Oops, I missed it–Ehrman does end up treating Josephus consistently with how he treats the three Roman sources, in a sentence where he says, after all his discussion, that in any case, Josephus would just be relating stories that were already in circulation, so his account can’t be treated as an independent source of information establishing Jesus’s existence.
So after discussion of the three Roman sources and Josephus, where we are is: At the end of the first century, there were stories in circulation about a “Christ” or “Jesus” who was crucified under Pilate. Of course this doesn’t add anything to our knowledge, since we know such stories were in circulation prior to any of these writings, in the form of the gospel accounts.
This looks like a good book on the methodology issue, written by established mainstream scholars, purporting to summarize and contribute to a controversy over method that has (according to the blurb) reached a “fever pitch.”
I can’t keep buying books but hopefully I can get a hold of this one sometime.
It’s no trouble at all. If I have a “preference” I’d “prefer” that there were a historical Jesus, as I am a Christian and everything…
With what you said in your first sentences, are you communicating that the available evidence is rationally compatible with both existence and non-existence being plausible? Or are you communicating that, even though the evidence is rationally compelling that Jesus did exist, nevertheless people will be moved to believe whatever they want to believe?
IDK but my impression was he didn’t see the point of the discussion. I think most people, unless they happen to have an interest in the history of early church or possibly the ancient near east during that time, aren’t going to see this as being an especially interesting topic because of the obvious assumptions as to what must motivate it. IOW, most people will assume the discussion has a religious motivation when in fact, anyone religiously or anti-religiously motivated probably already has pretty firm opinions one way or the other. So I think the idea was, if you’ve already made up your mind, just tell us and get it over with. I assume that it’s sort of what I was doing a few posts ago when I got the impression that you were just shooting down all of Ehrman’s arguments.
I do have a bias. I think it is more plausible that Jesus existed, for all the reasons Cecil originally gives. Why is there no groundswell to deny the existence of Mohammed or Gautuma or even Paul? After all, no Jewish or secular Roman source mentions Paul, yet he was the one who supposedly jumpstarted Christianity from Judea through Asla Minor, into Greece and Rome itself.
But I also concede that for those who really want to find a reason to deny Jesus’ existence, they can point to the paucity of such references as their grounds, although that begs the question, if not Jesus, then who started the movement and why.
But you miss the point. Apologists for any movement, either Christian or mythicist don’t have to be logical. And in fact they become apologists because they refuse logic.
Whew! Expensive! $35.00 for the paperback, and over $87.00 for the hardcover.
Who is Richard Carrier? I Googled, and found that he used to engage in very direct debates over theology – very basic debates, like, “Is Christianity Reasonable?” (He appears to take the negative.)
I’ll start out with one of his less expensive books, and work up from there.
(My opinion is that the sum total of all the available evidence could be put in a very small book and analyzed exhaustively in only a couple hundred pages. What, really, could be said to the extent of justifying a gigantic 700 page tome?)
Carrier definitely for sure has an anti-religion chip on his shoulder, and even in this book (which is peer-reviewed and which he’s angling to get paid attention to by the wider community of academic historians) he engages in some unfortunate rhetoric, shall I say?
But looking past that, I find his reasoning to be pretty solid. And even where it’s not, he consistently serves his overall project well, which is to show that historians of this period (and historians generally, though he thinks it’s especially bad in this area) both should and can get a lot more rigorous about method.
Cheaper, and in many ways setting up many of the ideas in this book, is his Proving History. And even cheaper, and a nice prologue to it all, is his Not the Impossible Faith.
Looks like that one you could have gotten free… Wish I could have caught that for you earlier!
Good luck with the book but unfortunately I’m afraid it’s not going to be representative of the other ones I mentioned because it’s explicitly polemic and makes no pretense to scholarship, (AFAIK–I haven’t read it all) plus it’s eight years old.
Oops and oops! Can you recommend one of his books that is more representative of his style – and maybe not too awfully expensive?
(I’m trying to fight against my own prejudices here: the guy is an active and outspoken atheist. That gives me a huge bias in favor of his writing. But biases aren’t good, even when favorable. So I want to try to educate myself more about the guy.)
I think you could start with either Not the Impossible Faith or Proving History. The first one I listed is cheaper, but is also basically a revision (I’m not even sure it’s too revised) of what can be found free here.
Proving History is a little more expensive ($10 on Kindle, more on paper), but is also more sort of careful and scholarly (while still basically being a popular work) and gets into really important and interesting issues in historical methodology which directly inform his approach in Historicity of Jesus.
There is a possibility that there actually was a living, breathing human back then named Yeshua bar Yussuf (or whatever the correct translation of Jesus, son of Joseph is). He may very well have been a very respected rabbi. He might have been a rabble-rousing pain in the ass to both the Roman and Jewish power structures.
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.
I glommed the book from the web site – “Was Christianity Too Improbable To Be False?” – and converted it to an ebook, so I can read it in some comfort. It’ll jump to the top of my reading list; I’ll be back with opinions.
(An SDMB member who has opinions? That’ll be the end of the world!)
ETA: Thank you!
This pretty much says it. How does one stretch this out to 700 pages?
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.
He spends the length of Proving History arguing that the methods used by NT historians are all invalid, and trying to introduce some rigor in the form of the use of Bayes’ Theorem to reason out how confident one should be about various conclusions.
In Historicity, he spends many, many pages on going over, I guess probably not everything we know relevant to that place and time in terms of historical background, but lots and lots and lots of the things we know about this. Just kind of lists it out as a series of “elements,” some of which he spends some time on if he thinks the reader is likely to be surprised by it. Then spends a chapter each on several different classes of textual evidence–extrabiblical, then gospel, then epistle–explaining why he thinks what we find in each is either best explained on the mythicist hypothesis or else gives no evidence one way or the other. Then at the end he pulls it all together, literally calculates probability using Bayes Theorem* and spends a chapter or two saying what ought to happen now that he’s done this.
*Two times actually, once with the prior probabilities he thinks actually hold, and once with prior probabilities very generously skewed towards the historicist’s hypothesis.
