gurugeorge

Assuming isn't "peering into the text for some original saying or action", it's just assuming there's some original saying or action.

If you had some good reason to suspect there might be some historical data in the texts in the first place (e.g., say as an ideal case, some independent confirmation from other sources at the time that there was a rabbi or whatever called "Jesus" at the time) then, yes, the CoE might be one tool in the arsenal for a peering exercise.

But as it stands, what is the reason to think there's anything historical in the text at all?

Another thing that annoys me about these discussions is when you have these "scholars" babbling about "multiple attestation" - that looks like a sneaky way of saying "oh we're doing the right scholarly thing - look we're triangulating from several sources, just like you're supposed to when you do historical research!". But here, again, there's no warrant for saying "multiple" at all.

Until we have more surety as to their provenance (who, when), these are all the texts of a religious cult. At this stage, a "multiple source" would be something outside the cult's texts, outside the cult's concerns (and preferably even hostile to the cult).

To pretend that, e.g., each of the synoptics is ALREADY one of a several independent sources is just silly. We have no surety about whether they are independent or not (in the sense of being genuinely independent wrt historical facts being reported) such that a multiple source criterion would make sense (in fact we can be pretty sure that some of them are cribbing from others). Nor can we be sure that any of them is trying to report what they thought "historically" (as we moderns would put it) happened.

As many people have observed, these very same methods could be used to draw "historical facts" out of comic books. Since we don't yet know whether these cult texts are (as it were) analogous to (religious) comic books (i.e. just made-up stuff, on the basis of religious fervour, mystical inspiration or whatever), we can't yet help ourselves to those sorts of methods (except as a purely hypothetical exercise - but of course that's not how it's presented).

Now at this point someone comes up with "but a real man is the most likely explanation for the existence of these texts". NO IT IS NOT. Not unless it has been decided that euhemerism is and ought to be the default explanation for myths. So far as I am aware, that is not the position in the broader academy: there are several types of origin for myth, for religion, etc., not just "real human eponymous founders".

If biblical scholars want to be taken seriously by that broader academy (and by interested laypersons like myself) then they've got to take a step back and go through a bunch of justificatory steps for WHY they are plumping for an euhemeristic basis for the evident Christ myth.

(OK, for the Christianly committed ones it's obvious and in a sense blameless, with respect to their own private lives and opinions; but if they're getting any sort of public funding then they have to take that step back into objectivity to justify it. Plus also, as a general point, you'd think they'd do it out of sheer intellectual self-respect.)

yin_sage

I guess it wouldn't be inappropriate to quote G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga at this point.

spamandham

Is there any reason to think that everything in Mark is not part of the earliest tradition? The part I bolded doesn't follow. The only proper conclusion we can draw is that Mark did not find the idea embarrassing, and Matthew did. This may help us reconstruct what was going on in Christian theology between those two points, but it tells us nothing about the historicity of the baptism.

There are over 10,000 copies of the KJV available online at Amazon right now. These are just as 'multiple' as the multiple sources you're referring to. What's important is not how many times a story has been rewritten or copied, but how many independent sources there are. You can't claim that Matthew rewrote Mark and simultaneously call them independent sources.

yin_sage

As I recall, this is more or less what Ehrman has said (it may have been someone else; not sure). The argument goes: Matthew (or Luke) saw what Mark had written and did not correct it. Therefore Matthew corroborates the evidence of Mark.

It's dumb, for sure. But I've heard it argued that way.

spamandham

Is that really his argument!? None of it makes a lick of sense. The argument is that Matthew altered aspects of the story he found embarrassing - as demonstrated by his omission of the purpose of baptism. Necessarily, that means that Matthew rewrote a pre-existing tale. Therefor, Matthew is not an independent source.

This is the kind of basic reasoning most of us learn in kindergarten.

yin_sage

The idea would be that Matthew knew the historical truth (from oral tradition or whatever) and would have acted as a kind of fact-checker, omitting anything he understood to be false.

I'm pretty certain it was Ehrman who said it, in one of his talks on the Historical Jesus. But I stand to be corrected on that.

David Deas

CoE claims to be able to indicate the truth value of a statement based on the level of embarrassment incurred by the party making the statement.

That *sounds* testable.

Always?

