With thanks to Cambridge University Press for an inspection copy.
Nina Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context raises questions that go beyond the authenticity and date of Paul’s letters. If we no longer discern a wandering charismatic preacher, one who is competing with other preachers, and planting house churches in Asia Minor and Greece as he works his way, via a thriving Jerusalem, to Rome, then what do we have in his place?
The argument structure of The Letters is as follows:
— an explanation of the origin of the current consensus that the New Testament letters of Paul include some that are authentic, mid-first century, writings to real churches; Nina Livesey (NL) shows that the arguments giving rise to this view [that is, the historicity of Paul, the authenticity of the letters, their first century date, and the related “home churches”] are circular and grounded more in conservative piety than independent evidence;
— a comparison of the letters of Paul with letter-writing more generally at this time (the Roman world of the first and second centuries); NL explains how the training of authors prepared them to create characters, both of apparent authors and recipients, and situations that attracted readers because they seemed “so real” and “personal”; NL further compares Seneca’s use of fiction to teach applied Stoic philosophy through artificial letters with the Pauline correspondence, pinpointing many similar literary devices. A case is made that Paul’s letters were a collection intended for general publication from the point of their creation by “a school” of a highly educated elite.
— independent evidence that explains the contents of the letters does not appear until the wake of the Bar Kochba war that (132-135 CE), far more than the first Jewish war of 66-70 CE, saw a genocide of the inhabitants of Palestine and even a denial of their name for their homeland as an ultimate punishment. In the context of Judea and Jewish practices like circumcision becoming a byword for all that Rome found contemptible, “Christian” teachers migrated to Rome where they set up “schools” not unlike other philosophical schools. It was from here that one such teacher, Marcion (later relegated by the “proto-orthodox” teachers as a “heretic”), identified with “Paul” and purportedly produced the letters under his name around 144 CE.
Further, the letters point to intertextuality with Acts and the gospels, indicating that the authors of all these works knew one another. Indeed, in Acts one finds the name of Paul emerging in the context of a work with a cluster of other fictional names, double-names and cipher (or symbolic) names (e.g. Stephen, the first martyr, meaning “crown”).
I look forward to discussing some aspects of NL’s book in more depth. This post is only an introductory overview.
NL’s overall argument does not identify an indisputable, concrete piece of evidence that directly places the letters of Paul (PL) in the mid second century and no doubt many readers will prefer to fall back on their “gut feelings” about the epistles. What NL offers is an argument that has fewer unsupported assumptions than are required by those who trust in at least their partial authenticity. The NL view appeals more directly and simply to the context of the external evidence. This external evidence is used to offer more direct explanations of the contents, the style and the known first appearances of the PL. Most simply:
— there is no first century external evidence to explain the contents and traditional beliefs about PL
— there is second century external evidence that does explain the contents and style of the PL
— what is known of literary education of the time further explains the PL as consisting of literary devices to teach a philosophical or theological set of beliefs; many inconsistencies and other difficulties within the PL that have engaged scholars who read the PL at face value are resolved by NL’s hypothesis of a second century school producing them.
Not too long ago I posted a very lengthy series on three books by Thomas Witulski proposing a Bar Kochba War context for the Book of Revelation. Witulski understood not only that war but the rebellions and massacres of Jews in the eastern Mediterranean under Trajan (prior to Hadrian) had a major impact on “Christians” at that time that was expressed in the “four horsemen” chapters of Revelation preluding the Bar Kochba revolt. Revelation expresses a remarkably different kind of Christianity that we know from the gospels and PL (see Couchoud’s discussions), even pointing an accusing finger at Christians who appear to embrace customs that surface in the PL (e.g. eating meat sacrificed to idols). Joseph Turmel (=Henri Delafosse) considered the “Man of Sin” Antichrist figure of 2 Thessalonians (see 2 Thess at his commentary page) to have been Bar Kochba but I wonder if a better case could be made for it being Hadrian, especially given Revelation’s favourable view of Bar Kochba (Witulski). How that interpretation might fit with NL’s arguments is a question I’d like to think through. Certainly Hermann Detering’s scenario of the “Little Apocalypse” prophecy of Mark 13 (and Matthew 24 and Luke 21) being best explained in Hadrianic times comes to the fore, as does his evidence (much drawn from Rudolf Steck) for Paul’s opponents belonging to the second century. The surviving writings of Justin (post the Bar Kochba War) also strongly suggest — contrary to conventional attempts to read his knowledge of our canonical gospels into his works — a time when there was a free-for-all scope for interpreting Jewish Scriptures as prophecies of “Christianity”.
So you can see how NL’s book ties in with many ideas I have been toying with for some years now. I look forward to discussing some of its details.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Nina E. Livesey is Professor of Religious Studies, Emerita at the University of Oklahoma.
Today I received a review copy from Cambridge University Press of Nina E. Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. I have already read the Introduction and Chapter 4 and highlighted along the way a few dozen other works referenced by Livesey to follow up. But what I found most inviting is that quite a few other references I have already posted about — and in some cases translated — here on Vridar. It is encouraging to meet a friend who likes and has found value in my other friends.
The first reference that stands out is Patricia Rosenmeyer. I posted on one of Rosenmeyer’s works in 2006 and it is one Livesey refers to often (as I also have done in subsequent posts):
Livesey references many scholars I have discussed here (some more extensively than others) but some names stand out as being more “radical” than others — to name but a handful some long-term blog readers may recognize:
Bruno Bauer — whose relevant works discussed by Livesey I translated and made available here: see his Pauline Letters and Christ and the Caesars. Livesey writes of BB, “his arguments are more sophisticated than those typically found in current Pauline scholarship” (19). Nice.
Paul Louis Couchoud — a very nice surprise to see him make an appearance
Rudolf Steck — my translation of one of his works is online at https://vridar.info/
Joseph Tyson — I posted at length on his work on Marcion and Luke-Acts
Herman Detering — whose scholarship is vastly under-rated by at least one prominent name who notably failed to do a basic Bayesian analysis of his work (see Staged Forgeries — another work I have translated)
Markus Vinzent
Richard Pervo
Boyarin, Daniel — of whom Larry Hurtado expressed distinct discomfort for his forays into New Testament studies
Nina Livesey argues that the Pauline letters all date from the mid second century — after the Bar Kochba War.
I feel a little ashamed that till now I have only allowed myself to wonder if all of the New Testament writings should be dated to the post Bar Kochba war period. Livesey takes that step boldly.
Drawing on Rosenmeyer and numerous others I look forward to reading Livesey contextualizes the Pauline letters within the ancient custom of “schools” and teachers writing letters in the name of others in order to teach and persuade. Paul’s letters are not the product of a “wandering charismatic preacher” but of someone belonging to the wealthy elite.
Such a portrait, however, poorly suits an individual both trained and socially positioned to produce such letters. On the other hand, there is ample evidence of creative literary activity and production in schools (haereses). As I argue in what follows, a second-century social and political context and a school setting, such as that of Marcion, are suggestive of a viable location for the creation of doctrinal exhortative letters written in the name of the Apostle Paul. (xif)
And the thesis extends beyond the letters:
While certainly a contentious and debated issue, the dating of NT writings plays an important role in my thesis. Not only Acts, but also the canonical Gospels are more recently considered not first- but second century writings. If we consider – as did the Dutch Radicals – that the Pauline letters were produced alongside of and in a complex and dynamic relationship with the Gospels and Acts, the forward shift in the dating of the latter lends further support to a second-century provenance of the letters. (27f)
So it’s back to Marcion and the post Bar Kochba era for “everything”.
“Christian” teachers arrived in Rome in the wake of the Bar Kokhba revolt and established schools under Roman authority near one other. “Christian” literature, including gospel texts, flourished during this time, with compositions reflecting a post-Jewish temple and post-Judaea social and political reality. Marcion’s publication of what has been interpreted as the First New Testament, consisting of a gospel (Evangelion) and a collection of Pauline letters (Apostolikon), is likely one of the earliest among these compositions. (251)
I look forward very much to reading the work in full and posting about it as opportunity permits.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
For the ordinary lay person who does not have the background to draw upon to enable a confident “vetting” the arguments of a consensus, I thought the three-part conditions set out by Avazier Tucker were a good rule of thumb for when to justify appeal to a consensus. It certainly provides a good answer to anti-vaxxers. Similarly, it offers good guidance to conspiracy theorists of various types. (Not that many of them would be convinced, of course, but it is nonetheless good to have “an answer” out there for those who are ready to change their minds.)
Richard Carrier thought Tuckers’ three part program was no answer at all to the problems he raised. It’s my fault entirely. I sneakily hid Tucker’s antidotes to the very problems Carrier raised in between the title and the last line of the post so anyone can be excused for missing them.
These conditions cannot be met in captured fields (e.g. you will never ever see a “consensus” in biblical studies by this definition that Jesus did not rise from the dead and is not God or the literal Son of God), so it is not useful as a metric.
Oh dear — my fault entirely. I should not have hidden the fact that Tucker’s three point proposition is explaining exactly why what is regarded as a consensus in biblical studies is not a justifiable or trustworthy consensus. I really do have to stop hiding the main points of my posts beneath their titles.
But more to the point, and by way of demonstrating how biblical studies fails on Tucker’s point 2 — the issues of Thomas Thompson and Thomas Brodie certainly illustrated the failure of Tucker’s points 1 (coercion) and 3 (coercion but also alert to the public about the heterogeneous character of the opposition to the consensus) in the field of biblical studies — more to the point, as I said, I must point to a work by Michael Alter published in the SHERM journal, Dataset Analysis of English Texts Written on the Topic of Jesus’ Resurrection: A Statistical Critique of Minimal Facts Apologetics —
This article’s abstract:
This article collects and examines data relating to the authors of English-language texts written and published during the past 500 years on the subject of Jesus’ resurrection and then compares this data to Gary R. Habermas’ 2005 and 2012 publication on the subject. To date, there has been no such inquiry. This present article identifies 735 texts spanning five centuries (from approximately 1500 to 2020). The data reveals 680 Pro-Resurrection books by 601 authors (204 by ministers, 146 by priests, 249 by people associated with seminaries, 70 by laypersons, and 22 by women). This article also reveals that a remarkably high proportion of the English-language books written about Jesus’ resurrection were by members of the clergy or people linked to seminaries, which means any so-called scholarly consensus on the subject of Jesus’ resurrection is wildly inflated due to a biased sample of authors who have a professional and personal interest in the subject matter. Pro-Resurrection authors outnumber Contra-Resurrection authors by a factor of about twelve-to-one. In contrast, the 55 Contra-Resurrection books, representing 7.48% of the total 735 books, were by 42 authors (28 having no relevant degrees at the time of publication). The 42 contra authors represent only 6.99% of all authors writing on the subject.
The article is available at the link above. The book referred to with the complete study is A Thematic Access-Oriented Bibliography of Jesus’s Resurrection. I don’t know how Michael had the stamina to undertake such a study, but again, it’s good to have things like this done and available.
Consensus per se is not a reliable sign of rationality. It depends on how consensus is reached. All sorts of methods can yield consensus: brain-washing, the threat of the rack or burning at the stake, totalitarian control of the sources of information. Consensus reached by these means does not guarantee rationality. — Goldman
Recent discussions have sent me back to a second look at Aviezer Tucker’s Our Knowledge of the Past. (I posted about this book back in 2013.) A detail I had forgotten in the meantime is Tucker’s interesting explanations about when a consensus is more likely to be trustworthy than not. Here is part of what he writes:
In the real world, there is no universal consensus on beliefs because some people always dissent. There are still people who deny that the earth is round or that it revolves around the sun and others who deny that there was a Holocaust. This led philosophers who consider consensus to be philosophically valuable to attempt to prescribe whose opinions matter for determining whether or not there is a consensus on beliefs. Reliance on professional organizations or academic institutions, affiliations, and certifications is a tempting approach. If all professional astronomers agree that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, it must be because they have knowledge of the heavens and those who honestly dissent must be either ignorant or irrational. At their best, professional and academic institutions should indeed reflect the qualities that make consensus among their members significant as a possible indicator of knowledge. Still, this appeal to authority failed too often in history. Academic and professional institutions have proved themselves to be too susceptible to political threats and manipulation, economic dependence and graft, or the common biases of a class of people who share professional interests and often social background. The corruption of the German academic system under the Nazis, the rejection of relativity in physics, the destruction of psychology, anthropology, and historiography in favor of dark racist fantasies is just the most extreme example of the ever-present temptation of academic and professional institutions, even in previously excellent academic systems, to prefer their institutional, class, and professional interests to intellectual integrity. (33)
So what does Tucker advise given the fact that the consensus of authorities may not always be a reliable guide to the truth of a matter?
The alternative approach I present here does not have to rely on authority, nor does it require universal consensus. It merely requires unique noncoerced heterogeneity: It does not matter if some do not agree to a set of beliefs, as long as the people who do, are sufficiently different from each other to reject alternative hypotheses to the knowledge hypothesis, and those who dissent are sufficiently homogenous to support hypotheses that explain their dissent by particular biases. For example, the group that reached consensus on Darwinian evolution is uniquely heterogeneous, it includes people who are secular and religious, and of many different faiths. The community that upholds the alternative “creationism” is quite homogenous, composed exclusively of biblical fundamentalists, almost all of whom are American Protestants, though many American Protestants believe in Darwinian evolution. Their bias in favor of an anachronistic, historically insensitive interpretation of Genesis is the best explanation of their beliefs. (34)
I know many readers of this blog will be thinking of the consensus on the historicity of Jesus. In the light of the above, we may see a reason certain critics of the Christ myth theory attempt to portray “mythicists” as a singular group of Christian-hating atheists. By ignoring the broad spectrum of “mythicists” — atheists, Buddhists, prominent public intellectuals, and even faithful Christians and others who have expressed a high regard for Christianity — the mythicists are portrayed as a narrow, homogenous group with a unique hatred of Christianity and thus able to be comfortably dismissed.
Tucker says a reliable consensus must be uncoerced and sufficiently large. How large?
The heterogeneous group that reaches consensus must be sufficiently large to avoid accidental results. Small groups can never be sufficiently heterogeneous to exclude hidden biases. . . . If only four scientists work on a particular problem and they agree on a set of related beliefs, it does not imply that their agreement reflects common knowledge. The four may be a professor, her assistant, a former student, and an untenured member of faculty who needs her vote on the tenure committee. The minimal size of a significant consensus depends on local circumstances such as whether the people who develop a consensus are related socially, the nature of their relations, and whether they attempted to replicate the process that generated the beliefs or merely accepted the conclusions of others on faith or authority (Sarkar, 1997, p. 510). Usually, when the consensus involves hundreds of people who are geographically, institutionally, and professionally dispersed, it is safe to assume that it is large enough. If the consensus is on an esoteric topic, and only a handful of experts are competent or interested enough to reach the consensus, they may possess knowledge, but their consensus cannot function as an indicator of knowledge. It is necessary to follow their reasoning to evaluate the status of their beliefs. (34)
Those are three key features for “mere outsiders” to look out for when deciding whether they have a right to hold any reservations about a consensus among the experts:
The consensus is uncoerced;
The consensus is found among a “sufficiently large” and heterogenous group;
Dissenting voices are from a “sufficiently homogenous” group such that their biases are readily apparent.
They look like a neat rule of thumb to me.
Goldman, Alvin I. “Foundations of Social Epistemics.” Synthese 73, no. 1 (October 1987): 109–44. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485444.
Tucker, Aviezer. Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Since I began drafting this post, Richard Carrier has responded specifically to some of my subsequent comments that were made in an exchange over what I, rightly or wrongly, understood to be some confusion about my view of Bayes’ theorem. He has not, as far as I see — again, I am open to correction and reminding — responded to the central argument of these posts. Further, I began posting a detailed review (scroll to bottom of the page for the reviews) of Carrier’s Proving History in 2012 but other questions arose that distracted me from that project after three posts. This series might be seen as an update on my views of Carrier’s application of Bayes’ theorem to history generally and Jesus in particular.
My position on the historical Jesus
To begin with, I think the only figures of Jesus of any relevance to the historian are
the Jesus in our early sources (especially the New Testament writings)
Attempting to “discover” a Jesus “behind” the sources through memory theory or other means (criteria of authenticity, form criticism) necessarily begins with the assumption that the stories told in the gospels have some kind of relationship with a historical Jesus. In other words, they assume a historical figure was the starting point of everything. (A passage found in a work by the Jewish historian Josephus, even if only partially authentic, can tell us nothing more than what was being said about Jesus some sixty years after he was supposed to have lived.)
My position regarding Bayes’ Theorem
One more point I should reiterate. I have said many times now that Bayes’ theorem is a fine tool to apply to many hypotheses. My point, though, is that I see little historical value in hypothesizing the existence or non-existence of Jesus per se. What is of historical interest is how Christianity emerged. A hypothetical Jesus or hypothetical non-Jesus alone doesn’t help us with that question. We simply don’t know if there was a figure identifiable as Jesus at or near the start of Christianity. The reason we do not know arises from the lack of independent and empirical data to establish his presence. Historical explanations can draw on hypothetical scenarios but when they do they can never be more than hypothetical proposals. I prefer that a historian works more modestly with what can be securely known and seeks to explain that much.
