outhouse

very intelligent reply Legion


I wish you would get your books finished/published


anyone else think it puts Doherty to shame??

LegionOnomaMoi

I would, but that isn't the case here. No single epistomlogy, certainly. But that's true of historiography and history in general. And again, critiquing methods used to reconstruct the historical Jesus, or even finding them all to be fundamentally flawed, doesn't say anything about a mythical Jesus. There is quite a divide between "Jesus didn't exist" and "we can't know anything about him because our sources are too problematic".


What issue? You assert something exists. I state there's no evidence for it. You respond that my stating that is somehow evidence. I've seen examples of hegemony within academic communities (the movement within psychiatry to a biomedical model is an excellent example). There's a unity within these that is utterly lacking when it comes to historical Jesus studies. Psychiatry went from the psychoanalytic framework to a biomedical and diagnostic approach with almost no research, creating the DSM-III to validate their practice as a scientific one and defend it against social workers, psychologists, and other similar individuals who lacked medical expertise. They continued to force others to use their manual, using their medical degrees and their claim that the disorders in their chinese-menu DSM were distinct, biologically based diseases to ensure that insurance companies, advocacy groups, and the government would give them priority over any other practicitioners. Colloborating with NIMH and drug companies they produced a ceaseless campaign pushing medicine rather than therapy and a ceaseless barage through various media of messages informing the public that this or that was a disease and to be treated as such. As a result, psychologists have largely failed in their decades long fight to be able to prescribe psychotropic medication, clinicians of all sorts use the DSM, the insurance companies require psychiatric diagnoses whether the practitioner is a psychiatrist or not, and all of this despite an enormous amount of evidence that even if their is a biological component to mental illness, it is far more general and environmental than the psychiatric community contends. But thanks to the status the public and the health community gives doctors the psychiatric model prevails, a constantly reinforced hegemony through unity and the appeal to a particular educational background persists.

We have nothing at all like that when it comes to Jesus studies. For one thing, it isn't even a field unto itself, but rather an area of research in which specialists with backgrounds ranging from theology to archaeology participate. There is no unity but a striking disunity. There is no single paradigm but several central ones and others more on the fringe. Rather than a believing public who readily accepts the expertise of specialists, the average individual who knows a bit about the historical Jesus quest usually knows almost every published mythicist out there and often only a handful of popular scholars. Most of those who have published something on the historical Jesus have published nothing intended for the general public. The only "unity" is that Jesus existed, and this too has been questioned more than once over the past 100+ years.


You don't point to any facts. You make a claim about some nebulous hegemony that lacks even the credibility of Chomsky's manufacturing consent, let alone Kuhnian models of paradigm shifts, but neither here nor the last time you appealed to this construct do you offer anything to support its existence.


Gramsci? Seriously? That's what you are comparing the maintenance of your "hegemony" to? Even though his Prison Notes specifically deals with intellectuals (and I don't mean the commessi)? First, both Gramscian and neo-Gramscian theory require a vastly different situation than we find with historical Jesus studies, because the vast bulk takes place not only apart from the public but without their knowledge. Second, both Gramsci and later theorists require not just the ascription of elite status to (in this case) intellectuals but a cohesive front which is maintained in various ways (for Gramsci, crises and continual battle in the political arena). The front, or focus, may shift (and may have to shift in order to maintain control), but the unity is a necessary component for maintenance, as is a continual, pervasive, and insidious interaction with the public, taking place in the public sphere (or, to use Habermas' term, die Öffentlichkeit). What you have consists of a very small subset of the academic community even bothering to publish works for the public, let alone engaging with the vast number of individuals whose discourse takes place online.

Iskander

I think that by “hegemony” it is probably meant that some group in a community has acquired the power to educate the children of everyone and to suppress contentious discussion and the dissemination of opposing ideas.

