Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Category: Biblical Studies
The biggie. Much work needs to be done on the children of this category. These need to be greatly reduced in number.
Should this category include the ancient history of Palestine-Judea, including second temple era and Bar Kochba rebellion and rise of rabbinic culture? If so, should Biblical Studies itself be renamed in some way?
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.
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.
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.
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.
In discussing how researchers create narratives to portray historical events or write biographies, Benedict Anderson, author of the highly acclaimed Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, drew a contrast with the Gospel of Matthew.
These narratives . . . are set in homogeneous, empty time. Hence their frame is historical and their setting sociological. This is why so many autobiographies begin with the circumstances of parents and grandparents, for which the autobiographer can have only circumstantial, textual evidence; and why the biographer is at pains to record the calendrical, A.D. dates of two biographical events which his or her subject can never remember: birth-day and death-day. Nothing affords a sharper reminder of this narrative’s modernity than the opening of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. For the Evangelist gives us an austere list of thirty males successively begetting one another, from the Patriarch Abraham down to Jesus Christ. . . . No dates are given for any of Jesus’s forebears, let alone sociological, cultural, physiological or political information about them. This narrative style . . . . was entirely reasonable to the sainted genealogist because he did not conceive of Christ as an historical ‘personality,’ but only as the true Son of God. (pp 204f)
Yet how many biblical scholars have attempted to fill in the gap in Matthew’s Gospel by calculating the exact or approximate years of Jesus’ birth and death! Rather, the more enlightening inquiry should be to seek to understand why the first evangelists did not have the historical interests that fascinate modern readers.
(Of course, it would be too easy to fall back on the claim that Pilate’s appearance in the gospel establishes a historical setting and time — until one pauses to recall that the Pilate in the gospels is a character utterly unlike the historical Pilate. As I wrote earlier, the Pilate of historical record (sc. Josephus) was renowned for his cruelty but all the evangelists, Matthew included, present him — most UNhistorically — as benign and soft when he meets Jesus, and as being cowered by the Jewish priests and mob into doing their will against his own. A historical person has been rewritten to meet the needs of the narrative.)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition. Verso, 2006.
Given that every historical event in some way is unique, how can historians have confidence that their research into the past is yielding reliable explanations for what happened?
The answer will depend on the type of event being studied and how historians frame their questions.
Two questions that particularly interest me are:
What led to the production and adoption of much of the “Old Testament” literature in Samaria (the Pentateuch) and Judea (the Pentateuch plus the historical, poetic and prophetic writings)?
What led to the production and adoption of the New Testament literature among certain Christians?
Notice I avoid, specifically, the question of origins of “Judaism” and “Christianity”. That’s because I don’t know how to define either of those two religions at the time of their beginnings. We can’t assume they looked the same as we find them in the record some centuries after their beginnings. But the texts are sources that we can define and work with as concrete data. They are something we can get our hands on and know what we are trying to understand with respect to origins.
But what would it take to make an explanation for the emergence of this literature to be more than guesswork or somehow guided by the fancy or prejudice of the researcher?
One tool the historian can pick up and apply in order to approach this goal comes from the field of sociology. There is nothing new about this approach:
Historians have begged or borrowed concepts and theories from many other disciplines, leading to an enriched debate around the course of human history, and the implications for both present and future. . . . (Green and Troup)
In a basic sense, sociology has always been a historically grounded and oriented enterprise. . . . The major works of those who would come to be seen as the founders of modern sociology, especially the works of Karl Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber . . . . to varying degrees, all offered concepts and explanations meant to be used in truly historical analyses of social structures and social change. . . .
Each of the founders was so committed to making sense of the key changes and contrasts of his own epoch that he was a historically oriented social analyst . . . . None of the founders ever got entirely carried away by a philosophy of universal evolution, by formal conceptualization, or by theoretical abstraction for its own sake. Each devoted himself again and again to situating and explaining modern European social structures and processes of change. (Skocpol 1985, 1f)
What does all of that mean in practice? How does it apply to the study of a non-repeatable historical event, in particular an event that consists of striking changes in a social group’s ideas, beliefs, and texts?What do sociologists do when there is not enough evidence to confidently construct an explanation for a particular change or development in a social group? Skocpol explains:
According to this method, one looks for concomitant variations, contrasting cases where the phenomena in which one is interested are present with cases where they are absent, controlling in the process for as many sources of variation as one can, by contrasting positive and negative instances which otherwise are as similar as possible. (Skocpol 1976, 177 – my emphasis)
Where else do we find groups producing fresh origin myths comparable to those we find in the Bible? What circumstances are associated with the emergence of those kinds of myths? In what ways can we both compare and contrast the various myths themselves and what we can know of their social, political and other settings?
That kind of inquiry requires us to begin where we have the firmest evidence. In the case of the Hebrew Scriptures that means beginning where the archaeological record and the independent literary witness points us. That means beginning with the early Hellenistic era and working back only insofar as our data dictates. For the New Testament writings it means beginning in the second century and working back, again, only insofar as explanations for our data necessitate.
The inquiry means casting our net to embrace other instances of the emergence of new foundation myths and comparable apocalyptic writings and philosophical-theological treatises. Non-biblical instances of these abound in Hellenistic and Roman eras. Studies of pre-Hellenistic era and the first century of imperial Rome will also prove useful — whether as offering either better or worse explanations in order to yield a better hypothesis of time of origin or a support for a hypothesis of a later origin.
Take, for example, the Old Testament prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve “Minor Prophets”, along with narratives involving prophets like Elijah, Elisha and Jonah. We find historical instances of those kinds of persons in pre-biblical ancient Syria. See my post, Meet the Prophets of Israel’s Predecessors. The written records of those prophets provide us with a useful starting point, but we are quickly led to something quite different in the Hebrew literature. If the Syrian prophets were generally encouraging kings of city-states to continue in their piety, the biblical prophets are often chastising kings of a realm (not just a city-state) to forsake their piety and champion a different deity. Does the evidence in the Ebla and Mari archives (as well as for Assyrian prophecies) enable us to imagine those prophets adopting a similar critical stance against their kings? What conditions might help us understand such a contrast? Do we have secure evidence for the contrasting conditions?
Or to take another example, this one from the New Testament writings of Paul. Our earliest independent witness to Paul comes from the second century records of theological conflicts. Do Paul’s writings address specific contentious issues at the centre of those conflicts? (Many scholars respond reflexively with a resounding “No”. But I think they are far too hasty with that conclusion. My point is that the question is one that involves a real choice: it is not merely rhetorical.) What functions do the epistles serve among the various and competing Christian factions? Troels Engberg-Pedersen has compared some of them to Stoic treatises. What does that insight tell us about a potential audience for them as well as their possible provenance?
I have introduced only two items of inquiry. I could introduce similar questions and viable instances for comparison and contrast with the Old and New Testaments’ narratives of origins — the Pentateuch and the Gospels with Acts. Scholars have often observed similarities between the biblical literature and literature of Greek, Roman and other cultures. Other scholars have published research into the emergence of new myths and ideologies within defined social groups.. (The link is to an introductory post on Tanya S. Scheer’s study of local origin myths being manufactured in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquest; for the emergence of new ideologies note John Dominic Crossan’s comparison of the “gospel” of Augustus with the NT gospels and Marianne Bonz’s comparison of Acts with the Roman foundation myth.)
