If we’re concerned about facts, burden of proof is irrelevant anyway. This isn’t the Scopes monkey trial where there’s ever going to be an adjudicative body that’s going to determine a winner or loser. There are going to be arguments for and against historicity that will succeed or fail on their merits, at least until new data comes along to either reinforce or alter the balance.
As I said: If you’re not hoping to prove a point, you have no burden of proof.
As I said! If you’re not hoping to prove a point, you have no burden of proof.
If you do want to argue that Jesus existed, then you incur a burden to prove it. An argument such as “an overwhelming number of people believe Jesus existed, therefore he probably existed” isn’t a denial that you have a burden of proof–rather, it is you taking on that burden and fulfilling it.
Ehrman begins by discussing the non-biblical sources we have that may be relevant to Jesus’s existence–sources that mention Jesus within a century of the beginning of Christianity. He discusses first pagan sources, then Jewish sources.
The three pagan sources he discusses are Pliny the Younger, Seutonius, and Tacitus. About each of these three sources he says that there is not a lot of value in the source since its lateness and its context make it quite likely that each of these writers’ own source was simply the stories Christians were telling about themselves. So from these three sources we only learn, at the most, that in the early second century, Christians were saying that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He says this isn’t too relevant as evidence for Jesus’s existence, and I agree. He also says, at the end of this discussion, that it is, “at least, a start.” I disagree. This doesn’t appear to be a start of anything that moves in the direction of evidence for Jesus’s existence, since what the three sources have to say would be just as explicable if Jesus didn’t exist as it would be if he didn’t. It’s not that they’re weak evidence for the existence hypothesis–it’s that they’re not evidence.
Nope. The is framing the question wrong. If an advocate for intelligent design demands that biologists prove evolution to their satisfaction, then biologists are under no burden to argue each time. That debate has happened and has been decided.
The debate over the historicity of Jesus has occurred, and although it was not as contentious as evolution, academic scholars have argued and there is a consensus among nonpartisans that the historic Jesus existed. They argue that it’s most likely he was actually baptized by John the Baptizer and was crucified by the Romans.
That is the extent to which there is agreement. From there, they disagree about the details.
There is no more need for the unbiased scholars to answer each and every unsupported new theory which mythicists invent any more than they need to contend against against each new claim of “proof” of the divinity of Christ that the Christian apologists present.
Despite what Tom has said, the issue is not what the general public believes or says. As Richard Feynman outlines in an appendix to his classic, Surely you’re Joking Mr. Feynman, the populous doesn’t matter; its what the experts say. He gives the example of at the time when Chinese emperors were never seen in public, asking everyone how large they thought his nose would be and then averaging it will give you a result, but it’s meaningless.
Carrier, too, acknowledges that to utilize the Bayes’ Theorem, expert’s opinion is essential and not all experts are treated equal.
If an apologist of either the Christian faith or mythicists wish to challenge the academic status quo, fine. Knock yourself out, and give us proof, but just as those who accept evolution are under no obligation to IDers, there is no reason to give you a default position of equality.
It’s simple to win the debate. Simply a solution which provides a better. But you don’t get a head start any more than the ID folks.
The review to note is not the one you cited. It’s the one by the historian and he rips Carrier to shreds. Nicely. But to shreds.
I really liked some of his comments:
The reviewer spends the first half complimenting the ideas and agreeing that there needs to be a more rigorous approach. Make people account for how much they really can trust their guesses.
Then, when it gets into the historical details mentioned in the volume, he clearly shows the weakness of Carrier’s argument.
Professor McGrath goes on to give a number of other examples which demonstrate Carrier’s lack of knowledge in this field.
and goes on to deconstruct his argument.
McGraff goes on to say
I listened to an hour-long discussion with Carrier by a sympathetic interviewer. Just as I felt from reading his “critical”* review of a fellow nut, he has no interest in engaging historians in a serious debate over merits. He’s preaching to his choir of atheists who would love to show that there is no historical Jesus. I guess that will make them feel better.
As a fellow atheist, it saddens me to one feels the need to reject logic for ideological purposes.
I debated my share of apologists and I have no interest in engaging someone who argues with a certainty beyond their knowledge and refuses to look at the facts and change their mind if they are wrong. Nor am I interested in debating someone who responds to imagined slights with pettiness.
I’ll join Dr. McGrath in waiting for the promised second volume from Carrier and will let the experts have at. Until a good argument arises, I’ll continue to place the mysticists in the same category as the ID folks.
