Richard Carrier

Vinnie: You say you "would argue that any violation of natural law (if that is what you mean by miracle) is so improbable as to be absolutely worthless as an historical explanation for any miraculous datum--regardless of how well attested."

First, I do not define "miracle" as a violation of natural law (it isn't even clear to me what "natural law" even means in such a context, but that's an entirely different question). Rather, I broadly define "miracle" in historical analysis as any event brought about wholly or in part by a superhuman agent (whether according to natural "law" or in "violation" of it, whatever that would mean). But I also, and perhaps most commonly, define "miracle" more narrowly as any event brought about wholly or in part by a super-natural agent, where a supernatural agent is a conscious entity that can effect its will, in whole or in part, without the complete mediation of natural forces (as is the case for acts of the human will--this fact will be explained in an essay presently under review here at the Secular Web).

Second, is effecting one's will without mediation by natural forces the same thing as "violating" natural law? This is terribly unclear to me. For example, according to natural law, water boils at 100 degrees celsius--unless the ambient pressure is higher or lower than that at sea level. Does that mean that variations in ambient pressure violate natural law? Certainly not. By the same token, if nature contains an entity that can change the boiling point of water by willing it, is that entity violating natural law? No more so than variations in pressure do. One can just as easily say that it is a natural law that such entities can change water's boiling point by willing it, just as one would say that it is a natural law that changes in ambient pressure do the same thing. So I see no utility in defining "miracle" in terms of violating natural law. Such a demarcation is hopelessly subjective and contentious in my opinion.

Third, is historical method logically incapable of proving that any improbable thing has happened? Surely you cannot believe that--or else most of history, even very recent history, would have to be tossed out as unverifiable even in principle. Indeed, much of our own memories would be convicted of unbelievability. So do you set some sort of probability "benchmark" such that historical methods can confirm things up to a certain level of improbability but not beyond? If so, what benchmark do you set, and why that instead of some other, and why should we believe your benchmark really is what you claim, i.e. the level of improbability beyond which historical method can no longer uncover the truth? I doubt you really have any defensible answers to these questions. I know I don't--and so I don't attempt such claims myself. For as far as I can see, there is always some scale of evidence that can overcome any subjective estimate of improbability.

For example, if we uncovered a historical record made independently in China, Mesoamerica, Rome, Alexandria, Babylon, Meroe, and Bombay, all on the same day in the same year, on carbon-datable papyri and paper and bone records, recording that all the stars in the sky rearranged themselves to say "Jesus Lives!", I cannot fathom any reasonable argument that we should have to deny this happened because it was so improbable even that scale of evidence could not confirm it. I, for one, would be convinced. Regardless of how I or anyone came to explain the observation, the observation itself would be undeniable. It just so happens no such scale of evidence has ever been forthcoming for any such events, but that is, pardon the pun, an accident of history, and not an inevitable deficiency in the logic of historical methodology.

Here is a more detailed example of what I mean: even though it is extraordinarily improbable that the ambient pressure in New York in 1891 would be four atmospheres, if we had extensive documentation that water throughout that city boiled at a temperature commensurate with such a high ambient pressure, why would you reject that testimony? Just because of its physical improbability? But wouldn't it be even more improbable, that so much simultaneous corroborating testimony would be generated, if it were not true? If other effects expected from a bizarrely dense atmosphere were also observed and those observations preserved in comparable historical records, then the unnatural air density would have to be conceded, surely. If such ancillary evidence was not observed, however, then one could reasonably hypothesize that some as-yet-unknown natural law affected the boiling point of water in New York in that year. But you could not reasonably deny the effect itself, on such good testimony.

Now, suppose we also had the same scale of testimony (such as several newspaper stories and government documents and diary entries and so on) that a little green faerie-like creature walked into New York that year and predicted that he could change the boiling point of water at will, asked leading scientists in the city to state a temperature for him to set, and then, afterward, just when he said he would fulfill their request, the boiling point of water changed exactly so throughout the city, and then the testimonial record showed he repeated the experiment three times again. Would you really have any reasonable grounds for denying that there are little green faerie people who can change the boiling point of water at will?

