Toto

Nomad has ignored my earlier post on the bogus use of "embarrassment", but I keep looking for other evidence that anyone uses the "criterion of embarrassment" as a major research tool. I have found another source that trashes it:

Excerpt From Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet by Dale C. Allison

I think the problem is that Nomad thinks it's just so obvious and common sense. But "embarrassment" or surprize or statements against interest may increase the probability of something being true, but hardly to the extent that they constitute proof. For example, every day people walk into police stations and confess to crimes that they didn't commit. Under the criteria of embarrassment, this should be enough to convict them, but the police have enough experience to not accept these confessions at face value without other confirming information - knowledge of the crime scene that was not in the newspapers, etc. The motives of the confessor could well be the desire for publicity or some more serious mental aberration, rather than a need to confess. Or people have been know to confess to minor crimes or misdemeanors to avoid major charges. The value of embarrassment is so weak, it is of hardly any help in deciding what is true about ancient legends.

I certainly am glad that you don’t have time for a lengthy debate Philip, or I might mistake your four page reply for something quick and dirty.

Actually, yes, I did quote from two scholars in particular, Michael Grand and Donald Akenson, both atheists, who accept the historicity of the event, and by extension, of Jesus, because of the baptism. Rather than clutter up the post with additional quotes, I left it to Doherty to come up with something original to show that it was not embarrassing. Instead, he simply claims that the Church didn’t find the event embarrassing, and moves on.

We are not talking about the embarrassment to the Church, so much as we are talking about the fact that the baptism runs counter to the interests of the evangelists and apostles that want to convince the Jews that Jesus is the Messiah. Try to stay focused here Philip.

Go through your criteria Philip. (a) focuses on specific acts and words ascribed to the individual. If they have the “ring of authenticity”, then they are accepted, and the historicity of the individual(s) associated with them is given greater credence. (b) couples nicely with the acceptance that the individual left his or her mark on history. (c) speaks of third party neutral references (in this case, Josephus and Tacitus). (d) applies to Jesus in particular, but not to the overall question of an individual’s historicity.
Apparently plenty of sceptics on these boards would accept Jesus existed, but unfortunately people keep claiming that He is God. This is a red herring however, and demonstrates their willingness to apply a double standard to the existence of Jesus.

I’ll get to Doherty’s response tonight. I am only going to deal with what you wrote here.

LOL! Philip, I withdrew my charge, but your continued insistence that attacking someone’s “tone” is not an attack on the person is noted. I’m going to keep that in mind for future discussions.

This is a two parter, and I have to say, I want to address this one first.

Philip tells us that I think that Doherty is in league with Satan, so all is fair game. Further, he continues to link me with Holding, I suppose because this is a good red meat technique with the mouth breathers out there in the sceptic world. I am not certain.

Now, from my point of view, I have no idea what Philip is talking about. I have NEVER thought of Doherty as being in league with Satan. Quite frankly, all I have ever thought about him is that his arguments are pure nonsense, and sophistry. No doubt it is more comforting to Philip to think that I will not take Doherty seriously because of some theological bias, but I would recommend that he stick to debating me, and not try to psychoanalyzing me.

My approach is confessional? How did you decide this one Philip?

As for Doherty wanting to only be involved in tightly regulated debates, this is quite true. What you failed to mention is that one of the regulations he demands be met is that any opponent that offends him in any way must be censored from the debate, and possibly banned. If you have not checked out how he is trying to remove the moderator of the Jesus Mystery Boards yet, you should. It is instructive in his methods, and will go a very long ways towards informing you as to why I insisted that the debate take place on the SecWeb.

I have stated flatly and repeatedly that I want this debate to continue, albeit not under Doherty’s rules. Ethan has tried to get us to communicate with one another to establish a framework, and each of my emails to Doherty to do exactly that have gone unanswered. He has, instead, chosen to come to the forum and complain bitterly, loudly, and at length about the unfairness of my style. I hold him solely responsible for his own failure, and for fleeing the field when he saw that his standard modus operendi was not going to work here.

The suggestion that you attempted to plant, that I somehow plotted to drive Doherty from the debate is disingenuous, and you know full well that you are merely attempting to assassinate my character and protect Doherty in the process.

Personally, I don’t really care, I have grown accustomed to such techniques from you and others, and have been content merely to offer my arguments and evidence, and let the chips fall where they may. If my skin were even 1/10th as thin as Doherty’s I would never have come to discussion forums like this in the first place, and I am sure that he will feel much safer in his protected forum where he can intimidate (and if he gets his way, remove) the moderator and any opponents that may challenge him.

