# Guys guys. I'm starting to stop thinking Jesus existed.
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [October 29, 2013, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527 "2013-10-29T04:11:43Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 13
### Author:  [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2014, 2:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/241 "2014-06-24T02:10:07Z")
> [@UDS](#):
>
> I guess one stretches it out by acknowledging that, if the man Clothahump describes had existed, one wouldn’t expect to find any contemporary records of him, and therefore one can’t draw any very reliable conclusions, one way or the other, from the lack of contemporary records. One then spends some time looking at the not-so-contemprorary records that we _do_ have, considering the weight that should be attached to each of them, and speculating about how they might have come about if the man they refer to had never existed. Finally one asks oneself which explanation for the records seems, on the balance of probabilities, the more plausible. And, quite possibly, one concludes that the more plausible explanation is the explanation that one wanted all along to adopt.
And one lays out the reasoning in some detail, so that regardless of whether one’s conclusion is the one one wanted all along to come out of the process, other people are well able to see for themselves whether your reasoning is sound or not.
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### Author:  [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2014, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/242 "2014-06-24T02:11:41Z")
Pardon the digression but I just ranted a little about this in another context on facebook so you’re getting some spillover. I hate _hate_ the nearly universal misconception that this is a good argument:
“X reached conclusion Y because X is biased to want Y to be true, therefore, I can safely ignore X’s argument.”
Bad reasoning. No. No. Down.
The argument stands or falls on its own, and X’s bias has literally nothing to do with this.
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### Author:  [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2014, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/243 "2014-06-24T03:04:16Z")
> [@Frylock](#):
>
> . . . Then at the end he pulls it all together, literally calculates probability using Bayes Theorem . . .
This is making alarm bells clang, loudly, in my head.
You can’t use math/statistics on problems like this. You don’t know the basic probabilities, and thus can’t calculate derived probabilities.
It’s like using Bayesian math to calculate whether George Washington really threw a dollar across the Potomac River. Yeah, we know that George Washington existed, and we know that Silver Dollars existed, so we can use Bayesian inferences to determine how those facts influence the question at hand. And… Nuh uh! It just doesn’t work!
Bayesian math works with real probabilities. If the first two cards in your five-card hand are Clubs, what are the odds that any of the other three cards are Clubs? Perfect question for Bayes theory. If you live in Los Angeles, what are the odds you live in the San Fernando Valley? Fine Bayesian question. But…Jesus’ existence? Not amenable to this kind of calculation. Just not!
I’m becoming very leery here…
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### Author:  [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2014, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/244 "2014-06-24T03:07:27Z")
> [@Frylock](#):
>
> Pardon the digression but I just ranted a little about this in another context on facebook so you’re getting some spillover. I hate _hate_ the nearly universal misconception that this is a good argument:
>
> “X reached conclusion Y because X is biased to want Y to be true, therefore, I can safely ignore X’s argument.”
>
> Bad reasoning. No. No. Down.
>
> The argument stands or falls on its own, and X’s bias has literally nothing to do with this.
Well…yes and no. X’s bias may have led him to make procedural errors. He may have unconsciously blinded himself to certain exceptions or cases. When we want something to be true, we tend to make errors that help support the conclusion we want. This is why double blind experiments are so important.
I agree that it isn’t a refutation. But it definitely is a warning sign of possibly flawed deductive technique.
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### Author:  [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2014, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/245 "2014-06-24T03:26:57Z")
> [@Trinopus](#):
>
> This is making alarm bells clang, loudly, in my head.
As it does for some other people, but I don’t really think it should. I think he gets really misunderstood on this point. I almost addressed this in my prior post. People seem to misread him as trying to pretend things are more precise than they are in his treatment of all this, or something. But he’s careful to outline the limitations of the method, and explain how important GIGO is in thinking about the results etc. He advocates use of BT in much the same way I sometimes try to get people to put their own arguments in propositional logic form. I don’t want them to become logicians, and I’m not claiming that prop. logic. is a pancea. It’s just a way to get people to think carefully about what their assumptions _really_ commit them to, and a way to get people to see which of their assumptions need supporting in the first place.
> [@](#):
>
> You can’t use math/statistics on problems like this. You don’t know the basic probabilities, and thus can’t calculate derived probabilities.
On a Bayesian interpretation of probability, a probability is confidence in the truth of the outcome. If you know how confident you are that a proposition is true, you know its probability (for you). Now there’s also the separate question of how confident you _should_ be, concerning prior probabilities, and BT doesn’t answer that, and Carrier doesn’t act like it does.
So GIGO, of course–if you’re not reasoning well about what premises to accept, your math is going to give you garbage results. But that’s not a problem for the use of Bayes in particular, it’s just something that has to be dealt with in any reasoning at all.
