Define “Crazy”.
If you mean outlandish, full of violations of physical laws, “weird”, “strange”, “freaky”, sure, the Gospels are all of that. “Crazy” can connote historical unreliability though, which I wouldn’t agree with. I agree the Gospels are not mundane, and are full of strange, extraordinary, inexplicable events. I think those events happened nonetheless, and that you’re going to have a poorer understanding of history and the world if you don’t take that into account.
John Robinson thought that John came earlier than the Synoptic Gospels. That, alone, is enough of a non-starter for me not to worry about his dating schema. I’ll grant you that if the Synoptics were written closer to 80 AD than 90, that only puts them 50 years after Christ’s death, not 60.
However, my point still stands. There’s a huge difference even today in a world of archived newspapers and video and audio recordings between telling a story about the Nixon-McGovern election and the Trump-Hillary one. Memories fade and the principal actors are all dead.
On what basis do you believe those events happened?
Well, I happen to think that things such as those you mention are, indeed, very good indicators of historical unreliability. But we’re allowed to differ on that. FWIW, I also think that there is a lot more to life than historical reliability. But that is neither here nor there. I just want to nail down to basic things for now:
1: Many people (whether rightly or wrongly is a separate discussion) consider violations of physical laws, outlandish, weird (and so forth) things, and similar, to be indicators of historical unreliability.
2: The Gospels are, indeed, full of such things.
Right now, what I longed for the most was an acknowledgment of the second point (I think we’re clear on the first one already). So, much appreciated. Thank you. Because this is the reason why the “Jesus didn’t exist” thing is even a thing to begin with.
Now, back to why this is important:
There’s seems to be a misunderstanding going around, having to do certain technical as well as colloquial meanings of “historical”, “invented”, “knowing”, “existing”, “knowing more” and “knowing less”. I think it is demonstrated upthread:
A common assumption, a lot of the time, about knowing about Jesus and doubting that he existed seems to be as follows: “We don’t know much about Jesus. Therefore, some people doubt that he existed.” The problem is that, in the case of Jesus, this is not the case. See, this is where the forgetting about or ignoring the unusualness of the Jesus case comes in, and adds this bit of wrongness: “Jesus is the same as any other historical figure”. As I’ve said, he isn’t.
Then, Nemo’s post adds to the soup something like this (not saying that it was Nemo’s intention, but it ends up as the end result) : “Actually, we do know a lot about Jesus, from the Gospel accounts. However, some people *still *don’t believe that he existed.”
One might take the following step: “OK, people know a lot about Jesus, and *still *don’t believe that he existed. Clearly, knowing a lot about someone is not sufficient for believing that they existed. Knowledge is not a reliable basis for belief in someone’s existence.”
The problem is that Jesus is a… OK, so I can’t say “magical wizard”. Can I still say “wizard”? I was considering “Special One”, but then people might confuse him with Jose Mourinho. Until further notice, let’s just call him a “Jesus”. The problem is that Jesus is a Jesus. This means that the assumption “we don’t know much about him, so therefore some people doubt that he existed” doesn’t apply. It might apply to a non-Jesus, but for a Jesus it’s exactly the opposite.
The more we know about Jesus from the Gospels, the more he looks like a Jesus. And Jesus being a Jesus is precisely the reason why the “Jesus didn’t exist” thing is a thing. The doubts about his existence are not caused by a of a lack of information. It is caused by an abundance of information that is considered historically unreliable.
The key here is the argument, as mentioned above and assumed by the the “Jesus didn’t exist” side, that Jesus was a Jesus, and Jesuses don’t exist. This is not the case for Alcibiades, because Alcibiades is not a Jesus. For Alcibiades, an equivalent premise would be “non-Jesuses don’t exist”. But no one is asserting that premise. That is, *until *you start confusing Jesuses with non-Jesuses.