Since Doherty blithely quoted from a source for which there is no historical evidence (“Q”), I saw this as extremely ironic, and pointed this out. If he has some unique method of deciding that a hypothetical “Q community” actually existed, even as he rejects the much less incredible claim that Jesus existed, I wanted to see how he did this.

As for his rejection of the criterion of embarrassment, I will deal with that tonight in my reply to his post.

Don’t be stupid or dense Philip. By now you know full well that I am willing to debate with all kinds of people, including non-Christians, atheists, and agnostics. I have told you often enough that I do not judge these people as “going to hell”, and the fact that you have repeated this lie here and now is disgraceful.

I hope you will have the decency to apologize. You have done this once before with me, so I know that you are capable of it.

LOL!

This is not “tone” Philip. It is a statement of fact.

I do not see how anything I have said above is any better or worse “tone-wise” than what Doherty had to offer. I can also assure you that I was stating my beliefs on these matters very candidly and honestly.

I hope Doherty was not as dense on this point as you have been Philip. The existence of John is not disputed by anyone, including Doherty, because of one mention in Josephus. I have argued from the outset that we should not treat the probability of the existence of Jesus any differently than we do any other person of antiquity. This is the very heart (i.e. crux) of my entire argument.

If we accept John’s existence on the basis of a single passage in Josphus, then we can do the same with Jesus. I will expand on this point more in my reply to Doherty, as I assume that he tried to rationalize why the two instances are not at all alike.

Again, you are confused Philip. If Doherty wants to assert that the baptism is not embarrassing, he must admit that the Church and its apologetics had made the event non-embarrassing. The problem here, of course, is that when sceptical scholars look at this objectively, there is no way that they are going to buy the Church’s explanations. The most probable explanation for the reporting of the baptism was that the story was too well known to the first Christians to be discarded.

Doherty just wants us to think that the Church did a great sales job, spinning the event in such a manner that it was not embarrassing at all. Of course, this “spin” is apologetics at work, and Doherty buys it the same way Christians do, even if for totally opposite reasons.

Hmmm… first I get chastized for not doing a point by point rebuttal of every one of Doherty’s points, then I get called to the carpet because you cannot find me refuting each of his non-sequitors. I have already told you Philip, I did not do this because they had nothing to do with the purpose of the debate, namely to determine the probable historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. I addressed the last one (on Joseph of Arimathea) only to demonstrate yet again Doherty’s uneven use of the evidence.

Calm down Philip. Doherty drops the Jesus Seminar name in order to lend credibility to his pathetic argument, but fails to mention that this same group rejects all of his reasons for refusing to acknowledge the embarrassment of the baptism of Jesus, as well as His crucifixion. If this authority is to be considered acceptable when arguing about Joseph of Arimathea, it does follow that we can examine their arguments for the historicity of the other two events.

Quite simply, Doherty cannot have his cake and eat it too. If these scholars are trapped in their biases, and subject to unseen peer pressures (which Doherty never quite proves exist, I suppose his assertions of this “truth” should be sufficient for the people who have faith in him), then he should not be appealing to them to support him on the one or two occasions when their opinions conveniently line up with his own. Further, as I said in my own arguments, I don’t have to prove the historicity of Joseph of Arimathea to prove that Jesus existed, so the argument is irrelevant. See below.

It is irrelevant to the discussion Philip, and you should know this. We have clear examples of legendary development for Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Apollonius of Tyana, and countless other historical figures. None of that has any bearing at all on the question of their historicity, so it is a red herring.

I really do wonder at your sceptical credentials sometimes Philip.

Nice little misrepresentation of my argument. Very sneaky Philip. I’m glad you did not elaborate on this lie, so I will leave it alone.

In Doherty’s case this is not quite right Philip. In order for us to understand Doherty’s view that modern scholarship is hopelessly corrupted by its own biases and internal conspiratorial pressures, we really must reject anything offered by these “experts”. After all, a poisoned well is a poisoned well, and I would no more drink from it if the cup were handed to me by Earl Doherty, or by Raymond Brown.

I have told Doherty that if the need for a translation of the Greek needs to be introduced in the debate, then he can use any translation he wishes. At the same time, if he relies on his own authority, and offers translations that differ from all other sources, then I am simply going to point it out, and leave it at that. In any event, thus far translations have not come up in the debate, so it has been a non-issue.