My position with respect to Richard Carrier’s historical methods
When Richard Carrier’s books Proving History and On the Historicity of Jesus first appeared I was intrigued by the Bayesian approach and in large measure rode with it. But what especially attracted me was the comprehensiveness of Carrier’s approach to the question that had at that time been a “hot topic” ever since Earl Doherty’s contributions. At the time I attempted to shelve some discomfort I felt over Carrier’s portrayal of “what historians do” and “how they do things” more generally. He seemed to me to be returning to a positivist view of history, a view that had largely been left in the margins especially since the mid twentieth century. One other discomfort I had was that I thought he was weakening his position and making himself too-easy-a-target for critics by adding new speculative arguments to those of Earl Doherty. I felt a stronger case and smaller target would have been made with less rather than more — with zeroing in on a selection of core arguments from Doherty rather than trying to cover everything that had been argued and adding even to that.
Though I have written many posts in favour of the application of Bayes’ Theorem to questions arising in biblical studies (and I have Richard Carrier to thank for introducing me to the usefulness of Bayes) I have also found myself in disagreement with some of Carrier’s views:
Ironically, in most of those cases, I think that it is Carrier who has dropped the Bayesian ball along with “rational-empirical” argument and it is yours truly who is using Bayesian reasoning to demonstrate where some of Carrier’s views are amiss.
At the time I held back my criticisms mainly because I did not want to be seen as part of what was then a hostile internet backlash against Carrier. But since I have recently been deeply re-engaging with the nature of historical knowledge and history itself I have felt the time is right to try to resolve some issues raised by Carrier’s work that originally left me a little uncomfortable.
Misapplied Conclusions from Bayesian Analysis
If we conclude from Bayesian reasoning that a historical Jesus is not likely to have existed, it tells us nothing useful. All it would mean is that if Jesus did exist there were many views expressed about him that gave rise to suspicions about his existence among later readers. He would not be the first.
No historical event is the same as another and no historical person is the same as another. Each and every historical event and historical person and circumstance is unique in some way. Hypotheses about the existence or non-existence of Jesus are hypotheses about a unique event.
But it is impossible to compute the frequencies of events that are unique. (Tucker, 136 — Tucker further notes, without comment, Carrier’s response to this problem, which is to assign a range of probabilities including subjective but informed probability estimates of experts — that is, measuring )
A Case Study
Carrier argues that even subjective expectations are ultimately (though perhaps hidden from one’s immediate consciousness) based on calculable frequencies of the same kinds of events:
Any time you talk about degrees of belief or certainty, just think about what you base that judgment on, and what facts would change your mind. Always at root you will find some sort of physical frequency that you were measuring or estimating all along. (272)
I am not so sure. Are “degrees of belief” or subjective “certainty” always or necessarily based on conscious or subconscious rational calculation? If so, there can be no such thing as “subjective” belief: every belief would be at some level a rational calculation based on relevant frequencies. I am not as confident as Carrier in the fundamental rationality of all subjective beliefs and expectations.
Alexander David Cooper – THE DEATH OF KING WILLIAM II. Image from https://clasmerdin.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-death-of-william-rufus-accident-or.html
Let’s take a unique historical event, one that Carrier discusses in Proving History, and examine his argument. The historical hypothesis here is that Henry I plotted to kill William II.
In our personal correspondence, C. B. McCullagh observed that to apply BT to questions in history
the hypothetical event has to be considered as a generic type, similar in some respect to others. That might worry historians, whose hypotheses are so often quite particular. For instance, consider how the hypothesis that Henry planned to kill William II in order to seize his throne explains the fact that after his death Henry quickly seized the royal treasure. The relation between these events is rational, not a matter of frequency. . . . (The example being referred to is discussed in C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 22.)
