Thanks for the response. Just a few comments:
The criteria that I believe to be a reasonable basis for determining whether something is evidence of a particular proposition or not are these:
1. For something to be evidence it must not be known to be false
2. For something to be evidence it must be supportive of the proposition if it were true.
I don't mean in anyway to say that the proposition has to be true. If both parts one and two are true the proposition still might be false..
Just on a technical point - I think the “proposition” (ie the actual claim, such as “Jesus existed”) does need to be true if there is to be real evidence of it. Because you cannot have evidence of something which never happened. If the event never happened, then whatever you thought was evidence of the event, was not in fact evidence of the event.
In that respect, what we call “evidence” is information that only becomes judged to be evidence after we have decided that the event was true, such that the information was indeed evidence of the event really happening.
But before we reach that positive decision of saying the event did happen, what we might call the “evidence”, is really only such things as testimony, claims, and various types of information thought to support the existence of the event.
The problem with the gospels being offered as “evidence” of Jesus is that they cannot actually be evidence of Jesus. Because none of the authors actually knew any evidence of Jesus.
All those gospel authors knew were the stories that other people had told. And even those stories came to the gospel authors only as hearsay from other people who again did not themselves know any evidence about Jesus. All they claimed to know was that earlier unnamed people had once said that Jesus had disciples who were with Jesus to see these things for themselves.
That’s actually the problem with any hearsay evidence, and it’s the reason why we have laws to prevent unscrupulous lawyers tying to mislead a jury with that sort of “evidence”. The problem with it is;- the hearsay witness is not actually a witness at all to any of the evidence he is claiming. He cannot actually provide any evidence, because he does not know any evidence!
That’s why the gospels do not, and really cannot, provide any evidence of Jesus.
But even without that sort of consideration, which as I say really should rule out any consideration of the gospels as evidence of Jesus (because by definition they cannot provide evidence of Jesus), what those gospel authors wrote makes them demonstrably unworthy as a source. If they had claimed just one or two things which seemed to be minor miracles, but which might possibly be argued as faith healing mistaken for a miracle, then you might just overlook that amongst the entirety of the gospel writing. But they don’t do that. On the contrary, all the gospels are packed from end to end with what are very clearly claims of numerous but impossible miracles. That means these authors consistently and repeatedly wrote things that were entirely untrue.
The same applies to their use of the OT as a source of their stories. If it were the case that just one or two of the gospel stories appeared to be suspiciously similar to what had been written centuries before in the OT, then again you might overlook that as just a coincidence. But on the contrary, numerous of the gospel stories can be shown to have been taken from what the gospel authors thought had been written in various books of the OT. So that is not a coincidence. I think in all honesty we have to conclude that the origin of the Jesus stories was the OT.
So just to summarise al the above -
- the gospels were not providing any evidence of Jesus, because they did not know any evidence of Jesus. They were merely reporting hearsay stories from earlier hearsay sources that could also not be providing any evidence of Jesus. But what those hearsay gospel writers and their hearsay informants told as their stories of Jesus, were actually obtained from their interpretation of various passages in the OT. And in drawing those conclusions from their ancient OT, they told the stories as utterly fantastic and certainly untrue accounts of constant miracles.
Looking at the issue of historicity of Jesus with regards to these criteria, I think in general the earliest evidence of the HJ is the most unreliable but if it were true it would provide the best support for the proposition that an HJ existed. Later evidence for existence of the HJ tends to be more reliable but it also provides only weak support for the existence of the HJ even if it is true.
Again just on a technical note - in legal cases it is almost always found that the earliest “evidence”/testimony is the most reliable, and that it is the later claims that become increasingly unreliable. Eg in witness statements, it is invariably the first things that a witness says that are the most revealing and important, whereas later more detailed statements are often found to be untrue/misleading.