No, he laughs off the science of textual criticism, and tells us that it isn’t one at all, even as he then tries to use it in a pathetic effort to claim non-existent interpolations, and his own idiosyncratic an self serving translations.

All we have here is Doherty’s beef that Paul didn’t write a gospel, and then tries to say from that, that Paul’s Gospel was substantially different from the Synoptics and John. Since this is complete nonsense, and Doherty has failed to address the fact that the Gospels and Paul relay the same core events of that Gospel (namely Jesus’ death on a cross and resurrection to life again), then the debate is basically over. Comparing incidental letters with narrative biographies is nonsensical, and Doherty should know this by now. No rational individual is going to demand the same level of biographical evidence in a letter as one would from an actual narrative.

Thus, when Paul employs phrases and words that are common with the Gospels, but Doherty wants to pretend that Paul’s meaning is significantly different from that used by those Gospels, he is blowing smoke.

Again, how credulous can you get to even grant Doherty the right to make such fallacious arguments?

And uses idiosyncratic translations, and baseless arguments for interpolation to try and rationalize away the problematic passages that DO refer to an historical Jesus.

By comparing the phrases to what we find in the Gospels (not to mention other epistles, like from Ignatius), we can see how faulty Doherty’s reasoning really is.

Since the question is not a complicated on, the arguments in favour of an historical Jesus are not overly involved either. Punching holes in Doherty’s sophistry takes more time, but that is the nature of the beast. He uses a lot of words, but rarely has much to say. Unfortunately, it requires similar volumes of words to show that fact.

Given your history, I’m not holding my breath.

At the same time, I will deal with Doherty again tonight, and who knows? Maybe he will have a rethink yet again, and return.

Brian (Nomad)

Would someone please point me to a link or two presenting a credible apologetic for the baptism? I've checked the JP debate and if it's there I couldn't find it. I've also checked Gleason Archer and took a spin through Tekton, all to no avail.

Frankly, I think the odds are about zero that there's an apologetic acceptable to contemporary Christians that would not also have been a plausible rationalization for the Gospel writers, but I'd rather read the apologetic before making a judgment.

BTW, Nomad, the notion (as you suggest in the JP debate) that only believers may use apologetics in an embarrassment analysis is absurd. The question is how the author whose statement is being tested could have or should have perceived the point.

I have to respond to a few of last Nomad's comments.

****

NOMAD: I certainly am glad that you don't have time for a lengthy debate Philip, or I might mistake your four page reply for something quick and dirty.

EARL: I said in the other thread that I don't have time now for a "serious" debate (such as one on the mystery traditions), as in one where I would have to run all over the place to do research.



NOMAD: Actually, yes, I did quote from two scholars in particular, Michael Grand and Donald Akenson, both atheists, who accept the historicity of the event, and by extension, of Jesus,

EARL: But their use of the criterion of embarrassment presupposes Jesus' existence, and therefore can be used only to show that given Jesus' existence he was baptized by John. Show me where a scholar uses the criterion and explicitly says "therefore Jesus probably existed" as opposed "therefore given that Jesus existed he did such and such."



NOMAD: OH!!! I see. You were attacking my tone, and calling my TONE arrogant, abusive, sloppy, dishonest (the real meaning of misrepresentation), but you certainly were not calling ME arrogant, abusive, sloppy, and dishonest. Thank you for the correction Philip. I withdraw my charge. Obviously you were not attacking me.

EARL: I was attacking the tone of the arguments that you wrote. My comments were directed at the arguments not the person making them irrespective of the arguments.

NOMAD: LOL! Philip, I withdrew my charge, but your continued insistence that attacking someone's "tone" is not an attack on the person is noted. I'm going to keep that in mind for future discussions.

[SNIP]

EARL: You call that a withdrawal? Sounded pretty sarcastic to me.



NOMAD: Don't be stupid or dense Philip. By now you know full well that I am willing to debate with all kinds of people, including non-Christians, atheists, and agnostics. I have told you often enough that I do not judge these people as "going to hell", and the fact that you have repeated this lie here and now is disgraceful.

I hope you will have the decency to apologize. You have done this once before with me, so I know that you are capable of it.

