Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Category: Historical Methods and Historiography
A broad church. Initially included Historiography in the name. Is “History” too broad and potentially misleading? This category includes discussions of research methods by historians as well as philosophical discussions about both the nature of history and the nature of the writing of history. Includes the problematic methods of biblical scholars. Or should the latter be moved to Biblical Studies as incompatible with the former? (Compare the difference between astronomy and astrology.) Does not include the methods of research and narrating history by ancient authors. See under Ancient Literature.
Russell Gmirkin did not argue that ALL of the books of the Jewish Bible originated in the Hellenistic era. When I began to post on the earlywritings forum that “Why the Hellenistic era for ALL “Old Testament” books should be taken seriously” I was attempting to set out why it is both possible and plausible to conclude that “all” were Hellenistic compositions. Russell and I had some differences in both hypotheses and historical methods, but I found the details of his case for the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) being of Hellenistic origin to be very strong: see the links in my post that initiated this series.
Finally a new critic emerged on the “Academic Discussion” section of the earlywritings forum. I post his criticism here:
This is a comment on Neil’s original post in this thread and the issues it raises about general historical methodology. It may not be a response to Neil’s position as developed in later posts.
In later posts Neil has referred to arguments that the author of the Pentateuch knew Plato et al. I’m going to leave this aside. a/ I am not at all convinced for reasons discussed in earlier threads and don’t really want to rehash those arguments. b/ Right or wrong this is a rather different argument that the earlier ones about general methodology. If we have solid evidence of links between Plato’s works and the Pentateuch then, accepting that Plato did not know the Pentateuch, there are straightforward implications for dating the Pentateuch whatever ones general methodology.
There is an argument that the Hebrew of the Pentateuch requires a preHellenistic date. I’m going to leave this aside. It is agreed that prima-facie the Hebrew of the Pentaeuch is much earlier than say the Hebrew of Daniel Chronicles Ben Sira but Hebrew scholars dispute how conclusive this sort of evidence is and my personal opinion is pretty much worthless.
The post is about ALL Old Testament books but I’m afraid I can’t take it seriously in this form. It may be my narrow mindedness but I’m sure Nahum for example is a pre-Hellenistic work. The same goes for Deutero-Isaiah which has real implications for tradition found in the Pentateuch. I’m going to concentrate on the idea of the Pentateuch in anything remotely like its present form being a Hellenistic work.
On the one hand we have no unambiguous pre-Hellenistic evidence for the Pentateuch. (I regard Hecataeus on the Jews according to Diodorus Siculus as authentic but this is technically extremely early Hellenistic rather than pre-Hellenistic.) On the other hand things like the Elephantine papyri suggest that the Pentateuch was not central to Jewish religion in the early Persian period. This means that prima-facie we should take seriously the idea that the Pentateuch was not only redacted in the Persian or later period but effectively created then. I have serious difficulties with a Persian origin of the Penateuch but it prima-facie should be taken seriously.
The difficulty is that neither Neil or I regard the Persian period as plausibly creative in this way, hence ‘Persian or later period’ becomes Hellenistic period. I am unable to regard this as prima-facie plausible. Apart from anything else the creation of a work that has all the signs of a long process of development and combination of different sources almost immediately before our earliest external evidence for its existence is IMO just not how things happen. I have similar problems with the idea of the NT being created around the time of Marcion. This may be a prejudice on my part, but if so then so be it.
by andrewcriddle » Fri Feb 23, 2024 9:54 pm
For the full context see the link/file at the end of this post.
What do you think of that criticism?
At first I was somewhat excited to think that a lengthy argument was being given for me to engage with, but there was precious little argument, alas. Rather, there were lots of “I’ll leave that asides” and an “I can’t take that seriously”. There was no engagement with the case I had set out for the logical fallacy at the heart of the hypothesis that the Hebrew Bible was composed over many centuries from as early as the Iron Age. There was a lot of incredulity expressed. I was disappointed. (It did not seem worthy as a submission to a forum headed “Academic Discussion”. Was the moderator himself unaware of the meaning of “Academic Discussion”? But it appears since I left the forum Andrew has been made the moderator of “Academic Discussion” so I have no desire to return there.)
