JoeWallack

JW:
The HJ/MJ debate has become popular on the Internet because there is something appealing for both sides. Christians like it because the HJ/MJ debate is one of the few in religion where the evidence favors the Christians. Skeptics like it because it is an illustration of Christianity concluding as proven what is only assumed. Looking at the Threads here, the majority of them involve HJ/MJ. Personally, I don't like this area because the lack of evidence in general makes the arguments subjective and in proof-text form. Fortunately in this Forum, largely due to spin and a few others, the Skeptical position has moved from MJ to Agnostic. The problem that both sides have is lack of a professional historical methodology. [sarcasm] This is understandable since you would actually have to go to Wikipedia to find relevant criteria.[/sarcasm] In an effort to reduce the time and effort spent here on HJ/MJ arguments why don't we go to Wikipedia and start finding some criteria to use in order to construct a professional historical methodology. One of the things I love about religious debate is that as an amateur, if you just use common sense, you can sometimes write something superior on a subject than anything else ever written on it and in this one paragraph I think I have done just that.

The starting point for criteria is to consider the source and when I say "source" I mean the creator of the information. Two significant sources have traditionally been identified as evidence for HJ, Paul and "Mark". For now we will just use them as examples to start building our criteria. Note that Doherty, as champion of MJ, has recruited Paul as a source for MJ.

Using my now famous Thread The Original Ending of "Mark". Debate - James Snapp, Jr. verses Joseph Wallack as a starting point for establishing relevant criteria used to build a professional historical methodology, I find the following criteria that are relevant to sources:

1) Credibility - to what extent is the source reliable.

2) Applicability - to what extent is the evidence from the source applicable to the conclusions.

3) Age - How old is the source.

4) Confirmation - To what extent are assertions of the source confirmed.

5) External force - Which conclusion would Transmission move towards and to what extent.

6) Variation - To what extent is the source evidence for different conclusions.

7) Directness - To what extent does evidence from the source directly address conclusions.

Time now to slowly digest the related Wikipedia article Historical method

JW:
We can use this to expand my starting criteria:

1) Form - Is the source relic or narrative?

2) Credibility - To what extent is the source reliable.

Sub-categories -

Distance - from the object

# of hands - First, second, other

Bias

3) Applicability - to what extent is the evidence from the source applicable to the conclusions.

4) Age - How old is the source.

5) Confirmation - To what extent are assertions of the source confirmed.

Sub-category -

Independence

6) External force - Which conclusion would Transmission move towards and to what extent.

7) Variation - To what extent is the source evidence for different conclusions.

8) Directness - To what extent does evidence from the source directly address conclusions.

This than should be the starting point for every HJ/MJ argument. What exactly is your historical methodology? Sadly, I've never seen one that starts finishes or has one in between. The Prophet Bart Ehrman is moving in that direction by publicly demonstrating that the Gospels have the source problems of no provenance, lack of confirmation and bias yet he still concludes a proven HJ. Based on what exactly? The legendary Vorkosigan has the closest thing I've seen to a historical methodology in his legendary
Historical Commentary on the Gospel of Mark. He limits his inquiry to the conclusion, is an individual story possibly historical. Based on a sound methodology he concludes that relatively few stories in "Mark" have much possible historicity. But this is a long way from concluding HJ/MJ.

There is also no shortage of Theologians masquerading as religious historians ignoring/denying what the criteria should be and substituting criteria of relatively little value (such as the embarrassing criterion of embarrassment) because they supposedly test positive as evidence for HJ.

So for Christ's sake, if you are going to argue HJ/MJ/AJ (Agnostic Jesus) use a historical methodology so your argument can be professionally evaluated and critiqued. Otherwise I fear that Jesus may actually return before the issue is properly analyzed.



Joseph

ErrancyWiki

aa5874

Please show what methodology, what source, what data was used to make such a determination that the "Skeptical position has moved from MJ to Agnostic".

And please give a list of the Skeptics who have moved to Agnostics and what is the tally of Skeptics who are MJ and Agnostics now?

No Robots

What happens, though, when both mj and hj adherents claim to subscribe to the same methodology, as Earl Doherty does here when he claims to follow the methodology established by Spinoza?

