Celsus

Thanks for the links all. It's a bit late so I'll get a proper response in the morning. Rick, I'll just point out that I depart from White but it's been so long since I read him properly that I can't remember what exactly I differ from him. I will say that I found his framework too limited and both Munslow and Jenkins took him apart in their own work - my position is somewhere between those.

Now I wonder: Could we have this same debate but ban the term 'postmodern' in order to force people to be more specific about exactly what aspects of postmodernism they disagree with? Is it its innate instrumentalism? Is it the problem of underdetermination? Is it linguistic relativity? Is it methodological anarchism? Is it anti-structuralist arguments? I think we might be able to better discuss it if so.

"Postmodernism" was a convenient umbrella term to group a whole swathe of arguments in response to modernist ideas that are themselves not homogenous. I don't think that my postmodernist approach, rooted in philosophy of science is like Aichele et al's project, and I may just find myself disagreeing with them (if I get to read that article!). But I can see that we both take postmodern approaches, and this is part of the source of confusion for sure.

neilgodfrey

I have been wondering about this. It is often said by non Americans about Americans that they have this "need to believe" -- in something, anything. We just don't seem to see the same extensive sorts of "commitments" to "belief" positions in some other countries. Is the commitment thing a cultural thing?

Adversarialism is a strong element of some Christians, but in my experience only a minority. I'm not saying my experience typifies the whole scene, of course. But it is pretty hard to think of Christianity in Australia (let alone in Singapore where I am now) as "adversarial". Certainly a few sects and individuals are, but that's all.

I also think of various nonsense assertions about Islam -- my reply seems to make at least some people stop and think: if extremist violence was an integral part of Islam we would have been seeing it throughout Islamic cultures for over a thousand years now, not just since the 1960s. Again, this all suggests to me that it is specific historical factors at play - not the religion itself. I work, travel and live among dozens of Muslims and it is simply nonsense to see them as "adversarial" about anything. (Some of them are even now wearing Santa caps on top of their headscarves!)

I suspect the adversarialism comes from a sense of threatened identities and egos, including one's broader cultural and group identities. Perhaps in a culture where a higher premium is placed on "belief" and "commitment" there is more scope for competing threats.

Dunno. Just wondering.

Celsus

I think if he'd qualified that as "Western Christianity" you might not disagree too much. Singapore is a unique case, being a highly multicultural society that simply can't afford to have adversarial religions, and those that have tried have been shouted down quite loudly, even by members of their own sects (did you follow the recent AWARE saga of a Xtian takeover of the women's group and their subsequent removal?). It's no coincidence that the loudest adversarial Christians in the US come from the most homogenous bible belt areas (well their leaders may be urban for networking convenience but their base is definitely in the belts), and this sort of thing provokes reactions. I think where any religion is the stark majority, ability to empathise with other beliefs drops considerably.

P.S. Anyone with a password to JBL can get me that article Toto linked?

neilgodfrey

If it is a western thing, then that would, I suggest, support my thoughts that the adversarial nature of religion is essentially culturally conditioned.

Singapore has some exceptional conditions certainly, but Moslems I work with commute regularly to Yemen, Indonesia and Malaysia, and they share their experiences with their "kind" and one gathers they are the same "all over"; and I have known Muslims and others in some of these countries and Turkey, too. Not to forget Australia. Certain Australians have in recent years lamented the introduction of Christian extremist fundamentalism into the country and have seen it as essentially an American import, and sigh with relief that it is still a minority feature of our cultural landscape. Some Australians fear that Indonesia is "filled with Moslem extremists" but it does not take visitors long to see that the extremist attitudes are very hard to find and such people have little respect from the majority of Muslims one meets.

I think what is true of most adherents of these religions is true of humanity generally: most people are basically decent and caring and good natured etc. As Robert Pape demonstrated in "Dying to Win", it is a western misperception that one religion is particularly more violent than another. Pape’s “Dying to Win” is a scholarly research work that amply demonstrates that suicide terrorism is related to national identity humiliation brought about by foreign occupation, and that perpetrators of this form of terrorism since the 1980’s have included both the religious and non-religious and secular, Christian and Buddhist as well as Moslem.