I have a question after having read so much about the proposed origins of the Judeo-Christian canon. Despite the many variant views about origins — and there have been many studies introducing sociological concepts here (e.g. Bruce Malina, Bengt Holmberg, Richard Horsley, James Crossley) — I have seen precious little offering comparative studies. Richard Horsley and John Hanson had an excellent opportunity to do so with Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus, but alas, they, too, hewed to a description of Palestine alone despite the known existence of other resistance movements elsewhere in the Roman empire.
Maybe my memory has failed me for the moment or maybe there are works/authors I sorely need to seek out. So this post is a plea for assistance. If you, dear reader, know of the kinds of comparative studies I am missing and are deplored at my lack of awareness, please kindly inform me!
Green, Anna, and Kathleen Troup. The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in History and Theory, Second Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
Skocpol, Theda. “France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18, no. 2 (1976): 175–210.
———, ed. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
In a recent post I praised Douglas Campbell for drawing attention to the laziness (if not “dishonesty”) of rebutting an argument with the blanket “I am not persuaded” line. In this post I come to blame him for rejecting a genuinely critical reading of source material. It is with the very essence of critical reading that he objects:
Descartes suggested, in a classic argument widely influential in the modern period, that everything is in effect guilty until proved innocent. The result was, rather famously, the reduction of all certain knowledge to the conviction that his mental processes at least guaranteed his existence. In other words, he used radical doubt as a fundamental method. Everything must be doubted until it can be demonstrated indubitably to be true. (16)
Now Descartes’ method (shorn of the extremism with which Campbell presents it) does serve well enough in everyday life and especially in the legalistic professions and scientific research enterprises. But it is possible to take issue with it on a philosophical level, as demonstrated by Wittgenstein. But is there not a valid comparison here? We know that Newtonian physics “fails” at the subatomic particle level; but we do not reject the fundamentals of Newtonian physics when taking care climbing ladders or driving a car.
Campbell wrote — and note the pejorative language in which he couches Descartes’ scepticism:
But the Cartesian method has struggled to get anywhere significant and has, moreover, been subjected to ferocious critique, not least from Wittgenstein, who pointed out (characteristically indirectly) that the use of language implies participation in a broader linguistic community, which is in turn difficult to detach from a complex broader reality that cannot be doubted in the first instance without lapsing into utter incoherence. So Descartes’s key initial claims are in fact delusional. Unfortunately, however, the critical method, which played such a significant role in the rise of the modern university, has had a long dalliance with Cartesianism, so the latter tends to live on, haunting the corridors of the academy like a restless shade. It allowed figures like Kant to reject tradition out of hand and to argue from simpler and more certain first principles, although Kant too struggled to develop his principles with the certainty and extension that he really sought. It is not a completely crass oversimplification to suggest, then, that many modern Pauline scholars, shaped in part by the traditions at work in the modern university, seem to assume, at least at times, that the “critical” assessment of evidence simply involves the application of doubt in a generic way, ultimately in the manner of Descartes. It is a posture of comprehensive skepticism. One must be unconvinced until one is convinced of something’s probity on certain grounds. But I would suggest that when practiced in this generic and universal manner, this is an invalid and self-defeating methodology and a false understanding of criticism.’ (16)
Campbell had faulted as “posturing” the “I am not persuaded” rejoinder as a substitute for critical engagement. He faults Cartesian scepticism with the same label — “posturing”.
I doubt that I would be excused from jury service if I tried to opt out by explaining that Wittgenstein tells me that my particular semantic world may not be capable of deliberating in a truly objective manner the information conveyed to me as it is coded in semantic variations other than mine. Newtonian physics is still valid, its quantum companion notwithstanding.
Campbell then proceeds to justify another misguided “howler”:
We will rely on slender snippets of evidence in what follows, because that is all that we have — occasional and fragmentary remains of conversations that took place millennia ago. But we do have evidence, and it will not do to dismiss parts of the following reconstruction with a generic claim that “this is insufficient” or “there is still not enough evidence.” If this is the evidence that we have and it explains the data in the best existing fashion, then the correct scientific conclusion must be to endorse it and not to complain that we need more data that unfortunately does not exist. (18)
That may sound like a correct scientific approach but it is not. A scientific hypothesis must rely on multiple datasets. A single experiment is never sufficient. An experiment, a survey, must of necessity be repeated in different places with different samples to be sure of the results. The medical profession will not rely on a single survey of data to recommend a particular program to treat a physical condition.
The scientific method does not build on “slender snippets of evidence” if there is no other choice. If the evidence is inadequate to answer a particular question, or on which to base a certain line of inquiry, then it is the question and the line of inquiry that must be changed.
I frequently encounter the following kinds of statements in by biblical scholars in their works relating to early Christianity or Judaism:
We historians confront a supposed event in the past, as in some text or object, as though to “try it in court,” in order to reach a verdict to establish the truth of the matter. And the principles we can best employ are those used in the practice of law:
(1) The accused is presumed (not judged) innocent unless proven guilty. (2) The preponderance of the evidence (anything over 50%) is decisive. (3) The verdict rendered is considered proven beyond reasonable doubt (not absolute).
(Dever 140f — Old Testament scholar arguing against fundamentalist readings of the Bible)
and arguing the case for accepting the overall integrity of the canonical text of New Testament writings…
As in a court of law, the evidence deserves to be judged innocent of being an interpolation until proven guilty. This proof must be able to stand up before the jury of scholarship, which must decide whether “guilt” has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. If there is reasonable doubt about the extraneousness of the accused data then it should not remain any longer under a cloud of suspicion. In that case the verdict must be acquittal in order to protect the innocent. If scholarship does not follow such a “rule of law,” serious injustice will be done to much innocent data.
Sometimes the biblical scholar will cite a (“nonbiblical”) historian for support:
Unless there is good reason for believing otherwise, one will assume that a given detail in the work of a particular historian is factual. This method places the burden of proof squarely on the person who would doubt the reliability of a given portion of the text. The alternative is to presume the text unreliable unless convincing evidence can be brought forward in support of it. While many critical scholars of the Gospels adopt this latter method, it is wholly unjustified by the normal canons of historiography. Scholars who would consistently implement such a method when studying other ancient historical writings would find the corroborative data so insufficient that the vast majority of accepted history would have to be jettisoned.29 In the words of the historian G. J. Renier:
We may find . . . an event is known to us solely through an authority based entirely upon the statements of witnesses who are no longer available. Most of the works of Livy, the first books of the history of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, belong to this category. Since there is no other way of knowing the story they tell us, we must provisionally accept their version. This brings us back full sail to accepted history as the starting point of all historical investigation.30
30. Renier, History, pp.90–91.
(Blomberg 304)
Although Blomberg cites a 1982 reprint of the classical historian’s (Renier’s) work, the original publication date stands at 1950. That is important for a reason I will explain.
But first, note the muddled metaphor in the above quotations. In a court of law it is not the witness who is “presumed innocent until proven guilty” but the one charged with a crime. Witnesses are cross examined to test their claims. Though the witness swears an oath to tell the truth their testimony is never accepted at face value. Their claims must be tested. Yet the above comparisons of the historical method confuse witnesses (sources) with the person who is on trial and seeking to prove his innocence.
In response to Dever above: In a court of law it is the one accused and on trial who is presumed innocent: it is the claims of the witnesses, the sources — not the accused — that must be tested.
In response to Wisse above: It is not the “evidence” that “deserves to be judged innocent”. It is the evidence that is tested for authenticity, relevance and reliability to determine the guilt or innocence of the one on trial.