But as far as the bible is concerned as evidence of Jesus - what are you thinking of as the earliest writing vs. the latest writing? Afaik, the only known source of any writing about Jesus comes from what we call the gospels and Paul’s letters, none of which are known in any original form, but instead only from later Christian copies where the date of the copying is often largely a matter of guesswork, probably often a matter of guessing optimistically early dates hoping to support a real Jesus, but really not known with any reliable accuracy at all.
In which case I think it would be very difficult to tell which of those copies was the earliest and which were the later ones.
On the issue of confirmation bias, what I tried to say with regard to your insistence on what is evidence and what is not evidence is that it suggests that confirmation bias might be influencing your views. You very well may have a good handle on your confirmation biases with regard to this issue, but you seem to have a gut feel self ascribed ability to judge what is evidence and what is not evidence with regard to this issue and the process is not completely apparent by which you make that judgment and one idea is that only something that supports your view can be evidence.
Well see all the above re. why hearsay writing in the gospels is not actually evidence of Jesus.
As to the criteria for reliable evidence in physics: One problem I see with the issue of transferring a sense of what is reliable evidence in physics to what is reliable evidence in history is that evidence in physics can usually be recreated so if something can't be recreated it is reasonable to discount the evidence entirely. This leads, I propose, to a situation in physics where distinguishing different degrees of reliability with regard to evidence isn't that important. I would imagine that evidence would generally be either very reliable or very unreliable. Perhaps there is sometime where there is ambiguity where attempts to recreate the evidence are ongoing but eventually things settle out and the results are either reliable evidence or just flawed experiments..
I don’t think we really want to get too deeply into what constitutes evidence in science, do we? Otherwise we might be here for years arguing about that alone.
But I don’t think there is essentially any difference in the concept of “evidence”, whatever subject we are talking about. The difference in the present context, is only that the sort of thing being offered from the bible as evidence of Jesus, would never be accepted in any science or in any properly objective field.
It is not evidence of Jesus for the gospel writers to say they themselves could provide no evidence of Jesus (because they never knew him and only reported hearsay), but that other unknown people had told stories of Jesus, but where those unknown n people could not present it as evidence either because they too did not know Jesus, but where they said they believed that even earlier people had known Jesus and knew the stories that were told.
That sort of gospel writing is not evidence of Jesus. It is at best evidence of a chain of un-evidenced unconfirmed non-witness story telling.
As to your comments about evidence from the NT
I think that you and I agree that the Gospels do not provide much support for the existence of an HJ. I am not sure what to make of them actually. Mostly from my perspective they are obvious fiction. They convey stories in a style in which the storyteller makes no effort to provide a plausible explanation as to who could be present to be recording the events. My thought has been that this style worked because people that read the Gospels had a sense that supernatural events are possible and their assumption was that the story writer could have derived his knowledge of events supernaturally.
I don’t think the gospel authors suggest that they themselves obtained their Jesus stories by supernatural means, do they? Why do you think that?
Afaik, the 4 canonical gospels were eventually written down from earlier preaching “pericopes”, i.e. short preached stories designed to illustrate to the listeners (the congregation) some important principle of the faith. The preacher would have a range of stories for different common situations (helping others, battling against an enemy, how to treat your wife and your cattle etc etc), and he preaches each illustrative story as a way of illustrating what the faithful must do in various situations.
And then at some later date, these preached pericopes were written down, and some were collected into groups covering similar themes. No doubt many were rejected as bad practice etc. And finally the groups of similar stories were compiled into gospels.
But the origin of each pericope, where they concerned the examples set by the messiah, was clearly the Old Testament. Preachers such as Paul and the author of g-Mark, simply looked in the books of the OT until they found various passages which could be set within the example of a messiah who did all the righteous things preached in the various pericopes.
As far as the listeners were concerned, eg people hearing Paul preaching these stories (whatever he preached), they must have believed that Paul knew the truth of his messiah stories as a result of Paul being specially chosen by God as one who was given the gift of understanding Gods true message hidden for many centuries as a great secret in the words of the OT. Because iirc, Paul’s letters actually tell us that Paul claimed to have been given this gift of revelation by God, whereby Paul discovers from the OT the true secret of God’s messiah meaning.
