Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Prominent and not-so-prominent scholars of the Bible. Should this category be restricted to individuals with discussions of scholars collectively to be included within Biblical Scholarship? Scholars of the Bible should include persons who produce scholarly quality works even if not a member of a biblical studies academy or department (e.g. classicist like John Moles; historian like Richard Carrier). Technically I also think Earl Doherty and Rene Salm should be part of this category but wouild their inclusion raise problems? If so, in what category should such persons be included? What of Acharya S and others of questionable scholarly standards? Perhaps better to keep names like these within a Category related to discussions of the Christ Myth Hypothesis.
Or you can read the original German language version on Herman Detering’s site:
Bart Ehrman puts up a pay wall barrier to his blog posts so I have not seen his full article but the teaser he makes public — Why Paul Persecuted the Christians — does not encourage me to want to see more.
Questions I would suggest be posed to him by those who are privileged financially to be able to donate to a charity of Bart’s choosing (or privileged enough to donate over and above what they already donate elsewhere) as well as interested enough:
It is a shame to see a scholar with a reputation for secular critical nous appear to limit his analysis (analysis that is presumably shared without charge, or paid for ultimately by taxpayers, in the professional journals, yet that he only gives to the affluent — who are presumably also taxpayers — if they donate again to his own preferred charities) to the narrow range of sources and assumptions that are approved by the faith-dominated majority of his field.
Christianity may teach us to be honest but as long as dishonesty serves the interests of faith I’m sure God forgives.
A certain Butler University Professor (his blog makes it clear he writes in his capacity as a Butler academic) who is well known for his strident dogmatism on the question of the historicity of Jesus has been at it again.
He writes in response to a “meme” that he realizes is false or flat wrong in every way except one: it scorns mythicism!
First falsehood:
the attempt to argue that because someone is only mentioned in the New Testament, therefore they are not historical, simply does not work.
Of course he cites no instance of anyone arguing this way. No publication putting in a word for the mythicist case that I know of has ever suggested that “because someone is only mentioned in the New Testament, therefore they are not historical”.
But he does say something that is obviously true. I think we can all agree with the following:
Mythicist dogmatists and Christian fundamentalists are not at polar opposite ends of the spectrum, except on the trite matter of what they insist they know. Their approach is an all-or-nothing one that are mirror images of one another, two sides of the same coin.
There certainly are “mythicist dogmatists” who are as, well, dogmatic, as any Christian fundamentalist.
Then he writes something most professional:
Historians, on the other hand, are supposed to deal in a nuanced manner with evidence, and to recognize that each piece of evidence must be assessed separately and on its own terms.
But then he slips off the rails. Two true statements bracketed by two false ones. A nice chiastic structure.
And so the heart of the matter is this: mythicism – the complete dismissal of the historicity not just of accounts but of the individual portrayed in them – is as illogical and indefensible as claims of Biblical inerrancy – the complete acceptance of the historicity of everything in the Bible because the existence of individuals mentioned in it has been confirmed.
Notice where he slipped? At first he made the obvious statement that a “mythicist dogmatist” is as bad as a “Christian fundamentalist”, but here he speaks of “mythicism” generically. Mythicism itself is as bad as Christian fundamentalism. I would have thought “mythicism” would stand in this context as a counter to “Christianity”: just as Christianity has its fundamentalists so does mythicism have its dogmatists. Both stand outside the realm of serious discussion.
And then he underscores the point:
Neither mythicism nor Christian fundamentalism is engaged in the practice of history.
Not, “neither mythist dogmatism nor Christian fundamentalism”, nor, of course, “Neither mythicism nor Christianity….”
Then we meet the professional indignation:
And when historians and scholars object to this misuse of their work, mythicists and inerrantists typically respond in the same way: by insisting that the academy is in fact conspiring to cover up the truth or infested with an ideology that blinds us to the truth.
Interesting that he speaks of “historians and scholars”. Is he trying to impress readers once again that theologians like himself really are true historians and scholars? Certainly a good number of theologians do call themselves historians and in one sense they are, but even in their own ranks we find criticisms that their approach to history is quite different from the way other historians work. (Raphael Lataster demonstrated that most emphatically in his book. Recall a paper of his discussing historical Jesus methodology that was rejected by a scholarly Biblical publisher was accepted by a Historical conference.) And of course our Butler Professor cannot be ignorant of the fact that it is theologians themselves, his own peers, who regularly complain about the ideology that blinds them as a whole to seriously radical ideas.