The forceful ‘conversion’ to some despised religion imposed on the defeated by by some victorious army can only be understood as the acquisition by the winners of captive children to be brainwashed into believing the fantasies that the ancestors of those children had rejected and this action together with the burning of dissenters, the burning of books and so forth is what is probably meant by ‘hegemony, and in that sense hegemomy is very concrete and very real.

Religions are all very fond of using a particular malignant form of ‘hegemony’; the methods they use include control over the ‘afterlife’ ,and thought police in the form of an ‘all knowing ever present god’ in addition to divine lordship over its human slaves through its saintly human overseers .

If by the word ‘hegemony’ one is drawing attention to the harmful effect on society of any dominant religion , then that word is used in a meaningful manner and it should meet with the approval of all.

sotto voce

Typically, in the West, and under sharia, that education has entailed promoting the concept of justification by works. These are not the good works of ordinary relationships in home or work, but are religious works, performed under the auspices of self-appointed religious castes. In Europe, these castes have, since WW1, and particularly since WW2, largely been discarded, though attempts are still made to maintain their influence.

In the USA, this trend has not been nearly so rapid, due to the unique history of that country. It appears that Americans are reluctant to abandon works justification. This is represented mainly by Calvinism, charismatism and Catholicism, and a unique religion known as Evangelicalism that owes nothing to evangelicalism, but everything to a sort of 'Protestant' moralising that is really only modified Catholicism of a medieval sort (modern Catholics of the USA being less morally punctilious than ever before).

So American skeptics need to be aware of the choice before them. The majority goes with works justification of a ritual sort rather than risk exposure to the idea of justification by faith.

rlogan

Exactly. Can't add to that.

LegionOnomaMoi -

Blah blah blah... anything but talk about the subject at hand or contribute to progress on a new application of a real science to this problem. "If" numbers can be used? God what tripe.

This is the simplest part of the modelling:

This data is in lines of books, the most important (first) Gospel book being Mark. I would like to do Mark. It can be compiled into a data set that is either a set of ideas, lines, or verses.

Each either has Hebrew Bible quote-mining or interpretation behind it or it doesn't. This is where some value judgements can be made. But each also potentially has a historical Jesus backing to it too. This is binary. So "if" the numbers zero and one exist, it can be done.

I am handicapped in the HJ somewhat because when you try to pin down what they say the Historical Jesus is - you get back almost nothing as Earl says above. It has been "constructed" by eliminating everything of significance about him.

I want to try giving a fair hearing to the HJ in this procedure but like Earl is saying above, you can't get anything productive out of the hegemony. They should welcome this kind of test if they had some faith in their own theory but it is pretty clear they don't. So it's just aimless attacks, anything but actually get going doing it. Malicious obstructionism. How dare you bring a statistical science to bear on this problem!

So I guess you do it alone.

LegionOnomaMoi

Then you should have no problem producing examples in which mathematical models were used to test historical hypothesis. After all, mathematics is not completely alien to historians. A classicist I know based his dissertation on a statistical analysis of roman drama. Authenticity of the Pauline letters made use of computational and frequency models.

Unfortunately, however, your incredibly naive approach is bound to fail:
An how, exactly, do you numerically determine "how much explaining of the text that does"? By how many times you can find a quotation? Or by how many times you can find parallels? And how do you determine what is or isn't a parallel? With loose enough comparisons, I can show that The Sound of Music used Herodotus or J. K. Rowling used the Elder Edda. A linguistic analysis of the type used to determine authorship (techniques used in textual studies for decades both within and apart from biblical studies, for example demonstrating that Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were both written by the same anonymous author) would do nothing for you here. In fact, the only way you can use a mathematical model is by arbitrary assignment of the probability that a given similarity implies dependence, which makes your model no more valid than those available. It just has more numbers.