> [@](#):
>
> It’s like using Bayesian math to calculate whether George Washington really threw a dollar across the Potomac River. Yeah, we know that George Washington existed, and we know that Silver Dollars existed, so we can use Bayesian inferences to determine how those facts influence the question at hand. And… Nuh uh! It just doesn’t work!
Hadn’t heard this story, but reading up a little on it, it _appears_ the probability of it is practically zero since we can trace the story back to an account by his grandkid of him throwing it across a completely different river, and not a quarter but a piece of slate.
What about that one? All we have is this one guy’s account. We know it is a humanly feasible task. I don’t think I have to run it through BT to say this is a 50/50 proposition (at least for all it appears to me we know). You don’t think actually running it through BT would give a substantially different result do you? If not, it would seem BT gives us the right answer. What’s your objection?
> [@](#):
>
> I’m becoming very leery here
Leer away but to be honest I think the whole thing (even Proving History) can be read while just skimming over the BT stuff. He just uses it to illustrate how a lot of historical methodology is invalid, and to illustrate how confident he thinks he is justified in saying he can be about his own conclusions. I generally just skip the math anyway. Following it, or even thinking it’s the best method to use, isn’t really necessary for understanding and evaluating the shape of his reasoning. The BT stuff is a heuristic.
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### Author:  [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2014, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/246 "2014-06-24T03:28:42Z")
> [@Trinopus](#):
>
> Well…yes and no. X’s bias may have led him to make procedural errors. He may have unconsciously blinded himself to certain exceptions or cases. When we want something to be true, we tend to make errors that help support the conclusion we want. This is why double blind experiments are so important.
>
> I agree that it isn’t a refutation. But it definitely is a warning sign of possibly flawed deductive technique.
I’m not criticizing the view that his bias may have led him to commit errors in reasoning. I’m criticizing the view that since he was biased toward the answer he got, this by itself is sufficient for us to conclude his argument is a bad one. **UDT** didn’t say this explicitly though the idea was certainly in the air of intimation… meanwhile other people do very often make claims exactly like this.
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### Author:  [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2014, 5:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/247 "2014-06-24T05:05:58Z")
> [@Clothahump](#):
>
> But we will never know, because there are NO contemporary records of him. There are writings, such as Tacitus who refers to followers of Chrestus or Christus. However, there is nothing contemporary; Tacitus didn’t write until 115 CE or so. The earliest is Paul, at about 70 CE, still well after the supposed death date of Jesus.
In the interests of fighting ignorance, Paul did not write his letters around 70 A.D. He was already dead by that date. The commonly accepted date for Paul’s earliest letters is circa 45 A.D.
In the ancient world, it was rare for anything to be written about a person during that person’s lifetime or in the first few decades thereafter. For instance, the more famous pre-Socratic philosophers (Thales, Xenophanes, Anaximander, Heraclitus, …) are known to us only through records dating from several centuries after their death. This is pretty standard for many of the best-known figures from the ancient world, yet no one questions that they existed.
In the case of Jesus we have four biographies written (almost certainly) 30 to 70 years of his death, on top of the Book of Acts, the epistles, and Josephus. This is a remarkably large and detailed collection of writings about the life of Jesus and those who interacted with him. If we had a similarly large collection of writings about any other ancient figure, historians would swoon with pleasure.
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### Author:  [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2014, 5:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/248 "2014-06-24T05:22:08Z")
> [@Frylock](#):
>
> As it does for some other people, but I don’t really think it should. I think he gets really misunderstood on this point. I almost addressed this in my prior post. People seem to misread him as trying to pretend things are more precise than they are in his treatment of all this, or something. But he’s careful to outline the limitations of the method, and explain how important GIGO is in thinking about the results etc. He advocates use of BT in much the same way I sometimes try to get people to put their own arguments in propositional logic form. I don’t want them to become logicians, and I’m not claiming that prop. logic. is a pancea. It’s just a way to get people to think carefully about what their assumptions _really_ commit them to, and a way to get people to see which of their assumptions need supporting in the first place.
I’ll wait to read more; you’ve settled my worst fears, for which thank you.
> [@](#):
>
> On a Bayesian interpretation of probability, a probability is confidence in the truth of the outcome. If you know how confident you are that a proposition is true, you know its probability (for you). Now there’s also the separate question of how confident you _should_ be, concerning prior probabilities, and BT doesn’t answer that, and Carrier doesn’t act like it does.
>
> So GIGO, of course–if you’re not reasoning well about what premises to accept, your math is going to give you garbage results. But that’s not a problem for the use of Bayes in particular, it’s just something that has to be dealt with in any reasoning at all.
This, too, is comforting.
> [@](#):
>
> . . . You don’t think actually running it through BT would give a substantially different result do you? If not, it would seem BT gives us the right answer. What’s your objection?