Finally, in response to Blomberg: The Renier method of accepting the testimony of Livy for believing in the historicity of events for which there is no other evidence may have been par for the course among classicists in 1950, but by 1983 that naive approach was well and truly debunked by a series of lectures delivered by the classicist historian Moses Finley:
For reasons that are rooted in our intellectual history, ancient historians are often seduced into [accepting as historically factual] statements in the literary or documentary sources … unless they can be disproved (to the satisfaction of the individual historian). This proposition derives from the privileged position of Greek and Latin, and it is especially unacceptable for the early periods of both Greek and Roman history…
(Finley 21)
Renier referred to Livy as an example of a historian whose word he felt he had no choice but to follow. Finley pointed out the cruel truth, however:
Yet a Livy or a Plutarch cheerfully repeated pages upon pages of earlier accounts over which they neither had nor sought any control. . . .
Where did they find their information? No matter how many older statements we can either document or posit – irrespective of possible reliability – we eventually reach a void. But ancient writers, like historians ever since, could not tolerate a void, and they filled it in one way or another, ultimately by pure invention.
The ability of the ancients to invent and their capacity to believe are persistently underestimated. How else could they have filled the blatant gaps in their knowledge once erudite antiquarians had observed that centuries had elapsed between the destruction of Troy and the ‘foundation’ of Rome, other than by inventing an Alban king-list to bridge the gap? Or how could they contest an existing account other than by offering an alternative, for example, to provide ideological support for, or hostility to, a particular ethnic group, such as Etruscans or Sabines, who played a major role in early Roman history? No wonder that, even in the hopelessly fragmentary state of the surviving material on early Rome, there is a bewildering variety of versions, a variety that continued to increase and multiply as late as the early Principate. Presumably no one today believes the Alban king-list to be anything but a fiction, but any suggestion that there is insufficient ground to give credence to the Roman king-list is greeted with outraged cries of ‘hyper-criticism’ …. (8f)
There was a time — it is long past — when classicists would reconstruct ancient history from their Greek and Latin sources as naively as many biblical scholars continue today to reconstruct the origins of Judaism and Christianity from the texts in the Bible. Finley added:
I suspect that Ogilvie’s slip [naive readings of ancient historians] reflects , no doubt unconsciously, the widespread sentiment that any thing written in Greek or Latin is somehow privileged, exempt from the normal canons of evaluation. (10)
Classicists have long since moved on. Perhaps it’s time for more biblical scholars to follow them.
Blomberg, Craig L. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. 2nd edition. Nottingham: IVP Academic, 2007.
Campbell, Douglas A. Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing, 2014.
Dever, William G. “Christian Fundamentalism, Faith, and Archaeology.” In Misusing Scripture: What Are Evangelicals Doing with the Bible?, edited by Mark Elliott, Kenneth Atkinson, and Robert Rezetko, 131–52. Routledge, 2023.
Finley, M. I. Ancient History: Evidence and Models. London: Chatto & Windus, 1985. [Chapter 2 was part of a series of J. H. Gray Lectures at the Faculty of Classics of the University of Cambridge]
Wisse, Frederik W. “Textual Limits to Redactional Theory in the Pauline Corpus.” In Gospel Origins & Christian Beginnings : In Honor of James M. Robinson, edited by James E. Goehring, Charles W. Hedrick, and Jack T. Sanders, 167–78. Sonoma, Calif. : Polebridge Press, 1990.
I use two sources for this post. The first is a widely used text for advanced studies (seminaries and universities) in the “biblical history of Israel”. The second is a research conference paper by a specialist in the Middle Bronze Age Levant.
Let’s get our bearings with respect to the various ages that will be referenced in what follows:
Ancient Times From the emergence of cities and the beginning of writing to Alexander the Great—i.e., the first three thousand years of recorded history. This was the era of the ancient empires of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah appeared toward the end of Ancient Times, during the Iron Age.
Early Bronze Age
3200 to 2000 B.C.E.
Middle Bronze Age
2000 to 1550 B.C.E.
Late Bronze Age
1550 to 1200 B.C.E.
Iron Age
1200 to 330 B.C.E.
Miller, J. Maxwell, and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. 2nd Ed. Louisville, Ky. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006. p. 2
Under the heading Questionable Correlations between Archaeology and the Bible Miller and Hayes explain the problem with early attempts to line up the Bible’s accounts of Israel’s origins with archaeology:
During the early years of archaeological research and throughout most of the twentieth century many archaeologists and biblical scholars attempted to correlate the constantly increasing archaeological evidence with an essentially uncritical reading of the biblical account of Israel’s origins. This approach has been largely abandoned in recent years, for two reasons. First, both the biblical story and the archaeological evidence had to be used selectively, and often given strained interpretations as well, in order to achieve even a loose correlation. Second, an increasing number of biblical scholars and archaeologists have come to view the biblical account of Israel’s origins as idealistic and not historically trustworthy. It will be instructive to review some of the proposed correlations between the biblical account and archaeology that linger on in the public media but do not represent the current thinking in most scholarly circles. (p. 51)
The first of the “proposed correlations . . . lingering on in public media” they discuss is:
The Amorite Hypothesis
In the Early Bronze Age we have strong city states flourishing in the Fertile Crescent until towards 2000 B.C.E. when we find “a breakdown of this urban phase . . . followed by a period of largely nomadic and seminomadic society”.
Mesopotamian texts around this time or shortly before the “urban breakdown” phase mention Amurru (the Amorites). During the Middle Bronze Age there is said to be a “resurgence” of urban centres along with Amorite rulers of major Mesopotamian cities.
The hypothesis formulated in the 1930s was that Amorite migrations into the Levant had been responsible for the “urban breakdown” and it was the Amorites who were responsible for the waves of nomadic or seminomadic movements. The patriarchs of Genesis, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who were said to have arrived from Ur of the Chaldees and who moved around the region of Canaan were understood against this background. The biblical patriarchs belonged to this “(semi)nomadic” time.
The hypothesis matched one selection of the Bible’s chronology:
And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord. — 1 Kings 6:1
Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years. — Exodus 12:40
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob
(Absence of strong city states allows easy movement between Mesopotamia and Egypt; customs of the time were supposed to match those depicted in the Bible’s patriarchal narratives)
ca 1900 to 1800 B.C.E.
Hyksos rule in Egypt
// Israelites enter Egypt
ca 1700 to 1550 B.C.E.
400 + years —–> Exodus // conquest of Canaan
ca 1100 B.C.E.
Solomon’s temple
ca 980 B.C.E.
Miller and Hayes point out that “there are serious problems” with the above hypothesis, noting:
A frontal assault on this view was carried out by T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (BZAW133; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974); and John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). (p. 52)
There is no consensus among archaeologists that the Amorites were responsible for the urban changes between the Early and Middle Bronze Ages.
A timeline of biblical chronology using the genealogical data (Genesis 15:16, 46:8-11 and Exodus 6:18-20) requires four generations (Jacob-Levi-Amram-Moses) with each generation averaging 100 years.
The earliest extra-biblical reference to Israel is the Merneptah stele of ca 1200 B.C.E. announcing that Egypt had defeated “Israel” in Canaan so that they “were no more”.
The parallels between biblical names and customs, on the one hand, and those known from Middle and Late Bronze Mesopotamian texts, on the other, become less impressive when one takes into account that the sorts of names and customs involved were not confined to the second millennium b.c.e. but were apparently characteristic of the first millennium as well. This renders the parallels relatively useless for pinpointing any particular period as “the patriarchal age.” (p. 53)
Biblical “traditions” associate the patriarchs with Iron Age Arameans (Deuteronomy 26:5) and other Iron Age people (Moabites, Edomites, Philistines) — never with the Bronze Age Amorites.