Now, on the reliability thing, and about knowing more and knowing less. For whatever reason, let’s say that you want to see if there’s some information about Jesus that you might consider reliable. What you might want to do is to set aside the information that you consider unreliable. OK? After this, you might have a lot less information that you started with. However, what you have will be reliable.
For a non-Jesus, the following might be the case: Knowing less about X makes us believe less in the existence of X. But, for a Jesus, you now have a situation which is the opposite. We know less about Jesus than before, but we now believe *more *in the existence of Jesus. Of course, we don’t necessarily believe that Jesus was a Jesus. But we might believe other things, such as that he was born at around a certain time, that he was crucified, and that people claimed that he was a Jesus.
Now, to carry on, the fact that Jesus is a Jesus, as opposed to a non-Jesus, means that other things might apply that also perhaps seem counterintuitive at first glance. One thing is that you’re not doing yourself any favors with the “Jesus didn’t exist” crowd by jumping through hoops on the census issue. (Not with me either, BTW, but for slightly different reasons.)
Insisting, in the face of any amount of reasonableness, that Luke could never, ever have made a mistake is not improving the situation. A reasonable person will not have a problem with the notion that Luke might have made a mistake. That’s fine, people make mistakes all the time. Heck, I made one just this morning. However, if Luke has to be right about everything, in every particular, come hell or high water, you end up having to accept him completely or throw him out completely. And he’s still saying that Jesus was a Jesus.
And then you’re back to people saying this:
Jesus was a Jesus.
Jesuses don’t exist.
Hence, Jesus didn’t exist.
You certainly can’t do history on him anymore.
Or, I should perhaps put it like this: If you do history on Jesus, maybe you will end up with the conclusion that the was, indeed, a Jesus. Long shot in my opinion, but it could happen. However, you will not get there by shoehorning your sources into your initial assumptions and insisting that they must be right about everything. That is not how you treat historical sources. For starters, your relationship with Herodotus is going to be a brief one.
Anyway, why the anxiety? Historians are pretty good at getting to the bottom of things. Just leave them to it. Let people be agnostic on the census issue for now, it’s fine. If Jesus was indeed a Jesus, historians are probably going to find out just that, if they keep at it long enough. It’s a pretty big thing to miss. In which case, you have nothing to worry about. No one has proved the opposite yet, so it’s not looking too bad so far.
The only other possibility is that there is some dark secret here, namely that - gasp - Jesus wasn’t a Jesus. And someone might find out. And then, next thing you know, cats and dogs will be living together. But I’m not going to suspect that this is what you’re thinking. I have more faith in you than that.
However, you won’t know either way if you don’t actually do proper history.
Probably already answered, but honestly, it’s mainly luck. The Greeks wrote a ton about various individuals as well as everything else, so to some extent that’s a factor, but in the end it’s luck what survived and what didn’t. I don’t recall exactly who it was about now, but I recall one of my history professors talking about a guy in ancient Greece who was referenced as one of the great genius’s by a number of other (really smart and well known) people of his age and even later, with a ton of very tantalizing references to inventions and papers he wrote, but who we have next to zero information about otherwise, or actual papers or inventions he did…just references to him by others, no specifics. It was all lost in the destruction of the great library at Alexandria, then the various wars and fall of Rome and just wasn’t translated by the Islamic scholars who saved so much from the wreck and eventually made it’s way back into our history.
Oh, that guy. Yeah, I think I’ve heard of him. 
BTW, which destruction of the Library of Alexandria? First Caesar destroyed it. Then Aurelian destroyed it. Then the Christians destroyed it. The the Arabs destroyed it.
I have this idea in my head about a comic book set in the ancient world, where the Library of Alexandria is like Kenny in South Park. Ever so often, I’ll have a character pop up and exclaim: “OMG! You destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria!”
I’m sorry, but I’m still not agreeing with your point.