So anyone listening to Paul speaking about that in the 1st century, probably did believe that Paul was a special conduit of God’s revealed truth. But I don’t see why those listeners would need to think that Paul or any of the later gospel preachers would be any more possessed of supernatural powers than that.
And afaik, all devout Jews at that date believed that they themselves had all sorts of special contacts from God and the spirit world. So Paul’s abilities would probably not be seen as so completely exceptional. Rather, what they probably thought about Paul was that he was simply someone so devout and righteous that God had chosen him to reveal the true secrets of the OT messiah prophecy which had dominated all their thoughts and beliefs for generations.
Despite the above I don't think the Gospels can be completely written off as some sort of evidence for an HJ, but I'm not sure, I'm just open to the idea. The Gospels, IMO, are more important as clues to the origin of Christianity than as a source of information about a hypothetical HJ. But even here the clues are obscure. It doesn't seem possible to pin down where they were written, who they were written by and whether Hellenistic Jews had anything to do with their creation.
Well as I keep saying - the gospels themselves cannot contain evidence of Jesus, simply because the authors did not have any evidence of Jesus. The only evidence they had was of people telling them stories of earlier belief in Jesus. So the only evidence available from the gospels is evidence of various beliefs.
So sure, the gospels can be seen more as a possible source of, as you say, “clues to the origin of Christianity than as a source of information about a hypothetical HJ“. Ie, not themselves actually proving the evidence of Jesus (because the writer had no evidence about him), but instead a conduit of reporting that earlier people once had the evidence … though none of them ever really tell us what that evidence is, because the stories are not really presented in any evidential way.
For me the elephant in the room here, is simply that gospel writing like that is obviously and undeniably unreliable in the extreme, to say the very least. And for that simple reason alone we should rule it out and request something much better.
If there is nothing better, then tough. But that cannot be an excuse for using writing so obviously flawed as the gospels as if it were reliable evidence of things that it’s own authors never knew.
As to your dismissal of Paul:
I don't know. I remain open to every Paul theory I've ever seen. I just don't know how you can prove any of them impossible at this late date.
Well I think the letters of Paul are in a rather different category than the hearsay of the gospels. Which is why I have almost always distinguished between rejecting the gospels out of hand, but not quite entirely rejecting Paul’s letters on that same basis. The main difference being that the letters are at least not openly admitted as hearsay.
On the other hand, Paul clearly never knew Jesus, and he himself did not and could not tell us anything about him. Again, Paul only ever tells us about his own beliefs in Jesus. But he repeatedly makes clear that his beliefs all come to him from what he understood to be God’s revealed secret in the OT. Iirc, Paul actually describes that saying such things as “he (God) was pleased to reveal in me…” and then he proceeds to give his opinion, ie his religious belief, on what he thinks the OT reveals to him as that true “secret” from God about the long awaited certainty of God’s messiah.
Even then we should ask “who actually wrote Paul’s letters anyway?”. Because if 6 or 7 of 13 letters are now generally agreed to be from other authors and not from “Paul”, then where does that leave the credibility of the remaining 6 or 7 that are claimed to be from “Paul”? And on what basis did anyone decide that these authentic 6 or 7 were indeed written by anyone named “Paul”?
But overall Paul’s letters are of no more value that the hearsay of the gospels. Because Paul himself, by his own admission, never knew Jesus in any way at all, except as he repeatedly tells us, through his own belief that God had chosen to “reveal in him” the great secret of the messiah contained in the divine ancient words of the Old testament.
So whatever else Paul might be talking about, where he talks about his belief in Jesus, he is very clearly talking entirely and completely about his religious belief drawn from the OT and from what he believed were his communications from heaven … if anyone thinks that is Paul giving evidence of a living human Jesus (who Paul never knew), then there is something very seriously wrong with their ability to treat this objectively … or perhaps, there is a good deal of “confirmation bias” going on when people look in the gospels and Paul’s letters and find actual evidence of a human Jesus.