*(as defined by
for those who say I’m unfamiliar with the term)
Hi TokyoBayer
Regarding the term “critical,” here is what you had to say concerning your reason for thinking Carrier’s review of Doherty was not critical:
It appears to me that you are arguing here that if a review is sympathetic and not detailed, then it is not critical.
Now you quote a definition of “critical”:
This definition does not require a critical review to be detailed, nor does it require a critical review to be non-sympathetic.
As it happens, I don’t think it’s a great definition of “critical”–it’s incomplete at least–but it’s certainly not wrong as far as it goes. The problem is, even this definition which you endorse (and are implying you would have endorsed all along) does not comport with the way you used the term “critical” in that past post.
Here you are discussing a burden to argue. That is different than a burden to prove. I would agree with you that no New Testament scholar has a burden to argue that Jesus exists. Every New Testament scholar is absolutely free, and can be rationally excused (so to speak) for taking Jesus’s existence as a given and to dismiss the issue as not worth arguing about. Nothing I’ve said implies otherwise.
However, if a New Testament scholar does wish to take the issue on, he thereby incurs a burden of proof. He is saying to his fellow man, “I am now going to treat this issue as worth arguing about,” and to treat an issue as worth arguing about is to give oneself a burden to prove some position or other concerning that issue.
To be clear: I would not say that just anyone who says “Jesus existed” has a burden to prove it. He may not be intending to convince anyone. He may simply be telling us what he believes. Absolutely fine. It would be wrong to tell them they’ve failed to discharge their burden of proof. (Well, it depends on the context, but let’s not get too deep here.)
However, anyone who says “Jesus existed” and intends to convince others has a burden (self-imposed!) to provide proof. Now, his proof may well be “look at what all the experts say,” and this is perfectly fine. He’s carrying his burden. But you (and Ehrman and Tomndeb are mistaking the act of carrying the burden for a claim that there is no such burden. It’d be like me, holding a fifty pound weight over my head, saying “I don’t have to hold it up, look, it’s not even touching the ground!”
A burden of proof of claim X does not entail a burden to argue against every single thing anyone says against X. After all, I can say enough to prove plenty of things without answering every conceivable objection. For example, If I tell you the sun exists, and I intend to convince you of it, then I have a burden to prove it. So I say “just look up at the sky, there it is.” There, I’ve carried my burden. Now if you say “But for all I know that’s an alien spaceship and Earth is just a kind of shuttlecraft,” chances are I will no longer particularly want to convince you that the sun exists. And so, I no longer have a burden to prove anything to you. (But: If I do still want to convince you, then I do still have a burden of proof.)
It is not clear to me what kind of “head start” you think I have asked for or would ask for.
So McGrath, I, and the reviewer I noted (after he had a nice and civil conversation with Carrier in the comment sections of his various blog posts reviewing Carriers work) all agree that Carrier’s definitely on to something when it comes to methodology. Very good! I am glad to see progress like this made, wherein people on opposing ends of a spectrum come to methodological agreement about how best to be objective. This is how we get better.
Alright after Ehrman next on my list is Van Voorst, but I’ll think about taking time to say what I think about McGrath’s historical points before that.
Next up in my remarks on Ehrman will be Josephus.
Quick preview concerning McGrath: Once he starts trying to say what it would mean to hold Carrier to Bayesian principles, it starts to look like McGrath doesn’t actually completely understand those principles. He says for example that Carrier should be limiting himself to the “evidence we have” and that it’s irrelevant if we know there’s a lot of background we don’t know. But this is false. If we know there’s a lot of background we don’t know, this will affect the Bayesian calculus pretty directly, as far as I can tell. Think “small sample size.” If I know I haven’t seen enough of the evidence to be sure my evidence is representative, then I should have less confidence in my results, in other words, my results lose plausibility.
Well, I’m about 70% sure that what I just said is correct about the Bayesian calculus. 
I’ll have to make sure of that when I return to this review for a more direct response, but
Bayes is all about conditional probabilities as in this example.
However there are stochastic and epistemological applications of Bayes and if you want people to follow along, you should probably try to be clear about which is being used and explain the methodology.
Which completely misses the point that one is not going to convince people who will not be convinced.
I found out long ago that it was pointless to debate true believers in anything. I got tired of the deliberate sidetracking of the key issues and the intensity of the insistence on minute peripheral points as the person is unable to win on merit.
Once belief overtakes reason, that I let someone else have a go at it.
