Ben C Smith

No, not to me. It can go either way. Some of the Roman emperors were called sons of God; the kings of Israel were called sons of God; the angels were called sons of God.

I have argued elsewhere that his answer is untenable. If he were to remove quite a few bits from the Pauline and other epistles as interpolations (as he recently did with Galatians 4.4), it would no longer be untenable.

That does not follow at all. Even if 99% of the gospel details about Jesus could be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to have been invented, that in and of itself says nothing about the other 1%. Each detail stands or falls on its own. There is no inherent improbability in an entire story having been made up, but there is also no inherent improbability in only 99% of the story having been made up. Examples of each abound.

Ben.

gstafleu

Good point. And apparently the whole of Israel can also been seen as Son of God. Nevertheless, the way Paul presents it sounds quite spiritual to me, buyt I see your point.
This also goes to Amaleq's question. Let us take your numbers, 99% is FBI. I would then argue that the most likely hypothesis for Jesus (a priori, i.e. without adducing more evidence than the general observation of 99%) is also FBI, and with a chance (likelihood) of 99%. That is all I mean by it. I'm not denying the 1% possibility, it is there, but the FBI possibility is the most likely. This can be changed by adducing evidence that the historicity of Jesus is not FBI. Hence my frequent question: which data cannot be explained by FBI (or can be much better explained by historicity). But without such extra evidence, the a priori probability of Jesus being historical (given the 99% FBI) is only 1%. That's all I'm saying.

Specifically, your claim that "Each detail stands or falls on its own" is wrong. Each detail can stand or fall on its own, provided that extra evidence (beyond the 99%) has been adduced for that detail. But as long as that has not been done, it falls under the "99% rule." It only gets out from under that rule once you show that the detail is independent of the evidence that provided the 99%--but that takes extra evidence!

To put it differently, you are saying that you have established that 99% is FBI, however, you are implicitly adding, the historicity of Jesus is not part of the data that established that result. You then claim special status for historicity: because we have not yet established Yae or Nay, we cannot assign it the 99% FBI probability that we have otherwise established. But that is not how statistics works. You are, I think, confusing certainty with probability. If we have established, from general meteorology, that tomorrow there is a 70% chance of rain, then you cannot say that, because we haven't seen tomorrow yet, tomorrow stands by itself and so we cannot assign it a 70% chance of rain. We most definitely can do that, but of course we might be wrong (with, in this case, a 30% chance).

Gerard Stafleu

Ben C Smith

I (think I) know what you mean by it, but it is incorrect. It does not work.

The 99% has nothing intrinsically to do with the 1%. The 99% means that 99% of the details are now unavailable for the purposes of historicity; it does not mean that the remaining 1% has a 99% chance of following suit. That is not how percentages work.

Some inerrantists make this same kind of argument. If they can relatively easily handle most of the objections thrown at them against inerrancy, the remaining sticky issues they handle by saying that the Bible has been proven correct in so many other matters that we can safely assume it is also correct in these matters. But that does not work, and for the same reason your scenario does not work. It is possible that the Bible has exactly one error; it is possible that it has exactly two errors; it is possible that it has exactly 1,089 errors. Same goes for the HJ. It is possible that only 1 narrated detail is historical; it is possible that only 2 are historical.

As long as some evidence can be marshalled for the 1%, the 99% is powerless against it.

This is semantic. What I meant by each detail standing or falling on its own, of course, is precisely that each detail requires its own evidence.

No. This cannot be. The 1% cannot be lumped with the 99% sure myth unless the 1% has also been demonstrated to be sure myth. If it cannot be so demonstrated, it is either sure history or not sure either way.

To place the datum in the not sure either way category does not claim special status for historicity.

If I were to wind up with 99% sure myth and 1% not sure either way, I would say without hesitation that there is no evidence that Jesus existed.

Oh, absolutely not. My category of sure myth is completely hypothetical (even if).

Tomorrow is the whole in this case. I never said anything about the whole standing on its own. I wrote about the 1% standing on its own. In this case, the 30% stands on its own against the 70%; there is a 70% chance of rain, and there is a 30% chance of no rain.