I have found this among a number of people who have long been so steeped in the Documentary Hypothesis that they have come to assume it is an unarguable fact. Different types of Hebrew are assumed to be evidence of a long evolving series of biblical compositions over centuries. That different forms of Hebrew, even those known to be old, were kept alive and used by different scribes in the same era seems to be too much for them to accept as a possibility despite the scholarly arguments for it.
I posted a copy of my response to Andrew Criddle’s objections at the same time here:
The biblical works have traditionally been understood as the product of an evolution over centuries, usually said to be from the ninth or eighth to the third centuries, under the influence of Mesopotamian, Hittite, Syrian, Ugaritic, Egyptian cultures.
There is a serious problem with that view, however. The absence of evidence prior to the third century for either the biblical works themselves or for the major events that the Bible narrates.
The advantage of the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the “OT” is that explains
all of the cultural influences we find in the Bible
AND ALSO explains
why we would not expect to find any evidence for either the books themselves or the major events they write about before the third century.
Notice this observation from a conference paper by Jonathan Ben-Dov (I am not suggesting Ben-Dov himself has anything to do with the Hellenistic era hypothesis):
As argued above, the metaphor of influence dictates that the source culture remains unaffected by the act of the contact. Like a candle, which can light other candles without diminishing its own flame, so the great source culture is not changed by the nation which received its cultural capital. . . .
This image, however, is not necessarily true. I would like to suggest an example from the field of Hellenism, which is close in its geographical scope and not too far away in time. People often talk of ʻHellenistic Influenceʼ on Judea, Syria or Egypt. However, the very essence of Hellenism is its being an amalgam of Greek culture with the rich and ancient cultures of the East. The Hellenistic kingdoms in Syria and Egypt were by no means Greek; they combined Greek cultural elements with the ancient traditions of the hosting countries. Hellenism was a cultural entity in constant progression.
That’s also the essence of what the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the Primary History in particular (Genesis to 2 Kings) is all about.
In another sub-forum in earlywritings someone used to object that the Hellenistic era hypothesis “degraded” Judeans and Samaritans by suggesting they were mindless pawns who could not have their own culture. But that criticism misunderstands Hellenism — as I have attempted to make clear from the start and as we see spelled out above by Ben-Dov.
The Pentateuch and Primary History are as unique as Hellenistic era Egypt and Hellenistic era Syria. None is “Greek”. Nor are any of them traditional “Egyptian” or traditional “Syrian”. They are each distinctive cultures that have been created by the Egyptians and Syrians themselves. Ditto for the Judeans and Samaritans, I suggest. The Pentateuch is not Greek, but nor is it a product of the pre-Hellenistic Syrian Yahwist cult. What we find in the Pentateuch, however, are many echoes of Greek literature and ideologies and many references to the Yahwist ideas found throughout Syria-Negev, etc.
For the original comment in its context and responses/criticisms see
In this post I will explain “my personal reason” for strongly suspecting a Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature — though I am sure I have come across the same ideas throughout different books and articles over the years. It follows on from #5 in the preceding post. When I wrote that I was expecting to follow up with detailed discussions from interpretations of the archaeological finds but have decided now to put that off for later.
I have more recently (subsequent to writing this post on the earlywritings forum) come across a comparable view that was expressed in a 2016 conference (my bolding):
As Jean Louis Ska suggests, The disappearance of a culture triggers off a certain type of literature. This is the case in Mesopotamia with Berossus and in Egypt with Manetho. They wrote their work in Hellenistic times when their civilizations’ glory already belonged to the past. The Torah could be – to some extent – an answer of the same type to the end of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah.
– Markl, Dominik, Jean-Pierre Sonnet, and Peter Dubovsk, eds. The Fall of Jerusalem and the Rise of the Torah. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. p. 6
Russell Gmirkin, it should be noted, published evidence that pointed to both Berossus and Manetho being sources for parts of the Penteuch.
My “personal vibe” that is in sync with the Hellenistic era is reflection on “the nature of the biblical literature itself”. The Primary History [i.e. Genesis to 2 Kings] is not the kind of literature that arises sui generis from a vacuum. One expects to see antecedents over time that lead to that kind of work. And the closest antecedents we find are in the Greek literature, not in that of the SyriaMesopotamian regions. Assyrian vassal treaties, the epics of Gilgamesh, of Baal, and so forth, simply fall short by comparison.
But what kind of society produces that kind of literature? It takes more than a scribal elite responsible for administrative and trade records, or even engaged in cultic verses and prayers and spells for cures, etc. The kind of literature in our Bibles required reasonably prosperous and complex societies with a literate class that engaged with the kinds of stories and ideas that had relevance to their class, ethnic and regional identities. They had to have a reasonably widespread audience to engage with those ideas and stories and whose interest or vulnerabilities or needs encouraged their literary development. The social groups must have been somewhat extensive and complex because of the various competing and related ideas found in that literature.
In other words we are talking about fairly advanced societies in economic growth and social complexity, and who also have comparable antecedent literature.
The archaeological record does point to some kind of growth of Jerusalem and surrounds in the eighth and seventh centuries, but I am not sure it really reaches the kind of level that Finkelstein and Silberman seemed to think was adequate for a “renaissance literary activity”. Besides, what kinds of antecedents were available at or up to that time to mushroom into what we find in the Bible?
The Persian era is by all accounts that I have seen in relative decline. Persian “liberal” rule that allowed Judeans and Samarians to do their own thing is more easily understood as administrative neglect, not caring at all about their development — only collecting levees for the army and taxes for the king. (Witness the Xenophon’s ability to march his Greek army untouched through the empire!)
The economic revival, with its related social growth in complexity and size, came with the arrival of the Greeks. So did the antecedent literature.
Herodotus’s Histories has a remarkably similar structure to the Primary History: opening with world history, having a close look at Egypt as a follow up, and finally getting down to the narrow view of the conflict between two powers — AND all told within the framework of a theological interest: the lesson of the deciding hand of the god through his earthly sanctuary. And all told in a series of books in prose, both frequently with competing accounts of the same event.
I am not denying the obvious differences when saying that. What I’m trying to do is to draw attention to the “equally obvious” similarities. Did those similarities really emerge independently? Did the Hebrew literature really inspire that of the Greeks? Were the Judeans and Samarians in the poverty-stricken, underdeveloped Persian era really hosting a literate class devouring Greek literature? (I am on record as deploring argument by rhetorical questions so I will hasten to add that those questions are more than rhetorical: they represent a series of expectations that we must propose with hypotheses other than the Hellenistic era one.)
And then we have the ideological content of the literature. How do we explain the sudden introduction of stories of Exodus, Joshua’s Conquest, Judges, David and Solomon’s united kingdom and empire, if those — as the archaeological record tells us — never happened?
At this point it is worth looking at the propaganda use the biblical works were put to in the Hasmonean period. Were not the Hasmoneans seeking to justify their conquests by appeals to a historical heritage? In a time of Greek conquest do we not expect indigenous populations to at least sometimes seek redress by counter-narratives that put themselves in the positions of the god-blessed and ultimately greater powers? Again, these are more than rhetorical questions.
As for the divisions found even within the literature — the Samarian/Mount Gerizim point of view versus that of Jerusalem — have not scholars long since identified these differences underlying the multiple points of view (and sometimes outright conflict) within the biblical literature?