Rick Sumner

The historian can't circumvent this problem. I'd be interested to know what--objective--standard you have to differentiate good speculation from bad speculation. "Evidence" doesn't cut it, because it's such an easily abused term. There's "evidence" for virtually every claim. Just not necessarily strong evidence. Though, of course, the weight we accord the evidence is still subjective. There's no tangible measure for "good" and "bad" evidence. Just the eye of the beholder.

I'm not sure that I've polarized anything, much less created a strawman.

You're misunderstanding me. My concern is that when we call some speculation "good" and other speculation "bad" we are left no tangible measure. Either we careen down a slippery slope to having only facts, and no interpretation, or we can only speak of personal plausibility. You can't rationally have it both ways.

I start with things I know about here as well. There was a real Christian movement. There were real people who wrote real texts. The speculation is about how those texts and that movement came to be.

What's speculated about is different only in content, not in principle. In the case I gave with Alexander, I speculate about what motivated him to marry. Here I speculate about what motivated Paul (or Mark, or. . .) to write.

If it's okay for Alexander--if it's okay to suggest a reason I think most plausible for him to have married--then it's okay here too. There's still no objective line. If we do it any other way then "good" is what you say is good, and "bad" is what you say is bad. There's no more tangible measure behind it.

Are you sure you're not jumping to a ready made response to seeing mention of Caesar here? Because I'm not using the oft-abused analogy you think I am. I'm not comparing the historicity of Jesus with the historicity of Alexander or Caesar. The discussion, as I thought we'd establish, is considerably beyond that, instead dealing with difficulties of historiography generally. You run into the same kind of problems whether you're discussing what motivated the early Christian movement, or what led Caesar to cross the Rubicon.

The knowledge base is there. It's just not where you'd like it to be.

You truly need to try and focus on the discussion at hand, and not focus on your crusade against the HJ/JM debate. It wasn't an example in the sense you think it was.

But it's not a "straw you." That is a "you" doing exactly what you condemn. You, yourself, said that "speculation is speculation, nothing more." All you have on "who wrote the scrolls" is speculation. It's grounded speculation. It's speculation based on an appraisal of the evidence. But ultimately you have nothing except that it's the most plausible explanation to you. No objective way to show that it's true.

You can't have it both ways. Either we only have facts, or we have facts and speculation. If it's the latter, then there's no way to objectively tell where the line is. Only personal credulity.

Everybody will put the line just past themselves. Everybody will declare their speculation acceptable. Everybody will be able to explain what makes theirs different.

But what do you have that we can measure? That we can all look at and say "Okay, that's where the line is?"

Regards,
Rick Sumner

spin

That's your assertion and problem.

My statement wasn't aimed so much at speculation at all so much as the job of the historian in divesting him/herself of each shred of an untestable assumption they can become aware of.

The eye of the beholder is a shaping instrument. The beholder needs to confront the effects of that eye.

Here:
More straw.

Can you tell me how many children Pilate had? Can you meaningfully speculate about it? I think your answers must both be "no". You need to accept that ungrounded speculation is a vain pursuit. You have no way to ground the christian literature; you have no way of knowing, given a starting position of Paul's letters, the value of any of the gospel content, which may have developed in fertile minds from the time of Paul's proselytism -- especially when I can point to a non-real person, Ebion, whose life story grew within the christian community out of nothing. If this was the process with Jesus, there would have been a lot more speculation about him than about Ebion. You are confronted with two functional origins for a Jesus and you have no way of choosing between them, no matter how "plausibly" you think you speculate your way.

This is not correct. There is certainly a qualitative difference regarding the two subjects of inquiry. We don't still need to establish the existence of Alexander. You could be building ivory towers on skyhooks for all you plausibly know regarding Jesus.

History starts with known information as a knowledge pool, hard knowledge, such as coins and inscriptions that give body to the figures talked about in the literary histories. Without that knowledge pool, the literary histories are not grounded. Fortunately with works such as Tacitus and Polybius we have a solid knowledge pool and they are validated by it and they in turn provide more information for this knowledge pool.

In the case of the christian literature there is no knowledge pool for the payload stories. As is, it's a hot air balloon without any mooring.

