ApostateAbe

Good to know. Thanks. I see the accusation of circularity thrown around much more often than it should be, and it complicates and frustrates the debates.

dog-on

It is almost unavoidable when one tries to grok history from the NT simply due to the nature of the evidence we have to work with.

ApostateAbe

You got that right.

ApostateAbe

gurugeorge, the first part of your post was great, and I am going to make another thread out of it soon. The second part of your post (above) is more relevant for this thread, so I will respond to it here.

Robert M. Price is a philosophical postmodernist. He has explicitly advocated postmodernism and found inspiration from postmodernist authors, and he wrote a book titled, Deconstructing Jesus--"deconstruction" being an exclusively postmodernist principle. Almost all of his arguments, in fact, follow from the postmodernist perspective--that the possibility of a proposition being true means that it has a place on the table. Whenever he offers an alternative explanation for data difficult to explain with a merely-mythical Jesus, for example, he seldom if ever explains how the alternative explanation is better than the established explanation. If he did, it would contradict his philosophy.

Unfortunately, in the topics of ancient history, anyone can find any sort of alternative explanation for absolutely anything, and indeed they do. The library bookshelves are filled with such books. There is one theory, appealing to feminists, that all of human society was matriarchal, before men became the violent oppressors and subjugators. There is another theory, appealing to blacks, that says the pharoahs who built the pyramids were black-skinned. Each such theory is contradicted by both the evidence and the opinions of qualified scholars. But, no matter, Robert Price would take such opinions as a very good reason to doubt and to put all explanations for the evidence on the same level of respect.

This is where "explanatory power" comes in. A right-thinking empiricist knows that a theory is improbable if it does not have explanatory power and plausibility, and that means the explanation should both imply the strong probability of the evidence given the explanation (explanatory power) and the explanation should be probable with respect to everything else (plausibility).

You seem to think that a set of possible mythicist conclusions covering all of the details of Jesus' life makes the mythicist conclusion more probable. However, possibilities counts for almost nothing. And, a possible hypothesis has almost nothing to do with either explanatory power or plausibility. Anything is possible, especially concerning ancient history.

No Robots

Hi ApostateAbe:

I found something that might interest you. It is a list of criteria for valid interpretation. It is from Sowing the Gospel: Mark's World in Literary-Historical Perspective, by Mary Ann Tolbert, pp. 10-13:

1. An interpretation of a text should be in accord with the standards of intellectual discourse of its age. It should reflect the contemporary status of scientific and philosophical knowledge.

2. The more fully an interpretation can demonstrate its points from the text itself, the more convincing it becomes.

3. The more coherence an interpretation can disclose in a text, the more persuasive it becomes.

4. An interpretation should be cognizant of the general historical, literary, and sociological matrix out of which the text comes.

5. An interpretation should be illuminating and interesting.

ApostateAbe

gurugeorge, I made a new thread based on what you wrote in the first part of your post.

How to judge an argument from silence.

ApostateAbe

Thanks, that seems reasonable, except for #5. Why should an interpretation by illuminating and interesting? I tend to favor interpretations that are uninteresting, as those tend to be the interpretations that are more plausible and in line with our informed expectations.

No Robots

You can read her rationale in Google books preview. Just search "illuminating" and go to page 13.

No Robots

Turns out I had a mo to type it out for ya:

The force of this criterion is twofold. First, presenting an interpretation for others to consider implies that something new or different has been seen in the text from what others have already perceived. Some illumination of the text is expected. While that illumination need not always be blinding, it should at least be interesting and engaging. Second, that an interpretation is interesting to others ensures its public character. Idiosyncratic, highly personal, or solipsistic readings rarely generate more than cursory notice. An interesting reading exhibits some communal (or institutional) acceptability.

Toto

Where do you get this nonsense? In the field of ancient history, you have to examine all possibilities, whether you are postmodern or not.

No, you don't understand anything here. I think that Price and his readers know a better explanation when they see it, so he might not have been explicit. Or you might have missed the explanation.

You have to read this with the background knowledge that Christian apologists have tended to argue that some things must be true because there is no other explanation. They have argued that Christianity's success was too impossible to be due to anything other than supernatural internvention, or possibly due to the strong charismatic personality of Jesus. They have argued that the gospels must contain history because no one could make that up. They have argued that the empty tomb must mean that Jesus rose from the dead because no other explanation makes sense.

When you have people making an argument like this, you can counter this argument just by showing that there are other plausible explanations.

Then you can ask which explanation is the most plausible, but that is, as we have seen with your recent contributions, a very subjective matter.