Recall again his point:
Historians, on the other hand, are supposed to deal in a nuanced manner with evidence, and to recognize that each piece of evidence must be assessed separately and on its own terms.
Do I need to quote again here the many instances of nuance and tentativeness and scholarly humility in the way scholarly mythicists (scholarly referring to any mythicist who argues in a scholarly manner — leaving aside the dogmatists) very often present their arguments and set them beside a list the many abusive and dogmatic denunciations of theologian “historians and scholars” like the Butler Professor himself when arguing for the historicity of Jesus?
Recently, while watching our favorite apoplectic antimythicist discuss “The Case of the Historical Jesus,” something the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature said caught my ear. Here’s what he said:
Historians tend to discount miracle claims and those kinds of things right off the bat, because even if they were to investigate them, the things that people call miracles tend to be things that are inherently improbable . . . But talking about things like walking on water, turning water into wine — most historians won’t even bother discussing those things, because the most a historian ever does is say something is probable. And a historian is never going to tell you that something inherently improbable is probable. And so those kinds of things can be set aside from the outset. (James McGrath, 2016)
Actually, two things drew my attention here. The first is the term inherently improbable, and the second is the claim that historians set aside miracle claims.
If you search among books, articles, and academic papers, you’ll find the term inherently improbable used quite frequently in the sciences, liberal arts, religious studies, and the law. But in philosophy (especially logic), you’ll also find people writing about it with some ambivalence.
What exactly do we mean by inherent probability? In his book, Acceptable Premises: An Epistemic Approach to an Informal Logic Problem, James Freeman cites John Nolt’s definition. Continue reading ““In Most Worlds, You Don’t Even Exist” — Miracles and Probability”
Continues from part 1 . . . .
Philip Jenkins in his reaction, The Myth of the Mythical Jesus, has an even more blunt response to anyone who ventures into the “far swamps of extreme crankery” by pursuing questions that have no place among biblical scholars:
“Scholarship is what scholars do, and if they don’t do it, it’s not scholarship.” That is by far the most important point against the mythicists, and really, nothing more needs to be said.
Jenkins remains silent about Carrier’s book, the book that largely prompted Brian Bethune to ask serious questions about the evidence for the existence of Jesus. One can only conclude Jenkins has not read it and that his confidence that he knows all he needs to know about mythicist arguments is perversely misplaced. After all, it’s not a view “done” by scholars so it would be a waste of time bothering with it. One cannot imagine a more classic illustration of contempt for (ideologically incorrect) public interests.
Such ignorance gives him the confidence that merely repeating a few mantras to a few informal mythicist bylines he may have heard second hand or from some “over zealous riff-raff on the web” is all that he needs to do to persuade right-thinking people to stay clear of the danger zones around those far swamps.
The affirmative evidence for that existence is easily offered, consisting as it does of a sizable body of writings dating from within a half century of the events described.
Those documents are, without question, the most closely debated and analyzed in human history. A vast body of scholars works on those texts and their implications, and they come from a wide body of religious backgrounds – Christians of every possible shade, Jews, skeptics and atheists, and people of various other faiths. Within that scholarly universe, the number of qualified scholars who today deny the historical existence of Jesus is infinitesimal. The consensus on that matter is near-total. (My bolding and formatting in all quotations)
“A paper I had written on a disturbing, ridiculous, and idiosyncratic method used by historicists was rejected by a prominent society of Biblical literature, but was later accepted by a general historical research organisation – forgive me if I feel a smug sense of vindication.[32] This paper dealt with what I call Ehrman’s law, which shall be explained later and discussed throughout this book. My presentation of the paper was very successful, with almost everybody (a room full of proper historians) agreeing with me that this method used by Biblical ‘historians’ is ridiculous and not typical of historians proper.
“[32] Raphael Lataster, “The Gospel According to Bart: The Folly of Ehrman’s Hypothetical Sources” (paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Australian Historical Association, Sydney, 7th July 2015).”
Lataster, Raphael (2015-11-12). Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists (Kindle Locations 400-405). . Kindle Edition.