Ben.

eheffa

I think that this analogy confuses the issues at hand as the Rain vs NOT Rain possibilities for tomorrow are mutually incompatible (i.e. either/or but not both). In the case for an historical Jesus, the 1% possibility of an historical core or some residual historical detail, is not actually eliminated by the other 99% fictitious embellishments.

-evan

gstafleu

We must be talking at some cross of purposes here, because that surely is how sampling works.

When you say that it has been established that 99% of the details are FBI, that can mean either of two things. It can mean (1) that you have actually "measured" 99%, and found them all to be fiction, while 1% you either have not measured, or you have measured them and found them not to be FBI--historicity would fall under this one.

It can also mean (2) that you have done sampling: you have measured enough details, establishing their (a)historicity, to be able to say that 99% of the details are FBI, this number being accurate within 0.5% (say) 19 times out of 20. But out of the available 1234 details, you have only measured, e.g., 125. In this case the not measured details, e.g. historicity, have an a priori (prior to further measurements) likelihood of being non-historical of 99%.

How does (1) relate to (2)? For simplicity, let us say that in case 1 you have measured 99% of the available details, and found them all to be non-historic. The remaining 1% is "unknown." In that case you actually have a sample where 100% of the measurements yield the outcome "non-historic." That means that the "unknown" 1% now has an a priori chance of non historicity of, you guessed it, 100%!

So you can now probably see why I say that, never mind exactly how you obtained your 99%, the 99% most definitely makes "not historic" the most likely hypothesis for any detail whose status is as yet "unknown."

That is a bit woolly. A better way to put it is: any detail that falls under the 1% unknown category is assumed to have a 99% chance of non-historicity unless evidence specific to that detail shows otherwise.

So, once again, it all comes down to one thing. Given that we know the prevalence of FBI, we need data from the docs that either cannot be explained by FBI or that can be much better explained via historicity (what specifically does not count is data that can also be explained by historicity). Until we have that data, the hypothesis that Jesus was not historic remains the most likely.

Gerard Stafleu

Ben C Smith

Exactly so, and well put. Thanks.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

But we are not sampling. At least, I am not sampling.

This is what I meant.

This is most assuredly not what I meant. Remember that I said: Even if 99% of the gospel details about Jesus could be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to have been invented. This means we have (hypothetically, course; the whole thing is hypothetical) actually examined 99% of the details.

Who, BTW, do you know who goes about this kind of research by sampling like this? Who really, honestly selects his or her data randomly?

Rather, I think researchers into the HJ select the data that seems in advance to have the best chance of proving something one way or another.

I already stated that if 99% of the details were provably nonhistoric and the other 1% not provable either way, I would not press the case for an HJ.

But surely you are not imagining that this is how I see the real state of affairs. Not at all. For one thing, the 99% was hypothetical and hyperbolic. For another, I think we glean positive indicators for historicity from various data.

I was not talking about the unknown category. I specifically postulated that evidence could be marshalled for the 1%; this means that the 1% is known (within the available parameters), not unknown.

I agree with this much (I think), and have at various times offered just such data.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History, page 143 (emphasis added):

[F]or each particular of a document the process of establishing credibility should be separately undertaken regardless of the general credibility of the author.

Ben.

EarlDoherty

If you read my Book Review of Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity, you would know that I have read Crossan extensively and that I have addressed his views. And when you scoffed at my “As far as I recall, no one, including yourself, has ever attempted a different explanation,” you misrepresent it. I was referring to the explanation as to how the early Christians could possibly be solely focused on scripture and be totally bereft of historical traditions about Jesus’ experiences and teachings. Your reference to Wells and Crossan hardly fills that bill.

The above quote shows one ‘explanation’ that cannot possibly fill the bill. But I’ll include it as part of a larger question. How could a religious movement be based on an historical man and his life, how could it be preached to others and be accepted by them, how could it keep itself alive for successive generations of believers themselves, if absolutely nothing was known about the man himself and his experiences? This is the crashing fallacy inherent in ‘explanations’ like Crossan’s. Are we to imagine an apostle like Paul approaching some group of people who have never heard of him or his Jesus and saying: “I want you to believe that a man about whom we know nothing, who underwent a death about which we know nothing, whom no one actually saw in person after his reputed resurrection, was the Son of God and savior of the world and will guarantee you an eternity in Heaven. Nevertheless, I was so impressed by him—second-hand, of course, since I never actually met the fellow—that I was convinced that I could find all about him in scripture, and have managed to put together all these passages which prophesied him…And, besides, if you don’t believe what I say, you won’t achieve salvation.” Would any audience have been satisfied with this? Would they have heeded him? Paul himself may have undergone some kind of imagined ‘revelation,’ but would his listeners? Would his children (if he had had any)? If this is what Crossan’s much-vaunted “methodology” leads to, then I’ll take my own, thank-you. Which is the bringing of common sense to an interpretation of the record.