I just picked a story at random, a tale known to be at least debatably mythical. BT doesn’t help tell us anything about it – and that was my initial opinion regarding BT and the story of Jesus. Knowing that parts of the story could be true – Silver dollars and the Potomac River and George Washington are all known to have existed – doesn’t allow us to put them together with any greater level of confidence.
(As someone said in another thread about Jesus’ existence, knowing that Tokyo is real doesn’t make Godzilla any more likely to be real.)
> [@](#):
>
> Leer away but to be honest I think the whole thing (even Proving History) can be read while just skimming over the BT stuff. He just uses it to illustrate how a lot of historical methodology is invalid, and to illustrate how confident he thinks he is justified in saying he can be about his own conclusions. I generally just skip the math anyway. Following it, or even thinking it’s the best method to use, isn’t really necessary for understanding and evaluating the shape of his reasoning. The BT stuff is a heuristic.
Oh, I’m a King at Leering (also in the sexually suggestive manner.) Again, you’ve eased me back from my initial cavils. You probably know, [BT has been misused egregiously, as in this example from Wikipedia, where one Stephen D. Unwin concludes that there is a 67% probability that God exists.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_D._Unwin) (The key to the calculation is a hatful of completely arbitrary numbers that Unwin pulls out of his – ah – imagination.)
(If I’m free to play the same game, I can quite readily construct a demonstration that it is 80% likely that Godzilla actually exists.)
Unwin’s really bad example has set my nerves on a hair-trigger whenever Bayes Theorem is mentioned in conjunction with theology.
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### Author:  [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2014, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/249 "2014-06-24T05:28:46Z")
> [@Frylock](#):
>
> I’m not criticizing the view that his bias may have led him to commit errors in reasoning. I’m criticizing the view that since he was biased toward the answer he got, this by itself is sufficient for us to conclude his argument is a bad one. **UDT** didn’t say this explicitly though the idea was certainly in the air of intimation… meanwhile other people do very often make claims exactly like this.
Just to be clear - I wasn’t targetting Carrier specifically with this comment; I haven’t read his book, and have no views on it or on him.
My comment is more general, and applies equally to people on both sides of this argument. This is a question on which the historical evidence is - unsurprisingly - limited. While you can argue the weight of the evidence one way or the other, it’s hard to argue that it’s _conclusive_ one way or the other. And an awful lot of people, faced with inconclusive evidence, will default to the conclusion they prefer. They may well be able to offer an articulate explanation of why they have chosen the conclusion they do; that doesn’t necessarily mean that their choice wasn’t motivated by their preference.
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### Author:  [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2014, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/250 "2014-06-24T13:57:41Z")
The problem with Bayesian probabilities, in the context of establishing, say, “Was Jesus Christ the Son of God” or whatever, is that every single prior and conditional probability that you put into it is contested.
Not only do I and Carrier, for example, disagree on the prior probability of God existing, or the prior probability of miracles like the resurrection, we also disagree on things like the quality of the biblical evidence (Carrier accepts the mainstream opinion of modern, ‘secular’ textual criticism regarding the Gospels, I don’t), and on the probability of the biblical accounts being myths (I don’t think anyone would have made up such a preposterous story, if they were trying to make something up, and anyway they don’t read like other myths). So, of course, we aren’t going to agree on “The probability that Jesus was the son of God”.
Bayes’ Theorem is a very useful methodological tool, but its application is only as good as the data you feed into it.
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### Author:  [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2014, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/251 "2014-06-24T14:37:02Z")
> [@Hector\_St\_Clare](#):
>
> The problem with Bayesian probabilities, in the context of establishing, say, “Was Jesus Christ the Son of God” or whatever, is that every single prior and conditional probability that you put into it is contested.
>
> Not only do I and Carrier, for example, disagree on the prior probability of God existing, or the prior probability of miracles like the resurrection, we also disagree on things like the quality of the biblical evidence (Carrier accepts the mainstream opinion of modern, ‘secular’ textual criticism regarding the Gospels, I don’t), and on the probability of the biblical accounts being myths (I don’t think anyone would have made up such a preposterous story, if they were trying to make something up, and anyway they don’t read like other myths). So, of course, we aren’t going to agree on “The probability that Jesus was the son of God”.
>
> Bayes’ Theorem is a very useful methodological tool, but its application is only as good as the data you feed into it.
I wouldn’t apply this kind of reasoning to a question like “Was Jesus Christ the Son of God.” It’s not just that the priors can be disputed, I’d dispute whether there can be any principled way to assign priors at all.
And to be clear, the book I linked to and the author I’ve been talking about doesn’t address that kind of question either, not using this Bayesian heuristic.