The Gospel accounts (and for that matter, even some of the apocryphal gospel accounts) are not at all similar to ‘things that usually turn out to be false’. They’re not similar to fictional stories (well, at least until the era of the very modern realistic novel), and they’re not similar to the kind of myths that were spun about Apollonius of Tyana, about god-men in the Hindu epics, about Greek demigods, or any of those. The repeated named chains of witnesses, the close attention to geographical detail, the lack of information on Jesus’ early life, the general consistency with each other and with secular historical accounts, all set these texts apart from other religious texts that I know of, and resemble much more closelyhistorical accounts.
They ‘make no sense’ in that they violate natural law, obviously. That’s the point: they are miracles. They represent the intervention of the supernatural into the natural order, and the suspension of natural laws. That’s what a miracle is, and that’s exactly what you would expect of a Divine incarnation. A Jesus who didn’t perform miracles would be, well, not much of a God-man.
Again, I’m failing to see why you consider stories involving miracles and violations of the natural law ‘obvious bullshit’.
Briefly: they were written close to the events, one of them by an eyewitness and the others by people who had spoken to eyewitnesses (I find the historico-critical arguments to the contrary extremely unconvincing), have close attention to geographical and historical detail as well as close attention to explaining the chain of witnesses between the events and the narrator, and are quite consistent with each other as well as with secular history.
It helps that on separate grounds I think that the Trinitarian conception of God makes more sense than any of its rivals, but even taken on their own, I think the arguments for historical reliability of the Gospels are very good.
Well, we clearly disagree on what is a ‘non-starter’: I fail to see why just because something seems unconvincing to you, it must also be unconvincing to me. I think independently of when you think the Synoptics were written, a pre-70 AD date for John makes sense for a very clear reason: he is clearly interested in pointing to examples of fulfilled prophecy, as he does with the death of Peter, but he doesn’t mention the fall of Jerusalem, which would be one of the best possible evidences that Jesus was right. (There are other considerations that make me quite certain of an early date for John, but that’s the most obvious).
Equally importantly though, there’s no reason to think that the Gospels were then first written records of events that had happened 35 years before. The Synoptics, none of which claim to be by eyewitnesses (only John does) them could easily have relied on written notes dating from closer to the events.
:dubious: These are not actually that different from, say, accounts of the miracles performed by the Prophet Muhammad, or the legends of Alexander the Great starting a few decades after Alexander’s death, or those of the Buddha and the Jaina Tirthankara Mahavira, or Guru Nanak a couple of millennia later.
There are in fact a lot of miracle stories about plausibly historical figures which involve various identifiable historical and geographical facts, even though the miraculous phenomena themselves may qualify as supernatural (or “bullshit” in MB’s terminology).
Um, no. The problem with what you’re suggesting is that you’ve essentially already defined the historical method as excluding the miraculous. (And for similar reasons, critical historians don’t consider historians who accept the miraculous, etc., as being actual historians). That’s fine, but the problem is that if Jesus really was who he claimed to be (i.e. a “Special One” or “A Jesus”, or “A Magical Wizard”), then the critical historical method is never going to unveil that, because it will always settle on some naturalistic explanation- no matter how implausible- rather than the real one.
I’m actually not really that interested here in “proving that Jesus existed”, my interest is much more in the argument “if you accept that Jesus existed, what’s the most plausible explanation: the historico-critical one or the Christian one?”
True, but then the historiographic problem centers on how you can identify which historically alleged miraculous phenomena were real and which were false.
At least the critical/materialist historiography has a very simple and internally consistent filter: Is this historically documented phenomenon something that could actually have happened according to our current scientific models of physical reality? No? Then bullshit.
I’m not saying that that makes it the only possible historiographic approach, but it suggests that competing approaches need to address the issue of how accounts of miraculous phenomena are assessed. Do we just believe all of them a priori, and if not, how do we determine which ones are more believable than others?
I don’t care, because you’re now having a conversation that I’m not even in. I’m not asking you to agree with my point. I’m just telling you what my point is.
Anyway, the only point that I care about getting across here is that people seem to be confusing Jesuses with non-Jesuses. Stop getting them confused. That’s all.