Until you get to first base, it doesn't matter how much running you do, you can't get to second. In dealing with the problems of understanding the more obscure reports regarding Caesar or Alexander, we do have difficulties in not having sufficient evidence to make a solid call, but we do know that each existed.

The balloon is floating away.

Just so we can keep track...
You persist in false analogy, pretending that you can eke an issue out of the uncertainties around a certain person to make your case about uncertainties around an uncertain person, or better your case about an uncertain person.

There is no knowledge pool in this issue, no tether to hold this balloon down. So, if you're aboard, there's no way to know where your ride will end up and all the "plausible" speculation in the world won't give you any security. Plausibility depends on the existence of that knowledge pool which is lacking.


spin

Rick Sumner

@Celsus & Hindley: Don't worry, I haven't forgotten you back there.

I'm not making any analogy, much less a false one. Here's where we run into problems. Let me try and make this as clear as I can for you: I don't care if it applies to Jesus or not. I'm not making any case, much less trying to better one. I know, I said that several posts ago. Why do I need to repeat it?

Really. It doesn't matter to me. It has absolutely nothing to do with the issues being raised here. Aren't you the one who termed it a "metadiscussion"? Then why are you so bound and determined to restrict the conversation?

The question is how we deal with uncertainty in history generally. What makes some uncertainty acceptable, but other uncertainty not, and how do we propose to tell the difference. "Evidence" isn't an answer to that. Neither is "tether" or any other cheery balloon imagery.

But the question is related to the HJ/MJ debate the same way disucssion of combustion is related to being a mechanic.

I'll come back to the bulk of your post later, but much of it reflects moving at cross purposes, so will probably be addressed here in due course anyway, if only indirectly.

The broader context of the discussion--the HJ/MJ thread it started from--seems to have the unfortunate side effect of coloring everything raised, even though that's not my intention. It's approached through that lens whether it's supposed to be or not.

so I wonder if we can put aside the question of all things biblical for the moment. Let's take a look at the marriages of Alexander as their own historical inquiry, and see if we can arrive, if not at an agreed upon historiography, at least some agreed upon points. Even after we look at things more biblical in nature, the HJ/MJ debate is the very last stop I'm hoping to make with it, and if we don't get there, it really doesn't matter to me, and doesn't matter to the discussion, except in the construct you've slapped together.

It is, to steal your term, a "metadiscussion." So perhaps if we put all things NT aside for the moment it can go somewhere, to look at broader questions of epistemology.

With that in mind I propose some basic premises to start us off. They seem pretty reasonable to me, but one never knows where one is going to find opposition.

1) Alexander did marry Roxana and Stateira II. I haven't read any contrary argument, but I imagine somebody, somewhere, has made one at some point. So my first proposal is that, in the event such an argument exists, for our present purposes we ignore it. That we take these unions, for all intents and purposes, to be historical facts.

2) Plutarch couldn't read minds (and neither could anyone else). He tells us Alexander married these women for love and politics respectively. Unless he had the Shining in addition to his better known talent for prose, it is at least equally likely that his words reflect his own narrative needs, and his own assumptions, as it is that they reflect anything historical. He isn't a good source on the matter.

3) We can't judge motivations based on results. It's a causal fallacy, of course. His marriage to Roxana did provide political advantages. That doesn't mean he married her for politics. It also provided political disadvantages. That doesn't preclude him marrying her for politics.

Assuming we can agree on those three points, I'll put the question and the nature of the problem together. The question, to anticipate an objection to its potential value, is not why Alexander married. I think everyone would agree that he married Roxana for either love or politics (or possibly both). I've never read anyone who suggested his wedding to Sateira II was not 100% motivated by political aims. That contrast is where the discussion is going.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

PS

Are you aware of any coins, inscriptions or other archaeological evidence for Stateira II? Just curious. I can't find any. A bit for Stateira I. Nothing for her daughter.

spin

You'd better get to them quick smart. We are seemingly talking past each other. The discussion came out of the issue of Jesus historicity and you seem to want to shift the focus onto, well,...

You're in this vehicle and I'm watching from the side of the road. As you have a destination in mind and you're the one behind the wheel, I'd say that as a spectator sport, this is not absorbing me.

