Vincent Guilbaud

And Bernard Muller who defended him too:
"But I found his (Carrier) application of the Bayes theorem very prone to attract detractors"

In his book "Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth", Ehrman said :

“the messiah was to be a figure of grandeur and power who overthrew the enemy”
(a "fallacious hasty generalization" according to Carrier.)
So "anyone who wanted to make up a messiah would make him like that."

In his blog, Carrier answered:

But "no divine being had militarily liberated Israel and resurrected all the world’s dead."
So "the only kind of messiah figure you could invent would be one who wasn’t like that"

**********
Muller's objection:
"typical Messiah was in the book" (New Testament)"

Sure, some of it was there of course, taken mostly from Scriptures or revelation,
otherwise, it would have not been a Messiah story!
But nobody said the contrary!
We just said the Messiah could have not been a figure of power who overthrewed the enemy by force"
**********

Then, while applying Bayes, Carrier said:
"This means the probability of that evidence (“anyone who wanted to make up a messiah would make him like that”)
on the hypothesis “someone made up a messiah” is exactly zero"

**********
Muller's objection:
It is not zero, far from it. Of course, with the death,
some Christians could still believe their Jesus Messiah will accomplish all that,
in the future, when he comes back (with the power of God!).

Nope. It is still zero.
Because this counter-example is still not a
"divine being who had militarily liberated Israel and resurrected all the world’s dead".
If Jews invented a Messiah, and were interested by this feature,
it could have only happened in the future like in the story we have.
Carrier is still 100% correct.
**********

Carrier finally concluded:

So if “someone made up a messiah”

Then "he would look essentially just like Jesus Christ:
A being no one noticed, who didn’t do anything publicly observable,
yet still accomplished the messianic task,
only spiritually (precisely the one way no one could produce any evidence against).
In other words, a messiah whose accomplishments one could only “feel in one’s heart”
(or see by revelation, ... or discover in scripture,...)"

**********
Muller's objection:
So if I devised a Messiah figure who gathered followers then offered himself to hungry lions
we can be absolutely certain he would look essentially just like Jesus Christ."

Nope.
In Bayes evaluation here, the 'like to Jesus' refers to an unnoticed man and a different kind of liberation...
not how he died exactly (a revealed and allegoric crucifixion in Paul that goes well with Scriptures).

------------------------------- Conclusion -----------------------------------

By applying some basic evidential logic,
we can conclude the exact opposite of what true 'profesionals' and 'experts' say:
If Jews had invented a Messiah story,
the story would look very similar on many important points,
to what we can find in our historical trace, biblical sources or not.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Vincent Guilbaud,

Good points.
It seems obvious that an invented Messiah post Judaic-Roman 67-73, could not be the predicted Kick-Ass Messiah-King who would save Abraham's descendents from the big bad Romans. An invented messiah would have to be a messiah sent from Yaweh who failed in order to match real history. However Yaweh sending a failed Messiah would show Yaweh to be a pretty weak God. If you are trying to promote Yaweh, the clear solution is to blame the Messiah fiasco on the Jews. Just say something like "They were too stupid to recognize him as the Messiah and follow him and they turned him over to the Romans who crucified him." The details don't matter (e.g., execution in the time of Tiberius or Claudius). You can make them up as you go along.

The issue of why the Jews didn't recognize him is the next important question. If you don't like the powers that be and their customs, you can say that they were following the laws too closely. The thing is to follow Yaweh's will not the laws. That is what the writers of the Pauline epistles argues. Alternatively, you can say, "Just follow the holy spirit that I give," as the writer of Acts of the Apostles does.

The invention of the Jesus character followed a reasonable and logical process.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Bernard Muller

to Vincent Guilbaud,
I do not see anything wrong with that statement. Ehrman never said it had to be proven historically that Messiah did overthrow the enemy. And, that picture of the Messiah would certainly be the preferred one for Jews.
It certainly looks, that in some circles (mainly Jewish Christians) they tried to do just that.
So Ehrman is, in part, right on that. But that goes against his case.
Carrier is assuming Ehrman indicated that Messiah had to have accomplished all that already.
No, because Carrier assumed that invented Messiah would have been successfull already.
If you make up a messiah, you have a lot of leeway to make it very differently of anything else, including like Jesus Christ.
Such as Jesus (or anyone else) gathering followers through preaching (telling he is the Messiah who would sacrifice himself for atonement of sins), and then, from his own free will, arranging his death publicly, and through a lot of (spectacular) suffering (and not being forcefully crucified by Romans, after being welcome as a would be King and then making disturbances in the Temple!), after guaranting those who do not sin again would go to heaven, after death for eternal enjoyable life.

It might look I am supporting an "invented" Messiah. Yes, but only in part. Sacrifice for atonement of sins, future King of the Kingdom of God to come, the big conqueror over Gentiles, resurrection and return to allow all that, of course, that was invented. But that does not prevent a Jesus to have been crucified in Jerusalem under Pilate and, for a group of activist Jews, believed to be the future King.

outhouse

BS dues to ignorance


who deified jesus? theses a good chance the jews deified him only after his death for being a martyr


BUT we know the roman authors of the NT hellenized jesus, used the OT to line up prophecy and deified him.


The jews recognized him, but the romans stole the idea and hellenized him

outhouse

false

the jews were villified because the romans took the control of the movemnet. without the roman hellenization and anti judaism sentiment, there would be no christianity. there would only be one more sect of judaism

Diogenes the Cynic

But this is not what was invented by the earliest followers - at least not that these things had been done yet, nor do we have reason to believe they thought the Messiah was a "divine" figure.

Carrier is also wrong if he's suggesting that no military Messiah ever liberated the Jews. One certainly did, and he is called the Messiah in the Hebrew Bible.

Oddly enough, he wasn't Jewish, though.

maryhelena

From the blog of Joseph Hoffmann:

tanya

Thank you for the link maryhelena. The reposting of his year old blog was quite interesting, at least to me.

Bears remarkable similarity to my own comments on this topic, a few weeks ago.

I am not a student of Hoffman....

dog-on

Of course, the student has it precisely ass backwards as Bayes will merely show the issues with one's assumptions, which is pretty much Carrier's point.

maryhelena

I simply find the idea that a mathematical theory/logic is a way forward for the ahistoricist/historicist debate to be illogical.....

That, I suppose, demonstrates the limit of my knowledge of such things - I just can't see how relevant any such outcome would be.....:devil1: