Here I want to briefly try to explain what I believe is the fundamental difference between a “known event” in history and a “probable” event. (This is, of course, a continuation of the ideas I presented in my four-part series on what I attempted to argue was Richard Carrier’s misapplication to Bayesian probability to “all historical claims”.)
Carrier does not believe that all our knowledge is a question of degree of probability.
All claims have a nonzero epistemic probability of being true, no matter how absurd they may be (unless they’re logically impossible or unintelligible), because we can always be wrong about anything. And that entails there is always a nonzero probability that we are wrong, no matter how small that probability is. And therefore there is always a converse of that probability, which is the probability that we are right (or would be right) to believe that claim. This holds even for many claims that are supposedly certain, such as the conclusions of logical or mathematical proofs. For there is always a nonzero probability that there is an error in that proof that we missed. Even if a thousand experts check the proof, there is still a nonzero probability that they all missed the same error. The probability of this is vanishingly small, but still never zero. Likewise, there is always a nonzero probability that we ourselves are mistaken about what those thousand experts concluded. And so on. The only exception would be immediate experiences that at their most basic level are undeniable (e.g., that you see words in front of you at this very moment, or that “Caesar was immortal and Brutus killed him” is logically impossible). But no substantial claim about history can ever be that basic. History is in the past and thus never in our immediate experience. And knowing what logically could or couldn’t have happened is not even close to knowing what did. Therefore, all empirical claims about history, no matter how certain, have a nonzero probability of being false, and no matter how absurd, have a nonzero probability of being true. Therefore, because we only have finite knowledge and are not infallible, apart from obviously undeniable things, some probability always remains that we are mistaken or misinformed or misled. (Proving History, 24f)
When I first read those words soon after Proving History was published I went along with them, believing them to be at least theoretically true. In theory, yes, we can always be wrong about anything, so yes, even the most secure knowledge must have a non-zero chance of being wrong even if that chance is infinitesimally small. But is that really true in practice, or in the practical world of experience?
Yes, history is “in the past” but does it follow, as Carrier reasons above, that every single claim about the past has a “nonzero probability of being false”? In theory I might surmise that to be so. I might surmise that I don’t even exist and everything I am experiencing is someone else’s dream. But in reality, in the real world where I have to live, I don’t really believe that.
Look at the exception that I have highlighted in the quotation. What the example points to is empirical experience, the experience of our senses. We can call this empirical knowledge. We do not think that there is a nonzero possibility that we are wrong, that there is some chance that we are not really experiencing these words right now. Some things we do know with absolute certainty.
We not only know what we can empirically experience but we can also communicate our empirical knowledge to one another. Further, we can establish ways of assuring others that the knowledge we transmit is reliable. When I read inscribed words on monuments testifying to a tragic event that happened before my time, I know that event happened. There are a host of empirical markers that assure me of the authenticity of the event being recorded in the inscription: the public space the monument occupies, the official emblems and standardised quality of the monument, the names and dates I can verify in other public records, and so forth. There is no doubt and no room for doubt — not even an “infinitesimally small” doubt — that the event memorialised actually happened. I have used the example of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor as an example of such an empirically grounded historical event for which there is no room at all to doubt that it happened.
It does not follow that because something is not part of our immediate experience, that it happened in the past, that there is necessarily some room for doubt about its past reality. Is there room for any doubt about the reality of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or of the events known as the Holocaust? Or of the displacement of indigenous peoples by white settlers in certain countries throughout the nineteenth century? We have records that we can test for authenticity and that confirm these events of the past. There is no room for any doubts at all. They are all empirically established facts of the past. We can prove they all happened without any shadow of doubt.
The further back we go, generally speaking, the fewer remains we have of past events and the less we know. But what we do know is based on the same kinds of verifiable empirical evidence. (I am speaking generally. Sometimes hoaxers, for example, planted forgeries with the intent to deceive. But those sorts of examples only highlight the need for care we take as a rule to authenticate our sources.)
Humans have the ability to communicate information along with ways of assuring others of its authenticity. Being human, we know how easy it is to be deceived and for others to practise deception. Hence we build safeguards and apply empirical methods to establish authenticity and assurance.
When historians research the events of the past, as a rule they are researching events that have been empirically determined to have happened. They are seeking to understand those events. Different historians will have different views about those events but the events themselves will be empirically determined to have happened. (Yes, there are some grey areas where doubts are raised but I am speaking generally, for the most part.)
Where the Historical Problem Enters
If after I have empirically established the reality of the event of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, I still have a giant gap in my knowledge. What is missing is not complete assurance that it happened — I have full assurance that it happened — but I do not know the reality of what it was like. I do not know all the details and I can only guess or imagine what the participants experienced. The event is gone. It no longer exists. It has to be reconstructed. That’s where my imagination enters, informed as best it can be by surviving records of the event. No reconstruction can ever recreate the event exactly as it happened. Every reconstruction must inevitably be partial and from a particular perspective.
That is the problem of historical knowledge per se. In the history wars in Australia, for example, different parties want to reconstruct past events relating to the Aboriginals differently. Some want to see the killings as the work of a few “bad apples” and far from systematic. Others believe it is necessary to introduce other sources that point to racist attitudes that enabled the killings. Some debate the relevance and interpretations of those new sources. And so forth. That is where the historical debates tend to happen. There is no question that certain events did actually take place. Arguments will often centre over the physical extent of those events, the motivations or awareness of those involved, etc.
Some can view the British and Roman empires of blessings to humanity. Some will view them as horrific blights on history. Others will have various shades in between. But that there were such empires in history cannot be doubted any more than you can doubt that you are reading these words right now. The empirical evidence for them leaves no room for doubt.
Empirically established knowledge is not the same as Bayesian probabilistic knowledge.
A few readers have indicated to me that my recent series of posts on the problematic use of Bayes Theorem for assessing “historical claims” have failed to make their intended point.
Hopefully here I can succinctly explain why Bayes cannot help us decide whether Christianity began with a historical Jesus.
Reason #1: If our question is simply, Did Jesus Exist? then it is meaningless. What is of interest is the question of how Christianity originated. What might Jesus have done that gave birth to the Christian religion? What did others do during the time of Jesus or after him that shaped or established Christianity? Those are the meaningful questions. Simply saying Jesus did or did not exist is somewhat pointless — unless, perhaps, one wants a negative answer in order to irritate believers.
Reason #2: If by using Bayes one concludes that Jesus “probably did not exist” then again, we have to ask, So what? If it appears unlikely that he existed then after weighing up the probabilities on the basis of the various strands of data, that tells the historian nothing useful at all. Simply saying that Jesus fits the pattern of mythical persons, if that’s where Bayesian inference leads, does not answer the question of whether he existed or not. Simply saying that there is, say, an 80% chance he did not exist still leaves open the possibility that he did exist. So what has been achieved? Nothing useful for the historian at all. Likewise, calculating that there is an 80% chance that he did exist would still leave open the possibility that he did not. The historian is no better off with either result.
I suspect King Philip II of Spain saw the odds of his Spanish Armada crushing the English fleet as overwhelmingly high. The odds against an event happening are irrelevant are irrelevant if they happen. And many times the unexpected and “out of the blue” does happen in history. That they may have been judged to have been unlikely at the time makes no difference to the fact that they happened and are part of the historical record.
Most historical events are “unlikely” or unforeseen until after they happen. After they happen commentators and the rest of us can see how “inevitable” they were. We can always predict what will happen after it happens. Carrier’s mythicist hypothesis can predict the type of evidence the historian will find after the hypothesis was originally formulated on the basis of that evidence. One might look at any number of events in the past and ask, What was the likelihood of X happening? The chances that I will be struck by lightning are very slim indeed. But if I were to be struck by lightning this weekend — stormy weather appears to be approaching — the odds against it happening will mean absolutely nothing against the fact (fingers crossed it won’t be a fact) that it “happened”! Odds against something happening are meaningless when investigating “what did happen”.
We don’t need Bayesian calculations to decide whether there was a Roman empire, or whether its emperors were worshiped as deities, or whether the Roman power destroyed the Jewish temple in 70 CE. The kind of evidence we have for the “raw facts” of the past, including who lived and who did what, are grounded in the same kinds of judgments we make in testing the authenticity of modern claims, whether they be events reported in the news or checking the reliability of advertised claims about a product that interests us. Some of us are less careful with respect to such matters than is healthy and easily believe false claims, present and past. When a historian is interested in whether “new facts” can be dug up to throw new light on a question, it is to the archives, to official records, to diaries and letters and reports of various kinds that they turn. These are tested for authenticity and reliability. If there is doubt about any detail it is more likely to find its way into publication by way of a footnote — with its questionable status clearly noted.
The only justifiable approach to reconstructing Christian origins is to build on the sources we have and on what we know about them — not on what we surmise about them. That approach will not allow us to join in the games of imagining what Jesus and his followers may have done. (We have stories of Jesus and we cannot assume — without justification that would pass the test in any other field of sound empirical inquiry — that they must be based on true events.) We will not have the wealth of details we would like if we avoid make-believe games. But the professional will not apologize for tailoring the question and scope of inquiry to accord with the extent and nature of the source material.
Sure, there is room for Bayesian probability when it comes to drawing certain kinds of inferences from archaeological data or for comparing the likelihood of competing hypotheses, but claiming that so-and-so did or did not exist is by itself a rather meaningless exercise for the reason I stated above.
(See also the section of my earlier post pointing out that not even postmodernist historians work with “what probably happened“.)
To address one specific point I referred to in my recent series: It may well be that one can find in literature more mythical persons who fit a Rank-Raglan hero type, but that is irrelevant to the fact that some historical persons did resurface in later literature wearing Rank-Raglan features (born of a virgin, died on a hill, etc). But even Raglan himself understood that the historicity of a figure was unrelated to the fact that fanciful tales were later told about him or her. If Jesus scores more highly than other historical figures on the R-R scale, so be it: such a “fact” would have no bearing whatever on whether or not he might have been historical. Ask Raglan himself.
Next, he devised a thought experiment, a 1700s version of a computer simulation. Stripping the problem to its basics, Bayes imagined a square table so level that a ball thrown on it would have the same chance of landing on one spot as on any other. Subsequent generations would call his construction a billiard table, but as a Dissenting minister Bayes would have disapproved of such games, and his experiment did not involve balls bouncing off table edges or colliding with one another. As he envisioned it, a ball rolled randomly on the table could stop with equal probability anywhere.
We can imagine him sitting with his back to the table so he cannot see anything on it. On a piece of paper he draws a square to represent the surface of the table. He begins by having an associate toss an imaginary cue ball onto the pretend tabletop. Because his back is turned, Bayes does not know where the cue ball has landed.
Next, we picture him asking his colleague to throw a second ball onto the table and report whether it landed to the right or left of the cue ball. If to the left, Bayes realizes that the cue ball is more likely to sit toward the right side of the table. Again Bayes’ friend throws the ball and reports only whether it lands to the right or left of the cue ball. If to the right, Bayes realizes that the cue can’t be on the far right-hand edge of the table.
He asks his colleague to make throw after throw after throw; gamblers and mathematicians already knew that the more times they tossed a coin, the more trustworthy their conclusions would be. What Bayes discovered is that, as more and more balls were thrown, each new piece of information made his imaginary cue ball wobble back and forth within a more limited area.
As an extreme case, if all the subsequent tosses fell to the right of the first ball, Bayes would have to conclude that it probably sat on the far left-hand margin of his table. By contrast, if all the tosses landed to the left of the first ball, it probably sat on the far right. Eventually, given enough tosses of the ball, Bayes could narrow the range of places where the cue ball was apt to be.
Bayes’ genius was to take the idea of narrowing down the range of positions for the cue ball and—based on this meager information—infer that it had landed somewhere between two bounds. This approach could not produce a right answer. Bayes could never know precisely where the cue ball landed, but he could tell with increasing confidence that it was most probably within a particular range. Bayes’ simple, limited system thus moved from observations about the world back to their probable origin or cause. Using his knowledge of the present (the left and right positions of the tossed balls), Bayes had figured out how to say something about the past (the position of the first ball). He could even judge how confident he could be about his conclusion. (p. 7)
In the late 1990s Earl Doherty revitalized public interest in the question of whether Jesus had been a historical figure with the Jesus Puzzle website (a new version is now available here) and book, The Jesus Puzzle (link is to a publicly available version — though Doherty subsequently published a much more detailed volume a few years later). In the wake of that controversy Richard Carrier undertook to examine the arguments for and against the existence of Jesus with the authority of a doctorate in ancient history behind him. To this end, Carrier initially published two works, the first, Proving History, laying the groundwork of the method he would be using to address the question of Jesus’ historicity, and then On the Historicity of Jesus, the volume in which he applied his Bayesian probability* approach to the question. In that second volume Carrier concluded that the odds against Jesus having existed were significantly higher than the opposing view.
Carrier regularly argued that the evidence to be found in the New Testament was predicted or could well have been predicted by the hypothesis that Jesus did not exist. As noted in my previous post, the term he used most often was “expected”, but he made clear in Proving History by “expectation” in this context he meant “predicted”.
Prediction or Circularity?
It would have been more accurate to have simply said that the evidence cited is consistent with the view that Jesus did not exist. The hypothesis did not “predict” any evidence. Indeed, one might even say that the hypothesis was drawn from the sources in the first place, so it is circular logic to then say that the hypothesis predicted the evidence that gave rise to that hypothesis.
Carrier’s stated aim is to form a
hypotheses that make[s] … substantial predictions. This will give us in each case a minimal theory, one that does not entail any ambitious or questionable claims . . . a theory substantial enough to test. (On the Historicity [henceforth = OHJ], 30 – bolding is my own in all quotations)
I argue, rather, that all Carrier has been able to accomplish is to show that a hypothesis is consistent with the data that it was created to explain. Historical research, as I have been attempting to show in the previous posts, cannot “predict” in the ways Carrier asserts.
Carrier begins with a “minimal Jesus myth theory”:
. . . the basic thesis of every competent mythicist, then and now, has always been that Jesus was originally a god, just like any other god (properly speaking, a demigod in pagan terms; an archangel in Jewish terms; in either sense, a deity), who was later historicized, just as countless other gods were, and that the Gospel of Mark (or Mark’s source) originated the Christian myth familiar to us by building up an edifying and symbolically meaningful tale for Jesus, drawing on passages from the Old Testament and popular literature, coupled with elements of revelation and pious inspiration. The manner in which Osiris came to be historicized, moving from being just a cosmic god to being given a whole narrative biography set in Egypt during a specific historical period, complete with collections of wisdom sayings he supposedly uttered, is still an apt model, if not by any means an exact one. Which is to say, it establishes a proof of concept. It is in essence what all mythicists are saying happened to Jesus.
Distilling all of this down to its most basic principles we get the following set of propositions:
1. At the origin of Christianity, Jesus Christ was thought to be a celestial deity much like any other.
2. Like many other celestial deities, this Jesus ‘communicated’ with his subjects only through dreams, visions and other forms of divine inspiration (such as prophecy, past and present).
3. Like some other celestial deities, this Jesus was originally believed to have endured an ordeal of incarnation, death, burial and resurrection in a supernatural realm.
4. As for many other celestial deities, an allegorical story of this same Jesus was then composed and told within the sacred community, which placed him on earth, in history, as a divine man, with an earthly family, companions, and enemies, complete with deeds and sayings, and an earthly depiction of his ordeals.
5. Subsequent communities of worshipers believed (or at least taught) that this invented sacred story was real (and either not allegorical or only ‘additionally’ allegorical).
That all five propositions are true shall be my minimal Jesus myth theory. (OHJ 52f)
By explaining that his “minimal myth theory” consists of the core of what Jesus myth exponents themselves have claimed, Carrier in fact is conceding that his “minimal” points are based on the information available in the sources that he will proceed to say he will “expect” to find, or to “predict” will be in the sources. (Earl Doherty, in particular, was Carrier’s source for the interpretation that Jesus was originally understood to be a deity in heaven rather than a man on earth.)
Now those mythicists such as Earl Doherty arrived at their concept of a mythical Jesus in large measure as a result of analysing and drawing conclusions directly from the New Testament itself as well as from extra-biblical sources. So when Carrier declares that the evidence in the New Testament is what his “minimal Jesus myth theory” “expected” or “predicted”, he is in effect reasoning in a circle. The mythicist view of Doherty (and of many other earlier mythicists) was based on his reading of the New Testament. So the passages in the New Testament can hardly have been what would be “expected” according to mythicism; rather, they were the beginning of the “theory”, not its expected conclusion.
The approach as Carrier sets it out sounds scientific enough ….
We have to ask of each piece of evidence:
1. How likely is it that we would have this evidence if our hypothesis is true? (Is this evidence expected? How expected?)