Mainstream biblical scholars often point to atheists among their ranks as evidence that they are not swayed by Christian bias. Craig Evans in the debate mentioned in my previous post did this when he spoke of the atheist James Crossley arguing that the Gospels were written considerably earlier than even many Christian scholars concede. What Evans was doing in reality was demonstrating that atheist scholars can only survive in the Christian dominated field of biblical studies as long as they conform to the minimal ideological foundations of Christianity. Arguing a Marxist model of Christian origins naturally conforms admirably with the values of many liberal Christians.
In fact neither Bethune nor anyone denies the “near total consensus” in the public face of the biblical studies guild. When prominent authors like Philip Jenkins not only demonstrate their ignorance of the arguments of those “infinitesimally” few scholars but even despite their ignorance insult them as belonging to the “far swamps of crankery”, one has to wonder if Raphael Lataster is quite correct when he writes that the historicity of Jesus is a debate that cannot be conducted among biblical scholars but can only move forward in other history and religion departments.
Hence reaction, neither engagement nor education, is the response.
Jenkins sees no need to bother with anything Carrier might have written nor even with the actual problems raised by Bethune. Leave all that to the “swamps of extreme crankery” — a nice intimidating phrase attached to the pointy headed doubters among those leprous masses.
And so Jenkins proceeds to address what he blindly presumes anonymous ignoramuses argue. The challenging questions of Bethune and Carrier are lost in the far swamps of Jenkins’s awareness and are replaced by some vague general points from the minds of an undefined “they”.
The first vague point unrelated to any of the questions troubling Bethune and that is posed as a substitute for Bethune’s questions:
Jenkins’s ignorance of serious mythicist arguments is palpable. Sweeping aside the issues of concern to Brian Bethune and many readers of the Macleans article, Jenkins embarrasses any slightly knowledgeable reader with this “explanation”:
All the canonical sources depict a very plausible Jesus in a very identifiable early first century historical setting. More significant, there are clear and well understood chains of evidence and tradition from Jesus’s time to the writing of those gospels.
Plausibility is a condition of historicity but that is a long step from being an argument for any particular scenario. Historical fiction works because it is equally plausible, set as it is in real times and places. That this point is ever raised as a serious argument for the historicity of Jesus is truly an embarrassment to our intellectual elites. Craig Evans made much of it in his debate with Richard Carrier. Why? It’s so obviously a red-herring, a non sequitur, an offence to anyone who has read any historical fiction, including ancient historical fictional writings.
As for the second point that there are “clear and well understood chains of evidence and tradition from Jesus’s time to the writing of the gospels”? Well, yes, there certainly are “clear and well understood” imaginative constructs of what scholars who presume a core historicity behind the gospel narratives believe must have existed. Of course there is no evidence for those oral traditions. Indeed, works that have seriously challenged the prevailing presumption that “there must have been oral traditions” passed on from eyewitnesses to eventually reach the authors of the gospels have been largely ignored. (See discussions of some of these in the oral tradition archive, as well as other posts on scholarship presenting evidence for literary mimesis.) Yet Jenkins presents the presumed model of oral tradition as part of a “clear and well understood chain of evidence“!
Clearly unaware of his ignorance that the mythicist case for Jesus as an “otherworldly being” is grounded in the writings of
Jenkins surely mystifies readers of Macleans and Carrier’s book when he writes: Continue reading “Biblical Scholars Reacting . . . Part 2”
Biblical scholars are reacting uncomfortably to signs of public interest in the view that Jesus did not exist. Not all biblical scholars, though. A tiny few do publicly welcome and accommodate this mythicist view of Jesus with their Christian faith and others who have confessed to being open-minded on the question. (For details see Who’s Who: Mythicists and Mythicists Agnostics.) But it is no secret that biblical studies is dominated by the Christian faith, both its liberal and conservative wings, so when articles questioning the most fundamental precept of that faith appear in prominent media outlets like The Washington Post, Salon.com, and most recently Macleans, some of those scholars let their indignation and impatience show. Unfortunately for their cause, however, while they focus on defending their traditional assumptions they all too often completely ignore (or misrepresent) the actual reasons many intelligent and educated people continue to have doubts.