One might still dogmatically insist that the strange creature pulled this off through some as-yet-unknown natural power (like, say, Vardra on Star Trek: TNG), but that would seem rather presumptuous in the absence of any evidence of such--for all your dogmatic resistance, I don't think you could reasonably deny that a kind of hopeful agnosticism was at least justified by such evidence. And if things like that happened all the time, it would be quite out of all reason to doubt it on such grounds as this, for then those grounds would not even have any general support.

This is, I believe your point. That is, the presumption that natural law always operates rests on near universal evidence that it always does so--but if that universal evidence were to the contrary, then the presumption would have no support, and supernaturalism (as I define it) would be the more plausible explanatory paradigm. And this could then be proven through scientific research--for instance, by testing all known ways the given miracle-worker could produce these effects through the mediation of natural laws, by forces and particles and fields or whatever, and eliminating them all, leaving only one hypothesis supported by the evidence: the existence of a supernatural will.

Now, such is the logical possibility, and historical method could in theory provide enough evidence to reach that conclusion (in general or in only a specific case) even if science could not yet confirm it. For it may be that, for example, a magical field was present around earth in the past but no longer today--as valid a scientific hypothesis as any, if the evidence were sufficient to support it. And it could be so supported, even on historical evidence alone, as is the case for much of those conclusions that geology and archaeology produce, for example, or ancient astronomy (especially ancient observations of supernovae, and the application of eclipse records to calculating lunar deceleration).

However, the reality is not this, but something altogether different. We do not have the scale of evidence required here, certainly not for any generalizations about the existence and operation of supernatural agents at any time in history, but not even for any particular instances of it either. That does not mean it is impossible for history to uncover such things, only that there just aren't any such things to uncover.

Indeed, your (and my) conviction about the improbability of such a thing as a supernatural event or agent is precisely and soley based on the historical record. So it cannot be argued that history has nothing to tell us here. It is the only field that does have anything to tell us. Not only because scientific records are no less historical records than anything else, but also because science has never been so godlike in its survey that it has ever been able to pronounce what always happens everywhere under all conditions. Most observations in history, and thus in fact most of what we know about the world, have been made, and recorded, by nonscientists.

Think of it this way. Can science tell us whether magic worked up to 200 A.D. but not after? Probably not. So, then, is such a thing literally unknowable even if it were true? I don't see why that necessarily follows. Given enough historical evidence of sufficient kind, I'll bet I could make a reasonable case for reasonable belief even in such a proposition as that. It just so happens that we don't have that evidence. Now, either we don't have it because the proposition is false, or we don't have it because the accidents of time have destroyed the evidence we would need to believe it even though it is true.

It is this dichotomy (and similar ones like it) that we resolve on informed intuitions of probability: Which is more probable, that real magic would leave insufficient evidence in the historical record, or that there has never been real magic? I agree with you: based on all our own past experience so far, which includes all of credible history so far, the answer is well on the side of the latter. But this is so because the historical evidence establishes it as such, not because of any inherent limitations in historical methodology.

At least that is my view of the matter.

Richard Carrier

Plump-DJ: I won't be debating these issues here, but you do deserve to know my position at least:

(A) As you can learn from my online review of Doherty, I am agnostic about the historicity of Jesus. I think there is a viable ABE against it, but that case is not sufficient to overcome reasonable doubt in my opinion. As to a "supernatural resurrection" (much less the even more specific hypothesis of resurrection by a particular God), I am much more confident that there is insufficient evidence to establish such a thing (which you can learn from my online Yale Lecture on the subject and from chapters I am contributing to a forthcoming anthology edited by Jeff Lowder and Bob Price that will hopefully be in bookstores within a year or two).

(B) You might be pleased to know that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is not a criterion I mention in my talk. Though it is a valid tool of analysis, it need not be articulated, since anyone who is using correct logic will already have accounted for it implicitly. The catchphrase you dislike so much simply articulates a basic fact of Aristotelian logic: no specific proposition can be true unless every general proposition that it implies is also true. But to establish the truth of a generalization requires far more evidence than one needs to establish a particular (this follows necessarily from any valid construction of inductive logic). For example, "I have a car" and "I have a nuclear missile" cannot stand on the same scale of evidence. The latter would require far more, and more reliable, evidence than the former, before you would believe it. Dislike it if you may, it is an inescapable fact of logic. This is an issue I will address in some detail in my own forthcoming book Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. So you can read about it there. But it will also come up in my talk, in an indirect way--namely, in the proper application of the ABE criteria, which are founded on the principles of inductive logic.