2. How likely is it that the evidence would look like it does if our hypothesis is true? (Instead of looking differently; having a different content, for example.)
3. Conversely, how likely is it that we would have this evidence if the other hypothesis is true? (Again, is this evidence expected? How expected?)
4. And how likely is it that the evidence would look like it does if that other hypothesis is true? (Instead of looking differently; having a different content, for example.)
And when asking these questions, the ‘evidence’ includes not just what we have, but also what we don’t have. Does the evidence—what we have and what we don’t, what it says and what it doesn’t—make more sense on one hypothesis than the other? How much more? That’s the question. (OHJ, 278)
But the problem is that all of those questions were raised and fully addressed by Earl Doherty and others when they formulated their view that, on the basis of their answers to those questions, Jesus was a mythical creation and not a historical figure. So to turn around and begin with the conclusions of mythicists to say that the evidence we find in the New Testament is exactly what we would expect according to mythicism, is to simply work backwards from what the mythicists have done in the first place.
In other words, there is no prediction of what one might find in the evidence. There is no “expectation” that we might find such and such sort of idea. Rather, the sources themselves have long raised the kinds of questions that have led to the mythicist theory in the first place.
Example 1: Clement’s Letter
Look at the example of Carrier’s reference to the letter of 1 Clement:
The fact that this lengthy document fully agrees with the expectations of minimal mythicism, but looks very strange on any version of historicity, makes this evidence for the former against the latter. . . . [O]n minimal mythicism this is exactly the kind of letter we would expect to be written in the first century entails that its consequent probability on mythicism is 100% (or near enough). (OHJ, 314f – italics in the original in all quotations)
But Doherty’s mythicist view was shaped by such evidence. So the characteristics of Clement’s letter are what lay behind the mythicist view, so it is erroneous to say that the letter is what we would expect if mythicism were true. Doherty, for example, notes
Clement must be unfamiliar with Jesus’ thoughts in the same vein, as presented in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. Clement also shows himself to be unfamiliar with the Gospel teachings of Jesus on many other topics discussed in his letter.
When Clement comes to describe Jesus’ suffering (ch.16) we must assume that he has no Gospel account to paraphrase or quote from memory, for he simply reproduces Isaiah 53. His knowledge of Jesus’ passion comes from scripture. Clement’s ignorance on other Gospel elements has been noted at earlier points in this book. . . .
Since Clement knows so little of oral traditions about Jesus . . . .
We have seen in the Pauline letters that the heavenly Christ was regarded as giving instructions to prophets through revelation. Clement shares in the outlook that sees Christ’s voice as residing in scripture. . . .
In Clement’s world, these things have come to be associated with revelations from the spiritual Christ. . . (Jesus Puzzle, 261f)
The oddities in the letter of Clement have piqued the curiosity of those who have seen in them support for the mythicist view of Jesus. The mythicist view of Jesus does not “predict” that such a letter would exist. It is the other way around.
Example 2: Extra-Biblical Sources
Notice another instance of this circularity.
When it came to the pervasive silence in other external documents (Christian and non-Christian), and the lack of many otherwise expected documents, I assigned no effect either way (although sterner skeptics might think that far too generous to minimal historicity). . . .
The probabilities here estimated assume that nothing about the extrabiblical evidence is unexpected on minimal mythicism. So the consequent probability of all this extrabiblical evidence on … (minimal mythicism) can be treated as 100% across the board . . . . Either way, as a whole, the extrabiblical evidence argues against a historical Jesus. It’s simply hard to explain all its oddities on minimal historicity, but not hard at all on minimal mythicism. (OHJ, 356, 358)
On the contrary, it is the extra-biblical sources that have been in part responsible for generating doubts about the historicity of Jesus ever since at least the early nineteenth century. If the extra-biblical evidence were different then the question of Jesus’ historicity is unlikely to have arisen in the first place.
I have no quibble with Carrier’s last two sentences in the above quotation if they are taken alone, without the context of “expectation/prediction”. What they are really confirming is that the available evidence is consistent with the mythicist view, not that it is predicted by mythicism.
Example 3: Expected Fiction?
In discussing one particular miraculous event in the life of Jesus Carrier concludes:
As history, all this entails an improbable plethora of coincidences; but as historical fiction, it’s exactly what we’d expect. (OHJ, 487)
In this case what is said to be “expected” is nothing more than a definition of the nature of fiction. The unbelievable coincidences define the story as fiction. They are not the expected observation of something already known to be fiction. They are the fiction.
Example 4: Paul’s Letters
The foundation of all Jesus myth views from Arthur Drews and Paul-Louis Couchoud to George Albert Wells and Earl Doherty has been the epistles of Paul. The questions raised by what Paul does not say and the ways he speaks in what he has to say have raised perennial questions among theologians so there is no surprise to find many passages becoming bedrock among mythicist arguments. So to say that those passages in Paul are what might be predicted by mythicism is getting everything back to front. Those passages are largely the foundation of the mythicist views, the port from which mythicism sailed, not the new continent of evidence it discovered or “expected”.
Again Carrier phrases the problem in terms of “prediction” of what one will find in the sources:
So even if, for example, a passage is 90% expected on history (and thus very probable in that case), if that same passage is 100% expected on myth, then that evidence argues for myth . . . .This is often hard for historians to grasp, because they typically have not studied logic and don’t usually know the logical basis for any of their modes of reasoning . . . .
I have to conclude the evidence of the Epistles, on all we presently know, is simply improbable on h (minimal historicity), but almost exactly what we expect on -h (minimal mythicism). . . .
Paul claimed these things came to him by revelation, another thing we expect on mythicism. . . .
On the [mythicism] theory, this is pretty much exactly what we’d expect Paul to write. . . .
This passage in Romans is therefore improbable on minimal historicity, but exactly what we could expect on minimal mythicism. . . .
Whereas this is all 100% expected on minimal mythicism.
The evidence of the Epistles is exactly 100% expected on minimal mythicism. . . In fact, these are pretty much exactly the kind of letters we should expect to now have from Paul (and the other authors as well) if minimal mythicism is true. (OHJ, 513, 528, 536, 566, 573, 574, 595)
Predicting or Matching the Evidence?
So Carrier is able to conclude,
All the evidence is effectively 100%, what we could expect if Jesus didn’t exist and minimal mythicism, as defined [above], is true. (OHJ, 597)
On the contrary, I suggest that many readers have noticed that the sources contain difficulties if we assume Jesus to have lived in the real world outside the gospels. It is from those “difficulties” that are apparently inconsistent with a historical figure that the Jesus myth view has arisen. By proposing to “test” the mythicist view by setting up “expectations” of what we will find in the sources really comes down to merely confirming the problematic passages in the sources that gave rise to the myth view in the first place.
What Carrier is doing, I suggest, is simply describing the sources that have given rise to doubts about the existence of Jesus. There is no prediction involved at all. He is describing the state of the evidence and showing how it is consistent with his “minimal Jesus myth theory”, something all other Jesus myth scholars before him have done — only without the veneer of scientific assurance.
Historians as a rule cannot predict what will be found in the available sources that might test their hypotheses. They usually do no more than point to what they believe to be consistent with their hypotheses.
The Rank-Raglan Hero Class and Prediction Therefrom
In the opening post of this series I addressed Carrier’s use of the Rank-Raglan “hero class” as a conceptual framework for certain types of persons in ancient myths and legends. There I noted that it is misleading to apply a percentage probability figure to Jesus (or anyone) being a member of that class because the total number of persons sharing the features of that class are well below 100. This is more than a pedantic point. The numbers of characters are not only limited, but they belong to distinctively unique cultural settings. This is the nature of all historical events. No two events are ever alike and no events are ever repeated except in the most general sense. Yes, there have been wars forever, but no two wars are ever alike. Each has had its own causes that are unrepeatable.
Here are the twenty-one names studied by Raglan as sharing a features (born from a virgin, nothing of his childhood is known, etc) from a second list of random length (Raglan said he could have added many more common features — see the earlier post):
Oedipus
Theseus
Romulus
Heracles
Perseus
Jason
Bellerophon
Pelops
Asclepios
Dionysos
Apollo
Zeus
Joseph
Moses
Elijah
Watu Gunung
Nyikang
Sigurd or Siegfried
Llew Llawgyffes
Arthur
Robin Hood
We know that historical persons have been associated with mythical stories overlapping with the lives of those in the above list: Sargon, Cyrus, Alexander the Great, even Plato was said to have been born from a virgin mother, fathered by the god Apollo. But those mythical or “hero class” features of Cyrus and Alexander are quite distinct from the actual historical person; that fantastical myths have been told about real people makes no difference to the reality of those historical persons. As Raglan himself declared:
If, however, we take any really historical person, and make a clear distinction between what history tells us of him and what tradition tells us, we shall find that tradition, far from being supplementary to history, is totally unconnected with it, and that the hero of history and the hero of tradition are really two quite different persons, though they may bear the same name. (The Hero, 165)
If historical persons are known to have accrued mythical features of the Rank-Raglan type, then it does not follow that any person about whom such tales are told is likely to have not existed in reality. Simply counting up so many features (e.g. born of a virgin, attempt on his life as a child, etc) and saying “real myths” had more of those features than historical persons does not make any difference. Adding up more “hero class” labels to apply to any one person would be nothing more than evidence of more highly creative composers. Moreover, such fanciful tales appear to be born from the minds of the literate at a specific time and are not haphazard accretions of illiterate storytelling:
If biblical scholars took note of Raglan’s point here about such myths being literary and not popular in origin they would need to take a second hard look at their attempts to find the historical Jesus through oral traditions and memory theory, since oral traditions and memory theory are built on the assumption that the tales were of popular origin.
It should . . . be noted that this association of myths with historical characters is literary and not popular. There is no evidence that illiterates ever attach myths to real persons. The mythical stories told of English kings and queens—Alfred and the cakes, Richard I and Blondel, Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund, Queen Margaret and the robber, and so on—seem to have been deliberately composed; a well-known character and an old story were considered more interesting when combined. . . .
“From the researchers of J. Bedier upon the epic personages of William of Orange, Girard de Rousillon, Ogier the Dane, Raoul de Cambrai, Roland, and many other worthies, it emerges that they do not correspond in any way with what historical documents teach us of their alleged real prototypes.” (The Hero, 172, 174 — the latter citing A. van Gennep)
The conclusion we must draw is that the miraculous tales told about Jesus are at most evidence of the creative imaginations of literate classes. Whether a Jesus existed historically behind these tales is still quite possible and the mythical tales about him make no difference to that possibility. Tales are indeed told of historical persons that “do not correspond in any way” with the true historical figure. The only aspect in common seems to have been their name. If Jesus has more and more amazing tales told about him than others it follows that literate story tellers were more abundant or creative than for other figures. Such tales tell us nothing about the likelihood of his historicity.
I conclude that it is erroneous to use the Rank-Raglan hero class to indicate a prior probability of whether Jesus existed or not. Every situation in history is different. If the Greeks had many heroes of a certain type, and if the tales told about Jesus shared many tropes of those Greek heroes, it might mean nothing more than that very fanciful tales were told about Jesus that caused the “real Jesus” to be lost behind the world of myth. Many theologians would agree. In other words, the historian cannot make predictions based on probabilities to determine how likely any historical event or person might have been. Historical events and persons are contingent. They are all distinctive and unrepeatable. They either happen or exist or they do not. Or the researcher simply does not know if they did or not. Probability does not enter the discussion.
The Evidence: Expected or Known in Advance?
What Carrier calls “expected evidence” is, rather, a description of what has been with us (and Jesus myth researchers) from the beginning. The state of evidence gave rise to certain questions that led to suspicions that Jesus was not a historical figure. So returning to that evidence and saying that the myth notion “predicted” the state of that evidence is a misplaced project.
Try to imagine, if you can, that you have never heard of Christianity. Try to imagine what a new ancient religion would look like if it combined features of Greco-Roman mystery cults and some form of Judaism. If you had never heard of Christianity would you really imagine a religion that turned out to be very much like Christianity? I doubt it. You might postulate a series of angelic beings or just one of them, or a translated Enoch, in the distant mythical past turned into saviour deities in some fashion. You would surely see little reason to introduce a human deity in recent times. Yet Carrier concludes his major study on the historicity of Jesus with the conviction that his hypothesis predicted (or “could have predicted”) the beginnings of Christianity:
So we should actually have expected Jewish culture to find a way to integrate the same idea; after all, every other national culture was doing so. And this is where we have to look at the possibilities in light of what we now know. Had I been born in the year 1 and was asked as a young educated man what a Jewish mystery religion would look like, based on what I knew of the common features of mystery cult and the strongest features of Judaism, I could have described Christianity to you in almost every relevant particular—before it was even invented. It would involve the worship of a mythical-yet-historicized personal savior, a son of god, who suffered a death and resurrection, by which he obtained salvation for those who communed with his spirit, thereby becoming a fictive brotherhood, through baptism and the sharing of sacred meals. How likely is it that I could predict that if that wasn’t in fact how it came to pass? Influence is the only credible explanation. To propose it was a coincidence is absurd. (OHJ, 611)
It is very easy to predict the current state of the evidence that has been with us from the beginning. Prediction in hindsight is easy. It is so easy to know what to have expected after the event. We only have to compare the many predictions that the recent US elections would be a tight race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. After the election it was easy to look back and see what we “should have expected” and why.
Jesus either existed or he did not. If he existed it was not with a probability of less than 1. If he existed he existed 100%. If we can’t be sure he existed then we are not sure or we cannot know. If we cannot know we cannot say he may have existed at a 30% probability. That would make no sense if he existed. If the historian does not know for sure then the historian does not know. The historian may say it is likely or not likely he existed, but that still leaves the question unanswered. Those are the fundamental options with respect to any historical event — it either happened or it didn’t or we have no evidence or at best ambiguous evidence for it happening.
Thomas Bayes (Wikimedia)
Don’t get me wrong. I like Bayes’ theorem. It is a brilliant tool at doing what it was designed to do. But historical research is not a science and few historians, maybe a few die-hard stubborn empiricist historians, would claim it is a science that can predict what will be found in the sources or even sometimes what will happen in the future. Historical events are unique. The justified historical approach to the question of Jesus is to study the Jesus bequeathed to us in the surviving sources. Whether a historical figure behind the myth and theology historically existed is an unknown and unknowable question, and, I think, ultimately irrelevant.
Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix, 2014.
Doherty, Earl. The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Canadian Humanist Publications, 1999.
Rank, Otto, Raglan, and Alan Dundes. In Quest of the Hero. Mythos. Princeton University Press, 1990.
For Richard Carrier the methods of scientific and historical research overlap and are different from each other only in degree:
Science and history are thus inseparable. But the logic of their respective methods is also the same. The fact that historical theories rest on far weaker evidence relative to scientific theories, and as a result achieve far lower degrees of certainty, is a difference only in degree, not in kind. Historical theories otherwise operate the same way as scientific theories, inferring predictions from empirical evidence—both actual predictions as well as hypothetical. (Proving History, 48)
Here I believe Carrier is mistaken about both the historian’s and the scientist’s methods. If there is any consolation it may be found in learning that the nineteenth philosopher John Stuart Mill made the same mistake in his attempt to describe scientific method and Mill was followed in the social sciences for many decades.
What Is a Scientific Theory?
ChatGPT image
Scientific theories do not arise naturally from observing empirical evidence:
Timing the fall of a variety of objects such as leaves, paper, cannon balls, rocks, boards, and automobiles running off cliffs has little (if any) utility for the development of a useful theory of falling bodies. One could run correlations between the weight of such objects and their time of fall for many lifetimes without ever accumulating the sort of knowledge conducive to theoretical thinking about falling bodies. (Systematic Empiricism, 29f)
Albert Einstein himself wrote:
. . . theory cannot be fabricated out of the results of observation . . . (Systematic Empiricism, 103)
In these posts I am presenting my view of “what history is” and “how history is done” that is at odds with Carrier’s empiricism. I reject the notion that the most historians can say about any past event is that it “probably” happened. Carrier makes his position clear early in Proving History:
If anyone rejects my axioms, then no further dialogue is possible on this issue until there is agreement on the broader logical and philosophical issues they represent. Producing such agreement is not the point of this book, which is only written for those who already accept these axioms (or who at least agree they should). . . .
Axiom 4: Every claim has a nonzero probability of being true or false (unless its being true or false is logically impossible). . . .
All claims have a nonzero epistemic probability of being true, no matter how absurd they may be (unless they’re logically impossible or unintelligible), because we can always be wrong about anything. . . .
Therefore, because we only have finite knowledge and are not infallible, apart from obviously undeniable things, some probability always remains that we are mistaken or misinformed or misled. . . . And although the probability that a given claim is true (or false) may be vanishingly small and thus practically zero, it is never actually zero. It’s vital to admit this.
(pp 20, 23, 24, 25 – my bolding apart from “Axiom 4”)
I do reject this axiom. Even though I am not omniscient or infallible, it does not follow that there might be even the slightest chance that I am wrong to believe many historical events did indeed happen: the English, American, French, Russian revolutions, for example, or the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic War, World War I, or in the past reality of figures like Winston Churchill, Oliver Cromwell, Martin Luther, or Julius Caesar. That many Jews, communists, Roma and disabled were murdered under Hitler’s regime in an event known as the Holocaust is as undeniable as the fact that you are reading these words right now. Probability does not enter the historicity of these events at all. Probability enters only with respect to justifying interpretations, reasons, results or the scale of such events. They happened and our knowledge that they happened or existed is absolutely certain. We don’t need to know everything about them to have absolute confidence; the possibility that we are mistaken in our assurance that these things happened or that these persons existed really is zero.
So my intention is to place my contrary perspective on history — one that I think is accepted by the majority of professional historians — for consideration as another point of view from Carrier’s.
So what is a scientific theory, then, and how does it come about?
Scientific theory is concerned with concepts, terms not defined by reference to observation, which consequently enter into exact theoretical relations with one another which are often expressed mathematically. . . . The purpose of theory in science is to explain, predict, and guide new research. But empiricist social theorizing consists of nothing more than generalizing, a process which summarizes what has been observed. A summary of past observations, however, cannot explain and predict, and accuracy cannot be gained from vagueness. . . .
The creation of a useful theory requires the abstraction of a pure structural model from the diverse material of observation. In other words, abstraction does not proceed by summarizing observations, but by generating a nonobservational structure which deliberately does not summarize. The abstractive process, because it links theory to observation, is never complete without both. Theory, on the other hand, can be applied only through abstraction.
A theory is a constructed relational statement consisting of nonobservable concepts connected to other nonobservable concepts. Concepts are defined not in terms of observations but by their relationship to each other. Although it may be meaningful to state “There is a cow,” the statement “There is a force” is senseless because force is not an observable. Conversely, the statement “Force is equal to mass times acceleration” is meaningful because nonobservable concepts can be related through mathematical connectives; but the statement “Cow equals four legs” is meaningless because observational terms cannot be so related. In other words, the truth of scientific theories is not an empirical truth based on observation; it is a consequence of form, the relationship of nonobservables. (Systematic Empiricism, 3, 24 – my bolding in all quotations)
No historian, nor indeed any social scientist, has ever produced a theory of the scientific kind to explain and predict social and historical events. Scientific theories and research have . . .
. . . resulted in explanation and prediction of phenomena . . .
but they have done so
through the rational cumulation of laws. (Systematic Empiricism, 6)
Theories and laws provide the framework through which the physical world is understood by the scientist.
What Carrier is doing is describing the data available to historians and drawing generalizations from subsets of it. Finding more data that is consistent with other known data does not involve making a prediction. It is simply describing the information we acquire from the data.
Can Historians Make Predictions?
Carrier argues that historians, like scientists, can make predictions on the basis of their “theories”:
And just as a geologist can make valid predictions about the future of the Mississippi River, so a historian can make valid (but still general) predictions about the future course of history, if the same relevant conditions are repeated (such prediction will be statistical, of course, and thus more akin to prediction in the sciences of meteorology and seismology, but such inexact predictions are still much better than random guessing). Hence, historical explanations of evidence and events are directly equivalent to scientific theories, and as such are testable against the evidence, precisely because they make predictions about that evidence.
In truth, science is actually subordinate to history, as it relies on historical documents and testimony for most of its conclusions (especially historical records of past experiments, observations, and data). Yet, at the same time, history relies on scientific findings to interpret historical evidence and events. Science and history are thus inseparable. But the logic of their respective methods is also the same. The fact that historical theories rest on far weaker evidence relative to scientific theories, and as a result achieve far lower degrees of certainty, is a difference only in degree, not in kind. Historical theories otherwise operate the same way as scientific theories, inferring predictions from empirical evidence—both actual predictions as well as hypothetical. Because actual predictions (such as that the content of Julius Caesar’s Civil War represents Caesar’s own personal efforts at political propaganda) and hypothetical predictions (such as that if we discover in the future any lost writings from the age of Julius Caesar, they will confirm or corroborate our predictions about how the content of the Civil War came about) both follow from historical theories. This is disguised by the fact that these are more commonly called ‘explanations.’ But theories are what they are. (Proving History, 47f)
What Carrier refers to as a prediction by a historian is really nothing more than a description of the relevant data found in the sources. A hypothesis formulated from the data can hardly claim to predict what is in the dataset. Rather, the hypothesis is tested for consistency with the data, but that’s not a prediction. In On the Historicity of Jesus Carrier regularly refers to what he finds in the sources as being “expected” by his hypothesis that Jesus was a mythical creation and not a historical person. I suggest, however, that the very notion of a “mythical” Jesus has arisen from a raft of studies on the question ever since the late eighteenth century and has been shaped by those studies and their interpretations of the New Testament. Carrier says, for example, on page 581 of On the Historicity that the idea that Jesus came from the seed of David — as per Romans 1:3 — could have been predicted by his hypothesis of mythicism:
So Paul’s reference to Jesus being ‘made’ (genomenos) of the ‘seed’ (sperma) of David and being ‘made’ (genomenos) from a woman are essentially expected on minimal mythicism . . . .
Instead, if we start with minimal mythicism, we can easily predict the original kernel to most likely have been that Jesus was indeed made from a celestial sperm that God snatched from David, by which God could fulfill his promise to David against the appearance of history having broken it. That this fits what we read in Paul therefore leaves us with no evidence that Paul definitely meant anything else. . . .
Minimal mythicism practically entails that the celestial Christ would be understood to have been formed from the ‘sperm of David’, even literally (God having saved some for the purpose, then using it as the seed from which he formed Jesus’ body of flesh, just as he had done Adam’s). I do not deem this to be absolutely certain. Yet I could have deduced it even without knowing any Christian literature, simply by combining minimal mythicism with a reading of the scriptures and the established background facts of previous history. And that I could do that entails it has a very high probability on minimal mythicism. It is very much expected. (On the Historicity, 581f)
In Proving History Carrier speaks of the historian’s hypothesis being able to predict “what type of evidence to expect” — that is, the evidence that his hypothesis “predicts”:
. . . the evidence we have is exactly what we should expect if the story was made up . . .
Specifying the ‘type’ of evidence to expect in this way allows wide ranges of possible outcomes . . . .
One must thus distinguish ‘predictions of exact details’ (which BT does not concern itself with in this case) from ‘predictions regarding the type of evidence to expect.’ . . .
. . . the evidence can fit our hypothesis fine, being entirely what we should expect . . .
It’s sufficient to construct h to make . . . generic predictions (predictions of what type of evidence to expect) (On the Historicity, 58, 77, 78, 167, 214)
Leaving aside the tautology (expectation is a kind of prediction, isn’t it? — Carrier means “predictions of what type of evidence we will find”) I suggest that the only reason Carrier could “predict” finding a text saying Jesus came from the seed of David is because he knew it was in the database to begin with and that he could not formulate a hypothesis about a nonhistorical Jesus that contradicted it. Indeed, his starting hypothesis had to allow room for what he knew to be in the database. Romans 1:3 had been widely discussed and debated among both Jesus mythicists and Jesus historicists by generations of scholars. That there is no real prediction involved can be assessed by a Bayesian analysis itself. We have historical records testifying to Judeans entertaining a wide range of notions about the messiah or similar figure to come and relatively few seemed to have made the same “prediction” Carrier speaks of:
Some used Scriptures to argue he would come from Joseph, not David.
Some used the same Scriptures to determine there would be two messiahs.
Some said that no-one would know his genealogy.
Some said he would be hidden and no-one would know where he was.
The canonical gospels even indicate some debate among early Christians over whether he really was descended from David or not.
And on top of all of that a few scholars have offered reasons to think that the relevant passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans about Jesus and the seed of David was a late interpolation — that is, that Paul did not write it anyway!
If John the Baptist could be said to have fulfilled the prophecy that Elijah was to appear again beforehand by “coming in the spirit and power of Elijah”, why could not someone say something similar of the messiah, that he would come in the “spirit and power of David”? Some scholar have said there were Judeans who did hold such a view of the future Messiah.
So the sources themselves tell us that there were many notions about a future messianic figure and only a few of them linked that figure to David, so by relying on our “background knowledge” of messianic predictions we would have to say that a Bayesian assessment of the hypothesis that Paul’s claim could have been genuinely “predicted” is that it is unlikely.
As if to underscore the pointlessness of Carrier’s “prediction” that Paul’s passage was of a kind of evidence that was foreseen by Carrier’s hypothesis, he concedes that the same passage could be predicted with twice the probability of being found by the opposing hypothesis (p. 581). Of course, Carrier also argues that the cumulation of evidence and attendant probabilities outweighs mathematically the success rate of all the other “predictions” of the Jesus historicists.
Nothing is predicted or explained if the event itself is more certain than the law supposedly explaining it. The event is a test of the statement, not a prediction from it. (Systematic Empiricism, 130)
I covered other aspects of this question of prediction in historical research in the previous two posts.
Experimental Testing
Carrier further equates history with science by pointing out that both fields do sometimes perform experiments to test theories.
Historical methods are identical to scientific methods in this respect, being just another set of iterations of [the Hypothetico-Deductive Method]. In fact, many sciences are historical, for example, geology, cosmology, paleontology, criminal forensics, all of which explore not merely scientific generalizations but historical particulars, such as when the Big Bang occurred, or how the solar system formed, or exactly when or where a large asteroid struck the earth, or when a volcano erupted and what resulted from it, or what happened to a specific species in a specific historical period, or who committed what crime when. Not even the claim that historians must deal with human thoughts and intentions makes a difference, as these are as much a necessary occupation of psychologists, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists. It’s also fundamental to the scientific study of game theory and all of cognitive science. Nor is there any demarcation based on the role of controlled experiments. Much of science does not rely on experiments but primarily involves field observations (e.g., astronomy, zoology, ecology, paleontology), an approach to evidence directly analogous to the historian (most clearly parallel in the science of archaeology, but “field observations” of the artifacts we call “texts” and “documents” is just as analogous). Conversely, experiments sometimes do have a place in historical methodology.10
The examples on the linked page contain a discussion of what a certain type of ancient Greek ship actually looked like and how it might have functioned. Not only historians are often fascinated by what techniques ancients might have employed for all sorts of things. But those kinds of experiments are not the kind that relate to the kinds of events that interest most historians. We cannot replicate and experiment conditions of human behaviour to test this or that explanation for, say, a war. To refer back to J. and D. Willer,
Empiricist induction is based on likeness, but lab experiments are by definition unlike natural cases and thus any inductions from them for application in social circumstances are illegitimate. . . . Only the field experiment is logically capable of generating results satisfying the systematic empiricists’ criteria and then only if the empirical power of the researcher is strong enough to effectively (or absolutely) control the empirical circumstances. But until sociologists become philosopher kings or are delegated total power over the environment of their experiments by a totalitarian government, the field experiment is as useless as the others. (Systematic Empiricism, 135f)
Does the Hypothetico-Deductive Method Make Prediction Possible?
As for the value of the hypothetico-deductive method for making predictions,
. . . “Pure logic” cannot draw necessary conclusions by deduction from inductive general statements. The only general statements which can lead to true necessary conclusions in pure logic are those which are “true” by definition, and these are nonpredictive. If it is true by definition that all swans are white we simply do not admit the existence of black swans but call those birds which look like swans but are black by some other name (“snaws”). We cannot predict that if we find a swan he will be white but we will call “swans” only birds which we observe to be white. (Systematic Empiricism, 126)
Consequently . . .
Consequently no empirical generalization can act as a major premise in a deductive explanation, and empirical generalizations can never be used deductively to explain or predict. . . .
Scientific explanation cannot be deductive because scientific laws are statements relating nonobservable concepts, such as force, mass, and acceleration in terms of nonobservable connectives such as an equivalence or an equals sign. (Systematic Empiricism, 130f)
In 1942 the Journal of Philosophy published a paper arguing, like Carrier seventy years later, that historical methods were scientific. The Willers in response write, in part,
It comes as no surprise that Hempel cites no general laws in that paper and shows no application to history; but at the same time he refers to a “metaphysical theory of history,” apparently intending this label to apply to Karl Marx. From an empiricist view of science Marx may very well have presented a “metaphysical theory,” but from the viewpoint of scientific knowledge systems this intended negative criticism is actually a compliment to Marx, who (unlike those who search for empirical “patterns” in history) based his view of history on theoretic relations of concepts. (Systematic Empiricism, 129)
History, a Very Bad Predictor of Future Events
So convinced is Carrier of his status of history as a scientific process that he believes history can be used to predict not only what evidence will be found but even the future itself. This is empiricism with a vengeance.
And just as a geologist can make valid predictions about the future of the Mississippi River, so a historian can make valid (but still general) predictions about the future course of history, if the same relevant conditions are repeated (such prediction will be statistical, of course, and thus more akin to prediction in the sciences of meteorology and seismology, but such inexact predictions are still much better than random guessing). Hence, historical explanations of evidence and events are directly equivalent to scientific theories, and as such are testable against the evidence, precisely because they make predictions about that evidence. (Proving History, 47)
No, they cannot. The reason is that the same conditions are never repeated in human affairs. We can have fears, hopes and plans for the future, but we can never predict it — except in hindsight! In hindsight what happens seems to have been inevitable. But only in hindsight.
While many people, especially politicians, try to learn lessons from history, history itself shows that very few of these lessons have been the right ones in retrospect. Time and again, history has proved a very bad predictor of future events. This is because history never repeats itself; nothing in human society, the main concern of the historian, ever happens twice under exactly the same conditions or in exactly the same way. And when people try to use history, they often do so not in order to accommodate themselves to the inevitable, but in order to avoid it. (In Defence of History, 50)
As for history being on a par with science in its methods, and keeping in mind Carrier’s frequent appeals to geologists being able to predict the future, Evans concludes:
History, in the end, may for the most part be seen as a science in the weak sense of the German term Wissenschaft, an organized body of knowledge acquired through research carried out according to generally agreed methods, presented in published reports, and subject to peer review. It is not a science in the strong sense that it can frame general laws or predict the future. But there are sciences, such as geology, which cannot predict the future either. (In Defence of History, 62)
In the next and final post in this series I will tie the points raised directly to the question of the historicity of Jesus and Carrier’s approach in particular.
Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix, 2014.
Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books, 2012.
Evans, Richard J. In Defence of History. Norton, 1997.
Hempel, Carl G. “The Function of General Laws in History.” The Journal of Philosophy 39, no. 2 (January 15, 1942): 35. https://doi.org/10.2307/2017635.
Willer, David, and Judith Willer. Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudoscience. Prentice-Hall, 1973. https://archive.org/details/systematicempiri0000will
Like many Americans, I’m still stunned about the 2024 election. In fact, it still feels a bit unreal. The morning after, I decided to suspend my Facebook and Threads accounts for mental health reasons. Doom-scrolling for countless hours will hurt your brain. But enough of that.
Over the past few years, I’ve been studying areas of history, historiography, and the philosophy of history not normally taught in U.S. universities. In particular, I’m focusing on the longue durée. You’ll sometimes see this perspective used “safely” with regard to geography and climate. However, political historians in my country tend to ignore it, chiefly because too many of its practitioners rely on the analysis of Marxian class structures and how they play out over time. Continue reading “How Did We Get Here? Part 1”
In the previous post I spoke of the historian’s absolute confidence — of their certainty, of no room for doubt — in the basic events of the past. I don’t know how anyone can seriously think there might be even the slightest room for doubt that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and overran Singapore shortly afterwards, for example. But historians are not interested in simply documenting past events. That’s not chiefly what they do. Not most of the time. Or certainly not all that they do.
There are many ways to write history but I will be speaking about the approach well known to us all — the narrative or story approach to describing past events.
It is not the facticity of the events that is in question
It is at this narrative level where problems and disagreements, doubts and uncertainties, among historians arise.
Consider the difference in the following statements about event of Japan bombing Pearl Harbor:
In a “Day of Infamy” Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, dragging the U.S. into war.
The US suddenly cut off nearly all of Japan’s oil supply, thus compelling Japan to take the oil fields in Borneo; but first it needed to make a preventive strike on the fleet at Pearl Harbor.
In both statements the raw events are the same. There is no dispute about any of the specific events mentioned. The “facts” themselves are certain. No probability analysis is required to determine how “probably true” any of the details are. But we have two very different stories, two very different histories, all because of the way the events have been selected from the masses of other details that could have been added to both stories, and because of the way those selected events are woven together and the innuendo in which they are embedded.
That’s where the debates of historians centre. That’s where historians, for all the pains they endure sifting through the masses of data, selecting particular items they think to be most relevant, and trying to weave them into a story that they hope will be worthwhile for others to read — that’s where the real historical work happens. It is not about assessing the probabilities that this or that event actually happened. The groundwork of getting the clearly established “facts” or events is a given. (I am speaking generally, not about those special occasions where new documents are discovered and in need of verification or where some isolated point is in dispute.)
Witness the History Wars
The book that opened Australia’s History Wars
Last time I referred to History Wars. When one side launches a salvo about, say, the good intentions of most of the pioneers and cites specific incidents to argue that very few indigenous people were mistreated directly or deliberately by white settlers, the historians on the other side might grant some of those points but pull out more newspaper stories and police records and archival material to supply the factual evidence that they expect to win the other side of the debate. The debates are about the meaning and interpretations of those recorded events. They may supply evidence to demonstrate that some of the details are exaggerated or down-played. But very rarely, as far as I am aware, do historians spend time trying to assess the probability that X or Y happened in the first place.
Undeniability of certain events
Richard Carrier does acknowledge that some of our knowledge is undeniable and not subject to any shadow of room for any doubt:
The only exception would be immediate experiences that at their most basic level are undeniable (e.g., that you see words in front of you at this very moment, or that “Caesar was immortal and Brutus killed him” is logically impossible). . . . Therefore, because we only have finite knowledge and are not infallible, apart from obviously undeniable things, some probability always remains that we are mistaken or misinformed or misled.
and
. . . . apart from the undeniables of immediate experience, all facts are theoretical . . .
Of course “historical facts” do include direct uninterpreted experience . . . .
(Carrier 25, 298, 302. My comment: Few historians would say that even direct experience is ever “uninterpreted” or that all knowledge that does not come to us from direct experience is necessarily “theoretical”.)
The war memorials, the war cemeteries, the plaques with honour rolls of the dead in countless school and club halls around the nation, the photographs, the memorabilia passed down through generations, — all of these and more tell us that the twentieth century world wars were not at any level (not even at an infinitesimally low level) “theoretical”. Those wars are not known by “immediate experience” to most people today. But those wars are “facts of history” that are undeniable. (Again, I am speaking generally. Of course we may discuss historical events as theoretical events for other reasons and in other contexts, but I am addressing more fundamental bread and butter issues here.)
When we examine why those wars are undeniable, we find certain kinds of evidence that gives us certainty. The same applies to other events in other times. The difference will be that the further back we travel, generally speaking, the more scarce various types of evidence become. But historians still look for the same kinds of evidence about the remote past as they find for more recent events. Naturally questions of authenticity arise for different types of sources. But that even applies in modern times. One famous historian who specialized in the study of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was initially deceived by the discovery of the Hitler Diaries that turned out to be forgeries. Historians are well aware of the possibility of fraud and the difference between fact and fiction when examining different kinds of evidence. But that doesn’t reduce all their knowledge of “what events happened” to a “theoretical” status along with some sense that they think they could be “possibly, even if only very very slightly, mistaken”).
So when Richard Carrier writes . . .
Most of what we can say, especially about ancient history, is “maybe” or “probably”—not “definitely.” There is obviously more than one degree of certainty. Some things we are more sure of than others, and some things we are only barely sure of at all. Hence, especially in history, and even more so in ancient history, confidence must often be measured in relative degrees of certainty, and not in black-and-white terms of only “true” and “false.”
(Carrier 23)
. . . I might be wrong, but I suspect that not even Richard Carrier entertains for a moment even the slightest theoretical possibility that there was no Roman empire in existence two thousand years ago.
Not even postmodernists view historical events as “theoretically probable”
One might expect theoretical doubts about “facts” of specific events in the past among postmodernist historians. But no, not even postmodernist historians go as far as Carrier does in the above quotations. In the words of a Professor of Religious and Cultural History at the University of Dundee, Callum Brown,
Any postmodernist historian is not being a postmodernist all of the time. Like every historian, the postmodernist must conduct empirical research, establishing that events occurred and the order of them, checking sources that verify the facts of the case, and making decisions of judgement (balance of probabilities may be the best term) where absolute certainty is not possible. . . .
Historians are probably the least likely academics to preface their books with theoretical explanation.
(Brown, 10f. My comment: note the role of probability applies to exceptional cases.)
Here is how Brown presents “a good historian”:
To be a good historian, it is thought you have to be good in empiricist method, and be seen to have a full grasp of facts. This involves the application of scholarship skills to a series of questions. These occur on different levels. On the upper level are the big questions of: What happened, when did it happen, and why did it happen? At the second level of scholarship, the historian answers these questions by asking: What is the existing state of historical knowledge? And what hypotheses best fit the known facts? At the third level, the historian tests the existing state of knowledge by locating new documents and other sources, or re -evaluating already known ones, checking their date and place of origin, their authorship, their destiny and circulation, and how these discoveries alter the existing state of understanding. Next and last, the historian writes a report or a narrative of the issue, replete with edited evidence and how to interpret it, properly sourced with footnotes, and publishes this in book or article form to be checked by peer review by other historians. If after being read by other historians the published account alters in some degree the existing state of knowledge, it acquires a degree of acceptance that other scholars then come along to challenge and re-assess, in turn to repeat the process of investigation in an endless cycle of moving knowledge forward.
This method of doing History is broadly what all academic and professional historians aspire to the world over.
(Brown 21f)
A time to be certain, a time to doubt
There is a difference between establishing facts beyond doubt on the one hand and interpreting those facts and weaving them into a bigger narrative on the other. So there is a place for doubt and debate among historians but it is rarely over whether or not a particular event at some level actually happened. Again, keeping with postmodernists (persons many would assume to “doubt everything, even facts”), we see that even they hew to “getting the basic facts right”, leaving no room for doubt in that area:
The postmodernist critic distinguishes three different aspects of empiricism. These are empiricism as an event, empiricism as a method, and empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge. To each of these, the postmodernist has different attitudes.
Empiricism as an event is the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is an event in the History of ideas within which empiricist method and empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge originated. . . .
Empiricism as a method is the second aspect distinguished by the post modernist. This is the method by which empiricism defines knowledge. Empiricism argues that knowledge is acquired through an apparatus of human observation, experience, testing of authenticity, verification, corroboration and presentation for judgement (or peer review) by others in a value-free form. Even if the consequences of empiricism are challenged, postmodernists most certainly do not reject empiricist methods. Like all historians, the postmodernist needs empiricist method for the essential skills, and any student of History must learn and deploy them.
The postmodernist distinguishes a third aspect of empiricism, however – empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge. And this is seen as being full of problems. In the work of many academics across science and non science disciplines, there is an implicit notion that empiricism constitutes all that is necessary to knowledge – that it is a complete system of knowledge with no other connections. This notion is that human knowledge acquisition is nothing more than empiricism, and needs nothing more than this for the advancement of each discipline. In the case of History, the writing of the past has been seen by some empiricists as being satisfactorily embraced by empiricist method.
(Brown 21-25)
Historians who go beyond “getting the facts right beyond doubt” and view all their historical work as “getting even the narratives right” are not in fashion today:
One such empiricist historian was Geoffrey Elton, a leading right-wing historian, who regarded empiricism as the only worthwhile basis of professional training in the History discipline. . . . His purist empiricist position brought him to dispute with other historians over decades – including non-postmodernists.
(Brown 25)
Callum Brown discusses the difference between undoubted (we can say “undoubtable”) events and the way historians put them together to tell a story. What we are calling an “historical event” (I prefer the term “event” to “fact”) in this post (e.g. the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor) is “something that happened . . . the event occurred . . .” Where historians differ is how they put those events together to each tell their own distinctive account.
Once an event of the past is described, it becomes something else — it becomes a narrative. . . . There is never any neutrality in a story.
(Brown 28f)
Brown concludes his discussion by leaving the reader in no doubt about the absolute certainty of the past events investigated by the historian:
Empiricism is the basic method in all scholarship. It bears endless repetition that the empiricist skills of verification, close textual attention, proper and rational sourcing, referencing and so on, remain absolutely central to all that historical scholarship does, whether postmodernist or not. In this regard, the Enlightenment created the method of the modern historian.
But empirical method is one thing. The other is the empiricist philosophy of knowledge, or modernism, and that most certainly is challenged . Empiricism gives the illusion of delivering fact, truth and reality, by slipping from the event to a human narrative that describes the event.
(Brown 30)
But does not certainty breed arrogance?
But doesn’t certainty breed arrogance? Is not there an admirable and necessary humility in doubt? Yes, but no one can be arrogant by claiming to know the world is round. The kind of certainty that engenders arrogance is the certainty of opinion and moral perspective — of conviction of holding “The Truth”. Brown calls upon the words of Friedrich Nietzsche to make the point that doubt belongs in the way we tell stories, in the ways we interpret and understand the events of the past. It is not about the two world wars of the twentieth century or the ancient Roman empire to some theoretical status of which we can only be 99.99% certain.
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding: truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins.(Nietzsche, 1873)
Certainty emerges as a linguistic construction which, Nietzsche went on, ‘prompts a moral impulse’ to doubt the denier of certainty, to see in doubt the very basis of immorality. This is a massive irony. Nietzsche says doubt itself becomes superior to fact and moral certainty. This seems like craziness. It seems to be completely absurd and inverted in logic. It over turns everything we are trained to believe as students at school and in college. It may be difficult to grasp that doubt is superior to certainty. This is why postmodernism is truly revolutionary as a philosophical system of thought.
(Brown 30f)
Was the gingerbread vendor really kicked to death?
There are occasions, however, when historians do actually disagree over the factual status of an asserted event of the past. The historian Edward Carr once argued that a past event known to have happened only becomes a “historical event” when it is used by historians in their narratives.
At Stalybridge Wakes in 1850, a vendor of gingerbread, as the result of some petty dispute, was deliberately kicked to death by an angry mob. Is this a fact of history? A year ago I should unhesitatingly have said ‘no’. It was recorded by an eye-witness in some little known memoirs; but I had never seen it judged worthy of mention by any historian. A year ago Dr Kitson Clark cited it in his Ford lectures in Oxford. Does this make it into a historical fact? Not, I think, yet. Its present status, I suggest, is that it has been proposed for membership of the select club of historical facts. It now awaits a seconder and sponsors. It may be that in the course of the next few years we shall see this fact appearing first in footnotes, then in the text, of articles and books about nineteenth-century England, and that in twenty or thirty years’ time it may be a well-established historical fact. Alternatively, nobody may take it up, in which case it will relapse into the limbo of unhistorical facts about the past from which Dr Kitson Clark has gallantly attempted to rescue it. What will decide which of these two things will happen? It will depend, I think, on whether the thesis or interpretation in support of which Dr Kitson Clark cited this incident is accepted by other historians as valid and significant. Its status as a historical fact will turn on a question of interpretation. This element of interpretation enters into every fact of history.
(Carr 12)
Notice that Carr understood the event to have been factual because it was found in an eye-witness’s memoirs. He was discussing what he understood to be a real event, not a theoretical one. But another historian checked the source and raised doubts:
The likelihood of the gingerbread salesman’s unfortunate death being a historical fact in this sense is moderately but not overwhelmingly high because the reference Kitson Clark used for it was not a contemporary one, but a set of memoirs written long after the event, and memoirs are sometimes unreliable even where they are giving eyewitness accounts of happenings in the past. If I had been Kitson Clark, I should have looked for a contemporary document to verify my claim. It is for this reason, I think, not because it has not been widely quoted elsewhere (except in discussions of Carr’s What Is History?) that the status as a historical fact of the gingerbread sales man’s murder in 1850 must be regarded as still provisional, to say the least.
(Evans 66f)
Richard Evans is far from being a postmodernist historian. Note the kind of source he prefers to use to help establish the historicity of a person or event. It is a contemporary one. Not even a late memoir of recording personal reminiscences is considered as secure as a contemporary reference to the event. Let those who rely upon Josephus as a slam-dunk verification of the existence of Jesus take note of how historical research is undertaken in “non-biblical departments”.
Where probability lurks in history
Notice also that Evans did acknowledge a role probability (and its attendant humility) in historical studies:
No historians really believe in the absolute truth of what they are writing, simply in its probable truth, which they have done their utmost to establish by following the usual rules of evidence.
But that sentence should not be ripped from its context. Evans was specifically addressing the narratives historians write, the way they interpret the established events. Here is the context:
In similar vein to David Harlan, Ellen Somekawa and Elizabeth Smith argue that because “within whatever rules historians can articulate, all interpretations are equally valid,” it is necessary for historians to “shift the grounds for the assessment of integrity from the absolute or objective truth to the moral or political. That is,” they continue, “rather than believe in the absolute truth of what we are writing, we must believe in the moral or political position we are taking with it.” They add that they “reject the assumption that if we abandon our claim to objective truth we must be writing in bad faith (writing propaganda in the most pejorative sense of the word),” but they offer no reason to suppose why this should not be the case. In fact, of course, in classic postmodernist fashion they are caricaturing the position they are attacking by pushing it out to an extreme. No historians really believe in the absolute truth of what they are writing, simply in its probable truth, which they have done their utmost to establish by following the usual rules of evidence. In the end it simply isn’t true that two historical arguments which contradict each other are equally valid, that there is no means of deciding between them as history because they are necessarily based on different political and historical philosophies.
(Evans 188f)
Evans is disagreeing with claims that interpretations or understandings of historical events are all equally valid and the accusation that historians necessarily believe that those interpretations are “absolute truth”. Note further that Evans began his book with the following quotation, even comparing the fact-finding methods of historians to the work of astronomers, a comparison used by Carrier though with a quite different perspective (Proving History, p. 105). In what follows I cannot detect any sense that the “raw events” of the past are to be understood as theoretical knowledge with a minimum of some room for doubt about their historicity. Quite the opposite, in fact.
However much they might have agreed on the need for accuracy and truthfulness, historians down the ages have held widely differing views on the purposes to which these things were to be put and the way in which the facts they presented were to be explained. . . .
Ranke, Leopold von
. . . Ranke introduced into the study of modern history the methods that had recently been developed by philologists in the study of ancient and medieval literature to determine whether a text, say, of a Shakespeare play or of a medieval legend like the Nibelungenlied was true or corrupted by later interpolations, whether it was written by the author it was supposed to have been written by, and which of the available versions was the most reliable. Historians, argued Ranke, had to root out forgeries and falsifications from the record.They had to test documents on the basis of their internal consistency and their consistency with other documents originating at the same period. They had to stick to “primary sources,” eyewitness reports and what Ranke called the “purest, most immediate documents” which could be shown to have originated at the time under investigation, and avoid reliance on “secondary sources,” such as memoirs or later histories generated after the event. . . .
Ranke’s principles still form the basis for much historical research and teaching today. . . .
Whatever the means they use, historians still have to engage in the basic Rankean spadework of investigating the provenance of documents, of inquiring about the motives of those who wrote them, the circumstances in which they were written, and the ways in which they relate to other documents on the same subject. The perils which await them should they fail to do this are only too obvious. All these things have belonged to the basic training of historians since the nineteenth century, and rightly so. . . .
Skeptics who point to the fact that all sources are “biased” and conclude from this that historians are bound to be misled by them are as wide of the mark as politicians who imagine that future historians will take their memoirs on trust. Nor is there anything unusual in the fact that a modern discipline places such heavy reliance on principles developed more than a century and a half before: Chemistry, for example, still uses the periodic table of elements, while medical research continues to employ the mid-nineteenth century device of “Koch’s postulates” to prove that a microorganism is the carrier of a particular disease. These analogies with scientific method point up the fact that when source criticism was introduced into historical study, it, too, was regarded as a “scientific” technique. Its use legitimated history as an independent profession. . . .
The understanding of science which these claims implied was basically inductive. Out there, in the documents, lay the facts, waiting to be discovered by historians, just as the stars shone out there in the heavens, waiting to be discovered by astronomers; all historians had to do was apply the proper scientific method, eliminate their own personality from the investigation, and the facts would come to light. The object of research was thus to “fill in the gaps” in knowledge—a rationale that is still given as the basis for the vast majority of Ph.D. theses in history today.
(Evans 13-17)
Evans goes on to point out that even the pioneer of modern history himself, Leopold von Ranke, failed to produce a genuinely “objective history” despite his claims to be attempting to do so. Ranke failed to understand the subjectivity that enters when we seek to understand and use data in a narrative. For that reason his approach to historical knowledge (not his methods), known as historical positivism, has long since been discarded by most historians today. But as Evans reminds us, the spadework required to establish facts as certain remains with historians today. (Here we are entering another misconception I very often find among biblical historians: they all too frequently tend to equate discarded positivism with the methods of positivism!)
History is not the same as science
Contrast Carrier’s comparison of historical research with the historical method:
Geology and paleontology, for instance, are largely occupied with determining the past history of life on earth and of the earth itself, just as cosmology is mainly concerned with the past history of the universe as a whole. . . .
For example, we can document our testimony to seeing highly compressed rock on a mountaintop with extinct seashells embedded within it. But this information is only useful to us if we can infer from such observations (and others like it) that that rock used to be under the sea and thus has moved from where it once was, and that this rock has been under vast pressures over a great duration after those shells were deposited in it. . . . A particular pattern and sequence of layers in a rock formation can even confirm to us specific historical facts, such as exactly when a volcano erupted, a valley flooded, or a meteorite struck the earth thousands of miles away. . . .
History is the same. The historian looks at all the evidence that exists now and asks what could have brought that evidence into existence.
(Carrier, 46f)
Marx and Toynbee — both believed that they had discovered “laws” governing historical events
I have to disagree with Carrier here. No, history is not the same. The geologist is interpreting the rocks through a knowledge of physical laws and seeing how those laws have acted out in the past to shape our earth today. History is not the same.
Historians study human actions and few historians would agree today that the persons or events they study follow predictable laws. There was once a time when a good number of historians hoped or believed they could find laws at work in historical processes but generally speaking those days are gone. The one example of historical processes following laws that most of us have at least heard about is Marxism: the view that historical events were all manifestations of class struggle. (Another “history follows laws” approach that I was introduced to at high school was Toynbee’s “challenge and response” model of historical events.)
The reason history cannot predict the future is because “it”, or human societies are all different, events are never repeated, they are never the same. They are not governed by the (theoretical) laws of science as is the physical matter of the cosmos. We can predict outcomes only at the most general level and at that level it tells us nothing more than we already know about human behaviour.
In principle the methods of the historian may be the same as the bulk of those of a scientist and for that reason history is sometimes called a science or scientific, but few historians are trying to understand theoretical laws to explain events.
Continuing in the next post…..
Brown, Callum G. Postmodernism for Historians. Routledge, 2005.
Carr, Edward Hallet. What Is History? Vintage, 1967.
Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books, 2012.
Evans, Richard J. In Defence of History. Norton, 1997.
It’s been a long while since I wrote about Jesus mythicism. I hope what I write now will present a slightly different and useful perspective.
Should not Christian apologists be thrilled with Richard Carrier’s widely known conclusion and welcome it:
In my estimation the odds Jesus existed are less than 1 in 12,000. . . .
There is only about a 0% to 33% chance Jesus existed.
(On the Historicity of Jesus, 600, 607)
Doesn’t that indicate that Jesus was a truly exceptional figure according to the best conclusions of the atheist scholar? Don’t believing Christians want Jesus to be unique, to be different from anyone else, to bring about an unlikely event by normal human standards? A 1 in 12,000 figure is surely bringing Jesus down too close to normality, isn’t it? Shouldn’t Jesus be a unique figure in history? So if historical tools as understood and used by Richard Carrier conclude that Jesus is not to be expected in the annals of normal human history and left no record comparable to the records of other mortals for historians to ponder, should not apologists take comfort from such findings?
I want to address what appears to me to be a widespread misconception about historical knowledge across various social media platforms and in some published works where this question is discussed.
Too often I hear that historians can never be absolutely certain about anything in the past and that they always, of necessity, can only speak of “what probably happened”. (When I speak of historians I have in mind the main body of the historical guild in history departments around the world. I am not talking about biblical scholars and theologians because their methods are very often quite different.)
So let’s begin with Part 1 of the question of probability in historical research. Richard Carrier is widely known for reducing the entire question of Jesus’ existence to a matter of probabilities. I agree with much of Carrier’s approach but I also disagree on some major points. A fundamental point on which I disagree with Carrier is the claim that the most a historian can say about any historical event is that it is “probably” true. Carrier writes:
All claims have a nonzero epistemic probability of being true, no matter how absurd they may be (unless they’re logically impossible or unintelligible), because we can always be wrong about anything. And that entails there is always a nonzero probability that we are wrong, no matter how small that probability is. And therefore there is always a converse of that probability, which is the probability that we are right (or would be right) to believe that claim. This holds even for many claims that are supposedly certain, such as the conclusions of logical or mathematical proofs. For there is always a nonzero probability that there is an error in that proof that we missed. Even if a thousand experts check the proof, there is still a nonzero probability that they all missed the same error. The probability of this is vanishingly small, but still never zero. Likewise, there is always a nonzero probability that we ourselves are mistaken about what those thousand experts concluded. And so on. The only exception would be immediate experiences that at their most basic level are undeniable (e.g., that you see words in front of you at this very moment, or that “Caesar was immortal and Brutus killed him” is logically impossible). But no substantial claim about history can ever be that basic. History is in the past and thus never in our immediate experience. And knowing what logically could or couldn’t have happened is not even close to knowing what did. Therefore, all empirical claims about history, no matter how certain, have a nonzero probability of being false, and no matter how absurd, have a nonzero probability of being true.
(Proving History, 24f – my bolding in all quotations)
A little further on Carrier raises again the exception of a “trivial” event like an “uninterpreted [direct personal] experience”:
The only exceptions I noted are claims about our direct uninterpreted experience (which are not historical facts) and the logically necessary and the logically impossible (which are not empirical facts).17 Everything else has some epistemic probability of being true or false.
17. Of course “historical facts” do include direct uninterpreted experience, because all observations of data and of logical and mathematical relations reduce to that, but no fact of history consists solely of that; and “the logically necessary and the logically impossible” are empirical facts in the trivial sense that they can be empirically observed, and empirical propositions depend on them, and logical facts are ultimately facts of the universe (in some fashion or other), but these are not empirical facts in the same sense as historical facts, because we cannot ascertain what happened in the past solely by ruminating on logical necessities or impossibilities. Logical facts are thus traditionally called analytical facts, in contrast to empirical facts. Some propositions might combine elements of both, but insofar as a proposition is at all empirical, it is not solely analytical (and thus has some nonzero epistemic probability of being true or false), and insofar as it is solely analytical, it is not relevantly empirical (and thus cannot affirm what happened in the past, but only what could or couldn’t have).
(Proving History, 62, 302)
And again, in pointing out that historians can never be absolutely certain about any “substantive claim”,
Such certainty for us is logically impossible (at least for all substantive claims about history . . . )
(Proving History, 329)
Not even God can avoid reducing all knowledge of the past to “what probably happened”:
A confidence level of 100% is mathematically and logically impossible, as we never have access to 100% of all information, i.e., we’re not omniscient, and as Gödel proved, no one can be, for it’s logically necessary that there will always be things we won’t know, even if we’re God . . .
I have to disagree. We don’t need “100% of all information” or to be “omniscient” in order to be absolutely certain about certain facts of the past. Historians are indeed certain about basic facts. We know for a fact that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor a few years before that event, that Europeans migrated to and settled in the Americas, Africa, Australasia in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, that King John signed the Magna Carter in 1215, that Rome once ruled the Mediterranean, that the Jerusalem temple was destroyed in 70 CE.
Historical events are unique and unrepeatable and our knowledge of many of them can often be absolutely certain. Witness the “History Wars” around the world — the Americas, India, Australia. In Australia, for instance, the arguments over the killing of aborigines and removing children from their families is not about what “probably” happened but what the evidence tells us did actually happen — with no room for any doubt at all. The 1992 Holocaust trial of David Irving was not about what probably happened but what can be known as an indisputable fact to have happened.
To be certain about such events does not require us to possess 100% of all the related information. Further, being certain about such events does not mean we are certain about all the details. There are grey areas where probability does enter the picture but the core events themselves cannot be legitimately doubted.
* The quoted phrases are from Hindess, Barry, and Paul Q. Hirst. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, page 2, in reference to Willer & Willer’s book, Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudo-Science.
A “brilliant and devastating critique”* of the probability approach to historical facts (in fact to the entire area of theoretical empiricism that once typically “characterised the academic social sciences and history”) was published in the 1972 book Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudo-Science by David and Judith Willer. The chapter that specifically addresses probability in this context was written by the sociologist Dr Cesar Hernandez-Cela. Here is what he says about probability in the context being discussed in this post:
A relative frequency is a probability only if the number of events taken into account is infinite. But when the number of instances is finite . . . the ratio is a relative frequency but not a probability. . . . . A relative frequency is a description, but a probability is a calculation. Although we may calculate a theoretical probability value of 1/2 for a universe in which A and B are equally represented when the number of instances approaches infinity, the most that can be said about the number of heads that will turn up when tossing a coin twenty times is that there will be a particular frequency which is unknown until we toss the coin. In other words, the assignment of a value of 1/2 simply because the coin has two sides is an error because we do not know that each side will be equally represented in any empirical case. Equal representation in probability is a mathematical assumption which is violated in finite empirical cases. . . . We may instead find that tossing a die results in a successive run of fives . . . .
The theory of probability . . . can be used in scientific theories, but it cannot be used to associate observables. Sociological statistical procedures are concerned with observables and therefore violate the conditions under which probability calculations may be legitimately used. But they are so often used that they are frequently accepted (in spite of their obvious absurdity) without question. We are told that the probability of rain tomorrow is 60 percent when, in fact, it will either rain or it will not. Such statements are unjustified, wrong, and misleading.
(Systematic Empiricism, 97f – italics in the original)
One is reminded here of Richard Carrier’s discussion of the “Rank-Raglan hero class”, a category of ancient figures — most of whom are mythical — who share certain mythical attributes.
This is a hero-type found repeated across at least fifteen known mythic heroes (including Jesus) — if we count only those who clearly meet more than half of the designated parallels (which means twelve or more matches out of twenty-two elements), which requirement eliminates many historical persons, such as Alexander the Great or Caesar Augustus, who accumulated many elements of this hero-type in the tales told of them, yet not that many.
The twenty-two features distinctive of this hero-type are:
1. The hero’s mother is a virgin. 2. His father is a king or the heir of a king. 3. The circumstances of his conception are unusual. 4. He is reputed to be the son of a god. 5. An attempt is made to kill him when he is a baby. 6. To escape which he is spirited away from those trying to kill him. 7. He is reared in a foreign country by one or more foster parents. 8. We are told nothing of his childhood. 9. On reaching manhood he returns to his future kingdom. 10. He is crowned, hailed or becomes king. 11. He reigns uneventfully (i.e., without wars or national catastrophes). 12. He prescribes laws. 13. He then loses favor with the gods or his subjects. 14. He is driven from the throne or city. 15. He meets with a mysterious death. 16. He dies atop a hill or high place. 17. His children, if any, do not succeed him. 18. His body turns up missing. 19. Yet he still has one or more holy sepulchers (in fact or fiction). 20. Before taking a throne or a wife, he battles and defeats a great adversary (such as a king, giant, dragon or wild beast).
and
21. His parents are related to each other. 22. He marries a queen or princess related to his predecessor.
Many of the heroes who fulfill this type also either (a) performed miracles (in life or as a deity after death) or were (b) preexistent beings who became incarnated as men or (c) subsequently worshiped as savior gods, any one of which honestly should be counted as a twenty-third attribute. . . .
1. Oedipus (21) 2. Moses (20) 3. Jesus (20) 4. Theseus (19) 5. Dionysus (19) 6. Romulus (18) 7. Perseus (17) 8. Hercules (17) 9. Zeus (15) 10. Bellerophon (14) 11. Jason (14) 12. Osiris (14) 13. Pelops (13) 14. Asclepius (12) 15. Joseph [i.e., the son of Jacob] (12)
This is a useful discovery, because with so many matching persons it doesn’t matter what the probability is of scoring more than half on the Rank-Raglan scale by chance coincidence. Because even if it can happen often by chance coincidence, then the percentage of persons who score that high should match the ratio of real persons to mythical persons. In other words, if a real person can have the same elements associated with him, and in particular so many elements (and for this purpose it doesn’t matter whether they actually occurred), then there should be many real persons on the list—as surely there are far more real persons than mythical ones. . . .
So there is no getting around the fact that if the ratio of conveniently named mythical godmen to conveniently named historical godmen is 2 to 1 or greater, then the prior probability that Jesus is historical is 33% or less.
(On the Historicity of Jesus, 229-231, 241 – italics original)
First, we have fewer than a quarter of 100 instances in our group so a per centum figure is misleading. The total number Raglan studied was twenty.
Second, on what basis can we validly decide to count only those figures who score more than half of the listed attributes? Carrier identifies ten of the twenty-two listed features as applicable to Alexander the Great and acknowledges (though disputes) the possibility of assigning him thirteen. Half seems to be an arbitrary cut-off point (or at least tendentious insofar as it excludes the exceptions, historical persons who would spoil the point being made) especially when we know that Raglan himself said that his list of twenty-two was an arbitrary number. Other scholars of mythical “types” produced different lists:
Von Hahn had sixteen incidents, Rank did not divide his pattern into incidents as such, and Raglan had twenty-two incidents. Raglan himself admitted that his choice of twenty-two incidents (as opposed to some other number of incidents) was arbitrary (Raglan 1956:186).
(In Quest of the Hero, 189. — Raglan’s words were: I have taken twenty-two, but it would be easy to take more. Would a more complete list reduce the other figures to matching fewer than half….? So we begin to see the arbitrariness of Carrier’s deciding to focus only on those with more than half of the attributes in the Raglan list of 22.)
Alexander the Great and Mithridates are not the only ancient figures to whom “hero attributes” were attributed in the literature. Sargon and Cyrus were also studied in the same context by other scholars:
Raglan wrote in complete ignorance of earlier scholarship devoted to the hero, and he was therefore unaware of the previous studies of von Hahn and Rank, for example. Raglan was parochial in other ways too. For one thing, the vast majority of his heroes came exclusively from classical (mostly Greek) sources. The first twelve heroes he treats are: Oedipus, Theseus, Romulus, Heracles, Perseus, Jason, Bellerophon, Pelops, Asclepios, Dionysos, Apollo, and Zeus. Raglan could have strengthened his case had he used some of the same heroes used by von Hahn and Rank and other scholars, e.g., such heroes as Sargon and Cyrus.
(In Quest of the Hero, 187 – my bolding)
One might even argue that the further east one went from Greece the more likely it was that historical persons matched the mythical hero reference class! Much fun can be had with statistics.
Let’s continue with Hernandez-Cela’s discussion of probability as it applies to the social sciences and history:
Social empiricists, when presenting numerical values such as the “probability” of churchgoers giving alms to the poor, might state that only in 5 percent of cases would an association as large as 60 percent or larger not obtain when instances are randomly selected. But, observing individuals, we may only say that they either do or do not give alms. In the first observation we may find that 60 percent of the total sample gave alms, but in succeeding observations this value may differ. We cannot, in fact, have any expectations of probability of giving alms to the poor, no matter how many samples we take. If, on the other hand, the sample approaches or is equal to the total population of churchgoers, then the figure represents a simple proportion, a frequency, not a probability. On the other hand, specification that only 5 percent of samples will not result in the .60 or more is meaningless. If we chose several samples all of the same size, and found that in only 5 percent of them the figure was under .60, then we still can draw no conclusions, for we know nothing about the empirical conditions prevailing in future samples. Such a claim has no basis either in theory or in observation. What the claim means is that if there were an infinite number of cases whose composition was on the average like that of the sample, then in only 5 percent of them would the percentage be smaller than .60. But, we cannot assume that any other empirical cases are on the average like the sample studied, and we cannot assume that they are infinite in number. Theoretical cases can be infinite in number, but empirical ones cannot. Such statistical claims, of course, cannot be violated empirically because they are not probability statements at all but disguised frequencies obtained by observation. Future observations cannot verify or falsify frequencies but only slightly modify their numerical value in the light of new cases. Furthermore, the statistical procedures themselves are not open to any kind of empirical verification or falsification . . .
(Systematic Empiricism, 99)
So a sample of a score of mythical heroes cannot be the basis for predicting the likelihood of any particular figure being historical or not.
The statement, “All As are Bs,” . . . . really means no more than “As have been observed with Bs.” But this statement is not a universal statement, but limited to a population. . . . Consequently no empirical generalization can act as a major premise in a deductive explanation, and empirical generalizations can never be used deductively to explain or predict.
(Systematic Empiricism, 130 — no longer from Hernandez-Cela’s chapter; italics original)
An illustration of the fallacy is set out thus:
Premise A: The probability of recovery from a streptococcus infection when treated by penicillin is close to 1.
Premise B: John Jones was treated with large doses of penicillin.
Conclusion: The probability that John Jones will recover from his streptococcus infection is close to 1.
(Systematic Empiricism, 130)
One might rephrase this as:
Premise A: The probability of a figure in the hero-class being non-historical is close to 0.
Premise B: Jesus is a figure in the hero-class.
Conclusion: The probability that Jesus is non-historical is close to 0.
But as D. and J. Willer observe,
Predictions and explanations cannot be made from [such a statement]. John Jones either does or does not recover. If he does recover the probability value of statement A is slightly increased by his case, and if he does not the probability value decreases. . . . [T]he event itself cannot be predicted with any certainty. Furthermore, if John Jones either recovers or does not, he does not recover with a probability of close to 1.
Individual facts either occur or they do not. Certain facts cannot be explained by uncertain statements. Even in ordinary everyday practical empiricism we do not make that error.
(Systematic Empiricism, 131, 135)
No two historical events are ever exactly alike. People and societies are not like that. There are always variables that make each historical event unique. Of course there are common experiences such as war or economic depression but no two wars or depressions are the same. Human events are not governed by laws in the same way geological forces or the weather are governed by scientific laws. Historians do not observe the results of “laws” in the historical data. They cannot make predictions about a unique historical event or person — all historical events and persons are unique in some respect — on the basis of limited samples with variable (“arbitrary”) attributes. Generalizations can be made about the impacts of technologies on various kinds of social groups but particular historical events are each unique in some way. But generalizations cannot predict what a historian will find in the sources.
The most that probability (in the context of Richard Carrier’s discussion) can tell us about the likelihood of Jesus having existed is that Jesus was one of a few historical exceptions (or even the only exception) to general notions about mythical persons.
In the next post I’ll show what historians say about the certainty or otherwise of “their basic facts”.
Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2014.
Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 2012.
Hindess, Barry, and Paul Q. Hirst. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Books, 1975.
Raglan, Lord. The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama. Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 2011.
Rank, Otto, Raglan, and Alan Dundes. In Quest of the Hero. Mythos (Princeton, N.J.). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Willer, David, and Judith Willer. Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudoscience. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
Since becoming a nation in 1948, the Israelis have developed a productive, fertile and wealthy nation in a desert wasteland. They have been outstanding custodians of their homeland. . . .
. . . . many Palestinian Muslims believe they also have a religious claim to the land of Palestine. That is why they have fought and will continue to fight so ferociously for it.
When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there, and the majority of them had arrived in recent decades. Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of most of the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. When the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: “There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.” In fact, Palestine is never explicitly mentioned in the Koran . . . .”
Prior to partition, Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:
We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.
In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”
“A land without a people for a people without a land” is a phrase that gets under the skin of most Palestinians, who think that the authors of the phrase looked at Ottoman Palestine, did not see them, and instead saw an empty land. Yet perhaps this phrase would have made sense if we zoomed in on the meaning of the word “people.”
Whoever coined the phrase that became a Zionist slogan did not use the word people to describe a bunch of humans dwelling on a certain land. People, in this phrase, is used to mean a nation, a state or a nation-state.
Before 1948, the Arabs who lived in Palestine had never organized themselves in a state, but had, for centuries, lived as subjects of empires that ruled them from faraway capitals, such as Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, and Istanbul. In the history of the Arabs, Jerusalem never served as the seat of any dynasty and never practiced sovereignty. At best, the city served as a provincial capital. In this sense, when the Zionists looked at Ottoman Palestine, they did not see a nation-state. They saw Arab provinces of successive empires, Arab or Turkish. This is why the land looked one without a people, that is without a nation state.
Historically, the word “Palestinian” did not refer to Arabs living in the region, but to the region itself. Some 100 years ago, the land was administered by the British, and its inhabitants were Jewish, Christian and Muslim – all of whom were identified as “Palestinian.” However, for most, their primary identity was not their nationality, but their religion.
Indeed, many Arabs bristled at being called “Palestinian,” voicing strong opposition to the label. Instead, they saw themselves first and foremost as Arabs or Muslims. Only in the mid-1960s was the word co-opted to mean Arabs.
Hence, before 1948, it would not have made sense to talk about Palestinians as opposed to Jews. The population was divided into two primary groups: Jewish and Arab.
This makes sense because a sovereign Palestinian state never existed. Therefore, there were no “Palestinian lands.” Rather, the land was part of the Mandate for Palestine, a geographical area controlled by the British after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.
The Palestinian peasant was indeed being dispossessed, but by his fellow-Arabs: the local sheikh and village elders, the Government tax-collector, the merchants and money-lenders; and, when he was a tenant-farmer (as was usually the case), by the absentee-owner. By the time the season’s crop had been distributed among all these, little if anything remained for him and his family, and new debts generally had to be incurred to pay off the old. Then the Bedouin came along and took their “cut”, or drove the hapless fellah off the land altogether.
This was the “normal” course of events in 19th-century Palestine. It was disrupted by the advent of the Jewish pioneering enterprise, which sounded the death-knell of this medieval feudal system. In this way the Jews played an objective revolutionary role. Small wonder that it aroused the ire and active opposition of the Arab sheikhs, absentee landowners, money-lenders and Bedouin bandits.
Comment:
. . . . Note that the local Arabs never claimed that they had a sovereign country.
. . . with
2 a humanist perspective, stripped of Eurocentric beliefs in the primacy of nationalist feelings:
[This history] refers to the groups that as a rule live outside the realm of politics and power. . . . The narrative is clear; it begins with a society in Palestine as remote as possible from politics in the late Ottoman period . . . .
They are not one mass of people. They are grouped according to choice in small social units, usually households. But, with time, they prefer to define themselves via ethnicity, gender, occupation, class or culture. They change at will, but at times are forced to, not always to their advantage. Their world is a mix of material necessity and spiritual solace. Many of them are closely connected to the land where they live or chose to settle on. They cling to the land or to their property not from a national imperative to protect the mother/fatherland, the entity, but for much more mundane and at the same time humane reasons.
These local actors are leaders as well as ordinary members of the community. They are Palestine’s women and children, peasants and workers, town dwellers and farmers. They are defined according to their religious or ethnic origins as Armenians, Druzes, Circassians, or Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews, as well as to their views on religion, whether secular, orthodox or fundamentalist. In writing about them, definitions call for a balance between their own claims and the author’s understanding of what groups them together. Feeding a family, staying on the family land or attempting to make a new life on foreign soil can be portrayed as patriotism or nationalism: for most people it is an existentialist and survivalist act. (bolding added)
So begins (pages 8-9) the history of the land by a Jewish historian:
Pappé, Ilan. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
(I am reminded of the way our nineteenth century ancestors (who had migrated thousands of miles from their homeland) erroneously portrayed the Australian aborigines as “nomadic”, with the implication that they had no notion of attachment to any land. It is a colonialist mind-set that has always “justified” ethnic cleansing and genocide. (I use the word “genocide” according to its meaning as defined by the originator of the word, Raphael Lemkin.)
In discussing how researchers create narratives to portray historical events or write biographies, Benedict Anderson, author of the highly acclaimed Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, drew a contrast with the Gospel of Matthew.
These narratives . . . are set in homogeneous, empty time. Hence their frame is historical and their setting sociological. This is why so many autobiographies begin with the circumstances of parents and grandparents, for which the autobiographer can have only circumstantial, textual evidence; and why the biographer is at pains to record the calendrical, A.D. dates of two biographical events which his or her subject can never remember: birth-day and death-day. Nothing affords a sharper reminder of this narrative’s modernity than the opening of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. For the Evangelist gives us an austere list of thirty males successively begetting one another, from the Patriarch Abraham down to Jesus Christ. . . . No dates are given for any of Jesus’s forebears, let alone sociological, cultural, physiological or political information about them. This narrative style . . . . was entirely reasonable to the sainted genealogist because he did not conceive of Christ as an historical ‘personality,’ but only as the true Son of God. (pp 204f)
Yet how many biblical scholars have attempted to fill in the gap in Matthew’s Gospel by calculating the exact or approximate years of Jesus’ birth and death! Rather, the more enlightening inquiry should be to seek to understand why the first evangelists did not have the historical interests that fascinate modern readers.
(Of course, it would be too easy to fall back on the claim that Pilate’s appearance in the gospel establishes a historical setting and time — until one pauses to recall that the Pilate in the gospels is a character utterly unlike the historical Pilate. As I wrote earlier, the Pilate of historical record (sc. Josephus) was renowned for his cruelty but all the evangelists, Matthew included, present him — most UNhistorically — as benign and soft when he meets Jesus, and as being cowered by the Jewish priests and mob into doing their will against his own. A historical person has been rewritten to meet the needs of the narrative.)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition. Verso, 2006.
Former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, speaking on Australia’s national current affairs program, 7.30, about the reason for the government of Israel refusing to declare a truce to free the hostages and for continuing the war (“if someone would have said we would still be stuck in Gaza after a year no-one would have believed it” @ 28:40) and even expanding it into the West Bank and Lebanon. The specific question Barak was responding to was whether “right wing elements within [Netanyahu’s] cabinet” ride their “successes” in the current war to continue to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank….
Oh sure. For sure they will do it. They do it even without this. They want a settlement… And if we wait for too long they might raise some idea that we had some promise from some corner of the Bible to get some part of Lebanon. They are Messianic Jewish supremacists, racists, of the worst kind. I compare them to the Proud Boys of America, those who were behind the 6 January event. So, think of the American President, who would nominate one of these leaders from the program to be secretary of treasury with certain formal roles and the other one to be in charge of national security, of homeland security. That’s crazy but that’s exactly what Netanyahu did because he needs tight control for the survival of the government. If there is even a ceasefire, in order to exchange the hostages and a ceasefire for four months, immediately it will become a day of reckoning because people will demand to establish a national investigation, a committee led by a Supreme Court judge, to find who is responsible for the worst day in our history. (@ 26 mins 55 secs)
(Of course, Barak is introduced as “having come very close to securing peace with the Palestinians” when he was Prime Minister. We are rarely reminded that the “best deal” the Palestinians were ever offered was a “state” divided into four island-regions, each surrounded by Israeli settlements or territory. The above quotation is not meant to imply agreement with every other view Barak expressed in the 7.30 interview. — No thought, of course, that there might be “a day of reckoning” to investigate responsibility for expulsions and killings of Palestinians since 1948.)
Given that every historical event in some way is unique, how can historians have confidence that their research into the past is yielding reliable explanations for what happened?
The answer will depend on the type of event being studied and how historians frame their questions.
Two questions that particularly interest me are:
What led to the production and adoption of much of the “Old Testament” literature in Samaria (the Pentateuch) and Judea (the Pentateuch plus the historical, poetic and prophetic writings)?
What led to the production and adoption of the New Testament literature among certain Christians?
Notice I avoid, specifically, the question of origins of “Judaism” and “Christianity”. That’s because I don’t know how to define either of those two religions at the time of their beginnings. We can’t assume they looked the same as we find them in the record some centuries after their beginnings. But the texts are sources that we can define and work with as concrete data. They are something we can get our hands on and know what we are trying to understand with respect to origins.
But what would it take to make an explanation for the emergence of this literature to be more than guesswork or somehow guided by the fancy or prejudice of the researcher?
One tool the historian can pick up and apply in order to approach this goal comes from the field of sociology. There is nothing new about this approach:
Historians have begged or borrowed concepts and theories from many other disciplines, leading to an enriched debate around the course of human history, and the implications for both present and future. . . . (Green and Troup)
In a basic sense, sociology has always been a historically grounded and oriented enterprise. . . . The major works of those who would come to be seen as the founders of modern sociology, especially the works of Karl Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber . . . . to varying degrees, all offered concepts and explanations meant to be used in truly historical analyses of social structures and social change. . . .
Each of the founders was so committed to making sense of the key changes and contrasts of his own epoch that he was a historically oriented social analyst . . . . None of the founders ever got entirely carried away by a philosophy of universal evolution, by formal conceptualization, or by theoretical abstraction for its own sake. Each devoted himself again and again to situating and explaining modern European social structures and processes of change. (Skocpol 1985, 1f)
What does all of that mean in practice? How does it apply to the study of a non-repeatable historical event, in particular an event that consists of striking changes in a social group’s ideas, beliefs, and texts?What do sociologists do when there is not enough evidence to confidently construct an explanation for a particular change or development in a social group? Skocpol explains:
According to this method, one looks for concomitant variations, contrasting cases where the phenomena in which one is interested are present with cases where they are absent, controlling in the process for as many sources of variation as one can, by contrasting positive and negative instances which otherwise are as similar as possible. (Skocpol 1976, 177 – my emphasis)
Where else do we find groups producing fresh origin myths comparable to those we find in the Bible? What circumstances are associated with the emergence of those kinds of myths? In what ways can we both compare and contrast the various myths themselves and what we can know of their social, political and other settings?
That kind of inquiry requires us to begin where we have the firmest evidence. In the case of the Hebrew Scriptures that means beginning where the archaeological record and the independent literary witness points us. That means beginning with the early Hellenistic era and working back only insofar as our data dictates. For the New Testament writings it means beginning in the second century and working back, again, only insofar as explanations for our data necessitate.
The inquiry means casting our net to embrace other instances of the emergence of new foundation myths and comparable apocalyptic writings and philosophical-theological treatises. Non-biblical instances of these abound in Hellenistic and Roman eras. Studies of pre-Hellenistic era and the first century of imperial Rome will also prove useful — whether as offering either better or worse explanations in order to yield a better hypothesis of time of origin or a support for a hypothesis of a later origin.
Take, for example, the Old Testament prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve “Minor Prophets”, along with narratives involving prophets like Elijah, Elisha and Jonah. We find historical instances of those kinds of persons in pre-biblical ancient Syria. See my post, Meet the Prophets of Israel’s Predecessors. The written records of those prophets provide us with a useful starting point, but we are quickly led to something quite different in the Hebrew literature. If the Syrian prophets were generally encouraging kings of city-states to continue in their piety, the biblical prophets are often chastising kings of a realm (not just a city-state) to forsake their piety and champion a different deity. Does the evidence in the Ebla and Mari archives (as well as for Assyrian prophecies) enable us to imagine those prophets adopting a similar critical stance against their kings? What conditions might help us understand such a contrast? Do we have secure evidence for the contrasting conditions?
Or to take another example, this one from the New Testament writings of Paul. Our earliest independent witness to Paul comes from the second century records of theological conflicts. Do Paul’s writings address specific contentious issues at the centre of those conflicts? (Many scholars respond reflexively with a resounding “No”. But I think they are far too hasty with that conclusion. My point is that the question is one that involves a real choice: it is not merely rhetorical.) What functions do the epistles serve among the various and competing Christian factions? Troels Engberg-Pedersen has compared some of them to Stoic treatises. What does that insight tell us about a potential audience for them as well as their possible provenance?
I have introduced only two items of inquiry. I could introduce similar questions and viable instances for comparison and contrast with the Old and New Testaments’ narratives of origins — the Pentateuch and the Gospels with Acts. Scholars have often observed similarities between the biblical literature and literature of Greek, Roman and other cultures. Other scholars have published research into the emergence of new myths and ideologies within defined social groups.. (The link is to an introductory post on Tanya S. Scheer’s study of local origin myths being manufactured in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquest; for the emergence of new ideologies note John Dominic Crossan’s comparison of the “gospel” of Augustus with the NT gospels and Marianne Bonz’s comparison of Acts with the Roman foundation myth.)
I have a question after having read so much about the proposed origins of the Judeo-Christian canon. Despite the many variant views about origins — and there have been many studies introducing sociological concepts here (e.g. Bruce Malina, Bengt Holmberg, Richard Horsley, James Crossley) — I have seen precious little offering comparative studies. Richard Horsley and John Hanson had an excellent opportunity to do so with Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus, but alas, they, too, hewed to a description of Palestine alone despite the known existence of other resistance movements elsewhere in the Roman empire.
Maybe my memory has failed me for the moment or maybe there are works/authors I sorely need to seek out. So this post is a plea for assistance. If you, dear reader, know of the kinds of comparative studies I am missing and are deplored at my lack of awareness, please kindly inform me!
Green, Anna, and Kathleen Troup. The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in History and Theory, Second Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
Skocpol, Theda. “France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18, no. 2 (1976): 175–210.
———, ed. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
In a recent post I praised Douglas Campbell for drawing attention to the laziness (if not “dishonesty”) of rebutting an argument with the blanket “I am not persuaded” line. In this post I come to blame him for rejecting a genuinely critical reading of source material. It is with the very essence of critical reading that he objects:
Descartes suggested, in a classic argument widely influential in the modern period, that everything is in effect guilty until proved innocent. The result was, rather famously, the reduction of all certain knowledge to the conviction that his mental processes at least guaranteed his existence. In other words, he used radical doubt as a fundamental method. Everything must be doubted until it can be demonstrated indubitably to be true. (16)
Now Descartes’ method (shorn of the extremism with which Campbell presents it) does serve well enough in everyday life and especially in the legalistic professions and scientific research enterprises. But it is possible to take issue with it on a philosophical level, as demonstrated by Wittgenstein. But is there not a valid comparison here? We know that Newtonian physics “fails” at the subatomic particle level; but we do not reject the fundamentals of Newtonian physics when taking care climbing ladders or driving a car.
Campbell wrote — and note the pejorative language in which he couches Descartes’ scepticism:
But the Cartesian method has struggled to get anywhere significant and has, moreover, been subjected to ferocious critique, not least from Wittgenstein, who pointed out (characteristically indirectly) that the use of language implies participation in a broader linguistic community, which is in turn difficult to detach from a complex broader reality that cannot be doubted in the first instance without lapsing into utter incoherence. So Descartes’s key initial claims are in fact delusional. Unfortunately, however, the critical method, which played such a significant role in the rise of the modern university, has had a long dalliance with Cartesianism, so the latter tends to live on, haunting the corridors of the academy like a restless shade. It allowed figures like Kant to reject tradition out of hand and to argue from simpler and more certain first principles, although Kant too struggled to develop his principles with the certainty and extension that he really sought. It is not a completely crass oversimplification to suggest, then, that many modern Pauline scholars, shaped in part by the traditions at work in the modern university, seem to assume, at least at times, that the “critical” assessment of evidence simply involves the application of doubt in a generic way, ultimately in the manner of Descartes. It is a posture of comprehensive skepticism. One must be unconvinced until one is convinced of something’s probity on certain grounds. But I would suggest that when practiced in this generic and universal manner, this is an invalid and self-defeating methodology and a false understanding of criticism.’ (16)
Campbell had faulted as “posturing” the “I am not persuaded” rejoinder as a substitute for critical engagement. He faults Cartesian scepticism with the same label — “posturing”.
I doubt that I would be excused from jury service if I tried to opt out by explaining that Wittgenstein tells me that my particular semantic world may not be capable of deliberating in a truly objective manner the information conveyed to me as it is coded in semantic variations other than mine. Newtonian physics is still valid, its quantum companion notwithstanding.
Campbell then proceeds to justify another misguided “howler”:
We will rely on slender snippets of evidence in what follows, because that is all that we have — occasional and fragmentary remains of conversations that took place millennia ago. But we do have evidence, and it will not do to dismiss parts of the following reconstruction with a generic claim that “this is insufficient” or “there is still not enough evidence.” If this is the evidence that we have and it explains the data in the best existing fashion, then the correct scientific conclusion must be to endorse it and not to complain that we need more data that unfortunately does not exist. (18)
That may sound like a correct scientific approach but it is not. A scientific hypothesis must rely on multiple datasets. A single experiment is never sufficient. An experiment, a survey, must of necessity be repeated in different places with different samples to be sure of the results. The medical profession will not rely on a single survey of data to recommend a particular program to treat a physical condition.
The scientific method does not build on “slender snippets of evidence” if there is no other choice. If the evidence is inadequate to answer a particular question, or on which to base a certain line of inquiry, then it is the question and the line of inquiry that must be changed.
I frequently encounter the following kinds of statements in by biblical scholars in their works relating to early Christianity or Judaism:
We historians confront a supposed event in the past, as in some text or object, as though to “try it in court,” in order to reach a verdict to establish the truth of the matter. And the principles we can best employ are those used in the practice of law:
(1) The accused is presumed (not judged) innocent unless proven guilty. (2) The preponderance of the evidence (anything over 50%) is decisive. (3) The verdict rendered is considered proven beyond reasonable doubt (not absolute).
(Dever 140f — Old Testament scholar arguing against fundamentalist readings of the Bible)
and arguing the case for accepting the overall integrity of the canonical text of New Testament writings…
As in a court of law, the evidence deserves to be judged innocent of being an interpolation until proven guilty. This proof must be able to stand up before the jury of scholarship, which must decide whether “guilt” has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. If there is reasonable doubt about the extraneousness of the accused data then it should not remain any longer under a cloud of suspicion. In that case the verdict must be acquittal in order to protect the innocent. If scholarship does not follow such a “rule of law,” serious injustice will be done to much innocent data.
Sometimes the biblical scholar will cite a (“nonbiblical”) historian for support:
Unless there is good reason for believing otherwise, one will assume that a given detail in the work of a particular historian is factual. This method places the burden of proof squarely on the person who would doubt the reliability of a given portion of the text. The alternative is to presume the text unreliable unless convincing evidence can be brought forward in support of it. While many critical scholars of the Gospels adopt this latter method, it is wholly unjustified by the normal canons of historiography. Scholars who would consistently implement such a method when studying other ancient historical writings would find the corroborative data so insufficient that the vast majority of accepted history would have to be jettisoned.29 In the words of the historian G. J. Renier:
We may find . . . an event is known to us solely through an authority based entirely upon the statements of witnesses who are no longer available. Most of the works of Livy, the first books of the history of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, belong to this category. Since there is no other way of knowing the story they tell us, we must provisionally accept their version. This brings us back full sail to accepted history as the starting point of all historical investigation.30
30. Renier, History, pp.90–91.
(Blomberg 304)
Although Blomberg cites a 1982 reprint of the classical historian’s (Renier’s) work, the original publication date stands at 1950. That is important for a reason I will explain.
But first, note the muddled metaphor in the above quotations. In a court of law it is not the witness who is “presumed innocent until proven guilty” but the one charged with a crime. Witnesses are cross examined to test their claims. Though the witness swears an oath to tell the truth their testimony is never accepted at face value. Their claims must be tested. Yet the above comparisons of the historical method confuse witnesses (sources) with the person who is on trial and seeking to prove his innocence.
In response to Dever above: In a court of law it is the one accused and on trial who is presumed innocent: it is the claims of the witnesses, the sources — not the accused — that must be tested.
In response to Wisse above: It is not the “evidence” that “deserves to be judged innocent”. It is the evidence that is tested for authenticity, relevance and reliability to determine the guilt or innocence of the one on trial.
Finally, in response to Blomberg: The Renier method of accepting the testimony of Livy for believing in the historicity of events for which there is no other evidence may have been par for the course among classicists in 1950, but by 1983 that naive approach was well and truly debunked by a series of lectures delivered by the classicist historian Moses Finley:
For reasons that are rooted in our intellectual history, ancient historians are often seduced into [accepting as historically factual] statements in the literary or documentary sources … unless they can be disproved (to the satisfaction of the individual historian). This proposition derives from the privileged position of Greek and Latin, and it is especially unacceptable for the early periods of both Greek and Roman history…
(Finley 21)
Renier referred to Livy as an example of a historian whose word he felt he had no choice but to follow. Finley pointed out the cruel truth, however:
Yet a Livy or a Plutarch cheerfully repeated pages upon pages of earlier accounts over which they neither had nor sought any control. . . .
Where did they find their information? No matter how many older statements we can either document or posit – irrespective of possible reliability – we eventually reach a void. But ancient writers, like historians ever since, could not tolerate a void, and they filled it in one way or another, ultimately by pure invention.
The ability of the ancients to invent and their capacity to believe are persistently underestimated. How else could they have filled the blatant gaps in their knowledge once erudite antiquarians had observed that centuries had elapsed between the destruction of Troy and the ‘foundation’ of Rome, other than by inventing an Alban king-list to bridge the gap? Or how could they contest an existing account other than by offering an alternative, for example, to provide ideological support for, or hostility to, a particular ethnic group, such as Etruscans or Sabines, who played a major role in early Roman history? No wonder that, even in the hopelessly fragmentary state of the surviving material on early Rome, there is a bewildering variety of versions, a variety that continued to increase and multiply as late as the early Principate. Presumably no one today believes the Alban king-list to be anything but a fiction, but any suggestion that there is insufficient ground to give credence to the Roman king-list is greeted with outraged cries of ‘hyper-criticism’ …. (8f)
There was a time — it is long past — when classicists would reconstruct ancient history from their Greek and Latin sources as naively as many biblical scholars continue today to reconstruct the origins of Judaism and Christianity from the texts in the Bible. Finley added:
I suspect that Ogilvie’s slip [naive readings of ancient historians] reflects , no doubt unconsciously, the widespread sentiment that any thing written in Greek or Latin is somehow privileged, exempt from the normal canons of evaluation. (10)
Classicists have long since moved on. Perhaps it’s time for more biblical scholars to follow them.
Blomberg, Craig L. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. 2nd edition. Nottingham: IVP Academic, 2007.
Campbell, Douglas A. Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing, 2014.
Dever, William G. “Christian Fundamentalism, Faith, and Archaeology.” In Misusing Scripture: What Are Evangelicals Doing with the Bible?, edited by Mark Elliott, Kenneth Atkinson, and Robert Rezetko, 131–52. Routledge, 2023.
Finley, M. I. Ancient History: Evidence and Models. London: Chatto & Windus, 1985. [Chapter 2 was part of a series of J. H. Gray Lectures at the Faculty of Classics of the University of Cambridge]
Wisse, Frederik W. “Textual Limits to Redactional Theory in the Pauline Corpus.” In Gospel Origins & Christian Beginnings : In Honor of James M. Robinson, edited by James E. Goehring, Charles W. Hedrick, and Jack T. Sanders, 167–78. Sonoma, Calif. : Polebridge Press, 1990.
What follows is what I originally planned as the second part of the previous post. My aim is to contribute towards expanding public awareness of material that is otherwise sheltered within cloisters of academic publications and paywalls.
The information here covers the evidence for the Hebrew language being indigenous to Canaan. That means that the Hebrew language was not introduced into Canaan by Israelites or anyone else entering the land as newcomers. Linguistic evidence supports the view that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah emerged from people indigenous to the land of Canaan. The roots of the Hebrew language are found in the Bronze Age, centuries before the emergence of Israel as a distinct political entity.
Think for a moment of other cases where newcomers have occupied land through mass migration. The Anglo-Saxon and Norman invasions of England made their mark in linguistic changes as evidenced in early literary sources. Yet, as philologist Felice Israel remarks, there is no comparable linguistic evidence to be found in the wake of the supposed entry of Israelites into Canaan after their acclaimed exodus from Egypt.
I was led to the evidence for Hebrew origins by a reference in a major 2008 volume on the archaeological finds relating to the religious ideas of Israel’s Syrian neighbours:
Recently, the results of a long study conducted by F. Israel on the general cultural aspects (primarily linguistic), whether innovative or conservative, related to the conquest of Palestine by the tribes of Israel, have been published.352
352 F. Israel, “La conquête de Canaan: observations d’un philologue,” in Antiquités sémitiques IV, Paris 1999, pp. 63-77. I wish to express my gratitude to my colleague F. Israel, who discussed with me the issues presented here.
(Mander, 97)
I immediately requested a copy of Felice Israel’s presentation, (translation = “The Conquest of Canaan: Observations of a Philologist”) from the ever-helpful librarians at the Queensland State Library.
The philologist begins with Israel Finkelstein’s archaeological reconstruction (published 1988) of the emergence of Israel in Canaan and selects the linguistic sources surrounding this period. Finkelstein had identified two phases of settlement expansion of the people who would later be identified in the historical record as consisting of the kingdom of Israel. Where did these settlers come from?
The vast majority of the people who settled in the hill country and in Transjordan during the Iron I period, must have been indigenous . . . . (Finkelstein, 348)
They had “dropped out” of earlier Bronze Age city-state networks that suffered collapse — Shiloh constructions were violently destroyed in the middle Bronze Age and sharp population decline followed. The first phase of the new settlement begins around 1200-1150 BCE (Early Iron Age) with former pastoralists beginning to settle down (left map):
. . . . These people had dropped out of the framework of permanent settlement back in the 16th century BCE and lived in pastoralist groups during the Late Bronze period. While they might have been active all over the country, their presence would have been felt most keenly in the sparsely inhabited ‘frontier zones’ that were suitable for pasturage — the Transjordanian plateau, the Jordan Valley, the desert fringe and the hill country. They had traversed these areas as part of a seasonal pattern of transhumance and established economic relations with the sedentary inhabitants, especially those resident in the few centers existing in these marginal regions, e.g., Shechem and Bethel. (ibid)
— Left map (Finkelstein, 325): first phase of settlement, ca 1200-1150 BCE; — Centre map (ibid, 329): second phase of settlement expansion, ca 1000-950 BCE “when the last Canaanite enclaves in the Jezreel Valley were subdued and when the Philistines were repulsed from certain areas”; — Notice the comparative emptiness of what was later Judah: the reason being that this area at the time was very rocky and covered in dense coppice (ibid, 326, 339) — Right map (added for comparative reference) from Coogan, 6.
So the archaeologist concludes that the population increase in the region destined to become the land of Israel “must have been indigenous”.
The Philologist’s Sources for Assessing Hebrew Origins
Top: Clay liver model (Landsberger 207); vase inscription with owner’s name (Yadin, Pl. CLXXX); Bottom: Lexical list (Tadmor, pl. 13); Letter fragment (Horowitz, 165); Multiplication table prism (Horowitz, 192)
Now for the philologist to present her evidence. This consists of . . .
— two inscribed liver models — a legal document — a new fragment of a known lexical list — a vase inscription from the 15th-16th centuries with the name of the owner — an administrative tablet containing a list of proper names — a letter — a mathematical text
— Tell Taanak: letters and name lists — Shechem: a letter and a contract — Megiddo: a fragment of the seventh tablet of Gilgamesh — Gezer: a letter recognized as being from the Amarna period — Tell el-Hesi: a letter
— Finally, among the various inscriptions from Aphek, the glossary no. 8151 … reveals the evolution of the diphthong ay > ê in the noun yênu, “wine,” as well as the preservation of the monosyllabic nominal form in the noun dušbu, “honey” …
These documents are compared with the Egyptian Amarna archive that contains copies of correspondence with Canaanite city states
(Israel, 65-68 — all quoted text from Felice Israel is my translation)
Felice Israel identifies in these sources specific features that become precursors of the two languages that will, following internal evolution, become Hebrew and Phoenicia. (68) (I have copied the technical information below.*)
The definition in Is. 19:18, according to which the language of Canaan and Hebrew are one and the same language, is thus confirmed. (68 – my highlighting in all quotations)
The above relates to the Bronze Age. We next come to the transition addressed by Finkelstein (above) — the end of the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, the period of transition of settlement especially in the region that later became known as Samaria/Israel. In this period we see both changes and continuities in the languages of Canaan. But before I list the details of those points and for the benefit of readers less interested in delving into the technicalities, here is the conclusion to the philologist’s observation:
At the end of this brief essay, let us take stock of the results. In examining the linguistic documentation from the Bronze Age as a substrate up to that of the first millennium, a few facts have emerged:
. . . . In the Middle [and] Late Bronze Age . . . the first manifestations of the Canaanite linguistic type can be detected. These early manifestations, due to their specificity compared to other Semitic languages, both synchronically and diachronically, compel the specialist to recognize Hebrew as an indigenous language of Palestine, already attested before the events conventionally called the “conquest.” Consequently, for the philologist, the hypothesis of a conquest by a group of external origin is not confirmed. (77)
Changes and continuities in the languages of Canaan from Late Bronze to Early Iron Age (ca 1500-1100 BCE)
(I have omitted the footnotes that far exceed the length of the main text)
Dialectal Fragmentation: The distribution of the different Canaanite dialects89 in the first millennium is as follows: on the northern coast of the Levant, various Phoenician dialects are noted, while on the southern coast appears the dialect we have elsewhere called “coastal Canaanite,” which was spoken in the Philistine region.90 In the interior of Palestine, however, we find the Hebrew of the kingdoms of Samaria and Judah, Moabite, the Ammonite dialect, and that of the Edomites.
Onomastic Innovations: The disappearance of the Hurrian component in Syro-Palestinian onomastics is observed. This component was well present in the documentation of the substrate or, according to traditional terminology, at the time of the “conquest.“91 To the data noted by R. S. Hess92, we can add Hurrian-derived anthroponyms mentioned especially in CAT 4.635 as coming from Ashdod.
Religious Innovations: The emergence of national or ethnic states is accompanied by the rise of the national god figure93. The history of some of these deities, such as Kamosh or Qaus, has been reconstructed, but for YHWH, as revealed by an investigation conducted by R. S. Hess94, all ancient95 or recent96attempts to find an attestation of the name outside the Old Testament have been unsuccessful. The only testimony of continuity is the heavenly nature97 of his theophanies, which brings him closer to the figure of Hadad. R. Zadok98 has highlighted the frequency of texts that mention this deity in relation to Palestine.