But, in fact, if the connection alleged is rational, then by definition it is a matter of frequency, entailed by a hypothetical reference class of comparable scenarios. To say it is rational is thus identical to saying that in any set of relevantly similar circumstances, most by far will exhibit the same relation. If we didn’t believe that (if we had no certainty that that relation would frequently obtain in any other relevantly similar circumstances), then the proposed inference wouldn’t be rational. Explaining why confirms the point that all epistemic probabilities are approximations of physical frequencies. The evidence in this case is that Henry not only seized the royal treasure with unusual rapidity, but that his succeeding at this would have required considerable preparations before William’s death, and such preparations entail foreknowledge of that death. Already to say Henry seized the royal treasure “with unusual rapidity” is a plain statement of frequency, for unusual = infrequent, and this statement of frequency is either well-founded or else irrational to maintain. And if that frequency is irrational to maintain, we are not warranted in saying anything was unusual about it. Likewise, saying “it would have required considerable preparations” amounts to saying that in any hypothetical set of scenarios in all other respects identical, successful acquisition of the treasure so quickly will be infrequent, and thus improbable, unless prior preparations had been made (in fact, if it is claimed such success would have been impossible without those preparations, that amounts to saying no member of the reference class will contain a successful outcome except members that include preparations). Again, the result is said to be unusual without such preparations, or even impossible; and unusual = infrequent, while impossible = a frequency of zero. Hence such a claim to frequency must already be defensible or it must be abandoned. Similarly for every other inference: making preparations in advance of an unexpected death is inherently improbable for anyone not privy to a conspiracy to arrange that death, and being privy to such a conspiracy is improbable for anyone not actually part of that conspiracy, and in each case we have again a frequency: we are literally saying that in all cases of foreknowing an otherwise unpredicted death, most of those cases will involve prior knowledge of a planned murder, and in all cases of having foreknowledge of a planned murder, few will involve people not part of that plan. If those frequency statements are unsustainable, so are the inferences that depend on them. And so on down the line.
Thus even so particular a case as this reduces to a network of generalized frequencies. And all our judgments in this case necessarily assume we know what those frequencies are (with at least enough accuracy to warrant confidence in the conclusion). We won’t know exactly the frequencies involved, but we know they must be generally in the ballpark stated, otherwise we wouldn’t be making a rational inference at all. (273f – my highlighting in all quotations)
Here Carrier notes as background knowledge that “considerable preparations” would have been required “before William’s death” for Henry’s actions to have succeeded. He confuses this background knowledge with “evidence” but understanding the complexities involved in asserting full control of the royal treasure is really background knowledge. That background knowledge forms the basis of the hypothesis that Henry murdered William. Carrier leaves this aside. He suggests that Henry’s ‘unusual rapidity’ in taking control reflects subconscious knowledge of how infrequently such events occur under normal circumstances. But I do not know how Carrier could verify that historians really do reflect on how many times a royal treasure has been taken over with such speed, or how often comparable “classes of events” have occurred. Carrier does not give examples of similar “reference class acts” with which to compare and I suspect most historians will need time to think before they could offer instances. Even if one did compile a list of comparable successions in an attempt to establish a reference class with which to compare Henry’s succession of William, historians would be hard pressed to tease out all factors that made each situation unique and to justify its relevance to the particular event of Henry’s replacement of William. Rather, it is simpler and more likely that historians who are informed of the political structures and scale of England at the time use that background knowledge to infer that the speed of Henry’s acts points to the likelihood of murder.
While typing up this post I was distracted by a news item about a woman being interviewed who said that she was told she had a “only a 10%” chance of contracting a certain terminal illness but now she had it. There was no longer any 10% business about it. Statistics and probabilities are relevant when dealing with effectively infinite numbers of factors. But historical contingency is not a probability event. It happens to a particular person with a certainty of 1 regardless of what the odds are in an infinite universe and there was no way to estimate in advance that that particular woman was going to get the illness. That that unfortunate person was part of a 10% subset within a population of many thousands was meaningless to her and her loved ones. A science body had produced statistics. This person experienced an historical event. Most historical events are unforeseen — except, as I keep saying, in hindsight.
Confusing History with Science
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. . . .
History is the same. The historian looks at all the evidence that exists now and asks what could have brought that evidence into existence. . . .
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. . . .
[T]he 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. (46ff)
I have recently addressed historical positivism at
What Carrier is describing here is a “positivist” view of history. This is a notion of history that was more widespread up to the middle of the last century. One of its leading exponents was Hempel who argued that historians should be seeking to discover predictable cause-effect relationships. (Hempel took positivism a step further than Carrier by claiming actual “laws” in history could be found.) His colleague, Carnap, stressed the importance of probabilistic reasoning in such an endeavour. The view that history could aspire to be akin to the natural sciences in method grew out of the Enlightenment when there was burgeoning confidence that Reason and Empiricism could liberate humanity from the shackles of superstition and dogma. But positivist history has long since been under strong attack from many quarters.
It is this positivist approach to history that explains the relevance of Carrier’s use of Reference Class. The idea of a reference class is to generalize historical events or incidents so that they can be compared with one another as a common type. That means they are temporarily removed from their historical contingency and treated as sharing common features for the sake of comparison. The point is to isolate generalized cause-effect principles.