As far as I’m concerned, the issue is much simpler than that. I’m not actually that interested in proving that Jesus existed either. What I want to know is what the heck happened on Saturday, and how I got this here tattoo.
Bear with me for a moment or twelve while I wax historiographical:
There is something about the way history is presented most of the time that bugs me. I think it confuses people. I mean, it’s not a game breaker, but it does bug me, especially concerning the ancient world. This is the business of narrative history. A historian will sit you on his lap, and tell you What Happened. You’re left with the impression that, gee, we sure know exactly what happened. I guess that means that sources are really clear, or that we have a crystal ball or a time machine.
Well, yeah, no. I really wish that historians would talk about sources more. See, a lot of the time it’s more like mud wrestling. You jump in, and then, later on, you come out traumatized. What you’re actually thinking is: “Well, that was weird, but I think I have some idea of what might have happened”. For some reason, historians then feel the need to take a shower, get a couple of therapy sessions, and only then sit down and tell people What Actually Happened.
Or. again, it’s like trying to figure out, on a Sunday morning, what happened when you were on shrooms on Saturday. As I said, it’s a very hands-on and practical matter. *Something *happened. Your buddy claims that it was an alien abduction. Well, your butt hurts, but there may be more likely explanations for that than a probing session. Huh, the dog has a smile on its face. That’s peculiar. What is this butt plug doing here? What’s going on with these pictures on my cell phone? They’re out of focus. Is that an elbow, or a boob? When did I get this tattoo? Anyway, that’s enough details about my private life.
Consider the Wiki article on Alcibiades, which got all this started: On first glance, it may seem as if, gee, we sure know what happened. But on closer inspection, you’ll notice that much of it is actually: “According to this guy, according to that guy, this bit over here is actually a bit spurious, and for that bit over there, the only thing we know is that we don’t know jack about it”. So, then it comes down to what you consider to count as “know about”.
You might ask: Well, why should I believe anything about history if it’s all according to this guy, or according to that guy? A lot of the time the answer will be: Well, it seems to make sense. It seems to add up. A few different people who didn’t know each other say it, or something similar to each other. At least if we’re lucky, since it might be just that one guy, but he’s the best we’ve got, and he doesn’t *seem *to be batshit insane. Well, at least not except for the parts where he does. It’s backed up by this here bit of archaeology. Also, that bit over there. And the protagonist of the story isn’t an invisible werewolf. Well, at least not most of the time. Maybe on Wednesdays.
The good news (I know, about time we had some) is that this may actually produce something solid after a while, if enough people do it enough. For instance, the kind of conspiracy theory you would have to come up with to claim that Julius Caesar didn’t exist, and that he didn’t more or less do the stuff he is supposed to have done, pretty much breaks the laws of physics and good sense in about six different ways. I mean, I tried it a little bit once for the heck of it, and, bow howdy, it’s a non-starter.
The idea that he became a god after his death is pretty much obvious bullshit, though. However, what we know about that isn’t that he became a god. It’s that someone, at the time, tried to bullshit people into thinking that he became a god, so it’s fine. Also, he didn’t say “et tu, Brute”. There is a claim that someone else claimed, apparently wrongly, according to the first claimant, that he said the Greek equivalent of “up yours”. So, that is where that comes from, and then Shakespeare. He may have said “alea iacta est”, but at that point he had probably already sent a force in advance to occupy the first town across the river before he himself crossed the Rubicon, so the dice were pretty much thrown already. Also, if he said it, it may have been in Greek. So, frankly, who knows what he did or didn’t say. One thing is for sure: If you see a historian explaining to you in detail what Caesar was thinking at that moment, as you might, they’re speculating, wild-ass-guessing, or making it up.
So, even on the best of days, you’ll probably end up with some mud on your shoes. On the worst of days, I hope you’re a masochist. Have fun with Herodotus. (And, actually, I mean that both ironically and non-ironically, since he is a ton of fun.)