You would also have us believe that a full 60 years after this unknown death took place, that a community of believers could still subsist with no problem on all this ignorance, simply on passages in the scriptures which were alleged to speak of this unknown man. (And, of course, longer than that, since Christians continued to so subsist for several decades more on the same ignorance, with only Ignatius seeming to be an against-the-grain example—and even he knew precious little.) You would also have us believe, and this is even more infeasible, that during those many decades after that reputed life, so many communities failed to develop details about it, imagine them, create historical fulfillments of those ‘prophecies’ in scripture, simply because that would be the compelling, inevitable thing to do. Apparently, only one writer thought of doing that very thing, the author of Mark probably after a good half-century, and the trend only began from his example, with no sign that his redactors possessed any historical traditions of their own either.

That is why I say that such alleged ‘explanations’ are not explanations at all, but raise more questions than they think to resolve. Wells, too, I have demonstrated many times, has an ‘explanation’ which has considerable problems. And performing an exercise which can create pseudo-historical data based solely on scripture does not deal with the more fundamental problem of explaining how the whole business could get off the ground in the first place or could maintain itself over time in order for one to create a certain pseudo-historical picture within it.

Where in heaven’s name have I said that the gambling for Jesus’ clothes was envisioned as happening in a spiritual realm? Things like that are Gospel details which, while originally part of an allegorical story that was not imagined as actually happening—anywhere—came later to be seen as an historical part of an historical event. Paul gives us no ‘imagined’ details like that for his spiritual Christ’s death. His ‘knowledge’ is restricted to death and resurrection, the former taking place at the hands of the demon spirits. He imagines a ‘cross’, but that’s about it. All of it came from scripture, as he tells us more than once.

Because: (1) If Paul and his contemporary Christians believed that scripture revealed a human being who had walked the earth, then traditions would artificially have developed reflecting that belief. Such things would be necessary for survival, to answer questions, to satisfy curiosity, to attempt to provide some biography for that human being and his work of salvation. At the very least, some kind of speculation would arise, a discussion of possibilities, a reflection on what scripture might be pointing to in terms of the when and what and how that supposedly took place on earth. We get nothing of the kind, right up to and including 1 Clement. This is the basic fallacy in the Wells position. His proposal is simply a way out of the problem he personally finds in those few ‘human-sounding’ phrases in the epistles, because he has not perceived the scriptural/cosmological setting they so easily fit into, and not because he has argued his position from evidence within the epistles which points in his direction. Wells does indeed have to shoulder a burden to support his case, and he has not met that burden. There is no "default" position here. Whether historical or non-historical, it has to be demonstrated from the evidence.

Because: (2) Paul and other early writers tell us things and use language which points in the direction of a non-material, spiritual world. They often exclude an historical man from what they say. My writings are full of examples and arguments surrounding such things. I maintain that the Pauline Christ cannot be read as historical, whereas there are many things in the epistles and elsewhere which indicate that we can readily read it as non-historical. And the only dimension for the latter is in the spiritual world, in the envisionings of myth. Hebrews gives us the perfect example of how Christ can be perceived, through scripture, as operating in the spiritual world of the heavens.

The question is, is my argument for interpolation of Galatians 4:4 a good one? I believe it is. (Although I argue for both positions and demonstrate that neither one is reliable as pointing to an earthly man.) And no one has taken it upon him or herself to demonstrate otherwise. It was not some capricious, arbitrary declaration on my part.

Earl Doherty

Amaleq13

Why does this not hold true for your position as well?

IOW, how could a religious movement be based on a mythical entity and his activities in a spiritual realm, how could it be preached to others and be accepted by them, how could it keep itself alive for successive generations of believers themselves, if absolutely nothing was known about the entity and his experiences?


Doug