Strictly speaking, prior probability is the probability of getting a specific kind of h when you draw at random from a reference class of all possible h → e [hypothesis to evidence] correlations. Those correlations don’t have to be causal, although in history they usually are. Because, in history, we are almost always asking what caused e and proposing h as the answer (see chapters 2 and 3). I’ll thus focus mainly on causal hypotheses and explain how to ascertain prior probabilities in a way that can produce intersubjective agreement among expert historians, and when and why such a process is logically valid. Some critics of BT are skeptical of causal language in applying the theorem, but that’s fundamental to many theories, especially historical ones, since any statement about what happened in history reduces to a statement about what caused the evidence we have. And you can’t propose historical explanations without proposing causes. Historians do distinguish claims about what happened (or once existed) from claims about why it happened (or why it existed). But ultimately all claims about ‘what’ entail claims about ‘why.’ (229)
I pause and ask if that is so. Many historians may agree with the above, but even among those who do, I think most would be sceptical about any attempt to assess varying degrees of causal probability to any of the factors associated with an event. Understanding human behaviour is not so mechanical an enterprise. The example Carrier offers does to me come across as unrealistically mechanically causal and even positivist with a vengeance:
. . . a hypothesis that a religious riot was caused by prior beliefs of that community (such as an ancient prophecy) in conjunction with new events (such as the appearance of a comet) obviously proposes a causal relationship between those prior beliefs and the riot . . . (230)
Such a view of human nature in general and historical events in particular is not one I share. I doubt that many historians have ever concluded that there can ever be such a simplistic one-to-one cause-effect of a riot as “a belief” of some kind. I propose that where riots occur a range of conditions will normally be found to help us understand the what and the why.
I think the principle applies to most works of historians today. Few, I believe, would think they can reduce historical events to isolated or particular combinations of specific causes each bearing a certain probability factor in the final equation.
In another instance, this time in On the Historicity of Jesus, Carrier continues the same refrain: the existence of prophecies would in effect have caused would-be messiahs to seek martyrdom, so in such a context, Christianity “almost becomes predictable”.
God had promised that the Jews would rule the universe (Zech. 14), but their sins kept forestalling his promise (Jer. 29; Dan. 9), which would also create a motive for would-be messiahs to perform atonement acts, which could include substitutionary self-sacrifice (see Element 43), out of increasing desperation (Elements 23-26). Christianity almost becomes predictable in this context. (OHJ 71)
Admittedly Carrier relegates this statement to a footnote but it does further illustrate the simplistic cause-effect positivism approach he has to the question of Christian origins: prophecy — would have inspired (caused) — would be prophets — to do an atonement act like Jesus — Christianity conceptually predictable (law of cause and effect) in such a scenario. If there were historically verifiable prophets acting that way, most historians would prefer to seek a deeper understanding about why such behaviour emerged at that time and place than the mere existence of a prophecy rolled away in the scrolls.
A recent work of history that I read is Killing for Country by David Marr. Along with Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland and Libby Connor’s Warrior, I have been left with a deep sense of shame about white treatment of the indigenous population of my state and a strong political and social conviction of what we owe their survivors. Those historical works were not about “cause and effect” but about understanding and awareness. There will always be causal elements in any explanation but causes per se are not always what history is about.
Reference Class Revisited
As far as I understand Carrier’s approach, he introduces Reference Class in the question of the historicity of Jesus in order to establish a prior notion of how likely a certain idea of Jesus is the result of a generalized cause-effect class of events. This is an attempt, as I understand it, to introduce some kind of “scientific” validity to the study of history. If we understand the “scientific” approach as one that seeks to establish the general from the particular, this is the intended function of assigning Jesus to the Rank-Raglan hero class and drawing probabilistic inferences based on cause-effect principles found in that class.
The idea is that among figures found in a subset of the Rank-Raglan class few or none are known to be historical. The principle Carrier wants us to conclude from this is that stories of a certain type are “caused” by something other than a historical figure behind them.
If therefore we find Jesus within this subset of story types, then it logically follows that those stories about him likewise owe their existence to something other than an actual historical figure of Jesus.
I agree that in principle — and it is the principle that counts — that is a correct conclusion. Lord Raglan himself expressed the same point:
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)
Further, I think a good many biblical scholars will also agree that what we read in the gospels about Jesus is in large measure unconnected with a historical Jesus. Many argue that the stories that arose about Jesus were fabricated to meet the needs of later generations.
In other words, the reference class itself is irrelevant to the question of the historicity of Jesus. It is a misguided attempt to establish a quasi-scientific or positivist approach to history by establishing a principle that transcends the uniqueness of each historically contingent event and person.