Preservation of the Hurrian Substrate: Regarding phonetic conservation, F. W. Bush’s hypothesis99 suggests that the double pronunciation of the bgdkpt consonants in Hebrew and Aramaic is due to the influence of the Hurrian substrate. This influence is not necessarily direct, as it reached Hebrew through contact with Aramaic. For now, it can only be noted that the Hurrian substrate/adstrate, which fully exerts its influence in Ugarit, Nuzi, and Emar, has never been thoroughly studied in the documentation of the first millennium. From an onomastic perspective, few proper names of Hurrian etymology100 have persisted in Old Testament documentation. The most famous of these are Uriah101, the husband of Bathsheba, sent by David to a certain death, and the judge Shamgar ben Anat102. In the lexicon, one of the few preserved Hurrian elements is the term siryôn and the variant siryôn, “cuirass”103.
Conservation of Egyptian Onomastic Elements: In the onomastic documentation of post-exilic Hebrew, Egyptian etymology104 seems characteristic of priestly proper names.105
Conservation of Egyptian Lexical Elements: A series of lemmas, which abundantly testify, through their etymology, to the ancient Egyptian presence in the province of Canaan, have been preserved in the Hebrew lexicon. These words can refer to chemical substances, such as neter, “natron”; plants, such as šittâ, “acacia” or gōme’, “papyrus”; semi-precious stones, such as lešem, “carnelian”, aḥlamâ, “jasper”, or šenhabbîm, “ivory”; certain boats, such as ṣî, “type of ship”; or finally, scribal tools like ṭabba‘at, “seal-stamp” or qeset, “scribe’s case.”
Conservation of Egyptian Administrative Practices: The scribes of the two Israelite kingdoms106 employed and preserved a numerical notation system of a hieratic type107, rather than a Phoenician-Aramaic type. This is confirmed by the presence in the lexicon of measurement unit names such as lōg, hîn, and ʾêpâ, all of Egyptian etymology.
(That last point, #7, relates to the experience of Canaan under Egyptian hegemony in the Late Bronze era.)
—o0o—
* Common precursors of the two languages Hebrew and Phoenicia that indicate they are both indigenous and related.
(I have omitted the footnotes that far exceed the length of the main text)
The phonetic evolution ā > ō 43: it is attested not only on the coast but also inland, in Galilee and Samaria, extending beyond the Jordan to Pella44. The shift from the etymological ā to ō is foreign to Aramaic45. Moreover, already in the Amarna documentation, it does not appear in regions that, in the first millennium, will be linguistically occupied by Aramaic. This phonetic evolution is absent from both Amorite46 and Ugaritic47.
Application of the Barth-Ginsberg law48: This law49—yiqtal(u) imperfective < Proto-Semitic yaqtal(u)—also applies in Ugaritic50 but not in Amorite51; in Aramaic, it will apply much later than in Hebrew52.
The independent personal pronoun of the first person singular anōkî53: The personal pronoun anōkî is a characteristic of Proto-Canaanite54, which is not attested in Ugaritic55 or Amorite56. It anticipates the Hebrew, Phoenician57, and Moabite58 forms.
The suffix of the perfect first person singular -ti59: This element is also considered a Proto-Canaanite characteristic60. It differs from Ugaritic61 but anticipates the usage in Hebrew, Phoenician62, and Moabite.63
The independent pronoun ninu64 and the first person plural66 suffix65 pronoun -nu: The appearance of the independent first person plural pronoun ninu is ambiguous because there may be interference between a Canaanite form, which can be reconstructed with a good probability based solely on Hebrew but not Phoenician67, and the usual Akkadian form68. Regarding this, see the analogous spellings attested in the Giblite dossier: da-na-nu-u16 and ni-nu-u16 in EA 362 = LA 168:16, 27. On the other hand, the use of -nu as the suffix of the first person plural perfect69 or as a suffix pronoun70 is a Canaanite characteristic because it anticipates Hebrew usage and differs from the Amorite71 and Ugaritic72 form -na and, at a different time, from the similar Aramaic form -na.73
The beginning of the pronominalization of the noun ašar74: This transformation of the term75 ašar, “place”76, into a relative pronoun, is not of the Amorite type77 but constitutes an innovation that will be common to Canaanite dialects such as Hebrew78, Moabite79, and Edomite80.
The modal system81: It seems to anticipate the modal system of Biblical Hebrew. The cohortative form yaqtula anticipates, for example, the Hebrew cohortative in an obvious way.82
The use of the internal passive83: It actually anticipates the reduction to only seven verbal conjugations, which will be typical of standard Hebrew and Phoenician.84
Coogan, Michael D., ed. The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988.
Horowitz, Wayne. “A Combined Multiplication Table on a Prism Fragment from Hazor.” Israel Exploration Journal 47, no. 3/4 (1997): 190–97.
Horowitz, Wayne, and Aaron Shaffer. “A Fragment of a Letter from Hazor.” Israel Exploration Journal 42, no. 3/4 (1992): 165–67.
Israel, Felice. “La Conquête de Canaan: Observations d’un Philologue.” In Guerre et conquête dans le Proche-Orient ancien: actes de la table ronde du 14 novembre 1998, edited by Laïla Nehmé and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 63–77. Antiquités sémitiques. Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1999.
Landsberger, B., and H. Tadmor. “Fragments of Clay Liver Models from Hazor.” Israel Exploration Journal 14, no. 4 (1964): 201–18.
Mander, Pietro. “Les Dieux et Le Culte à Ébla.” In Mythologie et Religion des Sémites Occidentaux. Volume 1, Ébla, Mari, edited by Gregorio del Olmo Lete, 1–160. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta. Leuven: Peeters, 2008.
Tadmor, Hayim. “A Lexicographical Text from Hazor.” Israel Exploration Journal 27, no. 2/3 (1977): 98–102.
Yadin, Yigael, Yohanan Aharoni, Ruth Amiran, Trude Dothan, Immanuel Dunayevsky, and Jean Perrot. Hazor II: An Account of the Second Season of Excavations, 1956. Jerusalem : Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1960. http://archive.org/details/hazoriiaccountof0000jame.
I use two sources for this post. The first is a widely used text for advanced studies (seminaries and universities) in the “biblical history of Israel”. The second is a research conference paper by a specialist in the Middle Bronze Age Levant.
Let’s get our bearings with respect to the various ages that will be referenced in what follows:
Ancient Times From the emergence of cities and the beginning of writing to Alexander the Great—i.e., the first three thousand years of recorded history. This was the era of the ancient empires of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah appeared toward the end of Ancient Times, during the Iron Age.
Early Bronze Age
3200 to 2000 B.C.E.
Middle Bronze Age
2000 to 1550 B.C.E.
Late Bronze Age
1550 to 1200 B.C.E.
Iron Age
1200 to 330 B.C.E.
Miller, J. Maxwell, and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. 2nd Ed. Louisville, Ky. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006. p. 2
Under the heading Questionable Correlations between Archaeology and the Bible Miller and Hayes explain the problem with early attempts to line up the Bible’s accounts of Israel’s origins with archaeology:
During the early years of archaeological research and throughout most of the twentieth century many archaeologists and biblical scholars attempted to correlate the constantly increasing archaeological evidence with an essentially uncritical reading of the biblical account of Israel’s origins. This approach has been largely abandoned in recent years, for two reasons. First, both the biblical story and the archaeological evidence had to be used selectively, and often given strained interpretations as well, in order to achieve even a loose correlation. Second, an increasing number of biblical scholars and archaeologists have come to view the biblical account of Israel’s origins as idealistic and not historically trustworthy. It will be instructive to review some of the proposed correlations between the biblical account and archaeology that linger on in the public media but do not represent the current thinking in most scholarly circles. (p. 51)
The first of the “proposed correlations . . . lingering on in public media” they discuss is:
The Amorite Hypothesis
In the Early Bronze Age we have strong city states flourishing in the Fertile Crescent until towards 2000 B.C.E. when we find “a breakdown of this urban phase . . . followed by a period of largely nomadic and seminomadic society”.
Mesopotamian texts around this time or shortly before the “urban breakdown” phase mention Amurru (the Amorites). During the Middle Bronze Age there is said to be a “resurgence” of urban centres along with Amorite rulers of major Mesopotamian cities.
The hypothesis formulated in the 1930s was that Amorite migrations into the Levant had been responsible for the “urban breakdown” and it was the Amorites who were responsible for the waves of nomadic or seminomadic movements. The patriarchs of Genesis, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who were said to have arrived from Ur of the Chaldees and who moved around the region of Canaan were understood against this background. The biblical patriarchs belonged to this “(semi)nomadic” time.
The hypothesis matched one selection of the Bible’s chronology:
And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord. — 1 Kings 6:1
Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years. — Exodus 12:40
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob
(Absence of strong city states allows easy movement between Mesopotamia and Egypt; customs of the time were supposed to match those depicted in the Bible’s patriarchal narratives)
ca 1900 to 1800 B.C.E.
Hyksos rule in Egypt
// Israelites enter Egypt
ca 1700 to 1550 B.C.E.
400 + years —–> Exodus // conquest of Canaan
ca 1100 B.C.E.
Solomon’s temple
ca 980 B.C.E.
Miller and Hayes point out that “there are serious problems” with the above hypothesis, noting:
A frontal assault on this view was carried out by T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (BZAW133; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974); and John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). (p. 52)
There is no consensus among archaeologists that the Amorites were responsible for the urban changes between the Early and Middle Bronze Ages.
A timeline of biblical chronology using the genealogical data (Genesis 15:16, 46:8-11 and Exodus 6:18-20) requires four generations (Jacob-Levi-Amram-Moses) with each generation averaging 100 years.
The earliest extra-biblical reference to Israel is the Merneptah stele of ca 1200 B.C.E. announcing that Egypt had defeated “Israel” in Canaan so that they “were no more”.
The parallels between biblical names and customs, on the one hand, and those known from Middle and Late Bronze Mesopotamian texts, on the other, become less impressive when one takes into account that the sorts of names and customs involved were not confined to the second millennium b.c.e. but were apparently characteristic of the first millennium as well. This renders the parallels relatively useless for pinpointing any particular period as “the patriarchal age.” (p. 53)
Biblical “traditions” associate the patriarchs with Iron Age Arameans (Deuteronomy 26:5) and other Iron Age people (Moabites, Edomites, Philistines) — never with the Bronze Age Amorites.
Immanuel Velikovsky argued for catastrophes on earth resulting from earth’s close encounter with a mammoth comet, specifically resulting in the pulling of the waters of the Red Sea apart and returning them in a tidal wave to drown Pharaoh’s army. The Egyptian plagues and subsequent “long day” of Joshua were likewise the ripples from cosmic phenomena in dance.
Others have bucked the trend to date the volcanic eruption of Thera to around 1600 B.C.E. by marking it around 1450B.C.E. Ash was responsible for the plagues and geological shifts produced massive waves destroying the Egyptian army pursuing Israel.
Bryant G. Wood and Piotr Bienkowski argue — behind the paywall of the Biblical Archaeological Review — over just how early in the Bronze Age an earthquake brought down the walls of Joshua’s Jericho. (When Miller and Hayes wryly comment on Wood’s argument, “apparently in perfect timing for the seventh day of the Israelite march around the walls”, I assumed they were being cynical. But no, a reading of Wood’s article does make it clear that the “earthquake” presumably struck after the Israelites had marched around the walls seven days!)
Theories of this sort attempt to give naturalistic and scientifically acceptable explanations for the more fantastic and miraculous biblical claims. In our opinion, however, these theories presuppose such hypothetical scenarios, such a catastrophic view of history, and such marvelous correlations of coincidental factors that they create more credibility problems of their own than the ones they are intended to solve. (p. 53)
The famous Ramses/Ramesses name featured eleven times throughout the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties of Egypt — from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age. And since in Exodus 1:11 we read . . .
So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh
. . . and since that bland “statement of fact” has, for some, a “ring of authenticity”, the Exodus is best dated during the reign of one of the Ramesses. The great Ramesses II is the one of choice. He began his long reign around 1300 B.C.E. One detail in favour of this time slot is that it would allow the Israelites to reach Canaan in time for the above mentioned Merneptah stele inscription to record that “Israel is no more” after an Egyptian campaign.
Hayes and Miller again draw readers’ attentions to the drawbacks of this hypothesized date:
For one thing, we would expect Israelite storytellers to be familiar with and to use Mesopotamian and Egyptian names and customs in their narratives. Another problem with this proposed correlation between Egyptian history and the biblical narrative is that it does not square very well with biblical chronology. The Nineteenth and Twentieth dynasties ruled from the end of the fourteenth century until after the beginning of the eleventh century. Yet biblical chronology seems to place the exodus already in the fifteenth century. (p. 54)
Transjordanian Occupational Gap
It was once believed that there had been a significant gap of more than half a millennium in settlement in the region east of the Jordan River prior to the thirteenth century. From the 1200s B.C.E. renewed settlements and the rise of the kingdoms of Edom and Moab were witnessed. Given that the Biblical account of the wandering Israelites encountering the kingdoms of Edom and Moab on their way to Canaan, it followed that the Exodus and conquest of Canaan could not have happened before the 1200s B.C.E.
This line of argumentation was combined with, if not inspired by, the identification of Pharaoh Ramesses II as the pharaoh of the exodus (see above).
But there is a but…
More recent archaeological exploration in the Moabite and Edomite regions of southern Transjordan has discredited the idea of a sharp occupational gap prior to the thirteenth century. (p. 55)
Thirteenth-Century Destructions
West of the Jordan River, in the land of Canaan, there is evidence of “widespread city destructions” toward the end of the Late Bronze Age. Here is the accompanying map from the Miller and Hayes volume (p. 56):
Again, M&H list the problems with this hypothesis:
Late Bronze Age city destructions “were part of a general pattern throughout the ancient world”. We cannot know if the destructions occurred simultaneously or even with the onslaught of a common enemy. We do not know if warfare was responsible in most cases.
With the exceptions of Lachish and Hazor, the cities destroyed in this period are not the ones listed in the biblical account of the conquest.
Most of the sites that are identified with cities that the biblical account does associate with the conquest, on the other hand, have produced little or no archaeological indication even of having been occupied during the Late Bronze Age, much less of having been destroyed at the end of the period. Prominent among such “conquest cities” are Arad (present-day Tell Arad), Heshbon (Tell Hisban), Jericho (Tell es-Sultan), Ai (et-Tell), and Gibeon (el-Jib). (p. 55)
The Search for a Distinctively Israelite Material Culture
If only distinctive cultural remains could identify “Israelites” in distinction from other ethnic groups in the land! Some scholars have focussed on “collared-rim jars and four-room houses”:
The collared-rim jars; the four-room house: room 1 is a narrow courtyard, rooms 2, 3 and 4 are separated by pillars – room 3 likely being unroofed. People likely slept in the upper storey, animals below. – (Images from Dever, Rise of Ancient Israel)
Yet there is nothing intrinsically “Israelite” about either of these features, and in fact they show up in the regions of ancient Ammon and Moab, east of the Jordan River, as well as in the areas generally associated with Israelite settlement. Apparently these items belonged to a commonly shared culture throughout Iron I Palestine and therefore cannot be used to isolate particular sites, geographical areas, or historical periods as “Israelite.” (p. 57)
And as for pig bones? Surely the absence of pigs would indicate Israelite settlement, yes?
From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that no human behavioral evidence exists to indicate that pig avoidance was unique to any particular group in the ancient Near East. The fact that complex variables affect the choice to raise swine have confounded attempts to find an origin to the pig prohibition. Lots of people, for lots of reasons, were not eating pork. The bald fact is that there is no date before the Hellenistic period when we can assert with any confidence, based on archaeological and textual evidence, that the religious injunction which enjoined Jews from eating pork was actually followed by them alone as a measure of social distinction. (Hesse & Wapnish, p. 261 — referenced by Miller and Hayes — See also the post: The “Late” Origins of Judaism – The Archaeological Evidence)
The Conquest of Canaan: Observations of a Philologist . . .
Continued in the next post . . . .
Miller, J. Maxwell, and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. 2nd ed. Louisville, Ky. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.
Hesse, Brian, and Paula Wapnish. “Can Pig Remains Be Used for Ethnic Diagnosis in the Ancient Near East?” In The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present, edited by Neil Asher Silberman and David B. Small, 238–70. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.
Shanks, Hershel, William G. Dever, P. Kyle McCarter Jr, and Bruce Halpern. The Rise of Ancient Israel. Lectures Presented at a Symposium Sponsored by the Resident Associate Program, Smithsonian Institution. Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013.