I _would_ apply this kind of reasoning to a question like “Given what we know, how likely is it that a person named Jesus is responsible for the founding of the Christian religion?”
Of course the priors can still be disputed, but there are principled ways to think about what those priors should be.
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### Author:  [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2014, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/252 "2014-06-25T15:01:15Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#):
>
> In the interests of fighting ignorance, Paul did not write his letters around 70 A.D. He was already dead by that date. The commonly accepted date for Paul’s earliest letters is circa 45 A.D.
Mea culpa (bangs head on desk). I meant Mark, which is regarded as the earliest Gospel, written around 70 CE. Dumbshit mistake on my part.
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [September 5, 2014, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/253 "2014-09-05T19:51:56Z")
[5 reasons to suspect that Jesus never existed.](http://www.salon.com/2014/09/01/5_reasons_to_suspect_that_jesus_never_existed/)
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### Author:  [@common\_good](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/common_good)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2014, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/254 "2014-09-09T21:34:19Z")
Jesus has always been a myth. I didn’t read any of the other posts in this thread. I figured this out decades ago, so there’s no need.
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### Author:  [@AbigailLemberg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AbigailLemberg)
#### Post date: [September 10, 2014, 6:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/255 "2014-09-10T06:07:08Z")
If we are to believe that Jesus doesn’t exist…Whose idea’s result was bible? Then bible would have been just the thought of the person who wrote bible…
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [September 10, 2014, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/256 "2014-09-10T06:12:34Z")
Bible and bible, what is bible?
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### Author:  [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)
#### Post date: [September 10, 2014, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/257 "2014-09-10T06:24:23Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#):
>
> [5 reasons to suspect that Jesus never existed.](http://www.salon.com/2014/09/01/5_reasons_to_suspect_that_jesus_never_existed/)
#1: This argument would only hold if we were to believe that Jesus was notable during his time. The Bible seems reasonably willing to admit that the man was basically a nobody, in Jerusalem. John the Baptist was far more famous and yet the only evidence we have of his existence is a small entry in Josephus and the Manichean holy books.
#2: That Paul - a man who admits to having never met Jesus - doesn’t know anything about the man’s life, where others did know about his life, doesn’t seem like an argument against the existence of Jesus. Just the opposite. I’m not sure why they included this.
#3: True enough, but not particularly meaningful as evidence.
#4: Ditto
#5: Ditto
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### Author:  [@crucible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crucible)
#### Post date: [September 10, 2014, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/258 "2014-09-10T13:53:02Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#):
>
> Hi **Frylock** ,
>
> You’ve certainly given as a thorough and well-written OP, and are much more intelligent than most of the folks who show up to tell us that Jesus didn’t exist. That said, much of what you write is simply wrong.
>
> There is absolutely no rational way to interpret what Paul writes on this matter as saying anything other than that Jesus was a flesh-and-blood human being.
yes, you may be right, he ‘believed’ Jesus was a real person…so? there is no evidence or assertion that he ever saw J of N, or that he spoke directly to anyone who had or received evidence of any sort that ‘proved’ some degree of divinity.
Descent from David? Who was David? No one has found any historical evidence of his existence, last I heard. Same with Solomon.
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### Author:  [@orangeapples](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orangeapples)
#### Post date: [September 10, 2014, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/259 "2014-09-10T16:59:26Z")
> [@AbigailLemberg](#):
>
> If we are to believe that Jesus doesn’t exist…Whose idea’s result was bible? Then bible would have been just the thought of the person who wrote bible…
Could you elaborate a bit on your post? It seems that you’re suggesting that Jesus must exist because the bible says so, and the bible also exists. If so, that’s blatant circular reasoning, and it’s not at all convincing or compellingly evident.
If memory serves (haven’t read the entire thread in a while, so I might be misremembering), this thread addresses three possibilities; Jesus did exist and was divine, Jesus did exist but wasn’t divine, Jesus never existed and was never divine. The bible includes the first of those options, but that inclusion in and of itself does not equal proof. In other words, “The bible says it, so it must be so,” just won’t cut it.
If I’ve misread your intent, I apologize and would ask for clarification.
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### Author:  [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2014, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/guys-guys-im-starting-to-stop-thinking-jesus-existed/672527/260 "2014-09-11T00:45:58Z")
> [@crucible](#):
>
> yes, you may be right, he ‘believed’ Jesus was a real person…so? there is no evidence or assertion that he ever saw J of N, or that he spoke directly to anyone who had or received evidence of any sort that ‘proved’ some degree of divinity.
>
> Descent from David? Who was David? No one has found any historical evidence of his existence, last I heard. Same with Solomon.
There was a small monument mentioning David. That he had an empire however is more of a problem. I believe many of the buildings supposedly build by Solomon were built later, including the temple.
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