Meier does no such thing. His works do not stress that point at all, dude. In fact, Meier spends the majority of his time *applying* these invented criteria to the discussion of the historicity of Jesus Christ, advocating the validity of these invented criteria. He hardly dedicates much time at all to discrediting these criteria. He never explains why 'it isn't a fail-proof guide to authenticity.' As far as I'm aware, he cites absolutely nothing at all when he introduces his criteria. He simply makes assertions that, as far as anyone can tell, are all based on common sense; common sense says people don't lie about embarrassing things, but common sense also says that is not always fool-proof.

The only place I'm aware of the widespread use of embarrassment criteria by professionals being addressed specifically in published research is rape cases, so if you did not know how commonly embarrassment criteria is used in rape cases (as well as in every day gossipy affairs by laymen), now you know.

Embarrassment criteria is an extremely popular way of judging the truth value of claims in general. It is intuitive. *Very* intuitive, in fact. It is highly intuitive to believe that some party would not tell lies about things that are embarrassing. And while admittedly intuitive, it is *not*, however, scientific. As far as I'm aware, this methodology has no place been validated. It has no place been tested. It has no place been shown by any published research to enable anybody to make more accurate predictions about the truth value of a particular statement. This, no matter how embarrassing.

The fact that there has been no independent published research addressing this usage is really a tremendous issue for me because Meier uses the word "scientific" to describe his criteria, including the CoE. He should never have done that because there is nothing remotely scientific about the CoE. Who the hell taught Meier the scientific method? Is anything having to do with the scientific method even in the curriculum for a Biblical scholar?

And in case you could not tell from my very sarcastic remarks about rape cases, where the criteria of embarrassment is in fact very popular, the available statistics regarding false rape cases prove embarrassment criteria is practically worthless. Some of that worthlessness, for example, stems from the fact that we don't know what is or is not embarrassing to the accuser; it is fallacious to arbitrarily assign a significant level of embarrassment to the accuser. Furthering the example, to the false accuser, it is common for there to be things even more potentially shameful and embarrassing than having been raped. The false accuser therefore alleges to have been raped because only a rape case could possibly throw up a big enough smokescreen to cover up what the accuser is truly most embarrassed about. For instance; a child out of wedlock while in high school, as one example, may be even more shameful than having been raped; therefore rape may offer a convenient explanation for pregnancy and or justification for an abortion, relieving responsibility from the accuser.

(*) The reasons a bunch of different women lie about being raped are fairly extensive, so I don't want to delve very far into that. But I did want to give at least one example of how and why it occurs so that you could see one possible avenue for the failure of embarrassment criteria where its application is very widely popular.

Well. No.

The point of the CoE is that 'people would not have said such embarrassing things if they were not true.' So as far as Biblical scholarship is concerned you're ass backwards with your application; you're supposed to pretend that you're beginning without any preconceived notions whatsoever. But operating with these "scientific tools" you have uncovered the historicity behind the Gospels and behind the characters therein.

The CoE was being used in this manner in order to judge the historicity of Jesus Christ long before Meier ever came along and tried to formalize it. You aren't supposed to openly admit that you're merely assuming there was a historical Jesus and that the gospels reflect something of what he said and did. Your starting assumptions are supposed to go completely unstated.

You're doing it wrong, man.

dog-on

Amen.

bacht

The rape example is instructive. Do we know how many male-on-male prison rapes go unreported? Do we have a way of knowing how many female-on-male rapes would actually be reported?

If Jesus were a eunuch there might be a case for the gospel writers being 'emabarrassed', or if Agrippa II really slept with his sister Berenice the author of Acts might have deliberately left that out.

andrewcriddle

We know (assuming Markan priority) that Matthew simply omitted some things in Mark (eg some of the odder healing miracles) which he apparently found problematic. Hence the fact that Matthew kept in the baptism of Jesus by John, but rewrote it to avoid misunderstanding, probably implies that the association of Jesus and John was too widespread in his sources and traditions to be simply omitted. (If one believes in Q as a pre-Matthean source, then it seems clear that Q associated John with Jesus.)

One could say that Matthew had no information/traditions/written accounts about Jesus other than those which have survived to our time, but this is not IMO a plausible default position, i.e. it has to be argued for not just assumed.

Andrew Criddle