(C) You say "historical methods do not always (should I say often) reveal 'causes' behind events; rather they deal more in the 'knowable effects' of history." I am not sure how one would go about quantifying the data so as to say what the ratio was, or if even a simple count would be meaningful (since some findings are more valued than others). But it is certainly true that history seeks two different kinds of conclusion, and any proper Ph.D. dissertation, for example, is expected to at least approach both, and most historical monographs, and a great many historical research articles, do likewise. Those two categories are the "facts" and the "explanations." In short, historians seek out what happened and then seek to explain why. Since the former is absolutely necessary for the latter (though often vice versa as well), it is more an accident of procedure if the former is more numerous--the latter remains the principle plum of historical research generally, and is what every historian ultimately seeks most of the time, even if a lot of the former must be done to get there.

In the case of the Resurrection, for example, the "what" would be whether there was an empty tomb and whether Jesus appeared bodily and so on, and the "why" would be whether these facts happened because Jesus was raised from the dead by a supernatural agent, or whatever. There is nothing inherently miraculous about the "what's" here--these facts only become "miraculous" when they are attached to a certain "why." So there is no avoiding the latter: we all have to go there. But, in the end, we might find out it is a place we can't get to, because of the scarcity of evidence. Hence, as far as I can see, there is no difference in principle between ascertaining whether God raised Jesus from the dead, and ascertaining whether Tiberius arranged the assassination of Germanicus. Both involve personal agents as causal agencies, both involve many corollary facts, both entail speculation about many unknowns, and so on. But in the end, for all our suspicions, we don't really know whether Tiberius did Germanicus in. We just don't have the evidence we would need to decide the matter. And so it is with the Resurrection. That is, at least, my view of the matter.

(D) Regarding Craig, he horribly misuses the ABE criteria, and it was exactly him whom I had in mind when I mentioned such abuses in my original post. Craig is both inconsistent in his applications, and incorrect in his understanding--otherwise plainly explained in his source (McCullagh, an expert in the philosophy of history, drawing on actual historians)--as to what the criteria actually measure. Just as pseudoscientists abuse scientific method to produce bogus conclusions with an air of scientific fact, so pseudohistorians like Craig abuse historical method to produce bogus conclusions with an air of historical fact. The existence of such confabulators, whether sincerely in error or blamefully negligent or deliberately deceitful (I don't really know which category Craig falls in), does not discredit the methods of science, nor does it discredit the methods of history.

The issue of Craig's ABE for the resurrection is addressed in several chapters of the forthcoming Lowder-Price anthology I mentioned above. But the articles you linked to do not contain an ABE or the McCullagh criteria, so I am not sure why you offered those as examples. They certainly don't mention any of the criteria I will be discussing in Sacramento. Craig does deploy the McCullagh ABE in several places in print and other places online. So I will discuss this issue in a new thread entitled "Craig's Employment of the McCullagh Criteria."

Otherwise, I think I've explained myself enough here. Even if I am wrong, I think you all understand at least what I believe to be the case.

spin

Of this last point I have no doubt, but you are already processing the data with your epistemological tools.

However, epigraphy and numismatics are from the period, we are forced to hear them and then judge them -- for all evidence needs to be weighed for value. Unless secondary evidence can be shown to be relevant historically, there is no need to consider it.

The only way this can be done is through support of the secondary evidence with primary evidence. No matter how much methodological effort one puts into analysing a text, it is only with the support of the primary evidence that it will have any weight.

Arrian, as per your example, can only be considered after we have developed a highly complex network of historical data, starting with archaeological data including the appearance of cities built at a relatively specific point in time, evidence for dynasties which were to continue for a few centuries, etc. Once you get back to clearly historical eponymous figures such as Seleucus and Ptolemy, to events such as the destruction of Persepolis, we have a cradle which provides us with benchmarks for dealing with Arrian and the various other writers on the same subject.