Immanuel Velikovsky argued for catastrophes on earth resulting from earth’s close encounter with a mammoth comet, specifically resulting in the pulling of the waters of the Red Sea apart and returning them in a tidal wave to drown Pharaoh’s army. The Egyptian plagues and subsequent “long day” of Joshua were likewise the ripples from cosmic phenomena in dance.
Others have bucked the trend to date the volcanic eruption of Thera to around 1600 B.C.E. by marking it around 1450B.C.E. Ash was responsible for the plagues and geological shifts produced massive waves destroying the Egyptian army pursuing Israel.
Bryant G. Wood and Piotr Bienkowski argue — behind the paywall of the Biblical Archaeological Review — over just how early in the Bronze Age an earthquake brought down the walls of Joshua’s Jericho. (When Miller and Hayes wryly comment on Wood’s argument, “apparently in perfect timing for the seventh day of the Israelite march around the walls”, I assumed they were being cynical. But no, a reading of Wood’s article does make it clear that the “earthquake” presumably struck after the Israelites had marched around the walls seven days!)
Theories of this sort attempt to give naturalistic and scientifically acceptable explanations for the more fantastic and miraculous biblical claims. In our opinion, however, these theories presuppose such hypothetical scenarios, such a catastrophic view of history, and such marvelous correlations of coincidental factors that they create more credibility problems of their own than the ones they are intended to solve. (p. 53)
The famous Ramses/Ramesses name featured eleven times throughout the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties of Egypt — from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age. And since in Exodus 1:11 we read . . .
So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh
. . . and since that bland “statement of fact” has, for some, a “ring of authenticity”, the Exodus is best dated during the reign of one of the Ramesses. The great Ramesses II is the one of choice. He began his long reign around 1300 B.C.E. One detail in favour of this time slot is that it would allow the Israelites to reach Canaan in time for the above mentioned Merneptah stele inscription to record that “Israel is no more” after an Egyptian campaign.
Hayes and Miller again draw readers’ attentions to the drawbacks of this hypothesized date:
For one thing, we would expect Israelite storytellers to be familiar with and to use Mesopotamian and Egyptian names and customs in their narratives. Another problem with this proposed correlation between Egyptian history and the biblical narrative is that it does not square very well with biblical chronology. The Nineteenth and Twentieth dynasties ruled from the end of the fourteenth century until after the beginning of the eleventh century. Yet biblical chronology seems to place the exodus already in the fifteenth century. (p. 54)
Transjordanian Occupational Gap
It was once believed that there had been a significant gap of more than half a millennium in settlement in the region east of the Jordan River prior to the thirteenth century. From the 1200s B.C.E. renewed settlements and the rise of the kingdoms of Edom and Moab were witnessed. Given that the Biblical account of the wandering Israelites encountering the kingdoms of Edom and Moab on their way to Canaan, it followed that the Exodus and conquest of Canaan could not have happened before the 1200s B.C.E.
This line of argumentation was combined with, if not inspired by, the identification of Pharaoh Ramesses II as the pharaoh of the exodus (see above).
But there is a but…
More recent archaeological exploration in the Moabite and Edomite regions of southern Transjordan has discredited the idea of a sharp occupational gap prior to the thirteenth century. (p. 55)
Thirteenth-Century Destructions
West of the Jordan River, in the land of Canaan, there is evidence of “widespread city destructions” toward the end of the Late Bronze Age. Here is the accompanying map from the Miller and Hayes volume (p. 56):
Again, M&H list the problems with this hypothesis:
Late Bronze Age city destructions “were part of a general pattern throughout the ancient world”. We cannot know if the destructions occurred simultaneously or even with the onslaught of a common enemy. We do not know if warfare was responsible in most cases.
With the exceptions of Lachish and Hazor, the cities destroyed in this period are not the ones listed in the biblical account of the conquest.
Most of the sites that are identified with cities that the biblical account does associate with the conquest, on the other hand, have produced little or no archaeological indication even of having been occupied during the Late Bronze Age, much less of having been destroyed at the end of the period. Prominent among such “conquest cities” are Arad (present-day Tell Arad), Heshbon (Tell Hisban), Jericho (Tell es-Sultan), Ai (et-Tell), and Gibeon (el-Jib). (p. 55)
The Search for a Distinctively Israelite Material Culture
If only distinctive cultural remains could identify “Israelites” in distinction from other ethnic groups in the land! Some scholars have focussed on “collared-rim jars and four-room houses”:
The collared-rim jars; the four-room house: room 1 is a narrow courtyard, rooms 2, 3 and 4 are separated by pillars – room 3 likely being unroofed. People likely slept in the upper storey, animals below. – (Images from Dever, Rise of Ancient Israel)
Yet there is nothing intrinsically “Israelite” about either of these features, and in fact they show up in the regions of ancient Ammon and Moab, east of the Jordan River, as well as in the areas generally associated with Israelite settlement. Apparently these items belonged to a commonly shared culture throughout Iron I Palestine and therefore cannot be used to isolate particular sites, geographical areas, or historical periods as “Israelite.” (p. 57)
And as for pig bones? Surely the absence of pigs would indicate Israelite settlement, yes?
From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that no human behavioral evidence exists to indicate that pig avoidance was unique to any particular group in the ancient Near East. The fact that complex variables affect the choice to raise swine have confounded attempts to find an origin to the pig prohibition. Lots of people, for lots of reasons, were not eating pork. The bald fact is that there is no date before the Hellenistic period when we can assert with any confidence, based on archaeological and textual evidence, that the religious injunction which enjoined Jews from eating pork was actually followed by them alone as a measure of social distinction. (Hesse & Wapnish, p. 261 — referenced by Miller and Hayes — See also the post: The “Late” Origins of Judaism – The Archaeological Evidence)
The Conquest of Canaan: Observations of a Philologist . . .
Continued in the next post . . . .
Miller, J. Maxwell, and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. 2nd ed. Louisville, Ky. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.
Hesse, Brian, and Paula Wapnish. “Can Pig Remains Be Used for Ethnic Diagnosis in the Ancient Near East?” In The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present, edited by Neil Asher Silberman and David B. Small, 238–70. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.
Shanks, Hershel, William G. Dever, P. Kyle McCarter Jr, and Bruce Halpern. The Rise of Ancient Israel. Lectures Presented at a Symposium Sponsored by the Resident Associate Program, Smithsonian Institution. Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013.
I intend in this post to throw an idea into the ring for consideration. I have very little with which to defend the idea but I find it of interest. I have nothing stronger than that as my motive for posting it here:
that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was an allusion to the seduction of Greek wisdom
Early last year I posted — solely for the purpose of showing that the idea was not unknown among scholars — a summary of one academic proposal that Plato at one point was ultimately drawing upon the biblical Garden of Eden story of “the fall”. I still have strong reservations about the case made in that article and for that reason I have from time to time returned to have another look at the relevant sources to see if more cogent sense can be made of the comparisons or if the notion should be dropped entirely. Now I would like to propose a more plausible and cogent case for the reverse: that the biblical authors were drawing upon Plato. (The idea that the Hebrew Bible drew upon Greek literature is a minority view among scholars but nonetheless a reputable one that has been published in academic sources: see Niels Peter Lemche, Mandell and Freedman, Jan-Wim Wessellius, Philippe Wajdenbaum, RussellGmirkin, andrelatedpostsetc)
It is impressive to note how ophidian or anguine symbolism permeates Greek and Roman legends and myths, shaping Hellenistic culture. (Charlesworth, 127)
Yes, the serpent was a positive image among the Greeks of the classical and hellenistic eras of their chief god Zeus, but I will offer a more specific literary connection.