[SNIP]

EARL: I didn't say you believe that Doherty is necessarily going to hell. I'm aware of your beliefs regarding hell, freewill, sufficient knowledge, religious experience, and so forth. I said that you must believe--assuming you believe that Satan exists--that Doherty whether he knows it or not is doing Satan's work, turning people away from Christ in a way more audacious than non-mythicist skeptics. Do you believe that Satan exists? If so, then it's reasonable to believe that that is indeed a factor in the abusive tone you use towards Doherty. I'm sure you also believe that Doherty's arguments are untenable, and that's a non-confessional factor in your response to him. But it's possible to have mixed motivations, isn't it?

If you don't believe that Satan exists, then my claim has no basis in fact and I apologize.



EARL: Then Nomad goes ahead and admits that after all Jesus' burial is indeed "controversial in the scholarly community," and states that that's the reason he didn't bring in Joseph to prove that Jesus existed.

NOMAD: Nice little misrepresentation of my argument. Very sneaky Philip. I'm glad you did not elaborate on this lie, so I will leave it alone.

EARL: Yes, Nomad had another reason why he didn't want to introduce Joseph, because he thought it would bog down the debate in irrelevant matters. Otherwise my statement was perfectly accurate. Here is Nomad's comment in its entirety from the debate:

"There are a couple of reasons that I did not bring up this particular incident in my "proofs" of the life of Jesus. First, I did not want to present any that are in any way controversial in the scholarly community, no matter how restricted that controversy might be. I happen to agree with Raymond Brown (Death of the Messiah), Robin Lane Fox (The Unauthorized Version), Michael Grant and other historians and scholars that consider Joseph of Arimathea to be probably historical, but I do not have to prove it in order to establish the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. Respected scholars disagree on this particular issue, and I did not see any reason to bog down the discussion on such points, and this was the second reason I elected not to introduce it into the discussion. We already have plenty to talk about in this debate. There is no point bringing in even more just yet. At the same time, for those more interested in why I consider this person to have been historical, I refer you to another conversation I had with another Earl on these boards found at the thread Jesus Christ: Worth Burying in a Tomb?"

Wow! I'm gone 36 hours and the board explodes.

From the commentary on the Gospel of the Hebrews at the Early Gospels s site:

The earliest followers of Yahshua believed that Yahshua was empowered by the Holy Spirit at his immersion, not at his birth (thus they did not include the later birth narratives in their gospel).

Since apparently at least some of the earliest Christians believe baptism was not only not embarrassing, but necessary, it follows that Nomad's application of the embarrassment criterion in the JBaptist case would fail even in its own terms.

Michael

I checked the link and couldn't find the commentary. Could you give a better link or direct me how to find the commentary?

I am truly amazed at how quickly you accept that the Gospel of the Hebrews has some historical value as to what the earliest Christians believed but are so skeptical about gospels that were written so many years earlier.

One what basis do you claim that the author of the Gospel of the Hebrews was one of the "earliest Christians?" I was under the impression that it was written well into the second century at the earliest?

Toto

I had previously posted an indication that the Ebionites also saw the baptism as the anointing of Jesus, the point at which God adopted him as his son. So the baptism could not be considered embarrassing.

It is one thing to use a text as evidence of what people believed when it was written, and quite another to use it as reported history. But you knew that, right?

Mike's quote is from an offsite link. (The earlygospels.net site will never win an award for good web design.) Try this:

http://home.talkcity.com/ParadiseDr/nkuehl/Hebrews.html

FYI, Layman, I decided to take a look at Early Gospels just for giggles. The link is there. You just have to scroll down the left-hand navigation window.

I am truly amazed at your inability to read simple English. I did not say I accept anything about the gospel of Hebrews. The quote is from a COMMENTARY on the gospel of Hebrews at the early gospels site, which as someone else wisely pointed out, is not very well constructed. You have to scroll down into the commentary to find the discussion.

Once again, since some early Christians, as two of us noted, considered baptism a necessity, Nomad's application of the embarrassment criterion fails in its own terms (never mind in its presupposition, as Earl and I have both pointed out, that the gospels are recording actual events).

Michael

[This message has been edited by turtonm (edited May 26, 2001).]

Welcome back Michael

Here' all that you have to do in order to demonstrate that the event was not embarrassing to the evangelists:

Show that 1st Century Jews expected the Messiah to be baptized or to be subject to anyone besides God. Do that, and then you will have made your case. Try not to be so credulous about what 3rd Century sources like the Ebonionites thought (or 21st Century ones for that matter) please.

Nomad