Later you give these as some of your categories of evidence:

All evidence needs to be weighed. Your categories make sense, but it is in the categorizing that a lot of problems will arise when talking to people who see things differently from you.

The simple dichotomy I have put forward allows certain data to be presented and others not to be. Primary evidence must be heard. Only secondary evidence supported by primary evidence can be heard. It is only then that the sort of categorization you outline needs to be made and agreed on.

Any text is historical data for the time in which it was written. Our task in order to use the text is to eke out what we can about the writer, his/her background, where written, when written, the audience, the purpose of writing, genre, and probably other facets. We will often not be able to find out much of these regarding particular ancient texts (there's so much we just don't and perhaps can't know) and that will render their value less effective. But, finding out these things is basically what you delve into when you mention text produced by governments and by freelance writers. We are now dealing with a mixture of historical and pragmatic concerns. I have no problem with this. It is relatively clear.


spin

Richard Carrier

I think you mistake my point. For the only remaining point of disagreement I have, if even that, is this:

The word "only" does not belong here. It is simply not true that historians would only consider, or only be justified in considering, Arrian as a source of evidence, if they had that other backing. That other data certainly strengthens (often enormously) our reliance on Arrian, especially (though not only) in those specific details that are corroborated. But if for some reason we had no access to that other data (i.e. for some reason we couldn't even expect such evidence to exist or be accessible to us--if, for example, the archaeological evidence was all buried beneath a living urban civilization and thus beyond access, as is the case for most of Tyre and Alexandria, for example, and so on), Arrian would still offer more than zero value as a source of evidence, simply because of the fact that he clearly states his methods and his sources (and his methods we know are sound, and he identifies his sources as eye-witnesses). This puts him well above the league of most contemporaries. Tacitus, for example, doesn't attain to Arrian's merit as a historian. Likewise, Thucydides and Polybius are inherently more trustworthy than not for the same reason that credits Arrian, over against other historians (such as Suetonius or Theopompus). Without corroboration, Arrian would not be a strong source of evidence, but it would not be a weak one either. We would not simply dismiss his material. But it is true we would not hold it with the same confidence as we actually do, from the fact of such extensive corroboration, particular in those respects you discuss.

So our disagreement is really just a quibble over a single hyperbole in your position. Which is not a very substantial a disagreement, IMO.

Likewise:

Though you are making a valid point, it is too extreme: it is not the case that all "secondary" evidence unsupported by primary must be discarded.

First, I suspect that would entail discarding well over 80% of all historical beliefs, and without good reason--especially since many of those beliefs are explanatory, not just expository, and so are supported by evidence of prior and posterior historical events, not just the one event being examined--that is, we can have other evidence on either side of one event supporting a chain of historical causation, which in turn lends credence to that middle event in a way that other events, which lack such support, do not enjoy.

Second, and drawing on my first point, the question is not black and white. It is a question of degree of confidence. And that cannot be settled in the way you suggest--which is far too simplistic. For there is more to the issue of assessing the merit of evidence than external corroboration. A lot more. The Arrian example (and causal chain example) doesn't even touch on all those other considerations that historians are trained to look to.

Finally, my point also was that there is rarely a clear or non-arbitrary demarcation between "primary" and "secondary" evidence. That fact complicates the simplistic program of evidence-assessment that you suggest. But this point is just a flip side of the other point: that there is more to weighing evidence than a primary-secondary corroboration scenario. But in the end, you are right in the one sense that your idea of primary-secondary corroboration is one marker that provides strong weight to such a system of evidence, perhaps even the strongest marker one can have (though I have not thoroughly considered the issue of relative weights of all possible indicators of merit). But it is not the only marker.

Vorkosigan

Richard, I very much enjoyed reading and learning from this thread, but there are still some issues that bother me, and they strike to the heart of the problem in judging, say, what the Gospels -- and even the letters of Paul -- are exactly. So let me ask some naive questions.