Evangelia Dafni attempted to argue that Plato’s panegyric of Socrates was indebted to some extent to the serpent who tempted Eve (see first link above). A key weakness in the argument, I believe, was its failure to provide a clear motive for the borrowing. If there was borrowing from the Hebrews it seemed to fail to add anything extra to the understanding of Plato’s text.
But notice how different everything looks in reverse. A potentially new depth of meaning is indeed added to the Genesis narrative by inverting Dafni’s suggestion.
Socrates can justly be considered the paragon of Greek wisdom. One might say that Socrates was the midwife at the birth of Greek philosophy, epitomized by Plato and Aristotle and their offshoots. In his dialogue The Symposium Socrates is directly compared with a viper whose bite is compared with Socrates overpowering his interlocutor by his unassailable questioning and speech. Socrates is depicted as being in a class of his own above all other mortals because of his wisdom as Eden’s serpent is wise above all the beasts of the earth. Socrates offers the wisdom of the gods. If one who had not met Socrates felt no disgrace or shame about his person, after an encounter with Socrates he would indeed be overwhelmed with shame of his former state of ignorance — as Adam and Eve were not ashamed of their nakedness until after they succumbed to the serpent’s temptation. What Socrates offers with his words is described as full of beauty, desirability and wisdom.
At this point, let’s recall the passage in Genesis:
2:25 And the two were naked, both Adam and his wife, and were not ashamed.
3:1 Now the serpent was moreφρονιμώτατος [LXX = discerning, prudent, wise] than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Let’s back up a little and start at the beginning.
Socrates is telling his companions a story of his encounter with the prophetess Diotima of Mantineia (punning names that could be translated literally as “Fear-God of Prophet-ville” – Rouse, 97) who educated him about the nature of love and immortality. Interestingly (perhaps, for me at any rate) Socrates deems the act of sexual intercourse between a man and woman as generating a form of immortality:
“To the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality,” she replied; “and . . . . we needs must yearn for immortality no less than for good . . . .”
All this she taught me at various times . . . . (Symposium, 206e-207a)
The discussion extends to addressing various ways humans can be thought of as immortal (“continually becoming a new person”), not unlike (this is my own comparison here, not that of Socrates) the common ancient image (as ancient as the epic of Gilgamesh) of the serpent regularly shedding its old skin in a process of “eternal” renewal.
I was astonished at her words, and said: “Is this really true, O thou wise Diotima?”
And she answered with all the authority of an accomplished sophist: “Of that, Socrates, you may be assured; — think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to . . . undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal. (208c)
Socrates proceeds to report Diotima’s elucidation of what is truly beautiful, “passing from view to view of beautiful things” until the one learning wisdom finally grasps true beauty and no longer is content with the inferior beauty of the physical world. Diotima concludes:
“Do consider,” she said, “beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, [one] will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities . . . and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if any man ever is.” (212a)
After Socrates’ speech in which the words of a divinely inspired prophet were presenting the ultimate in beauty that could ever be desired by mortals for the sake of an immortal name, who should rudely interrupt the occasion but a drunken Alcibiades. Alcibiades was a “man of the world”, a famed political figure, conscious of his beauty but also one who was enamoured of Socrates, both intellectually and physically.
Bust of Silenus (The MET) and Marsyas the satyr (ChatGPT image): “He is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up in the statuaries, shops, holding pipes and flutes in their mouths; and they are made to open in the middle, and have images of gods inside them.“
In Plato’s dialogue each guest had been expected to deliver some kind of ode to “love”. Alcibiades, arriving late, instead will tell all what Socrates himself can be likened to — in similes. Socrates is like the ugly Silenus, grotesque on the outside but cut him open and inside you will find images of the gods. Or he is like the entrancing satyr Marsyas who invented the music of the flute and “bewitched men by the power of his mouth”. The only difference, Alcibiades explains, is that Socrates can enchant and stir a longing for the divine merely by the means of his speech:
The only difference … is that you [=Socrates] do the very same without instruments by bare words! . . . When one hears you . . . we are overwhelmed and entranced. (215c-d)
Alcibiades brings in another simile with which to liken Socrates and his words: the serpent, specifically the persuasive power of the serpent!
Besides, I share the plight of the man who was bitten by the snake. . . . I have been bitten by a more painful viper, and in the most painful spot where one could be bitten — the heart, or soul, or whatever it should be called — stung and bitten by his discourses in philosophy, which hang on more cruelly than a viper when they seize on a young and not ungifted soul, and make it do and say whatever they will. (217e-218a)
Eve is not bitten by the serpent, of course, but she and Adam do for the first time feel shame as a consequence of listening to him. Shame was the bite Alcibiades said he felt after his time with Socrates. Alcibiades had attempted to seduce Socrates sexually but found him unmoved. Socrates gently chastised him by pointing out that he was trying to exchange what was beautiful to one’s physical eyes and pleasures (bronze) for the true beauty of wisdom (gold) – with the result that Alcibiades felt deep shame for his attempts to attain sexual favour with Socrates:
And there is one experience I have in presence of this man alone, such as nobody would expect in me; and that is, to be made to feel ashamed [αἰσχύνομαι, a form of the same word in LXX Gen 2:25]; he alone can make me feel it. . . I cannot contradict him . . . and, whenever I see him, I am ashamed . . . . (216b-c)
It is at that point where Alcibiades begins to describe his vain attempt to seduce Socrates and its humiliating aftermath.
Socrates was a man like no other:
There are many more quite wonderful things that one could find to praise in Socrates: but . . . it is his not being like any other man in the world, ancient or modern, that is worthy of all wonder. . . .
When you agree to listen to the talk of Socrates . . . you will find his words first full of sense, as no others are . . . (221c-222a)
But, Alcibiades warns, beware of being seduced by his wisdom to the extent that you are stirred to a desire for sexual gratification (an exchange of false beauty for true) and one feel shame as a consequence:
That is a warning to you . . . not to be deceived by this man . . . . (222b)
There we have it. In one episode in Plato’s dialogues we have a blend of a person “more wise” than any other mortal, one likened to a serpent, one whose speech is overpoweringly persuasive, who promises a form of immortality, who displays all that is truly beautiful and to be desired, yet who leaves the ignorant feeling shame over their former condition — specifically in relation to sexual desire.
Much more could be written but I have introduced them in earlier posts. We have seen Russell Gmirkin’s observation that it was Plato who portrayed an idyllic origin scene where animals and humans could converse with one another. I linked above to a similar discussion by Evangelia Dafni who drew attention to Plato’s comparison of Socrates with the serpent — although I believe this post brings an explanation for a possible borrowing from Plato to the Bible. If we ride with the possibility of a Hellenistic origin for the biblical literature, we may see in the serpent’s temptation of Adam and Eve a rebuke to the Greek philosophy that would have stood opposed to the wisdom that must come from an obedience to the commands of God. The image of the serpent as a religious icon had been familiar enough in the Levant for millennia and was most prominent anew in the Hellenistic world with its associations with Zeus, Athena and a host of other Greek associations (compare, for example, the golden fleece in a tree guarded by a serpent) — and even as a fit simile for the shame-inducing yet enlightening and immortality promising wisdom of Socrates.
By no means do I expect the above thoughts to seduce an innocent to partake of the wisdom of a Hellenistic origin of the Hebrew Bible. I present the above thoughts as an observation of some interest to those already persuaded on other grounds for the stories of Genesis being being formed from the raw material of Greek literature, Plato in particular.
Charlesworth, James H. The Good and Evil Serpent: How a Universal Symbol Became Christianized. New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010.
