I try to read any criticism I can find about him, (see the lists above), but most of them (as yours) seem to boil down to “He’s mean, so his arguments aren’t valid.”
Although Carrier isn’t involved, I’m also looking forward to the Buzzed Belief debate Did Jesus Exist? by Dr. Robert Price and Bart D. Ehrman.
That is a 100% misconstruction.
His responses to criticism convey an approach. It is not a professional analytical approach, it is a polemical approach. This says many things about the thinking and the quality of the thinking Particularly his (not convincing) responses to the criticism of his Bayesian analysis.
This is a pretty balanced article which discusses the historical-evidence question from a scholarly viewpoint. It looks at the authenticity-or-otherwise of several figures or events, including Thermopylae, Jesus and others.
Kinda poisons the well, right off, by sneering at the “bizarre standards of evidence” of Jesus mythicists.
You call it balanced, but it looks pretty biased to me. Ruling out one point of view a priori is, whether or not it is correct, not balanced.
I am not convinced that “balanced” means the same as “giving all theories equal weight”.
But, yes, I may have mis-chosen the word.
There is a theory A that Jesus was a historical figure and a theory B that Jesus was a mythical figure.
One historian may consider theory A with regard to evidence, X, Y, Z and say with perfect justification that under theory A, we would expect to find evidence X,Y,Z. They then may incorrectly claim that theory A is true. A lot of the quotes in this very thread are of this sort – “Consider attestation X, therefore A.”
Another historian may consider theory B as well and agree that evidence X,Y,Z might be found under theory A, but are actually more likely to exist if theory B is true. Their conclusion is that theory B is more likely to be true than theory A.
Some types of evidence are very likely to occur for historical figures and unlikely to occur for mythical figures. We don’t have very many of those for Jesus.
Other types of evidence are very likely to occur for mythical figures, and less likely to occur for historical figures. We have loads of that for Jesus.
Back to the OP, for most ‘historical figures’, we find evidence that is likely to exist for historical figures and unlikely to occur for mythical figures.
Just coming up with yet more evidence that would exist if A were true or if B were true doesn’t affect the balance of probability between A and B.
There’s another important difference. Angels bearing golden tablets of Scripture are highly unusual and require a rather high level of evidence.
Itinerant wanna-be messiahs in Israel at the time of Jesus were a dime a dozen. Rome executed quite a lot of them. Jeshua was a common name. There is nothing particularly unusual about the basic backbone of the story. So i don’t feel a very high standard of evidence is needed.
The supernatural stuff? Sure, that requires some evidence. And as i said above, i am not Christian, and don’t believe there is enough evidence to support that part. And i wouldn’t go so far as to say we are certain that Jesus-the-man was a real historical figure. But the lack of evidence is to be expected for a person from then and there, and it seems much more likely than not that Jesus lived, preached, and was crucified.
Yeah, it’s really only an argument you would make if you had an agenda, or were ignorant of how history is done. I’m inclined to discount anything someone says on the topic if they support that claim.
Paul’s point was that the idea of salvation thru circumcision and keeping kosher for Gentiles was not “new”. Salvation thru faith in Jesus was the new idea.
That’s why it is a false gospel - it is not really new (although the idea of salvation for Gentiles thru conversion to Judaism was not exactly mainstream Jewish thought during the period) and it is not really good, since it teaches that salvation is thru works and keeping the Law.
Regards,
Shodan
Et alors?
this is all fine but the underlying problem of a pretension to probability analysis via the Bayesian analysis are very many input potential errors.
I am not a historian, I am a financial economist. I don’t even care very much about whether the christian idea of jesus is correct, founded or not.
However I am quite sensitive to the errors of the naive usage of statistical analysis where the confidence in the data and the framing of the data for the statistical analysis suffers from excessive confidence and ignoring fundamental definititional questions (as it is was a source of truly destructive decisions on false confidence in the financial crisis). This follow-up post is useful as it is highlighting some truly fundamental issues.
Posing this the way you do, it is making massive and not very well supported assumptions on a state of knowledge and a quality and completeness of data.
Carrier, he is clearly a polemecist.
I do not care about the subject in itself (it seems to me some strange christian thing) but the false usage of the statistical analysis, that I am more familiar with and it is incorrect. The responses of Carrier do not give any confidence, they are not reasoned, they are polemical.
The way I approach the matter is as follows:
(1) Clearly something or someone inspired Christianity.
(2) The stories themselves propose a charismatic preacher as the inspiration.
(3) Charismatic preachers were hardly uncommon in 1st century Judea. We know there were lots of them.