Mention has been made of Gmirkin in this thread. Before I read Gmirkin’s book I was prompted to read Plato’s Laws (as well as, again, Timaeus and Crito) by another scholar and was completely thrown back in my chair when I saw (and wondered how I had not seen it before) the striking similarities between Plato and the Pentateuch’s laws. Oh of course all those sacrifices and cultic rituals are of Levantine/Syrian/Canaanite origin, but the Pentateuch is a lot more than those.
The creation, the merging of humans and gods, the flood and annihilation, the wandering of the new generation, the coming together ….. and so forth. And then the laws about holiness, godliness, sacred feasts, marriage and sexuality, the judges and tribes, etc etc etc etc : Did Plato really twig to all of that from his reading of the Pentateuch? (At least one scholar has addressed the relationship of a scene in Plato’s Symposium with the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.)
And further yet — how many scholars have noticed the similarities between the biblical Yahweh and the Greek Dionysus? I have read the comparisons a number of times. Surely pre-Hellenistic Yahwism was distinctively Levantine, with no appreciable differences between the Yahwism of Samaria, Judea, Negev, Canaan, Syria…. So what gave him the Greek overlay in the Bible?
Okay — these are my generally subjective responses to how I read the literature of the OT with my knowledge of Greek literature in mind. I have not presented a systematic argument, I know. But for what it’s worth, I thought it might be of some point to note how I have come to read the literatures of the Hebrews and Greeks and the conclusions that seem to present themselves to me as a result.
by neilgodfrey » Tue Feb 20, 2024 4:29 pm
To read the original post in context and to see Stephen Goranson’s critical responses ….
By the way, I have informed Stephen Goranson that he is welcome to respond here to my resposting of his criticisms of Russell Gmirkin — despite my earlier prohibition on his posts to this blog. For this series alone I have lifted my relegation of SG’s comments to spam.
In Part 4 I pointed to discussions that answered a list of criticisms against the case that the Hebrew Bible was composed prior to Hellenistic times. Those discussions were mostly from other blog posts of mine but they covered what had been repeated at various times in the earlywritings forum. For anyone interested in the details and context of Stephen Goranson’s ongoing discussion of my responses to his list of data points (that he presented as “evidence” of pre-Hellenistic biblical writings) see the copy of the page at the end of this post.
What follows here is the second part to my attempt to justify the plausibility (even greater explanatory power) of the Hellenistic provenance of all (though Russell Gmirkin would, I think, have said only “most”) the books of the Old Testaments. In my opening post (Part 1) I addressed the circularity underpinning the dominant current view of the Documentary Hypothesis. This time I branched out into the data that is better explained by the Hellenistic era thesis.
I included this in my discussion on the earlywritings forum — again, see the link below for the context.
Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2
There is more to the Hellenistic provenance thesis than the simple fact of the circularity of the methods of dating the OT books by the past conventional scholarship — something that so far not even SG has denied. Given that SG’s reference to Langlois (when read in full) also allows at least for the possibility of a Hellenistic provenance, we have room to continue.
Archaeology reveals
1. The archaeological evidence of pre-Hellenistic Judea-Samaria has demonstrated that major moments of biblical history are fictions. The “invasion” of Canaan by an “Israelite” ethnic group never happened. The most that can be said about the “Kingdom” of David and Solomon is that it was little more than a village incapable of extending dominance over any area of note. (Jamieson-Drake saw evidence of development from a “lower-order society” to a “chiefdom” in Jerusalem, which falls far from the level of “a state”.)
Why write fiction?
2. The question must arise, then, why such stories were told? Were the stories derived from historical memories? Archaeology has suggested that is unlikely. A fundamental and inescapable fact of any literature is that it must reflect the ideas and beliefs and understandings that are part of its cultural matrix. One specific ideological feature of the narrative of David is that it shares manners, customs, assumptions that we find in the Persian kingdom. One might therefore wonder if the stories were told as part of ideological hopes for an imminent greatness, or at least as an attempt to identify with other great powers, whether of the past and/or present.