My own position on mythicism: Following is my (slightly modified) email reply to someone who recently asked me if I was an agnostic on the mythicist question. —
Yes. It is the best we can argue. The evidence and critical methods we have can only allow us to argue that our New Testament literature can well be explained without recourse to a historical Jesus but that fact does not itself prove their was no historical Jesus. Even some “historicists” admit that the historical Jesus is essentially irrelevant to what became Christianity.
Personally I see no reason to believe in the existence of a historical Jesus but I cannot prove that position, so I must remain agnostic. The best I can do is to demonstrate how the evidence we have for Christian origins can be explained far more cogently without reference to a historical figure.
[A danger some mythicists fall into is an ideological desire to prove Jesus was not historical but the expression of some other deity or cosmic phenomena,] — that is, looking only for evidence to support their theory. That approach is susceptible to confirmation bias. If we can’t find ways to test our hypotheses and identify how they could be disproved then we are not using valid historical or scientific reasoning. [I think a more interesting and profitable pursuit than trying to prove or disprove the historicity of Jesus is to explore and understand the evidence that sheds light on Christianity’s origins.]
In this series of posts I will address the public responses of two mainstream scholars, Philip Jenkins and Stanley Porter (who responds jointly with Hughson Ong, a relatively new name in the field), to Brian Bethune’s discussion of Bart Ehrman’s new popular book, Jesus Before the Gospels, in the context of questions raised by Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus. The two articles:
Both responses are clearly written with considerable impatience:
In debates about Christian origins, one tiresome canard is going to come up sporadically, and usually, it’s not worth wasting time on. (Jenkins)
Here we go again, chasing after another ill-conceived theory about the Bible, this being one that periodically rises from the mordant ooze. (Porter-Ong)
And both responses completely sidestep Brian Bethune’s core questions. By way of reminder here are those unaddressed questions that arise from Ehrman’s book:
Ehrman’s memory book, in effect, is more an appeal to the faithful to accept historians’ approach than a new way of evaluating evidence. His list of what historians, including himself, think they can attest to hardly differs from a list he would have made a decade ago:
- Jesus was a Jew,
- an apocalyptic preacher like the man who baptized him, John the Baptist;
- his teaching, rooted in Torah, was delivered in parables and aphorisms;
- Jesus had followers who claimed his message was validated by the miracles he wrought;
- in the last week of his life, Jesus went to Jerusalem, where he caused a disturbance in the Temple that, some hours later, led to his arrest;
- Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor found him guilty of sedition and had him crucified.
However appealing and reasonable such a list is to modern skeptics, it is still drawn almost entirely from within the faith tradition, with buttressing by the slimmest of outside supports—brief references from Roman observers. (My own bolded emphasis and formatting in all quotations)
Bethune then shows us just how slim the most “rock-solid” of those outside supports are:
Consider one item on Ehrman’s list, perhaps the most accepted and certainly the one with the largest claim to historical accuracy embedded within it: Pontius Pilate executed Jesus. Scholars are almost universally on-side, as are most Christian churches. Pilate is the sole figure from Jesus’s trial for whom we have undoubted archaeological evidence, and he’s also, perhaps coincidentally, the only one to become part of the Nicene Creed, the most widely embraced capsule statement of Christian faith: “For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.”
But that wasn’t what all early Christians thought.
- The apocryphal Gospel of Peter says King Herod signed the death warrant.
- Others who thought Jesus was nearly 50 when he died believed that happened in the 40s of the first century, long after Pilate had been recalled to Rome.
- The Nazorians, an intriguing sect of Torah-observant early Christians discussed by a fourth-century scholar, believed Jesus died a century before the canonical Gospels, around 70 BCE. (And, since they were descended directly from the first followers of Christ, called Nazarenes before they became known as Christians, the Nazorians cannot be easily dismissed. The Babylonian Talmud, composed by the fifth century, notes the same.)
Yet Pilate is in Mark as the agent of Jesus’s crucifixion, from which he spread to the other Gospels, and also in the annals of the Roman historian Tacitus and writings by his Jewish counterpart, Josephus. Those objective, non-Christian references make Pilate as sure a thing as ancient historical evidence has to offer, unless—as has been persuasively argued by numerous scholars, including historian Richard Carrier in his recent On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt—both brief passages are interpolations, later forgeries made by zealous Christians. . . .