Actually, a quick open letter to Herodotus:
OK. Croesus of Lydia decided to test the Oracle at Delphi, and it got it right that at a particular time, he was boiling a lamb and a tortoise in a bronze pot. Yeah, no, I don’t think that was exactly what happened there, dude. That sounds like one lucky guess, or it was a real oracle. I’m guessing someone made that detail up. I suppose I’ll take your word for some of the other stuff, though, as it seems to make more sense and be supported more. Although, I really wish you could have given some more details about what the heck happened at Marathon. And that guy running home, saying that he met the god Pan on the way? What is that about? You include that, but no battle details? Also, the rest of your book? Well, it’s the same sort of thing. And yes, I know that you’re often not saying that this or that happened, but that someone told you that it happened. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t help much. Why are you passing it on to me now? Is it because you take it to be true, or because it’s the funniest story you’ve heard all week? It’s really hard to tell sometimes. Especially when you’re talking about Cyrus.
Anyway. Of course, you can’t write history like that, because it would be completely unreadable. You certainly can’t stick it on Wikipedia. Although, once in a while, I wish that someone would.
Another thing is that even having a source is awesome. If you have one that was written earlier than two hundred years after the stuff it’s talking about, you’ll want to marry the damned thing. For Caesar, you actually have some real-time boots on the ground, but, boy howdy, that’s pretty exceptional. See, that is why historians don’t hate, for instance, Luke (or, by implication, America or the baby Jesus), whatever or whomever he is, and despite what some people might think. Historians love Luke. Or, if they don’t, they should. They just don’t take his word for everything. However, they also don’t throw out everything he says just because he’s wrong or bullshitting sometimes. The reason is that they had the instincts to do either of those things beaten out of them on the first day on the playground, by Herodotus.
See, this is the thing about jumping through hoops to get rid of a possible mistake in Luke. That is not the sort of things that historians do. For that matter, it’s not the sort of thing that anyone who has been within a mile of the ancient world does, historian or otherwise, unless they have some kind of mistake-phobia. And don’t get me started on the bullshit. There are mistakes and bullshit everywhere. You just sort of live with it, I guess.
Here’ s what you’re doing:
“OK, this here thing that Luke says makes sense and checks out. Cool. Here, he seems to have made a mistake. Oh no! Alarm bells! Must be resolved by way of acrobatics! Phew, got away with it. OK, here he talks about, basically, the equivalent of an invisible werewolf. Oh no! Alarm bells! Must lower bar for accepting supernatural phenomena to where it includes invisible werewolves! Phew, got that over with.”
Well, fine, but now you’re stuck with a papered-over mistake and an invisible werewolf. That’s all jolly good, until you run into the same sort of thing in the next text over. Now what are you going to do? Move the goalposts, or take some dude’s word for it when he says that Oracle of Delphi wasn’t bogus?
See, I think it depends on what you might call your dating history. If you’ve been married to the Bible, you might do one thing. However, it might be different if you’ve the sort of person who has already been kicked around on the playground by Herodotus, had a weird and wonderful relationship with Plutarch, been in love with and then been dumped by Tacitus, and then wanted to kill yourself after trying to make sense of the Augustan History. Maybe it’ll be more like this:
“OK, this here thing that Luke says makes sense and checks out. Cool. Hey, we may get some new historical information from that bit. Sweet. Here, he seems to have made a mistake. Well, no kidding? That sounds like business as usual for this sort of thing. Does it have any important consequences? No? Well, fine, whatever. Next! OK, here’s a bit where he talks about an invisible werewolf. Does anyone know about invisible werewolves? Is that a thing? No? Totally bogus, you say? That’ what I thought. Were they a real thing in the ancient world? Not as far as anyone knows? Well, did you email the werewolf department? Oh, they’re still saying no. OK, write that up as “Luke makes interesting but probably bogus claim about invisible werewolf.” Cool! This is really good stuff. Next! Hey, here’s a bit that tells us something plausible again. Oh, here’s a dude being crucified. Crucifixion is a real thing, right? Call the crucifixion department. Totally “yes” on that one? What, Crassus crucified six thousand dudes once? Holy shit! Are you sure? Maybe not quite that many? But crucifixion is attested in a bazillion places? Cool. OK, write that up as “plausible, bordering on confirmed”. What else?”