(4) Therefore, it makes sense to assume that the stories are correct and that a charismatic preacher inspired Christianity, unless there is some convincing evidence to the contrary. Other explanations, it would appear, require numbers of folks to lie for no particularly good reason, and the existence of a “human Jesus” is in no way extraordinary or even particularly unusual.
(5) Equally, it makes sense to assume that the aspects of the story that are supernatural are mythological additions (unless extraordinary proof is available to demonstrate that they are true). The supernatural is extraordinary, by definition, and thus requires extraordinary proof.
(6) Assumptions as to the existence of Jesus the charismatic preacher who inspired Christianity do not extend to assumptions that the supernatural aspects of the biblical stories about him are literally true.
To be inelegant about it, Jesus Christ existed in much the same way Santa Claus existed-while there may have been some human preacher that was the seed of all the stories that were later built up around him, he bears as much relation to the “Jesus Christ” that people speak of nowadays as Saint Nicholas of Myra does to the “Santa Claus” of today-in fact, we actually know a lot more about Nicholas of Myra.
Bayes’ theorem is a mathematical formula that relates numerical probability. The formula can be found in any statistics textbook. With no numerical probabilities, there’s no way to use the theorem.
It would be possible, I suppose, to take qualitative descriptions about probability (“very unlikey”, “somewhat likely”) and argue that one could be using a Bayesian type of analysis with those. But to actually claim to be using “Bayes’ Theorem” when doing so is a dishonest attempt by Carrier to claim a mathematical rigor for his results, when in fact there is no mathematical rigor there. Further, Carrier does keep saying that he has put actual numbers on the probability of ancient events. As noted in one of the reviews linked to already, “Carrier claims to establish that the odds that historical Jesus existed, are somewhere between 1 in 3 and 1 in 12500.” Such numbers are pulled out of thin air; they have no basis in reality.
Actually, we do have those for Jesus, as others have noted in this thread already. There are four biographies of Jesus, namely the canonical gospels. The earliest, Mark, was probably written 30-40 years after the ministry of Jesus, and the latest, John, probably 60-70 years after.
Now, there was a well-defined genre of historical biographical writing among the ancient Greeks and Romans. Craig Blomberg’s The Historical Reliability of the Gospels explains how the genre is defined, and why the great majority of scholarship about the gospels treats them as fitting in the genre. Among books in that genre, there are great many written about historical figures. There are very few, if any, written about mythical figures. And certainly there is no case where any historical biography with the same level of historical and geographical detail as the gospels was written about a mythical figure.
It depends - the “Jesus Christ” we are talking about in this thread is the rabble-rousing preacher executed under Pontius Pilate, not the miracle-working Son of God. It would be like going into a thread discussing St. Nicholas of Myra and complaining that there is no evidence for flying reindeer.
Except that the so called contemporary cites of his existence describe the miracle working S-O-G, and the rabble-rousing preacher is being extrapolated from that and very little else. On the other hand, if we start a thread about Nicholas, we have a bit more than extrapolation from stories about Santa Claus to work with, because the contemporary cites aren’t so…fantastic.
Could you please cite the sources that you find reliable to establish what we know about Nicholas of Myra, and show the extent to which they are more numerous and more reliable than the Gospels, Tacitus, and Josephus? Because AFAICT there is only one sourcethat is even close to contemporary, and even that one mentions a miracle performed by Nicholas.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Shodan
Richard Carrier is plainly, obviously and admittedly biased. His “scholarship” in this venue is completely worthless.
Nicholas of Myra is a good example - he’s an undoubtedly real person who had miracle stories told about him, for example:
It is perfectly possible - in fact, sensible - to dissociate the very real bishop who participated in the debate about Arianism, from the figure of myth and legend who is credited with many of the very same miracles Jesus was credited with (raising the dead, miraculously increasing food).
Similarly, it is possible - even, I assert, sensible - to dissociate the first century charismatic preacher of Judea, who inspired the new cult of Christianity, from the figure of myth and legend who raised Lazarus (rather than the three kids murdered by a malicious butcher, like Nicholas was supposed to), and who multiplied the loaves and fishes (rather than the load of grain bound for Constantinople, like Nicholas was supposed to). Only someone with a real axe to grind would insist that, because Nicholas was credited with raising the dead and miraculously multiplying grain, a “historical Nicholas” never existed.
This is what makes the most sense for me, after reading a bit about it out of interest. It simply seems to account for the evidence without requiring any leaps or conspiracies.
I’m definitely no expert on the subject, though I feel like some of the complaints in this thread about how the history is pieced together are ignoring how much of everything from that long ago is pieced together. My concentration in my degree was the Ancient Near East (undergrad only), and it’s amazing how much we simply don’t know. Singling out the Jesus story as the one where bigger and better proof is needed to show he ever existed feels odd to me.