You raised the issue of genre earlier, but didn't go into it enough for me. One thing that would help immensely is a set of criteria for determining that -- for example, the difference between "critical biography" and "didactic hagiography." People seem to be carrying around a set of not-very-explicit ideas in their heads about what constitutes fiction writing and what constitutes fact. When I personally read the scenes of Jesus before Pilate, for example, I read fiction in its entirety; it never happened. For others this looks like a rendering of fact dressed up as a story.

A second problem with the issue of genre is that the historians I have interacted with on XTALK and elsewhere seem to utilize it as a kind of defense. "You have to settle on genre before you can talk about authenticity" whereas I felt that determining authenticity would help settle the idea of what genre we were looking at -- where we stood on the spectrum between the hard liquor of Absolut Biography and the 3.2% beer of didactic hagiography. Where did I go wrong? What is the interaction between genre and historicity?

A third problem, it seems to me, is that genre is not important to authenticity. Narratives about Luke Skywalker are found in movies, toys, comics, novels, short stories, and websites, but they are all fictions regardless, though they may incorporate current knowledge (except, of course, for how fast you can go on the Kessel run!). So with narratives about Robin Hood in ballad, song, novel, and poem, though they may incorporate historical elements (I see very little difference between the Jesus materials and the Robin Hood materials in terms of the historical authenticity of the stories about the two protagonists). Further, a demonstration of the fictionality of Luke Skywalker invalidates him equally for all genres. So where have I gone wrong in thinking like this? Again, how are genre and historicity related?

Finally, it seems to me that the criteria generally proposed by people like Gerd Ludemann, John Meier, J.D. Crossan, and others, take it as axiomatic that Jesus existed and that the various Christian writings can tell us something about him. They then evolve criteria to separate "fact" from "fiction" in some probabilistic way. But no set of criteria seem to underly this axiomatic assumption of Jesus' existence. The usual strategy is the appeal to outside vectors. Besides this one, what criteria "internal" to the documents would show that the people, events, and stories they tell are fictional?

Vorkosigan

NOGO

I do not doubt that early Christians believed. I doubt that what they believed is true.

This brings me to another point. Science investigates the behaviour of objects. It should also be able to investigate the behaviour of humans.

Why do people believe what they believe?

Toto

That is the province of psychology and the social sciences. See How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God.

Richard Carrier

If you want to bone up on this subject, then required reading is Charles Talbert, What Is a Gospel? The Genre of the Canonical Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977).

There are numerous books on the subject of genre assignment, and the role genre played in determining how an author approached and structured a work. It is this variation in narrative structure, introduction, conclusion, method, style, and voice, for example, which varies because the objectives of each genre vary, and also because of cultural presuppositions about how something was to be done, such as how one writes a glory tale about a holy man. And this leaves telltale signs on a text, and at the same time gives us important information about what the author intended by writing what he did, which definitely affects any weight put on it as evidence.

Because of the literary culture of the age one can often demarcate genre easily, especially prior to the Enlightenment. After that, Western writers became much more experimental and defiant, and mixing and inverting and inventing genres became common--one of the reasons moderns who don't have a strong background in ancient texts have a hard time understanding the importance of genre in evaluating sources (though there are still statistical programs that can demarcate genre among modern texts, even identify the gender of an author or whether a text is fiction or fact, by analyzing linguistic content in ways the human eye can't catch--but that generally doesn't work on ancient texts, or at least no one has developed any significant tools for such a purpose).

Even without the textbook background, one can tell genre very easily if one has a wide-ranging experience with documents from the period. Compare Mark and Matthew with any ancient history or biography and you cannot help but notice fundamental differences in approach and structure--until you pick up a hagiography. There are tons of medieval examples--there used to be tons of ancient examples, but because they were about pagan holy men, the Church didn't bother preserving many--rare exceptions include the Life of Apollonius of Tyana and a few surviving fragments from the many hagiographies of Pythagoras (and one might include the Alexander Romances, but more fitting for Luke-Acts is the Travel Tale, a genre mocked by Petronius, but exemplified more soberly among pagan religious texts, such as the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and the various early novels). The fact that the Gospels (except maybe Luke) fall well into the pattern exhibited by the hagiographies, and notably far from the pattern of histories and biographies, is not a trivial fact.