But what kind of fiction?
3. The literary structure and style of the Primary History (Genesis-2 Kings), as other scholars (not those arguing for a Hellenistic origin, by the way) have shown, is comparable to the Histories of Herodotus. The closest genre to the Primary History is found in the Greek world. Another comparable genre is the autobiographical narrative. Some scholars have attempted to explain this observation by speculating that Greek works were well known to the subjects of the Persian empire or that even the biblical books were known to the Greeks and influenced the Greeks. One needs to look for the explanation that raises fewest difficulties or questions.
Nothing uniform — why?
4. There are vastly different styles among the biblical books. One can explain this fact by positing a long period of evolution and various cultural influences over centuries. One can also explain the same fact by positing contemporary regional differences. As one scholar noted, imagine if all we had about Socrates were the writings of Plato and Xenophon. Would we have to assume that there was a vast time gap between the two accounts since they are so at odds in so many ways?
What kind of society?
5. One ought also to look at the kind of socio-cultural-economic society that would be required to produce the biblical literature. Here again the archaeological evidence can be interpreted in favour of the Hellenistic period. But this is a vast topic of its own.
The argument emerges from other hypotheses
The scholars I have had in mind while setting out the above points have, with one exception, not been advocates of the Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature. The archaeological evidence that discounts the historicity of “biblical history”, the comparisons with Greek literature and Persian royal ideologies, — all of these are found in works of scholars who never entertained a Hellenistic time setting, as far as I am aware. Philip Davies himself (with whom I began in the OP) always argued for the Persian era for the Primary History and Prophets.
But there are also problems with a Persian era setting that disappear if we move the compositions of the books to the third century.
by neilgodfrey » Tue Feb 20, 2024 11:24 am
In the next post I will set out my personal reason for strongly suspecting a Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature.
Stephen Goranson has been a regular critic of Russell Gmirkin. Stephen posted the following points (in the earlywritings forum) that he claimed gave reasonable grounds for dating the entire Hebrew Bible (he referred to the “TaNaK“) before Hellenistic era:
There are reasons to consider some TaNaK texts to be older than third century, some of which have been discussed here.
Qumran texts, safely considered to be copies rather than autographs, show developments over time. And some may themselves may be older; at least, so Michael Langlois (name searchable here) has argued concerning some paleo-Hebrew mss. Few have been radiocarbon dated (more to be published). Statistically it is unlikely that the oldest one has yet been tested and published.
Deir ‘Alla inscription.
Silver amulets.
It is not plausible that temple priests, before third century, were illiterate and had nothing to read.
As Stephen Goranson noted, several of those points had been discussed previously on that forum so one might have expected him to have addressed what had already been presented as responses to his claims that they pointed to a pre-Hellenistic date for the Jewish Bible. I posted my response to Stephen’s reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Michael Langlois’ argument in an earlier Vridar post:
As for the Deir ‘Alla inscription, I posted my own observation about how it could well be interpreted as confirmation of Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic era thesis. See
Stephen’s next point — implying the Hellenistic era hypothesis was declaring that priests “were illiterate and had nothing to read” — is just silly.
As for the difference between the Hebrew of the Pentateuch and other parts of the Bible, we cannot assume that the only explanation for the difference must be a long period of development, and I am sure Stephen knows this. Recently I translated a French work by a couple of renowned biblical and archaeological scholars that included this section:
Linguistic Evidence?