If you detect they’re not going to be convinced no matter what you say, then very probably you’re going to stop even wanting to convince them. And, since you only have the burden of proof if you actually care to convince them of the thing, it follows that you don’t have the burden of proof. Far from “missing the point,” the point you make is suggested by what I’ve said about burden of proof.
Reasonable remarks, with unclear relevance.
Anyway, Josephus remarks coming soon.
In Josephus we have the Testimonium Flavium. I’d always had the idea, for some reason, that this was almost universally believed to be an interpolation. Apparently not. Ehrman says the general consensus is that some version of it is original to Josephus. Here’s the version he says most people agree on:
Ehrman characterizes this as something it would be reasonable to expect Josephus, a non-Christian, to say. I’m not confident that this is so, but I’m not confident that it’s not. I’d need to know more than I do about Josephus’s writing in general. How does he treat similar figures in his works, for example? Respectfully, derisively, neutrally, or what?
I’m a little surprised if this is considered a neutral treatment of some kind. Josephus here seems to be specifically endorsing Jesus “as a teacher of those who receive truth with pleasure.” (And who else does Josephus call “wise?” That sounds like an endorsement as well unless he means less by it than it seems on a first reading.) The last bit about the tribe of Christians not having died out “up to this very day” seems a bit laudatory too. Would he not have simply said “The tribe of Christians still exists?” rather than the fairly emphatic phrasing of “up to this very day” and “not died out” and so on? But this is just my worry on an uneducated reading of the passage so I don’t put much stock in it.
What’s more important to ask is what the significance of this passage is even if Josephus wrote it. About the pagan sources, Ehrman said they don’t tell us anything, really, since they’re very plausibly simply reporting what Christians say about themselves. But Ehrman doesn’t address this possibility concerning Josephus, even though Josephus, too, is reporting on things that happened decades ago. What are Josephus’s sources for this information? Is there some reason he can’t be plausibly read as passing on information from Christian sources, or even gospel sources? Ehrman doesn’t address this.
In Josephus we also have the reference to “the brother of Jesus, whose name was James.” Here he is reporting on an incident that happened about 25 years before he is writing. Some versions of the text have “who was called messiah” after the word “Jesus,” but it seems most scholars think this is not original to Josephus. Either way, we do definitely here have the mention of a Jesus who is supposed to be a brother to a person named James, which parallels with what Paul says in Galatians. How strong is this as evidence for Jesus’s existence? Not very strong, since Jesus and James are very common names at the time. Does Josephus here indicate he assumes all his readers will know who Jesus is? (This would explain why he doesn’t think it necessary to explain which Jesus he’s talking about.) But at that time, Christianity was not well known to Josephus’s audience. And there are many other Jesus’s mentioned in his text, including in the very passage being discussed. There seems little to justify much certainty that this is THE Jesus being referred to here.
Recap:
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Ehrman seems confused about the right way to frame the logic of the debate, though he comes around to saying the right thing in the end (but only, supposedly, as a “generous” gesture of some kind. He’s wrong to say he’s being generous–he’s doing what’s logically required, if he truly intends to do what he claims to intend to do.)
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Ehrman says the three “pagan” sources (Tacitus, Seutonius and Pliny the Younger) don’t really have any significance as evidence for Jesus’s existence, though he strangely then goes on to say that, somehow, what they say is “a start.”
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Ehrman discusses the two Josephus passages. Regarding the TF, he doesn’t explain why the passage should be given more significance than the pagan sources, and he doesn’t give a convincing argument that the pared-down version of the passage is genuine to Josephus (though I would not say I’m confident no such argument exists). Regarding the “brother of Jesus” passage, this seems like only very weak evidence, as I know both Jesus and James to be very common names at that time.
Next up, IIRC, will be discussion of the sources behind the gospels.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think would constitute proof of the historicity of Jesus and what standard of proof would you consider minimally adequate? The reason I ask is that if the few non-Christian sources that exist, at least that we know of currently, are singularly non-persuasive for whatever reason, I imagine that any number of problems can be found with the Christian sources if one looks hard enough. So it might be helpful to know in advance if you’ve already pre-ordained the outcome of this discussion for us since then we can’t really rely on you to give a fair survey of both sides of the argument.
For example, as to standard of proof, are we using preponderance of the evidence including whatever reasonable implication can be drawn therefrom or do you think some higher standard should be imposed.
Also are you going to cover how to weigh the evidence and the methodology to be used in assigning weight. So for example if we have multiple sources referring to a particular, identifiable Jesus, are we going to give them more weight by assuming that more likely than not those sources are unconnected or less weight by assuming that because they all refer to the same person they must spring from the same source?