Dafni, Evangelia G. “Genesis 2–3 and Alcibiades’s Speech in Plato’s Symposium: A Cultural Critical Reading.” HTS Teologiese Studies 71, no. 1 (2015).
Rouse, W. H. D. Great Dialogues of Plato – The Republic – Apology – Crito – Phaedo – Ion – Meno – Symposium. Mentor Books, 1956.
Translations of Plato are a mix of those by Jowett, Fowler and Rouse (above) — with constant reference to the Greek text at the Perseus Digital Library
How often does one encounter the “I am not persuaded” copout? I call it a copout because it usually functions as an easy escape for one who is unable to say why a disliked argument is faulty. Here’s a formal response to the “I am not persuaded” line:
How might we recognize inappropriate doubt masquerading as valid criticism? Such doubt generally does not attend to the actual data and its explanation, falsifying it directly. It begs the question. Or, more commonly, it suggests a comparative situation but fails to supply the comparison; a given argument might be pronounced insufficient to convince, but what exactly establishes argumentative sufficiency is not stated (and usually cannot be). Of course, such judgments are meaningless without an overt standard or measure of sufficiency. And that measure is the data itself in relation to the broader object under investigation and the current explanation in play! Do these actually match up, or is a problem discernible in their relationship(s)? If the latter, the appropriate critical process should elicit doubt, along with the modification or abandonment of the hypothesis. Modification or the clear provision of an explanatory alternative is a signal that the appropriate critical method and doubt are operative. Without these elements, a doubting critic runs the danger of merely posturing.
Campbell, Douglas A. Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2014. p. 18
These past few weeks I’ve been trying to untangle my way through the data strands that seem to relate to Christian origins and early development (again) and I find myself coming back to the chimerical figure of Paul (again).
When I reach this point, as I have done so many times before, I tend to seek out (again) critics of the radical views and defenders of some form of canonical figure. This time, one of those critics I have dusted off from my database of electronic files is Richard Carrier. About nine years ago he posted The Historicity of Paul the Apostle in which he sharply criticized the arguments of Hermann Detering and Robert Price proposing that Paul was not a historical person. In this post I am more interested in what he has to say about Detering’s case than Price’s since it is Detering’s work (and works he engages with: Schoeps and Schwegler in particular) that I have been deeply immersed in recently. Carrier writes of Detering:
The best formal attempt to argue for the non-historicity of Paul is that of Hermann Detering (see The Fabricated Paul). I cannot ascertain his qualifications in the field. But his writings are well-informed. They just trip over logic a lot. His case is not sound. Nor is anyone else’s I’ve examined. They falter on basic methodology (like ignoring the effect prior probability must have on a conclusion, or conflating possibility with probability) and sometimes even facts (e.g., Detering seems to think self-referencing signatures commonly appear only in forgery; in fact, they are commonly found on real letters—I’ve seen several examples in papyrological journals).
Before I continue, some readers may think that my focus has been slanted towards “extreme” or “fringe” positions — terms that I find problematic despite their appearance in scholarly publications — but I must hasten to explain that the reason I don’t post so often on mainstream views is simply because they are widely recognized and readily accessible for anyone interested anyway. There are in fact two recent works on Galatians in particular that have made rich contributions to reading that epistle in new ways but within the parameters of “mainstream scholarship” that I would like to post about here, too. But I need to see if I can unravel a few questions relating to core issues first. Everything in its time. And speaking of time, I do point out again that the post by Carrier I am addressing is almost a decade old so I am not assuming he would necessarily write the same today.
I must also make it clear that I am not addressing the Paul-Simon Magus connection argument even though that was the focus of Richard Carrier’s criticism. I will address what I consider a few less well-founded criticisms of Detering, however.
But to the chase, and I have no doubts that that will be a collegial dialogue. (I further note that the blog post of 2015 has a tone of one of those pieces “written on the fly” — leaving the reader with the impression that more care and detail would have been added in a different venue at another time.)
Carrier’s first specific criticism:
Detering seems to think self-referencing signatures commonly appear only in forgery
I do not see evidence to support that criticism in any of Detering’s work, including in the specific item I understand Carrier was addressing: The Falsified (or Fabricated) Paul. The specific passage in focus here is Galatians 6:11
The link is to a page with thirty plus translations of the same passage.
Detering’s focus in The Falsified Paul is the inconsistency among scholarly exegetes:
The writer’s reference to his handwriting in 2 Thessalonians 3:17—’I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the mark in every letter of mine; it is the way I write’—is regarded by most exegetes as a sign of the letter’s inauthenticity. Why is the corresponding reference in Galatians not so regarded?
(Detering, p. 55, my bolding)
What would interest me is a comparison of the specific terminology of the signatures we have in the Pauline letters and an explanation for these statements. A quick cross check on ChatGPT yields the following instances:
Self-referencing signatures in ancient letters were a way for the author to authenticate the document, demonstrate authority, or add a personal touch. Here are a few notable examples from different cultures:
1. Letters of Cicero
The Roman statesman Cicero often ended his letters with a personal note or signature. In some letters, he explicitly mentions writing with his own hand, such as in a letter to Atticus: “Ego enim has quidem, Attice, litteras scripsi meis manibus.” (“For these letters, Atticus, I wrote with my own hand.”)
2. Aramaic Letters from Elephantine
In the 5th century BCE, Jewish mercenaries stationed at Elephantine in Egypt sent letters back and forth, some of which include self-referencing signatures. For example, in a letter from the archive, one of the writers adds a line in his own hand, noting that he wrote the letter himself as a way to authenticate it.
3. Papyri from Oxyrhynchus
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a collection of Greek texts from Egypt, includes many personal letters where writers occasionally mention that they are writing with their own hand. For instance, one letter might end with the phrase “ἐγὼ αὐτός,” meaning “I myself,” to indicate the writer’s personal involvement in the composition.
4. Babylonian Cuneiform Tablets
In ancient Mesopotamia, some cuneiform letters on clay tablets were signed by the scribe or author. Although they might not have used the phrase “with my own hand” due to the nature of the script, they often included personal seals or mentions of the scribe’s name as a way of authentication.
5. Biblical Letters
As mentioned earlier, Paul’s letters in the New Testament include self-referencing signatures, such as in 2 Thessalonians 3:17, where he writes, “I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand,” to assure the recipients of the letter’s authenticity.
6. Egyptian Hieratic Letters
In some ancient Egyptian letters written in hieratic script, the writer might add a personal note or a self-referencing line at the end of the letter to indicate that the content was personally composed or approved by them, though this was less common than in Greek or Roman letters.
These examples show that self-referencing signatures were a widespread practice across various cultures and periods in antiquity, often serving as a way to authenticate or personalize a document.
Unless Paul expected the original single letter to “the Galatians” — presumably implying a very wide geographical area with multiple church assemblies — should be preserved for a reading (and visual inspection) in each church area, without it being copied, one must wonder what such a distinctive handwritten signature was likely to accomplish. Did not the author expect the letter to be copied by another hand? In the case of Cicero writing to Atticus I can understand such a signature. But in a letter to be circulated among a wide geographical distribution of churches? Not so much. Either way, such a signature cannot serve as decisive evidence for the historicity of its claimed author.
With respect to Carrier’s criticism of Detering, I may have missed the evidence for Detering seeming “to think self-referencing signatures commonly appear only in forgery“. If that has been a point in any of his arguments it is one I have not recently located — though I cannot say I have read everything or even most of his works, in English or German.