First, note that this is not so serious a problem--if you picked up a modern novel, you would never mistake it for a history, even after reading a single page. And yet that's without having any explicit criteria in mind at all. Why? Because you are a native in this culture. You have lived and breathed the textual environment of this culture. Your brain is subconsciously well-prepped to recognize and distinguish a novel from a textbook, a religious tract from a newspaper article, and so on. I am quite certain you would never question your judgments on these distinctions--except when an author has inverted or mixed genres on you (or is deliberately trying to fool you). We have developed computer programs that can detect the same patterns our brains subconsciously detect in modern texts, and the patterns include things as seemingly innocuous as the relative frequency of operators, like the word "of," alongside more obvious indicators, such as vocabulary keywords or the content and style of a text's title or introductory paragraph. But you, I am sure, have never determined a text's genre by analyzing it with a computer tool. You can just tell. It's obvious to you.

It follows that as you gain an equivalent familiarity with another culture, the more familiar (the closer to a native) you get, the more easily you will be able to demarcate genre instinctively. By the same token, just as we have done for modern genre assignment, a serious scholar can examine these intuitions and identify what is actually physically different, what pattern variations are shared across a genre but not (or less) with other genres. And this has in fact been done (Talbert discusses some of the research on this subject, but there is a lot more). So it is no longer necessary to take genre distinctions as implicit. You can study their explicit indicators, by consulting the appropriate scholarship.

The question in both cases of course is "Why?" Or even just: "Who?" Which has more experience with multiple genres from the same period--you or them? If you are both in the same boat on that score, then what do those say who have the extensive experience? Then scholars can start breaking down the "Why" once they have the "What," as Talbert does (though his approach is primarily structural and contextual, whereas there is a lot else that has been done on linguistic markers, for example).

An easy way to go for someone who doesn't want to get a Ph.D. in the subject is simply to start reading. Read, say, three complete ancient historical biographies (try to vary the authors as much as possible), and then read three complete hagiographies (again, try to vary the authors as much as possible). Even with so little exposure as that you will start to see in which category the Pilate scene seems closest to--and that's without even yet grasping just what it is that is different. And if you meet with someone who has done this, and still disagrees with you, all you need then do is start in on the "Why" question: what is it about the Pilate scene that is more like the one genre but not the other? With enough critical debate along those lines, I am certain any two reasonable people will end up in complete agreement as to the true genre of the story. Of course, there are many unreasonable people--and not just among religionists. But there is nothing you can do to persuade them anyway. Facts and epistemic truth will hold no importance for them.

Always remember your Aristotle: the best way is the mean.

On the one hand, it is not true that you "must" settle genre before talking about authenticity, since there are many other criteria one can consider when evaluating authenticity which are genre-independent. But if you have not settled genre, you have to actually mean it. In other words, you can't claim to have skipped that step and then start assuming the text is a history, for example. If you don't know a text's genre, then none of your arguments regarding the reliability of its contents can be based on generalizations that attach to genre. For example, you cannot say that "most histories tell mostly the truth about most things, therefore we should presume this text does as well," because that presupposes that your text is a history, and if you are now going to presuppose that, you have to fess up and not pretend you aren't making a claim to genre. In the end, if you want to benefit from generalizations that attach to genre (and be wary: you probably do that an awful lot without realizing it), then they are right: you do "have to settle on genre" first. And one should do that competently rather than not.

On the other hand, it is rarely the case (especially for ancient history) that you get to start on the other side of the fence, i.e. knowing a text's reliability before knowing its genre. The vast majority of ancient history makes such a privileged and advantaged starting point impossible. The method you propose is only useful for establishing the generalizations with which you will evaluate other texts in a similar genre. For instance, in every case where we can do what you want (determine from, say, external evidence that what a history says is probably true), you can develop an analysis of what the tendency is for the entire genre (for instance, let's say, of all facts open to test, what is the percentage that histories tell the truth vs. novels, and vice versa). Then, when you get to the vast bulk of other cases, where no such test is or ever will be available, you can make an informed judgment about the probability of its reliability. We all do this instinctively already for modern texts. All one needs to do is relearn how to do it for texts in an alien culture--such as that of the Gospels.