No Robots

As for "Jesus agnosticism," I would ask that any proponent of this position provide the name of any historian or historiographer who supports this position or who provides a theoretical framework upon which to base it.

ApostateAbe

R. Joseph Hoffman, I think, may be the only one. I am not sure if he has a specific theoretical framework.

No Robots

According to Toto, Hoffmann is not a Jesus agnostic:

I have been following this since I listened to Hoffman's first lecture at the Center for Inquiry on the Jesus Project, and it was clear then that he followed the liberal consensus that 1) the gospels and the character of Jesus described there were myth in the best sense of the word BUT 2) there was still a historic person that you can call Jesus who inspired the myth, even if you can't discover much about him.

I agree with Toto when he says, "[i]f there is any secular, non-apologetic academic consensus, I think this sums it up." I would call this position "soft," willing to be shaped according to the way the wind blows. It is reactionary in that it does not take a firm position, but leaves itself open opportunistically to whatever position seems to provide the greatest scope for self-advancement. In a word, it is liberal. If the mythicists have a gain de cause, then they will blow that way. For now, they are happy to sit on the fence. They feel somewhat threatened by the idea of a wholly Jewish Jesus, though. Liberals generally have limits to their liberalism, and a wholly Jewish Jesus is apparently one of these limits. This is, in my view, why they are willing to flirt with mythicism. It seems that, for them, better no Jesus than a thoroughly Jewish Jesus.

ApostateAbe

I have often brought up ABE (Argument to the Best Explanation), and I’ll explain why I like it so much.

It is universally applicable. It can be applied to every field of history and, more generally, every field of inquiry, with the most sensible results every time.

It keeps a broader perspective that it is all about the best explanation out of many, rather than just one explanation isolated from all other competing explanations.

It gets right to the relevant points. For example, your criteria of “Applicability,” “Variation” and “Directness” all seem to be variations of just a single item of ABE: greater explanatory power.

Here it is:

1. The statement, together with other statements already held to be true, must imply yet other statements describing present, observable data. (We will henceforth call the first statement 'the hypothesis', and the statements describing observable data, 'observation statements'.)
2. The hypothesis must be of greater explanatory scope than any other incompatible hypothesis about the same subject; that is, it must imply a greater variety of observation statements.
3. The hypothesis must be of greater explanatory power than any other incompatible hypothesis about the same subject; that is, it must make the observation statements it implies more probable than any other.
4. The hypothesis must be more plausible than any other incompatible hypothesis about the same subject; that is, it must be implied to some degree by a greater variety of accepted truths than any other, and be implied more strongly than any other; and its probable negation must be implied by fewer beliefs, and implied less strongly than any other.
5. The hypothesis must be less ad hoc than any other incompatible hypothesis about the same subject; that is, it must include fewer new suppositions about the past which are not already implied to some extent by existing beliefs.
6. It must be disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs than any other incompatible hypothesis about the same subject; that is, when conjoined with accepted truths it must imply fewer observation statements and other statements which are believed to be false.
7. It must exceed other incompatible hypotheses about the same subject by so much, in characteristics 2 to 6, that there is little chance of an incompatible hypothesis, after further investigation, soon exceeding it in these respects.

Source: C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions, Cambridge University Press: New York (1984). ISBN 0-521-31830-0. via Wikipedia’s entry: Historical Method.

ApostateAbe

This is from Hoffmann's blog:

I admit to being a bit prickly on the subject, having finally concluded that the sources we possess do not establish the conditions for a verdict on the historicity of Jesus. Some of my reasons for saying so are laid out in a series of essays included in the anthology Sources of the Jesus Tradition, coming out in August. The main argument for Jesus-agnosticism is being developed in a more ambitious study, The Jesus Prospect, for which watch this and other spaces. (The prologue on method will be ready later in 2010.)

Toto

ApostateAbe claims to follow the ABE, but he reaches a completely different result from Richard Carrier.

When you agree on methodology and disagree on the results, you have to refine your arguments. After that, nothing is left but insults, mockery, and name calling.

And the ultimate response is to accuse the other side of anti-semitism or holocaust denial, invoking Godwin's Law.

aa5874

When ABE is used to determine the historicity or non-historicity of Jesus then Jesus, by ABE, is fictional or non-historical.