Here again we have the problem of "motivated by Hebrew scripture." The problem is (primarily) two-fold. First, apart from direct quotes, the only way to determine if a given component is "motivated by Hebrew scripture" is to apply a weight based on your opinion of the similarity between the component in Mark and the parallel you think it is based on. Second, there is no reason to think that a first century Jew wouldn't say and do things in order to deliberately construct parallels between his works and the OT. We find such parallels quite apart from Jesus (in, for example, Josephus' description of other would-be messiah types). So once more, you're back to arbitrary assignment of numerical values and weights. Garbage in, garbage out.

You have the answer? Fantastic. Where's the math? And what about your J-Test:

In case you have forgot the equations, I've uploaded Davidson & MacKinnon's original 1981 paper from Econometrica here. Just click on the "low speed download" and you can get it for free. I eagerly await to see whether your extra regression was linear or nonlinear, and what your observation vectors consisted of.

Greek actually. We're talking about the LXX.

Wow. What is your statistical background again?

Either that, or the social sciences and humanities have been using statistical models for years (unfortunately, too many without an adequate enough grasp of statistics), and the type of application you're talking about simply doesn't work. You're way beyond linguistic analysis in which everything from ANNs using bayesian based thresholds to simple chi-squared analyses can be used. Your models require so many assumptions that the assignment of values makes them meaningless.

rlogan

Blah blah blah.


You don't think model selection criteria can be applied to this. Fine. So you are of no value to me.

Your ego is immense, pretending you are some kind of sovereign that can make me answer endlessly to you. That doesn't help me model this now does it?

Welcome to ignore.

LegionOnomaMoi

That pretty much describes your suggested application of statistical analyses, yes.


That's hardly the issue. You talk of my ego, yet without apparently knowing much at all about statistical techniques employed in historical analyses (biblical studies included) you arrogantly suggest that your knowledge of statistics is somehow vastly superior to the ignorant thousands of PhDs out there whose work has concerned the historical Jesus:
Right. Biblical scholars are just waiting for someone who knows statistics to help them out. Or they're scared that statistical models will somehow show they're wrong. Nevermind the fact that computer analyses, data mining, etc., have been used in biblical studies for decades. Nevermind that you made baseless claims which now you can't back up:

Great. I gave you the original paper where the author's outline their methods. I'm waiting for you to demonstrate its applicability. You stated:
Fantastic. Here's the basic model you were talking about:


I eagerly await your application.

No. Some research might help though. And the realization the regression models designed for interval or similar data doesn't lend itself easily even to ordinal data, let along arbitrary assignment of valued.

Will Wiley

Well, why not do it then?

spin

When you can find a way to extract what is a datum of veracity about the past purely from a tradition source do let me know.

I use a notion that is commonplace and you want me to reinvent it. I've pointed you to some sourcing on the matter.

The current mythicist caffuffle is the result of repressive tolerance reaching its limit and active steps starting to be taken to deal with it. The smirking academic chimps are starting to feel that it's time to quash the stupidity. It's pure hegemony at work.

You continue paradoxically by pointing out "disunity" to assert hegemony. You invent (reinvent, you started the same way) a monolithic model of hegemony that you don't believe. Don't waste your time. Either deal with the mainstream notion or don't.

Prestige is a key element to the notion of hegemony. Consent in our case is manufactured in the acceptance of the prestige of the purveyors of hallowed academic dicta. Chomsky knows his Gramsci.

Seriously. He's the starting point of the notion. It has evolved since the 1930s as have the institutions and means of maintaining hegemony. But to understand hegemony you start with Gramsci... and then see the way the notion is understood today in the fields of cultural and political studies. The notion of manufacturing consent would not be possible without Gramsci.

I briefly mentioned earlier in this thread that Gramsci had a simpler society with fewer tools for constructing consent to deal with in his analysis.

This assertion doesn't deal with surface features of the hegemony.

The role of any institution within hegemony is to maintain and control its sphere of interest. The individual people that make up the institution may be at odds with each other, but having been inducted into the institution, will almost invariably reproduce the institution. Those that don't get ignored or ejected from their positions. You basically have to be in it to play the game.