My point is that it’s nice to review the scholarship as it relates to religious matters but it’s a mistake to think that scholarship is going to give you any solid answers - at least unless and until archaeology decides to provide you with new evidence.
My intention isn’t to determine whether this or that author has proven Jesus’s existence to within some specific degree of confidence. My intention is to say how strong the arguments are–both how strong the evidence is that he provides for his claims, and how strongly his claims support Jesus’s existence.
If you like, I can put numbers to it or something. For example, on a scale of zero to ten with ten being logical certainty that Jesus existed, and zero being a failure to provide any support at all, based on what Ehrman’s said about them, I’d put the pagan sources at 0, the brother of Jesus passage from Josephus at like a 1, and the TF I’d withhold judgment on because I really am not confident one way or the other as to whether it’s genuine to Josephus. For the reasoning behind these numbers (or withholding of judgment) see my previous posts. Ehrman himself says the pagan sources are worthless for our purposes. Meanwhile the brother of Jesus passage seems like very weak evidence since there is no particularly compelling reason to think it’s referring to THE Jesus. It could be. It’d fit what Paul says in Galatians. So it’s not a zero. But no more than a one I think.
As I said, I don’t know what to think of the TF right now.
This will be discussed as it becomes relevant.
As much as possible, though, my intention is to focus more on “even if it’s true, what does that mean?” It’s not always as simple as that, but when I can focus on that question, that’s what I hope to focus on. For example, with Josephus, I didn’t get involved in disputes about the “brother of jesus” passage even though there are scholarly arguments about this. I bypass that discussion because I’m interested in the question of what it would even mean if it were original to Josephus. The way I see it, even granting authenticity to the passage, it doesn’t give you anything, almost, to go on w.r.t. the historicity question.
(Another example coming up involves what Ehrman has to say about the Aramaicity of some of our hypothesized sources. He spends a surprising amount of ink emphasizing this. He thinks this shows that these sources probably go back to Jesus or his immediate followers. But I don’t understand why this should be, and Ehrman doesn’t really argue for the point (though he repeats it again and again). I can grant that there existed Aramaic original sources that dealt with Jesus. This, it seems to me, has no implication at all as to how old the sources are. If Jesus existed, Aramaic didn’t die out with him! This is an illustration of the way in which, when the question can be discussed separately, I want to focus on the question “What would this imply even if it were true” rather than “how do we know this is true?”)
Regarding Josephus, Wikipedia puts him down as living from 37-c100AD. So isn’t everything he would have written about Jesus necessarily second hand? Accordingly, since nothing was footnoted I assume, don’t we need to call anything he says into doubt? So how is it that you or Ehrman or anyone else making a judgment call on anything he or any other ancient writer has to say? Specifically, if I want to adopt the position that Jesus didn’t exist, can’t I just refute any evidence by saying that Josephus was lied to in the same way that all of the other early followers were lied to?
It seems to me that if you’re going to have standards, they at least need to be applied consistently.
My guess would be that since Greek was the lingua franca of the time, that after the fall of the temple, there wouldn’t have been much of a call for documents written in Aramaic. Prior to that, you may have had things written for Jewish Christians, but once Jerusalem was destroyed, it’s hard to imagine much of a need for Aramaic unless you can somehow argue for its continued use in the areas where it was still spoken like Syria maybe.
I should have been more clear–he’s talking about these as oral sources. (IIRC–I haven’t gotten back up to this part in my process of going back through to write about it so if I get there and it turns out I’m remembering wrong, apologies in advance.)
I’m not clear on what standards you’re saying are being applied inconsistently, or who’s applying them inconsistently. In my view, it is indeed plausible that Josephus is getting his stuff from Christians, meaning what he has to say is not an independent source of information. That’s what I said in a prior post:
Like I also said, I’m not confident there’s no good argument to be made here–it’s just that Ehrman hasn’t made it. He dismissed Pagan sources for a reason, but the reason would seem to apply to Josephus as well, and he fails to dismiss Josephus for that same reason. Why not? He doesn’t say.
The inconsistency I thought I saw was why Josephus should be given any more or less credibility than Christian sources if we don’t know what Josephus’ sources were, but you seem to be saying that Ehrman doesn’t give any good reasons for treating him differently.
Now to play devil’s advocate on the other side, I guess the question be what do we know about the accuracy of Josephus’ accounts generally. IOW, if he has a track record for veracity, that might be a good reason for according his testimony more weight even in lieu of knowing his precise sources since presumably he tended to exercise more or less the same standard of care throughout his writings.