I would have been interested in any historiographical insight you might have brought to the problem of a whole corpus of information whose basis cannot directly be related to the real world.


spin

Celsus

FWIW I've got my hands on the Aichele et al article but haven't got round to reading it. I'll post some comments this weekend (I have exams this week!) perhaps.

Rick Sumner

I don't. "Certitude," so far as history goes, is oxymoronic. Or at least relative. My question, at present, is whether or not we can consider something more plausible than another, and whether or not taking that position hinders the discussion, as spin has indicated it will.

If we use the Alexander example I gave spin we can follow a continuum, from the strongest conclusions to the weakest. Loosely we might go 1. Alexander was real > 2. He conquered Persia > 3. Stateira II was real > 4. Roxana was real > 5. He married Stateira for politics > 6. He married Roxana for love politics or both.

Only the first two have any hard evidence behind them. 3 & 4 we simply take people's word for. But 5 & 6 is where it gets interesting. Because the gap between 5 & 6 in terms of the certitude most would ascribe is huge. But we have the same evidence both times: None. So why are we so confident of 5, but would probably answer six with a question mark?

5 is just intuitive, and it's more than simply that, because if Plutarch is any indication, it has always been intuitive. It doesn't reflect a prejudice of the modern individual, it reflects a prejudice in how people think in general. But that doesn't make it right, it could well be that we're simply wired to be too much the cynic and too little the romantic.

If I were to say "It's likely Alexander married Stateira II for politics," nobody would bat an eye. But if I were to say "He married Roxana for love" I would rightly expect to find some opposition on that point. In the former case I can speculate. In the latter case I can't, or at least can't very much. In the latter the only safe route seems to be to state that Plutarch says he married for love--catalog the fact, no more, no less.

At some point the speculation becomes unacceptable, but the line for where that happens is arbitrary--our evidence is the same in both instances. Once we acknowledge the fluid nature of that line, we're almost forced down the epistemological path to a sort of historical nihilism. The only truth we can claim is the catalog of facts, everything else is speculation, and we can only assess that speculation with the measure of plausibility.

History is in the eye of the beholder. Discussion of plausibility doesn't hinder the discussion, it's the only discussion we have. Without it it's not simply that we can't move discussion of reconstruction forward, it's that discussion of reconstruction can't exist. The study of history can be argued back to the point that it can be little more than memorizing an almanac of facts, with no interpretation. At the point you draw a line somewhere, the line can be forced back, simply because it was arbitrary in the first place.

If the line is arbitrary, as noted above, then we can't pick and choose where discussion of plausibility is appropriate. Speculation is speculation. Unless we have an objective grade we can't be consistent in our epistemology by calling some speculation better than others, only that it sounds better to me.

I wouldn't mind some elaboration by what you mean here.

I'm assuming you mean ontology in the sense of creating a hierarchy. If I'm mistaken (and I may be), I'll be glad to be set right.

So can such an ontology possibly be developed? What makes your hierarchy better than the next guy's? And how do we create one that doesn't fall prey to that criticism?

I'm not sure that nihilism--at least in terms of certitude--isn't our only option though. Subtle differences, small events, can change the world hugely. At a rate the diverges by area and demographic, to such a degree of variance that it is impossible to provide a real definition of a culture by which we can judge the actions of the few figures we might be interested in.

I can tell you, for example, in very broad strokes what changes happened in the empire after the "year of four emperors." I can tell you roughly how long they took, in some instances can even trace a geographic path based on archaeological and textual evidence.

Can I tell you how it affected Rome proper? Less so. How about specific areas of Rome? The immediate millieu required to truly understand a given character is gone.

"Intersubjective elements" (don't mind the scare quotes, just trying to make sure we know what term I'm misunderstanding your use of if it happens to be the case) can tell me at best that we have collective credulity, sometimes that works out okay (Just ask any racetrack if the odds are paying off), sometimes it doesn't (Just ask a 1929 investor). It doesn't give us certainty, it gives us plausibility. Just plausibility with company.

Lit crit theory doesn't seem to affect much outside of study devoted to historiography though. Current academic thinking in History and Theory hasn't done much to affect current academic writing in The Journal of Roman Studies for example. It might be wrong, but the Biblical historian is in good company. Every other branch of historical inquiry seems to be doing it wrong with them.