The Gospels are forthright in their agendas to serve theological and not historical needs. Mark may have pinned Jesus’s death on Pilate because he knew or believed it to be true, says Carrier, or he may have been practising “apocalyptic math.” [“Apocalyptic math” is a reference to the interest in that day of finding a timetable for the appearance of the messiah in the mysterious numbers in the Book of Daniel.]
Uh oh, is Carrier befuddling the public with the question begging “interpolation” card? Is he blithely sweeping aside contrary evidence as possible forgeries? That’s how Craig Evans, another mainstream scholar, chose to react to Carrier’s case in a recent debate. But in a live debate situation Carrier was able to respond on the spot and remind the audience that far from any question begging, detailed and abundant evidence for the claim of forgery was used to back up the assertion. (Bart Ehrman himself not very long ago even wrote another popular book demonstrating just how widespread forgery was in the early Christian world.)
http://ksutv.kennesaw.edu/play.php?v=00030027
When Craig Evans brushed aside Carrier’s assertions he was brushing aside all the evidence and argument upon which those assertions were grounded. That’s not addressing the arguments; it’s reacting to them in a way that leaves the critical public unpersuaded. Continue reading “Biblical Scholars Reacting to Public Interest in Mythicism: Part 1”
Imagine for a minute that you’re administering a test on the history of English literature, and one of your questions asks the students to explain in a short essay the meaning of word bowdlerize. Now imagine I’ve taken your test, and my essay begins:
“To bowdlerize something means doing what Thomas Bowdler did.”
I’m off to a bad start. But it gets worse. I continue:
“We can debate about why he expurgated Shakespeare’s plays, but what matters is what not why he did it.”
Then, oddly, I cite Aristotle’s four causes as if they have any relevance to the meaning and history of a word. Next, I veer off into a discussion about what other bowdlerizers have done.
“Some were offended by sexual innuendo, while others were put off by curse words and impiety. But it doesn’t matter why they did what they did, nor does it matter what the effect was. What they all did in common is the same one thing: expurgate works of literature. A trend begun by Bowdler. And thus so called.”
If I were you, I wouldn’t give me any points. The tiny part I happened to get right is overshadowed by the rest. We’ll see why as we go on.
Richard Carrier, in his recent “Brief Note on Euhemerization,” provides a helpful TL;DR, which begins:
Euhemerization is doing what Euhemerus did: convert a non-historical deity into a deified historical man (in contrast to deification, which is when an actual historical man is converted into a deity).
Everything after the colon is generally correct, albeit incomplete. But in the first part of the sentence Carrier commits the same error I did concerning the word bowdlerize. He has demonstrated a rather extreme case of the etymological fallacy. Usually, that would mean that he knew the original meaning of the word and discounts the current meaning. However, in this case, he has gone all the way back to the word’s eponymous roots.
That isn’t how English works. That isn’t how any language works. Words gain meaning through usage, which explains why Oxford, Collins, Merriam Webster, et al. keep vast repositories of lexical citations. You can’t understand what a word means without knowing how people use it. Living languages are not prescribed; they are described. Continue reading “Euhemerism Is Not “Doing What Euhemerus Did””
I trust I have set out Professor McGrath’s proofs for the historical existence of Jesus fairly and accurately in my previous post. Since the Professor has declined to engage in discussion with me I wonder if any interested readers would like to raise the following questions with him and alert us here of his responses.
Paul says Jesus was of the seed of David according to the flesh — thus indicating he believed him to be historical. Here Paul is talking specifically about “the Davidic anointed one” and referring to a “kingly figure” and the “expectation that the kingship would be restored to the dynasty of David”. That expectation meant that the messiah would be made the king, not crucified. So crucifixion was almost automatic disqualification from being the Davidic messiah.
“So if you’re inventing a religion from scratch and trying to convince Jews that this figure is the Davidical anointed one, then you don’t invent that he was crucified.”