Again, you can’t write history like that, but sometimes I wish that someone would.
And that right there might look to some people like a historian being critical of Luke. It’s really isn’t. That right there is a historian going on a date with Luke, and humping his leg. That’s how much he likes him.
Damn it. I got sidetracked and forgot to actually answer the question. OK, again:
If you put a gun to my head? Heck, I don’t know. What do I look like, the guy who knows everything? It’s not like it’s a super simple question with a super simple answer, and if someone tells you that it is, they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Why don’t you go ask an oracle? If you can find one, that is, I think the Christians shut them all down. BTW, that was just around the time that they destroyed the Library of Alexandria, (OMG! They destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria!) Then again, good luck getting a straight answer from an oracle. Unless, apparently, you ask it about what you were cooking for dinner yesterday.
We’re all just trying to get on with whatever we’re doing, I guess. But I called the miracle department. They’re saying that miracles apparently happened at least once, with that guy Jesus. They’re not completely positive on that, though. Do I believe it? Well, hang out in the ancient world long enough, and the distinction between things that happened and things that didn’t can get a bit blurry. Especially if you don’t watch yourself. It’s a world full of strange and mysterious things.
But isn’t a more likely explanation that either the writers were mistaken about the supernatural events or they were making them up? If (for example) we have a really great account of the volcanic eruption in Pompeii, and the writer also states “during the eruption a 20 foot angel descended from the skies and declared Pompeii guilty of crimes against heaven”, wouldn’t it be reasonable to be skeptical of this part of the account? It seems to me mistake/hoax/deception is fundamentally always the more likely and more reasonable explanation for a description of supernatural events, especially when they supposedly took place in the distant past, then taking the description at face value.
OK, let’s establish whether this is even about a sliding scale of likely, or an either/or thing. If I put you on the spot, would you entertain the possibility, no matter how slight, that Jesus wasn’t a bona fide miracle man? Would you be able to utter a sentence such as: “It *might *not have happened like that”, or “there *might *be other explanations”?
'Cause I’m not entirely sure if the concept of the middle ground is clear in your head. For instance, I’ve been saying about sixty times in this thread: Miracles might have happened. But you insist that I’m saying: Miracles can never happen. So I’m not sure if one of us might be speaking Klingon. Therefore, it might be useful to clear that up.
And yes, I know, you’re saying that I’m using a methodology that automatically excludes miracles. That’s not the same thing. I’m just wondering about personal opinion. How you feel about it in your heart of hearts.
Look, BTW, there is something else that needs to be pointed out about sources. I think we both might be confusing innocent bystanders.
There are sources, and there are sources. There are ancient historians and biographers. They are writing history and biography. They still don’t necessarily look like modern history or biography. Heck, Thucydides, the prototypical “scientific historian”, says flat out that he invents speeches. But, still. Let’s call them Category 1.
Then there’s everything else. Plays, poetry, treatises, letters, religious texts, farming manuals, books on architecture, books on mathematics, and - deep breath here - philosophy (oh dear me, the philosophy). Let’s call them Category 2.
There are cases that are borderline. Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Heck, Herodotus (those who have a drinking game for mentions of Herodotus can take a shot now).
When you call Luke a “historical text”, and I talk about him in the same paragraph as historians, we should be clear on something: The Gospels are not Category 1. They are nothing like, say, Josephus. They are solidly Category 2. They are religious texts.
Furthermore, they are religious texts from long ago, when genres where different. You can’t automatically assume that they set out to tell you what really happened, any more than you can assume that Plato is setting out to tell you exactly what Socrates was like. Their relationship with facts and invention may be a bit more complex than that. It is for a lot of texts. That is not some kind of accusation. It is just the way it is.