You are committing a hasty generalization fallacy here--you are picking one genre and generalizing about all genres. Indeed, you are doing something even worse: picking one of the most extreme genres (complete fiction) and generalizing from that to all other genres, even those not at the extreme. What about genres that lie more in the middle--like propaganda, or historical fiction? What about encomium or eulogy? What about letters to posterity vs. private letters? The latter is a particularly important example: letters that one intends to publish are in quite a different category from letters that one thinks will never be published (there is, for example, a clear structural and stylistic difference between Romans and 1 Corinthians that, though not quite indicating the same genre dichotomy, shares affinities with it).

Or consider a case I have written about for German Studies Review: the bunker stenographs of Adolf Hitler's private rants. That's a pretty bizarre and rare genre, but it is a genre all the same, distinct from others like, say, ideological treatise (Mein Kampf) or televised political speech. And it is distinct in precisely that regard that matters here: relative reliability. There are certain things we can expect not to trust in a televised speech from Hitler that would not be so tainted in private recordings that he only believed would be published after extensive editing and only when the Third Reich had already conquered the world (when Hitler knew he could say whatever the hell he really wanted). And the issue is not a simple matter of relative reliability--genre affects reliability not across the board, but in specific ways (there are things Hitler would lie about in a speech, but also things he would not bother lying about there--whereas it may even be the reverse for a private stenograph, since his audience is different, as is the purpose of the text).

One might also add that Narratives about Luke Skywalker are not necessarily devoid of valuable data for a historian: the moral values and categories presumed in those narratives say a lot about the culture and time when the stories were written, for example. Likewise, "The Force" was not fabricated ex nihilo--George Lucas is a child of the 60s, and the obvious marriage of well-known themes and concepts from Eastern mysticism, with the Western technological mindset of the Space Age, is very much a grandchild of the 60s. Or consider the curious fact that all the villains in Star Wars have British accents, adhere to Roman political structures, and dress like Nazis. Those weren't random choices. They are historically and culturally significant--and a historian would find that to be just as valuable as historical data as the fact that Petronius wrote a parody of the pagan holy novel wherein the lead character went on an Acts-like adventure in order to secure a resurrection for his penis. No, it never happened. But it tells us a lot about the times and the culture of (and preceding) Petronius. Hence, identifying genre makes a big difference in how one uses the data from a text--even absolute fiction has data a historian can use, but the genre will affect in what manner it can credibly be used.

I can't comment on this because I have not read, much less studied, the source tradition for Robin Hood. But what you are claiming here is that the two source traditions share a common cultural genre-parallel. And I presume you actually infer from this analogy conclusions about the reliability of the Gospels. But, if that is so, the question then arises: How can you draw conclusions about the Gospels from an analysis of the Robin Hood tradition, without first establishing that they are analogous? And that amounts to analyzing genre--though in this case, a cross-cultural analysis, since the properties adhering to a genre in antiquity were no doubt at least somewhat different than in the late middle ages, so genres across the two cultures that are comparable in terms of aim and reliability may not be comparable in terms of structure, etc. Hence my reticence to go any further here, without the requisite experience.

But contrast the ahistoricity of Luke Skywalker (which is clear-cut) with that of Teddy Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion. That's fiction, too. Yet Teddy Roosevelt really existed. [BTW, did you notice the irony here, in your choosing a modern hero named Luke?]

Or to pick an even more bizarre example (but for that very reason a very distinctively modern example): Being John Malkovich. For example: Is Charlie Sheen really John Malkovich's best friend? Hmmm. Not easy to say yes or no--the genre does not help here, even in the way you want it to (such as in establishing the ahistoricity of Luke Skywalker). Certainly much of that movie is a fictional account of John Malkovich's life. But it would be a predictable irony to include genuine details in such a genre of film--such as hiring to play his buddy an actor who really was. On the other hand, maybe not. So is there any genre-based help here on establishing the ahistoricity of a close friendship between Charlie Sheen and John Malkovich? Some, yes: unlike, say, Mommy Dearest, where the mother of the lead actress (who was playing herself) wasn't really her mother, in the avantgarde genre such an irony would be as probable as not. But does that mean the genre affords no better help on any other questions one might bring to this document? Again, no. Because for a historian a thousand years from now--who, say, digs the thing up from the ruins of the Lost American Empire--it will be very helpful to know its genre (not only as fiction, but a particular kind of fiction--which may not have a name, but certainly a distinct company), and that will help in evaluating many of its elements, not only their reliability, but in exactly what respect they inform the historian about the history of the culture that produced it.

