Stone
No problem.
proudfootz
I'm not "anti-Bayesian," just observing that Bayes doesn't cure the specific thing Carrier was quoted as being optimisitc that it might. When there is plenty of evidence, just about all the methods will agree on the same answer. When there is little evidence, opinions mostly reflect "what makes sense" to each individual, based on their background information. Bayes doesn't help much there, since it has no definite theory of belief formation. Bayes works best where it has the most to say: managing evidence so as to approach the correct conclusion by regular change of beliefs.
I think the HJ-MJ-GJ problem is evidence-poor, and likely to stay that way for a long time. Bayes doesn't hurt, but doesn't help much either. IMO - discussions about Bayes, pro and con, resemble religious debates in many ways
.
Ian
What do you think are the essential points on which all, or almost all, bible scholars would agree as definite evidence of Jesus?
The only evidence
about the question for scholars or anybody else is literary. This cannot be surprising, since Jesus' natural contribution to history could only be ideas and example. That evidence would be mainly the consensus letters of Paul, the Gospels, especially
Mark, the two mentions transmitted in Josephus, and some later mentions, including the rest of the NT. (Things like the Pilate Stone are interesting, but there was little doubt that Pilate was a historical man before the stone was found, and the stone has nothing to do with Jesus specifically.)
Evidence serves two functions: hypothesis formation and hypothesis discrimination. Formation plainly seems to have achieved some consensus: to "count" as an interesting Jesus, we need a particular Jewish man who died in the first half of the First Century, with surviving admirers and a continuous chain of successors from those earliest admirers - a "patient zero" if contagion language is used (as in Dawkins' "meme" metaphor).
It's hypothesis discrimination where the hard fighting sets in.
I don't know that there is a near-unanimous consensus that Paul thought that his James is Jesus' literal brother. I am at least as confident that Paul meant "former companion and not kin" as I am that there was a historical Jesus who counts. The latter for me is 60-40, the former 65-35 or better. As to the crucifxion, nobody can be more confident about that than they are confident about HJ as such. Crossan is entitled to his boast, but I have to wonder about the reliability of his self-knowledge. Speaking for myself, I am
much more confident that Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by multiple assailants in Rome in 44 BCE.
One nice thing about Bayes is that it does insist on clear separation of confidence from behavioral disposition. Jesus' "importance" may explain why I bother to think about whether or not he really lived, but it doesn't have anything to do with what I think about that.
max
Actually it is a historical position:
I understand you think that, but historians have nothing to say as historians about people really rising from the dead, or whether there are demons for anybody really to have cast out, or even a man really changing water into wine. So if statemenrts about these activities are true about Jesus, then their truth would need to be established by something other than scholarly historical means, and the conclusion would fall outside the professional interests and expertise of a historian.
Marshall goes on to say both ends of this HJ spectrum
And that's the problem, I think: a spectrum is a linear object, and what you're saying points to a two-dimensional opinion space. A hypothetical historical Jesus is a flesh and blood man who died and stayed dead. There is no other way for anybody to be a historical person. Hypothetical Gospel Jesus didn't stay dead. Gospel Jesuses can be distinguished from Mythical Jesuses by having really been here in time to launch Christianity, and from Historical Jesuses by being an impossible preternatural quasi-man.