The mythical stories about Jesus tell the historian something important to the interests of early Christianities but as Lord Raglan pointed out by implication — those stories of themselves cannot have any relevance to the question of whether there was some kind of historical Jesus at the start of it all. If we think otherwise we would need to argue the case with evidence.
Of course, many other biblical scholars are quick to deny this point and will claim “memory theory” and “triangulating” “gists” of gospel stories and sayings can help them see “through a glass darkly” some outline of the historical Jesus. But such notions are founded entirely on the assumption that Lord Raglan was wrong and that the stories did evolve from a historical person.
We simply have no way of knowing if “a historical Jesus” existed. There are many interesting studies that explain the New Testament sources emerging from within the historical, philosophical and literary milieu of the day without appealing to a hypothetical role for a historical Jesus. We don’t need to over-reach and try to “prove” anything within any margin of probability. Hypothetical notions relating to the existence or nonexistence of Jesus cannot help the historian produce any serious reconstruction or understanding of Christian origins. Let’s be content with what we cannot know and focus on what we do know. Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus, especially its Backgound/Context section, offers many areas for further study. As I pointed out above, I think there are some areas where even Carrier can more consistently and profitably apply Bayesian analysis.
Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 2012.
Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014.
Tucker, Aviezer. “The Reverend Bayes vs. Jesus Christ,” History and Theory 55, no. 1 (February 1, 2016): 129–40.
Each time I start to write one of these posts, I have to pause when I realize that I haven’t yet introduced some fundamental concept. And I run the risk of leaving the station with passengers standing on the platform, confused by the timetables. I’m thinking of the first time I traveled in Europe and found that the departure board was listed chronologically. In the U.S., we show departures in alphabetical order, by city. So I stood there for quite some time, neurons firing incoherently.
Now imagine if the very word “departure” meant something subtly different in Frankfurt from what it means in Atlanta. Does the departure time refer to when the plane leaves the ground, when the plane pushes back from the gate, or when boarding of the jet is arbitrarily halted? Or does it mean something else altogether?
What is belief?
The political left, center, and right sometimes talk past one another because they often use the same words to mean different concepts. Some fundamental concepts are understood differently on the religious right and the far right. One key example is what it means to believe something. If you’re like me, you presume that belief has something to do with the evaluation of a proposition, in which you use evidence and logic to decide whether something is true. In classes on religion, we’re taught that in certain circumstances evidence and logic sometimes aren’t enough, so we have to take a “leap of faith.” Sometimes, belief needs a kick in the pants. Continue reading “How Did We Get Here? Part 2: Belief”
Hayden White is a historian of some notoriety (or acclaim, depending on one’s point of view) in his field, generally acknowledged as the founder of postmodernist history. So some readers may be interested to note what he wrote a decade and a half ago with reference to both historical Jesus studies and the question of the existence of Jesus.
Here is where “historical research” enters: its aim is to establish whether the new event belongs to “history” or not, or whether it is some other kind of event. The event in question need not be new in the sense of having only recently arrived to historical consciousness. For the event may have already been registered as having happened in legend, folklore, or myth, and it is, therefore, a matter of identifying its historicity, narrativizing it, and showing its propriety to the structure or configuration of the context in which it appeared. An example and even a paradigm of this situation would be the well-known “search for the historical Jesus” or the establishment of the historicity (or ahistoricity) of the “Jesus” who was represented in the Gospels, not only as a worker of miracles but as Himself the supreme miracle of miracles, the Messiah or God Incarnate whose death and resurrection can redeem the world.
If some thoughts expressed by certain mainstream biblical scholars be any guide, I suspect some of them will be a little chagrined that White should be so “naive” as to place the question of the historicity of Jesus (“mythicism”, if you will) alongside, without qualification or demeaning predicate, studies on the historical Jesus.
. . . I am reminded, thanks to the inevitable replay of Jingle Bells in shopping centres that I cannot avoid, that I spent my entire childhood wondering, mystified, over what sort of contraption was so much fun to ride — you know, the one they sing (as it sounded to my ears year after year) a “one horse sloaplinslay”. I did eventually learn that the slay part was a sleigh, but never till I was an adult did I learn the truth of what a “sloaplin” or “slopeland” sleigh was. Childhood can be such a lonely experience, lost in wonderment, never quite knowing what the world was trying to say to you to make you feel happy.
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 as 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?
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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.