Carrier launches into the main body of his criticism with “The Prior Probability” rubric. Now I like Bayes’ theorem. It has a place in research of any kind, as the cover and title of Sharon McGrayne’s book on the theory demonstrates:
McGrayne, Sharon Bertsch. The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy. New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012.
Don’t knock Bayes’ theorem.
But historians work with multiple tools, not just one. And much depends on the way we conceptualize the questions. Here is an example of what I mean:
Jesus belongs to several myth-heavy reference classes. He is a worshipped savior deity. He is a legendary culture hero. He is a Rank-Raglan hero. And he is a revelatory archangel (already as early as the earliest writings we have, granting the letters of Paul are such). All of those classes of person already start with a high prior probability of being mythical, because most members of them are mythical (or for culture heroes, about even). And these are beings all of whom are claimed to be historical, yet are usually in fact mythical. Just like Jesus.
(Carrier, The Historicity of Paul the Apostle)
Agreed. But we can make it even simpler. The Jesus that all historians have to work with is a literary Jesus — by definition. He is found in no other ancient place than literature or inscriptions or scribblings. The same, we must hasten to add, is true of any “historical” person — whether we are talking about Winston Churchill or Julius Caesar. What I am saying is that history is dead; it no longer exists; there is nothing there — except in written or other forms of recording. All our historical persons live only in our minds as we read the surviving records. Some of those imagined figures once had a historical reference figure who was real — but that reality now escapes us in its fullness and can only be reconstructed according to our “best lights” of imagination fuelled by inscriptions or writings or other evidence. The historian’s job, or at least one of them, is to study those texts and images to discover what led to their creation, whether it was a reality or a fiction.
Yes, Bayes’ theorem can help us answer the question of whether certain texts and images reflect a real or an imaginary figure as their source of inspiration. But there is a but. It begins with how we frame our question.
So let’s get back to Paul. In contrast to Jesus, Carrier writes:
Paul … falls into the class of ordinary persons who wrote letters and had effects on history. In ratio, most of such people claimed to exist, actually existed.
So in Carrier’s blog post of nearly ten years ago Jesus was presented as a miracle working, death-defying man-god — a clearly mythical figure — while Paul was, by strikingly mundane contrast, an “ordinary person who wrote letters and had effects on history”.
That starting point is where I have a problem.
No, Paul did not write letters like any “ordinary person”. An “ordinary person” reveals their personality or their ideas through letters. Contrast Paul as a letter writer as summed up by Albert Schweitzer:
The odd thing is that [Pauline scholars] write as if they understood what they were writing about. They do not feel compelled to admit that Paul’s statements taken by themselves are unintelligible, consist of pure paradoxes, and that the point that calls for examination is how far they are thought of by their author as having a real meaning, and could be understood in this light by his readers. They never call attention to the fact that the Apostle always becomes unintelligible just at the moment when he begins to explain something; never give a hint that while we hear the sound of his words the tune of his logic escapes us.
(cited in Hart, 131f)
Carrier referred to an article on Paul by James Tabor and it is worth returning to Tabor’s words in this context:
There are four different “Pauls” in the New Testament, not one, and each is quite distinct from the others. New Testament scholars today are generally agreed on this point.
(Tabor referencing F.C. Baur and more recent scholars such as Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Jerome Murphy-O’Conner)
So which one is “the historical Paul”? We know that the author of Acts most certainly did not consider an “ordinary letter writer” to be the historical Paul.
I could fill several posts pulling out similar statements by scholars testifying either to the obscurity, or to the anything-but-ordinary “incomprehensible genius”, of a figure behind the letters.
Furthermore, on what basis can we assert that Paul “had effects on history”? Does not the evidence indicate that Paul’s letters had been somehow lost or forgotten while the churches grew, and that it was only from the mid second century that the letters were coming to light and being embraced. Christianity was evidently well established quite apart from any memory of Paul by the early second century. That sounds like Paul had little impact on history in the first century. Does not the evidence rather suggest that Paul was a product of second century history?
Another question comes to my mind here: Is it not somewhat hard to understand how a “brilliantly inconsistent” thinker could have had a serious and long-lasting impact on many other persons? A philosopher can be expected to write with a bullet directed point of view. Paul’s many contradictions, non sequiturs and mis-matches are sometimes said to be indications of his febrile genius or simply of an expansive and fluctuating intellect. Maybe that was the case. I wonder how many such persons have dramatic impacts on history, though. (I am open to being better informed here, so leave a comment if you can contribute to this point of discussion.)
First, they all cohere in style (idioms of vocabulary, connotation, grammar, punctuation, sentence length). The forged letters do not. They neither cohere with each other (except when produced as a unit, like the Seneca correspondence), nor with the style features of the authentic six. So one person did write those six (even if, as the letters openly state, they also reflected the views of a co-worker whom Paul sometimes names in each case).
No, they do not all cohere in style. I recently posted Harold Hoehner’s demonstration that Galatians has a style quite distinct from other letters attributed to Paul. Douglas Campbell in Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography, reminds readers that Paul’s letters are…
characterized by a remarkable variation in argumentation, structure, and expression. Just Romans and 1 Corinthians, whose authenticity is usually uncontested, when placed side by side, seem to come not infrequently from overtly different places in conceptual terms. Meanwhile, adding only 2 Corinthians and Galatians to the comparison diversifies the overall situation further, creating a fundamental methodological challenge. How are interpreters to supply a unified account of various aspects of Paul himself as his texts strain in multiple directions?
The same scholar addresses the range of stylistic differences that have divided scholars over questions of authenticity of both whole letters and parts of letters. While Campbell seeks to resolve many of these arguments (including with a discussion on computer assisted stylometric analysis), his detailed work is at the same time a reminder that scholars have long been troubled by what they see as a lack of coherence and inconsistency of style in the letters of Paul. Paul may have used a vastly varying range of styles or maybe we should test the idea of multiple authors as the preferred explanation — either way we must explain the lack of coherence in style! It makes no difference to the question of historicity. But let’s adhere to the real state of the evidence.
Carrier’s next claim:
Second, they are stitched together from pieces of other letters. Each full letter named in the New Testament actually contains pieces of several letters, whose full content and original destination are now lost (see OHJ, p. 511). Sometimes so badly connected up as to be nearly unintelligible (e.g. the transition between 1 Cor. 8 and 9: OHJ, pp. 582-83). One does not forge letters that way. Which makes this another good indicator that these are not forgeries. Rather, someone tried to semi-reverently keep an original collection, but just the parts they liked, and assembled them together into a new whole in the most logical way they could. Their meddling after that was small and nitpicking, as the manuscript evidence shows, or blatant and obviously un-Pauline, as some of the interpolations made before 150 A.D. show.
Here Carrier is assuming that a historical Paul wrote the pieces of letters stitched together when in fact that is the question being raised. If we have a “Pauline school” of scribes, with different authors contributing individual perspectives to a whole, we then have a literary corpus not unlike some of the Old Testament works claiming to be by this or that prophet or by Moses himself. Collaborative efforts found ways to accommodate different perspectives up to a point, often stitched somewhat crudely together. This is arguably part of the catholicizing process that we see in other New Testament writings (especially Luke and Acts). So the evidence is open to multiple interpretations.
Next,
Third, they all make arguments and interact persuasively in a context where the Jewish temple was still standing and its cult operating. And in a context where views of Jesus and the Church that appear in the Gospels have not yet come to exist (not even to denounce or counter or rebut, much less use or co-opt or transform). This is very unlikely unless the letters were written before the year 66 A.D. (when the Jewish War began, an event wholly unknown to the author), and before the Gospels were written (which could be as early as 70 or 75 A.D. for Mark).