For something closer to my field: Did Apollonius of Tyana exist? Did the Greeks really sack Troy in the 12th century B.C.? Did Proteus Peregrinus really burn himself alive at the Colosseum? Certainly, the genre of written sources on these matters might only provide some help in answering these questions--and the help it provides might end up being overridden anyway by other evidence--but even so, is not an insignificant issue for anyone who wants to answer them.

I have, as you may know, already commented on this state of things in my review of Doherty. To that I can add here that there certainly are some available indicators in this case, but they are insufficient to be decisive. The name "Jesus" (as just one example) is exactly the name one would expect from a myth of an eponymous hero, though it is also still consistent with a real man. And genre would be a big help here (in favor of ahistoricity) if it were not for the contested meaning of the Epistles. The Epistles are not at all in the same genre as the Gospels, and yet they treat Jesus (by traditional interpretations) as a historical person. And if one relied solely on genre, one would have to conclude that he was. It is only from an analysis of the way Jesus is discussed in them that one can argue that, though the epistolary genre is not inclined to fabricate historical persons, these epistles are not pretending to fabricate a historical person, but are discussing a (believed-to-be) genuine celestial person--if one follows Doherty's interpretation.

And that is the only way such an argument can be carried off. To argue for the ahistoricity of Jesus, your job would be a lot easier if all we had were the Gospels (and a hell of a lot easier if all we had were Mark or Matthew), though even then it would not be as decisive as religionists and antireligionists might want. But we have the Epistles. And any theory of ahistoricity must account for their content. For example, if you wanted to argue that the epistles are fabricating a historical person (let's say, Paul wrote them knowing there was no Jesus, but didn't think that was important to the movement he was fostering in Greece and Asia Minor), you would be going against the expectations of the semi-private epistolary genre, and therefore would need to advance some evidence (even if only internal) sufficient to justify that deviation. In contrast, one does not need additional evidence to assert at least a weak but still sufficient confidence in what fits the expectations of a genre (such as the historicity of Jesus). Thus the burden is really on the ahistoricist here. This does not mean he can't meet that burden, only that he must present evidence that outweighs the strength of our genre-based expectations. Doherty makes a pretty good case to that end, for example--even if he is wrong, his approach is a paradigm example of how such an argument must procede.

Bede

Well, I hate to be a cheerleader, but I must thank Carrier (when will it be Dr Carrier?) for that excellent post and indeed thread. Perhaps, after all the effort, it will turn into an article too.

We already quote him on the historians on the Jesus myth page!

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

Malachi151

The probolem with with history is the same as the problem with many other fields of study, the correct views have been discarded for politcal reasons.

The only correct way to study history is historical materialism, yet due to this methodologies origin in Marxism and obvious connections to Communism, it has been discarded by all non-communists, however, it is the only correct method of historical analysis, as all forms of materilaism are the only correct means of analysis.

The problem with correct history is that correct history points out the flaws in the development of the current social structure, and thus real history is shunned by society and its teaching is opposed.

The really supid thing about "the Jesus myth" is that it has been disproven for over 300 years. There is nothing new to add to the disproof of the bIble, the Bible was uterly destroyed by the early 1800s. It doesn't matter, people don't want to hear it. The facts are already out, and have been out for a long time.

Our society is now in the process of re-writing the Enlightenment and taking America back down the road to the Dark Ages. All of the phiolosophy of the Enlightenment leads to the correct view of materialism, of course atheism, thus in order to maintain the current socail structure the reality of the Enlightenment is dened to the public.

There is nothing to new to say, all that needs be said was said already.