Febble

Well, the MJ lends itself more readily to a null hypothesis, which means that the HJ is in principle easier to demonstrate, if you have evidence for it.

Well, I'm not a historian (well, that's a long story), but in experimental science, it is very much easier to demonstrate that the null is falsified than to demonstrate that it is true. That's exactly why we devise null hypotheses. If I want to demonstrate that Christians live longer than atheists, my null is that there is no difference in life expectancy. If I sample deathrates, and find that life times of Christians are longer than atheists, I can claim support for my model hypothesis. However, if I fail to find that Christians live longer, I merely "retain the null". It doesn't mean the null is true, merely that I have not falsified it. So it is much harder for anyone to demonstrate that two groups are NOT different (in fact, they always are, if you go to enough decimal places) than that they ARE.

So lack of evidence for an HJ may mean we retain the MJ null, but we do not conclude that the MJ is true. Of course we have to have a decent model hypothesis. Lack of evidence that Jesus was an alien from Mars doesn't mean that we can't retain the null (that he wasn't) with confidence - because there is simply no reason to take the model hypothesis seriously.

Well, I agree, which is why to be convincing, an MJ hypothesis needs to be formulated in which HJ is the null. I don't know how you go about formulating predictive hypotheses in history, but what, presumably would be positive evidence for an MJ would be the discovery of some manuscript with what was clearly a precursor of the Jesus Myth, reliably dated to a few years before his alleged birth. Of course that won't work if the hypothesis is that the myth emerged after the alleged time of his death. But I'm trying to say (from the perspective of a lab scientist) that the trick for the MJers to pull is to devise a hypothesis in which HJ is the null - and to provide evidence for rejecting the null.

Oh boy, need to spend some time with Wikipedia before I can digest this....

Well, I think that sort of boils down to what I was saying, amazingly enough. Or possibly not.

Cheers

Lizzie

Solo

Under ideally controlled conditions, i.e. both sides (MJ/HJ) agreeing on testing parameters and the interpretation of test results, both theses are theoretically equally falsifiable. There is nothing that epistemologically favours one over the other that I can see. In pristine forms, the theories are mutually exclusive: Jesus either existed as a historical human (within an agrred-on time frame) or not. There is no third possibility. Any relevant item of evidence would therefore favour one theory at the expense of the other in a zero-sum game.
A newly discovered manuscript in Hebrew on the West Bank featuring dominical sayings from the Sermon, dated by carbon and confirmed by paleography to between 80-140 BCE, would decimate HJ as a historical personage within the Christian framework.
An unearthed manuscript by Apollos, ridiculing Paul and Cephas for exaggerating out of all proportion the importance of the apostle martyred in Pilate's lawless reign over Judea, would equally flatten hopes for MJ origins in zodiac and vegetation cycles.

My $.02

BTW, Keith Windschuttle deals with the falsifiability approach and epistemic relativism of the Popper-Kuhn-Lakatos-Feyerabend school in his thoroughly enjoyable critique of The Killing of History (or via: amazon.co.uk). Warmly recommend to all who detest Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Stanley Fish and the like.

Jiri

Peter Kirby

What...is...that critter?

Vorkosigan

It's not, but it is a useful criterion for thinking about whether a theory is useful or not. I've been reading papers on transaction cost analysis and resource based view in business theory, and frequently scholars hurl it at theories they don't like.

In any case, falsifiability is not really a valid tool for historical analysis of human history and literature. How would you "falsify" (or establish) the claim that the Temple Tantrum is based on the OT or 2 Macc or whatever? Once you have that critical insight, replicating it inside another human mind is easy and easily falsified, if you have some universal language like logic or math, but difficult if you don't.

Really, the HJ-MJ clash is the clash of competing interpretive frameworks in fields where methodology is unsettled. Fortunately for HJ adherents, they have the backing of powerful social institutions, so they can maintain a state of methodological impoverishment -- indeed, methodological imprecision is an important tool in maintaining the support of social institutions, since vague methods prevent the field as a whole from making findings that negate the support of social institutions for their enterprise. Note that conservative writers on the HJ dispense with methodology entirely, and instead engage in displays of erudition. Those of us with other views have to become more methodologically profound and precise in response, and keep pounding on the other side for its methodological impoverishment.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Dunno, but if you see it on the road, kill it. A mutant like that must be in a bad way.

gurugeorge

I was metaphorically ducking below the blast I expected from Peter or other historians here, who might have taken umbrage at me hinting that history might not be a science

Well Peter was sort of claiming that Popper is a nobody in modern philosophy (specifically that sub-domain of philosophy called epistemology, the study of how we acquire knowledge and/or how we should acquire knowledge), and I was just pointing out that (as I say, so far as I can tell from my amateur perusal of contemporary philosophy, something I try and keep up with as best I can given that I have to sleep 6 hours a day) that's not strictly true, his ideas are alive and well, and still have some respect, although they're still not mainstream.

Peter Kirby

"Sort of"? How about the modifier, "not" instead of "sort of"?

gurugeorge

I was referring to your: "Besides, Popperian theory on falsification is all but part of the wastebasket of philosophy anyway." I thought that needed a qualifying response.

Zeichman

I'm not sure that "conservative" or "liberal" are useful ways to describe the scholarship of individuals. Kloppenborg is "conservative" insofar as he uses a "minimal Q" and Wright, Johnson and others are "liberal" in that they believe it is possible Q contained a resurrection narrative despite a lack of evidence, should Q have existed.

That said, I agree that it is frustrating to go from Crossan to Wright, in terms of methods. But I don't think that the more minimalistic academics use more refined methodology. Burton Mack comes to mind as an individual that is extremely skeptical about the NT but did not define methods well when discussing the historical Jesus. I'm sure he had good reasons for a lot of his conclusions, but often they are not stated and thus appear to be conjecture or argument-by-assertion. This, too, is one of my biggest criticisms of Earl Doherty. I'm not sure what constitutes "conservative" for you and I tend to read more minimalistic individuals, so I can't really comment on this as a whole in such scholarship.

Vorkosigan

I should have defined that more clearly -- by conservative I meant someone who defends conservative Christian religious views, someone like Gundry or Wright.

I agree with your assessment of Mack and to a certain extent of Doherty. I think it might be due, though, to the attempt to create a global solution to early Christianity in a single book. You just can't go into anything very deeply.

Vorkosigan