Can the question of the date of the texts of the Pentateuch, or of other biblical texts, be resolved by distinguishing between Classical Biblical Hebrew and Late Biblical Hebrew—a distinction that would offer certain seemingly objective criteria for dating biblical texts? It is not surprising that this method has gained a significant number of adherents, particularly in North America and Israel; we will not go into detail here.19 Let us simply highlight a few precautions to observe in using this method. First of all, we must ask, with E. Ullendorf and E. A. Knauf, whether Biblical Hebrew was truly a spoken language.20 The evidence for the existence of so-called Classical Hebrew21 outside the Bible is limited to a few inscriptions and personal names, which do not allow us to affirm that there existed a unified “Classical Hebrew” during the monarchical period. We must allow for dialectal variation in extrabiblical written and oral texts and, more importantly, for differences between literary language and vernacular language. Furthermore, there is no doubt that certain late texts like Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) differ from what is called Classical Biblical Hebrew. But texts that may well be as late as Ecclesiastes can also be written in perfectly “Classical” Hebrew, as is the case with Zechariah 1–8 and the extracanonical Psalm 151.22
Finally, it is also very difficult—if not impossible—to draw a clear dividing line between “Classical” and “Late” Biblical Hebrew. As C. Edenburg recently observed, biblical texts that all scholars agree are late (from the Persian period) share with Iron Age Hebrew/Moabite inscriptions a preference for direct object suffixes attached to verbs.23 This means that we cannot assert a linear development.24 “Biblical Hebrew” is, above all, a literary language, whose lifespan would have extended beyond the spoken stage (if such a stage ever existed), and which endured in the scribal milieu. The distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew—especially when applied to an entire book—fails to take into account the widely recognized fact that every biblical text is the product of a long process of composition and revision. It thus appears that the scribes were capable of preserving or even partly inventing a language that had not been spoken for many centuries. We must therefore be cautious when claiming that the entire Pentateuch was composed before the Exile simply because it is mostly written in Classical Biblical Hebrew.25
[19] C. EDENBURG, Dismembering the Whole: Composition and Purpose of Judges 19–21, Atlanta, SBL, 2016, 115–123.
[20] E. ULLENDORF, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1977, 3–17 ; E. A. KNAUF, « War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache? », in K. SCHMID et al. (éd.), Data and Debates, Münster, Ugarit-Verlag, 2013, 411–423 (421): « l’hébreu biblique n’a jamais été une langue parlée. »
[21] KNAUF, « War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache ? » remet même en question la plausibilité d’un tel concept.
[22] I. YOUNG, « What Is “Late Biblical Hebrew” ? », in E. BEN ZVI et al. (éd.), A Palimpsest: Rhetoric, Ideology, Stylistics, and Language Relating to Persian Israel, Piscataway, Gorgias Press, 2009, 253–268 (258–259).
[23] EDENBURG, Dismembering, 120–121.
[24] Voir I. YOUNG, « What Do We Actually Know about Ancient Hebrew », Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 27 (2013), 11–31, qui remet en question ladite théorie des trois étapes (hébreu classique, hébreu tardif et hébreu mishnaïque), voir également des appréciations différentes du livre de Job par A. HURVITZ, « The Date of the Prose Tale of Job Linguistically Reconsidered », Harvard Theological Review 67 (1974), 17–34, et par I. YOUNG, « Is the Prose Tale of Job in Late Biblical Hebrew ? », Vetus Testamentum 59 (2009), 606–629.
[25] M. EHRENSVÄRD, « Once Again: The Problem of Dating Biblical Hebrew », Scandinavian Journal of Old Testament 11 (1997), 29–40.
(Translation of a section written by Thomas Römer)
— Finkelstein, Israel, and Thomas Romer. 2019. Aux Origines de La Torah: Nouvelles Rencontres, Nouvelles Perspectives, Paris. 2019. (My electronic copy that does not include page numbers.)
I’ve addressed the Documentary Hypothesis several times before (see a list of post beginning here). The DH is the basis through which the Hebrew Bible is understood to have begun its development as early as the days of David and Solomon, and in the time of the Babylonian Captivity and through to the period of the Persian Empire. Russell Gmirkin took up the proposal of Thompson and Lemche that the Pentateuch and other biblical texts had their origin as late as subsequent to the conquests of Alexander the Great, less than 300 years before the common era.