If Jesus was crucified then is it not equally unlikely that the early disciples would have come to interpret him as having been the Davidic Messiah? Yet they obviously did interpret Jesus this way despite his crucifixion. So how can we explain a historical crucified man being interpreted as having been the Davidic Messiah? Is not your argument invalidated by the very fact that the early Christians chose to interpret a crucified one as the Davidic Messiah? Continue reading “Questions for Professor McGrath re Those Proofs”
Professor James McGrath explains in the Talk Gnosis video interview what he believes is “the case for the historical Jesus”.
Interestingly the interviewers open the program by assuring viewers that the interview with McGrath will provide loads of fun. To be discussed is a “fun topic” and “a super fun topic”. The point is to explain whether or not “there is a good reason to believe that Jesus actually existed”.
The prime interviewer opens by asking McGrath if the reason most scholars don’t believe Jesus is a myth is because they might think there are good reasons for thinking he is historical. Makes sense.
McGrath “personally” thinks a good case can be made for the historicity of Jesus.
Point one: When a mythicist apologist gets up and says that there is not as much evidence for Jesus as for an emperor who minted coins and fought battles then serious historians are not surprised.
Point two: Historians don’t bother discussing improbable miracles. What many mythicists lack is a detailed acquaintance with the New Testament texts and the rationalist (i.e. don’t believe in miracles) perspective that historians bring to them. Most mythicists are familiar with the Jesus they have been brought up with — i.e. that Jesus is God incarnate, etc. And so most mythicists are as shocked as conservative Christians are when you explain to them that Jesus as we meet him in the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Luke is “not that sort of figure”. He is a human being in those gospels though people believed he carried out cures etc — just like other people in that day and even today who are believed to have those abilities.
So Jesus being believed to have these powers is just like other people also believed to have these powers whom we do think are historical.
McGrath says mythicism is not a taboo topic but an outdated one. Casey and Ehrman took the time to look at recent claims and still found it to be unpersuasive. McGrath has “long wanted there to be some serious well-argued cases for this so it would give us something to discuss”. Scholars as part of their job description want things to discuss so if they don’t discuss mythicism it is because they think they’ll be hurting their own credibility if they do.
Next question: What are the reasons scholars believe there was a historical Jesus? Specifically, what are the reasons the crucifixion leads us to believe there was an HJ?
McGrath: No one would say that Socrates did not exist if the earliest evidence for Socrates came from a disciple of his. So it is bizarre to discount the evidence of early “Christians” for Jesus.
Paul says he met the “brother of Jesus (sic)”
Paul says Jesus was of the seed of David according to the flesh — thus indicating he believed him to be historical. Here Paul is talking specifically about “the Davidic anointed one” and referring to a “kingly figure” and the “expectation that the kingship would be restored to the dynasty of David”. That expectation meant that the messiah would be made the king, not crucified. So crucifixion was almost automatic disqualification from being the Davidic messiah.
“So if you’re inventing a religion from scratch and trying to convince Jews that this figure is the Davidical anointed one, then you don’t invent that he was crucified.”
Tony Sylvia (interviewer) adds that if you are inventing a story and wanted people to believe it you don’t include all the embarrassing things that don’t further your point. And crucifixion doesn’t help the early Christians’ case at all.
McGrath: It doesn’t give them the kind of figure they are claiming.
Mythicists often credulously swallow what historians find problematic. Example: mythicists often claim Jesus was based upon Old Testament prophecies as their fulfilment. It seems to McGrath that these mythicists have only heard this claim from Christian apologists or the NT authors themselves and that they haven’t actually looked carefully at these texts. In fact most of the scriptures are not prophecies at all and the few he seems to fulfil he doesn’t really (unless one forces the interpretation) so — if you’re inventing someone who fulfils the prophecies, you invent one who fulfils the prophecies. (Jesus doesn’t fit this bill.)
When we see the evangelists trying to link Jesus’ life with texts that don’t really fit him at all, then we have a situation where they have a real figure and they are struggling to make him fit — they can’t just make up anything about his life that they wanted to. Continue reading “Proofs that Jesus Did Exist (by Professor McGrath)”
The problem with trivial objections is that they leave the central thesis largely untouched. It is fallacious to oppose a contention on the basis of minor and incidental aspects, rather than giving an answer to the main claim which it makes. . . .The fallacy is akin to that of the straw man. Instead of facing the main opponent, in this case it is only a few aspects of it which are confronted. The trivial objections are possibly valid, the point is that they are also trivial, and not adequate to the work of demolishing the case which is presented. The fallacy is committed because they are not up to the task to which they are assigned, not because they are erroneous. . . . .
