as the gospels and Paul’s letters were never written by anyone. Nobody is arguing that Christianity did not eventually spread to all sorts of nations. Nobody is arguing that Christianity does not exist today. None of that is disputed by anyone. Some person or persons definitely were responsible for spreading those beliefs around the 1st century.
But uniquely (except for all other religious gods and deities), and entirely unlike Caesar or Pythagoras, what matters in the Jesus case is whether he himself did or did not exist! His existence is the crucial factor here, because the entire foundation of worldwide Christianity and the credibility of all the biblical beliefs depends solely and entirely on his actual existence! If he did not exist, then the Christian religion is based on a myth and has no defendable importance that is based on any truth in Jesus.
That is completely different from figures like Caesar or Pythagoras whose existence is relatively unimportant, and where the importance lies entirely in the philosophical ideas, the buildings and the legal systems etc. which they left behind.
That’s why I said many times earlier in these threads - Jesus is not at all like Caesar or Pythagoras (or Kim Jong il or whoever), but far more like all the other gods and deity’s who are the foundation of every religion ever known. Religions depend entirely on their claimed deity’s being real. Otherwise the religion, which is only a set of claims about what people should believe, has no basis at all if it’s founding deity’s never existed.
Well I don’t think what I said was wrong. What I said was. there may be a variety of reasons of reasons why you would believe Jesus is real (if that is what you believe), one of which might for example to be that you agree with almost everyone here who says that these “historians” are the authorities who we must not disagree with. I did not say that was definitely your reason - I said that seems to be the reason that almost every HJ defender here says they are most strongly influenced by - that appeal to academic authority … that has been stated here literally hundreds of times by almost everyone as a major reason for believing in Jesus.
But where I do think you are most definitely wrong in your above quote is where you appear to be saying that so-called "mythicists" must produce an alternative theory to convince you that Jesus was myth, otherwise you do not accept that idea of Jesus as myth. That is again, not the sort of thing that is admissible as evidence in law, and again for the same sort of reasons of it being a dishonest tactic used by lawyers. That is - there is no obligation at all on any witness in court to answer questions that require the witness to guess or speculate as to how something may have happened, unless the witness claims themselves to actually know first-hand how any such thing happened. So in the Jesus context - what I am saying (what has been said here very many times before) is that it is entirely fallacious and quite dishonest as a demand (I do not mean you are being dishonest about it at all … I mean this is known to be a dishonest demand from years of legal experience in courts) to insist that so-called “mythers” must produce a specific myth theory to counter any claims of a historical Jesus.
On the contrary, anyone who is sceptical about claims of a HJ, has no obligation at all beyond pointing out that the claimed evidence for Jesus is weak to the point of being non-existent.
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Your statement is not logical. You are writing silly things. I read the NT--it is evidence for a Myth Jesus.
The NT is about Jesus the Son of God, born of a Ghost, God Creator who walked on the sea, transfigured, resurrected and ascended.
I asked you for evidence repeatedly because I have read writings attributed to Philo, Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the elder and Pliny younger but there is nothing at all about characters called Jesus of Nazareth, the 12 disciples and Paul.
Where did modern Scholarship get its corroborative evidence for your unknown consensus?
If you don't know just say so.
You seem unaware that there still is an on -going quest for an historical Jesus.
The Quest for an historical Jesus has been initiated for hundreds of years and up to now no-one can find who HJ was.
An HJ is like a mirage--you think you can find evidence but in reality there is none.
May I remind you that over a hundred years ago Albert Schweitzer in "The Quest for the Historical Jesus" did already show that HJ is really a product of imagination.
The fact that there are multiple version of HJ prove that there is no real evidence but massive guessing, speculation and whole cloth inventions.
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pakeha
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Versatile and...mythical.
Belz...
Fiend God
Let's try again: what is the minimum evidence you would accept ?
And, while you're at it, could you answer this:
Well, I am unsurprised that Scholars cannot universally agree about HJ. There are multiple versions of HJ which signify that there is a consensus that HJ has no real evidence.
davefoc
Philosopher
I was a bit surprised by this answer. The two people in this thread that have had something to say about Bayes theory and the issue of an HJ that I understood even a bit are you and eight bits. Based on my interpretation of what both of you had to say about all this it doesn't seem like there was a lot of disagreement.
I particularly liked the example that eight bits provided about the fiancee of Elmer Van Orden. I also thought his comments about Buddha were interesting.
In the end though, I haven't understood why Richard Carrier thinks that BT or Bayes method would be able to provide insight on to the issue of an HJ. There just isn't enough information available to assign reliable probabilities to the clues. I might make another attempt to understand Carrier's point but JaysonR did a pretty good job of describing why BT wasn't going to provide insight on the issue of an HJ and my inclination is to just leave it at that.
You have said it much more clearly than I could. Thank you.
JaysonR could not have done a "good job" because he does not really know much about Bayes Thereom and basically introduced a strawman argument.
Bayes Theorem is simply a mathematical equation to numerically quantify probability.
Even without Bayes Theorem one can logically deduce that the probability of HJ is very low based on the existing evidence--the only difference is that Bayes Theorem may give a numerical value for that probability
with the data provided.
It may be true that there was probably an HJ but it is less than 1% probable.
In other words, it is more than 99% probable that Jesus was a figure of mythology unless new evidence is found.
Can you show us the method you used to arrive at your 99% probability?
The Norseman
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Same method you used to arrive at your 90% probability, probably.
Possibly, but I bet I had more sources of data than dejudge. He appears to have read a book review.
The Norseman
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Not surprised at your answer. Despite myself and at least one other asking you specifically, you constantly hand-wave and deflect any questions so who is really to know what you know?
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