This is a common point of view but it is not a solid argument. The most basic principle of dating documents is to begin where we have the most certain evidence. That means it is sound method to begin with the middle of the second century for the indisputable existence of the Pauline letters. It is only in that century that we have independent confirmation of the existence of the letters. As we work back we rely more on hypothetical reconstructions. Mark “could be as early as 70” but it could equally be as late as the second century (cf arguments for the influence of Josephus and the abomination of desolation pointing to Hadrian’s time). There are passages in Romans and 1 Thessalonians that make a lot of sense in a context after (even well after) the destruction of the temple and end of its cult. So the historical context is not so clear cut. Similarly for the opponents of Paul that we read about in Galatians and the Corinthian correspondence. Scholars have had to assume the existence of various types of “heresies” for which we have no first century evidence. It is only when we come to the second century that we begin to read evidence for the existence of “false gospels” and some Christians attempting to impose circumcision on believers and the heated controversy over the teachings and authority of Paul vis a vis Jerusalem apostles. The second century does indeed look very much like a potential home for the letters of Paul. I elaborate a little on this point in addressing the next section of Carrier’s argument.
In Carrier’s view,
That third point is important, because the letters explicitly present themselves internally as having been written in the 50s A.D. . . . So the congruence of that fact with their content totally ignoring later existing doctrinal and tradition battles in the Church is very likely if the 50s is indeed when they were written.
I have to disagree. It is in the second century that we find debates over circumcision and whether the law should be obligatory on Christians (one example: Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho), over whether meat sacrificed to idols should be eaten, speaking in tongues (Montanism in Asia Minor from the 150s), questions of celibacy, the competitive status of Paul and the Twelve (Marcionism from the 140s). It is as if Paul’s letters (and the Jerusalem council of Acts 15) had all been forgotten somehow. But how convenient it was that in the midst of those competing claims we find the first evidence of Paul’s letters and, lo and behold, they happened to give decisive — “historical” — answers to such pressing second century questions.
Carrier continues:
Note that letters that don’t speak to a forger’s own time and circumstances, even covertly or obliquely or prophetically, run counter to a forger’s interests; the last thing forgers want to do is work hard to produce a document that is circumstantially obsolete before it is even published.
Circumcision and the requirements of the law were questions in Justin Martyr’s time (mid second century) and Justin had no knowledge of a first century apostolic council to bring to bear on the discussion. The Elchasite “heresy” originated in the early second century (the time of Trajan) and was so significant that it became influential in the subsequent rise of Manichaeism and Islam. The Elchasites taught a “gospel”, a “good news” that required circumcision for believers in Christ (who happened to be a great angel from heaven) and revered certain days and “elements of the world” (water, heaven, earth, bread, oil, salt, wind) — blithely unaware of Paul’s letter to the Galatians that sought to combat the distinctive features of that second century “heresy”.
So I do sympathize with Carrier when he writes:
I can’t even think of a single example of an ancient forger successfully ignoring all the central doctrinal and tradition disputes of their own day merely to produce a convincing period-accurate but thereby contemporarily-irrelevant document. The temptation to support or attack the then-going views (usually by fabricating early support for them, e.g. 2 Peter) is simply too strong, and in fact is the usual motivation for forging documents in the first place.
Very true. But I believe he is mistaken when he adds, “In short, the letters of Paul make no sense in the second century.” On the contrary, the second century is when we find the most relevance for Paul’s letters.
As far as I aware we have no evidence outside the letters themselves (and Acts) for these controversies existing in the first century.
Carrier:
Most Detering-style arguments are based on claiming hundreds of interpolations in these letters that conveniently and circularly support Detering’s conclusions, all based on a series of ad hoc assumptions about the second century history of the Church, when in fact almost everything we know about that is speculation, not established fact. The more assumptions you have to rely on, and the more conveniently complex they are, the lower the prior probability of your thesis. Speculation in, speculation out. Detering does not seem aware of this logical fact. He thus falls into the common trap of all bad historians: any theory you can gerrymander to fit all the evidence must be true. Because look how well it fits! Sorry. Illogical.
I don’t know the evidence on which Carrier bases the above characterization of Detering’s arguments. I have not seen arguments of his that are “based on claiming hundreds of interpolations . . . . and . . . . ad hoc assumptions about the second century history of the Church”. On the contrary, I have seen in Detering’s works an abundance of documented source material from the second, third and fourth centuries that address the state of “the Church”, with varying degrees of reliability, in the second century. I have translated a 270 page essay by Detering on this era and you can make the judgment for yourself. As for the 85 page book Falsified Paul a word search on “interpo” (for interpolation/interpolator…) yields only three hits. Nor should we overlook the undeniable fact that letters and biographies of Paul really were written by forgers in the second century. We have several of those forged letters in the New Testament (the Pastorals, for example). And we know for a fact that there were disputes about what was original in Paul’s letters, what had been cut out by opponents, and so forth. This situation is a fact that any historian must be aware of when examining the evidence.
It is true that the state of the evidence does not often allow a historian to do more than reconstruct “a more plausible scenario” for early Christianity. To that extent there is inevitably a degree of speculation in our reconstructions. The use of Bayes can help us refine the “most plausible” scenario. But when it comes to the question of “how/when/where Paul began”, whether as a historical figure behind the literature or as the literary figure itself, I think at least some “Detering style arguments” are well worth serious consideration.
Campbell, Douglas A. Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing, 2014.
Carrier, Richard. “The Historicity of Paul the Apostle.” Richard Carrier (blog), June 6, 2015. https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7643.
Detering, Hermann. “Die Gegner des Paulus – Judaistenthese 2. Jahrhundert – Radikalkritik,” July 4, 2018. http://radikalkritik.de/die-gegner-des-paulus-judaistenthese-2-jahrhundert. — Translation: The Opponents of Paul: A Second Century Judaizers Thesis
Detering, Hermann. The Falsified Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight. Journal of Higher Criticism, 2003.
Tabor, James. “The Quest for the Historical Paul.” Biblical Archaeology Society, June 13, 2024. https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/the-quest-for-the-historical-paul/
Hart, Patrick. A Prolegomenon to the Study of Paul. Leiden ; Boston: BRILL, 2020.
And with thanks to Chrissy Hansen’s articles alerting me to more works to read and ideas and criticisms to ponder, if not always to agree with.
Others have translated several of Hermann Detering’s works into English and these are available on Radikalkritik.
I have translated a number of additional works of his but copyright prohibits me from making some of them public. Some works that are otherwise only available in German on HD’s Radikalkritik website can be made public — as far as I am aware. I have attempted to make contact with guardians of Radikalkritik without success. I am more than willing to work with them should contact be made in the future.
Translation of the independently published Inszenierte Fälschungen: Die Paulusbriefe in der holländischen Radikalkritik. This is based on HD’s doctoral thesis:
Title and overview of Gnostic Elements in Paul’s letters
Introduction
Phil 2:6-11 or: Jesus versus Jaldabaoth
1 Corinthians 2:6-8 – Who are the “rulers of this age”?
1 Corinthians 15:8 – The Apostle as a “Miscarriage”
Bibliography
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The following is a copy of files I produced for my own personal use in January 2022. They almost certainly will not be of a quality for general reading, but I upload them here simply because I suspect I will not get around to tidying them up for more general use and others may make allowances for their drawbacks and still find them useful:
The Gnostic Interpretation of the Exodus and the Beginnings of the Cult of Joshua Jesus
I could see no publisher proprietary data in my Kindle version so I have posted my machine translation in good faith, believing that this upload is not in violation of any laws.