But there is hope. Despite the above shortcomings of trivial objections they nonetheless can be used to good effect:
If you dwell on your objections, listing them and showing how each one is valid, your audience will be impressed more by their weight of numbers than by their lack of substance. (Pirie 2006 pp. 163-164 — bolded emphasis is my own)
And so it is that probably the best-known anti-mythicist on the web has mastered the tactic of trivial objections to deflect attention from the substance of mythicist arguments.
Responding to an article that was published in the Cambridge online journal published for the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Think, Professor McGrath demonstrates with aplomb the masterful application of the art of the trivial objection.
To fully appreciate McGrath’s finesse we need to identify the core argument of the article being addressed. The author, Raphael Lataster, makes the central point clear in his conclusion:
The approach taken by the mainstream historicists is riddled with unjustified and no longer tenable presuppositions, employs the use of illogical methods such as the overuse of non-existing sources, and surprisingly involves attacks on critics’ personal beliefs and qualifications. By contrast, the work of ahistoricists like Carrier and myself is published in the peer-reviewed literature, and is measured and impersonal. Given the state of the available sources, it is entirely reasonable to be undecided over the issue of Jesus’ historical existence.
Lataster sums up his discussion of Bart Ehrman’s arguments for the “certainty” that Jesus existed (set out with my own formatting):
He claims that he has demonstrated, at the very least, that the Historical Jesus certainly existed. But his case relied on
- assumptions that the Gospels are basically reliable and don’t elaborate on or adapt the earlier Christian sources,
- ill-considered musings about what Jews of the time would and would not have believed,
- and sources that don’t exist and can’t be analysed.
Continue reading “Trivial Fallacies of a Hostile Anti-Mythicist”
Someone alerted me to James McGrath’s general amnesty for all commenters and since that time I have posted comments twice on his blog. The third time I attempted to do so was in response to http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2016/03/the-ethics-of-conspiracy-theories.html. My attempt to comment was met with the following message:
Now why was that?
My first comment was in response to http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2016/03/the-fundamentalist-mind.html — The Fundamentalist Mind:
I wrote:
Samantha Field does not speak of a desire for “clarity” as an indicator of fundamentalism. That’s been added by James McG in his post. Whenever speaking about fundamentalism we need to keep in mind the double binds (very conflicting “clarities”) in the thinking of fundamentalists.
I find myself agreeing with Samantha’s post, by the way (that is, the explanation she herself offers and not their slightly tilted paraphrase here). Her views gell with my own experiences completely.
I don’t know of any atheists who argue for mythicism who came out of fundamentalism. The few who once were fundamentalists, to my knowledge, actually came to atheism via a detour in liberal or progressive Christianity — the very sorts of people Samantha acknowledges are among her friends and who are NOT the “fundamentalist atheists” being criticized. It’s a matter of record that most mythicists came from liberal Christian backgrounds — some are still Christians.
My second comment was to: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2016/03/without-using-the-bible.html#comments — which contained a fundamental factual/methodological error. I wrote:
Is this post a joke? Of course we have evidence attesting to Socrates from contemporaries and non-disciples. Everyone knows about Aristophanes for starters, surely.
Apparently that was enough to have McGrath ban all further comments from me on his blog. Some professors really do not like laypersons pointing out fundamental undergraduate errors in their posts, do they.
Anyone following biblical studies on the web soon learns that there are some scholars who fear the potential of the internet. Anyone following certain scientists with larger than average egos also soon learns that some of them, too, don’t like what damage the web can do to their influence. And anyone attempting to engage in a scholarly or professional manner with political and social viewpoints that are very controversial in some quarters soon learns that some people cannot handle a truly free exchange of ideas and information.
Everybody, but scholars especially, should welcome the full potential of knowledge sharing that the internet has made possible. The Open Access movement can be said to have begun with the Budapest declaration of 2002:
By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
What is the point of OA?
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.
One might also argue that those who have had the privilege of higher learning have a responsibility to others in society. How can anyone justify keeping knowledge that has a public benefit away from the public, or how can one justify setting up hurdles to leap in order to access it?
Another benefit of OA is that it has the potential to keep researchers and academics generally just a little more accountable and honest. Surely most academics would presume that anything that works at increasing the appearance of public accountability is a good thing. Why would any object?
This is where we also enter the realm of free discussion. It is clear that too many scholars are not at all comfortable with defending their views in a public arena unless it is filled with sympathetic supporters of their ideas. The excuse sometimes given is that there are “trolls” out there, and time-wasters, and all sorts of problem commenters. Yup, there are. But that’s the beauty of the web — each of us has the ability to ban/delete etc the undesirables. Unfortunately too many researchers define undesirables so broadly as to include serious critics. Biblical studies seems far more than some other disciplines to be populated with scholars who are more interested in a form of evangelizing their own biases than in engaging seriously with critical discussion.
Some scholars are very stuck in an elitist pre-web mentality. They scoff at Wikipedia as a source when they could quite easily make a correction to an article they find in error. Do they despise the idea of getting their fingers dirty by engaging in a democratic sharing of knowledge?
They scoff at the bizarre ideas found “out there” — forgetting, it seems, that what they read on the internet are the same sorts of “bizarre ideas” that have always been in the public domain. Some of them even viciously insult those who remain committed to ideas and beliefs that they themselves once held before they learned better. They seem to forget, some of them, how lucky they have been to have been in the circumstances that allowed them to know better, to acquire a superior education. Does not such luck and privilege bring a responsibility with it? Not all seem to think so, unfortunately. Perhaps they believe they have had no luck or privilege at all but have worked and sacrificed hard to achieve their good fortune. If so, they still have more to learn, like how lucky they have been to have had the genes, the make-up from birth or environment, the opportunities, to apply such effort so successfully.
Added later….
(One prominent scholar has placed a different kind of hurdle to leap for anyone wanting to hear him air his views on his professionally developed blog. One is obliged to donate to a charity of his choosing. That, too, is another elitist technique that functions to filter out those less likely to disagree with his view or at least risk offending him; it is also a barrier to all but the more affluent who have the means to donate to charities above and beyond what they already do. (I say that on the basis of my past experience in collecting for charities: many of us who have done that sort of work door to door learn that it is often the poorest who are the biggest givers.) Perhaps Bart Ehrman thinks the minimal amounts he is asking are hardly onerous. I guess that’s true for many Americans.
Does Bart really think his own approach is one that others should follow — so that everyone would have to be paying every time they want to tap in to a more privileged person’s learning?
Sorry, but Bart Ehrman would do everyone a greater service if he joined up with the open access movement and accepted the public responsibility that comes with (educational) privilege.
Those words were posted by a respected New Testament scholar and professor who should remain nameless to avoid personal embarrassment.
There certainly is room for ambiguity and varying interpretations of much of the evidence we have for Christian origins.
Hence Raphael Lataster writes:
it is ambiguous as to whether an earthly or celestial Jesus is being referred to [in the NT epistles] (Jesus Did Not Exist, loc 229, Kindle Edition)
Further on the evidence in Paul’s epistles, with alternative readings possible and with interpolations apparent,
it should leave us with agnosticism. We simply don’t know that Jesus existed. . . . If the evidence is not good enough to conclude, either way, then so be it. We ought to be agnostic. (loc 5591)
And then on Richard Carrier’s conclusion in On the Historicity of Jesus,
[The scholar] must demonstrate why their hypothesis is probably true. And Carrier is the only one to have done so. (loc 7610)
Carrier concludes his book in part with
I intend this book not to end but to begin a debate about this, regarding both its methods and its conclusions. (p. 617)
Yet the New Testament Professor in question would insist that ambiguous and less than certain evidence should lead one to conclude that without any doubt at all Jesus did exist and to continue to question this conclusion is the sign of a crank.
What the Professor means by an ability to accept the ambiguity and uncertainty involved in historical inquiry is that when it comes to Jesus then the historian must acquire the ability to draw dogmatic conclusions from debatable evidence.
I think our Professor has misconstrued the truism about historical inquiry dealing with probabilities and uncertainties.
My today began in Australia then spent most of its daylight hours in Singapore and is now in Thailand — and since it’s now over 26 hours since I’ve slept do kindly excuse the absence of comment. Just listen to a great discussion.