Here are a few of my posts in the Academic Discussion section of the Earlywritings Forum that attempted to draw attention to the circularity at the heart of the DH.
Demonstrating the Circularity at the Heart of the Documentary Hypothesis
It had been suggested on the forum that by claiming circularity was at the heart of the DH there was some “caricature” of the DH involved, that the DH was not being presented in a fair way. So I went back to the source and in response to being asked “who” exactly dated the texts in such a way, wrote (I was writing to an audience whom I assumed would know that Julius Wellhausen was the principal pioneer of the DH (=Documentary Hypothesis):
By whom? Here is what Julius Wellhausen wrote in Prolegomena:I.II.2
The Jehovistic Book of the Covenant lies indeed at the foundation of Deuteronomy, but in one point they differ materially, and that precisely the one which concerns us here. As there, so here also, the legislation properly so called begins (Deut. xii.) with an ordinance relating to the service of the altar; but now we have Moses addressing the Israelites in the following terms: “When ye come into the land of Canaan, ye shall utterly destroy all the places of worship which ye find there, and ye shall not worship Jehovah your God after the manner in which the heathen serve theirs. Nay, but only unto the place which the Lord your God shall choose out of all your tribes for His habitation shall ye seek, and thither shall ye bring your offerings and gifts, and there shall ye eat before Him and rejoice. Here at this day we do every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes, but when ye have found fixed abodes, and rest from your enemies round about, then shall the place which Jehovah shall choose for His habitation in one of your tribes be the one place to which ye shall bring your offerings and gifts. Take heed that ye offer not in every place that ye see; ye may not eat your holy gifts in every town, but only in the place which Jehovah shall choose.”
The Law is never weary of again and again repeating its injunction of local unity of worship. In doing so, it is in conscious opposition to “the things that we do here this day,” and throughout has a polemical and reforming attitude towards existing usage. It is rightly therefore assigned by historical criticism to the period of the attacks made on the Bamoth by the reforming party at Jerusalem. As the Book of the Covenant, and the whole Jehovistic writing in general, reflects the first pre−prophetic period in the history of the cultus, so Deuteronomy is the legal expression of the second period of struggle and transition. The historical order is all the more certain because the literary dependence of Deuteronomy on the Jehovistic laws and narratives can be demonstrated independently, and is an admitted fact. From this the step is easy to the belief that the work whose discovery gave occasion to King Josiah to destroy the local sanctuaries was this very Book of Deuteronomy . . .
The whole reasoning process begins with the assumption of the historical veracity (at least in its core) of the biblical Josiah account. From that assumption it follows that the book of Deuteronomy was the source of those reforms (after all, Deuteronomy attacks false worship, just like Josiah did) and therefore Deuteronomy had to have been in existence before the time of Josiah.
That is an invalid argument. How do we know Deuteronomy existed before Josiah? Because the Josiah narrative tells us so? How do we know the Josiah narrative is based on true history? Because the book of Deuteronomy explains his motivation for the reforms. How do we know the book of Deuteronomy explains his reforms? . . . . gets dizzying….
by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 10:58 am
—oo0oo—
The above failed to impress, so I added another:
Here is another demonstration of the circularity in the dating of Deuteronomy to the time of (or before) Josiah. It is from William Dever in Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah (2017), pp 611-613.
First, Dever reminds us of the importance of archaeology in assessing the historicity of the biblical accounts:
[A]rchaeological data are primary because an external witness is required to lend support to the historicity of the biblical narratives, if possible, and archaeology is, by definition, the only candidate (including, of course, the texts that it may recover). Archaeology is primary because it provides an independent witness in the court of adjudication, and when properly interrogated it is often an unimpeachable witness. (p. 18)
Agreed 100%.
But then compare that noble statement with how he actually uses archaeological data to “confirm” a biblical narrative:
It is the reign of Josiah (648–609) that is best correlated with the archaeological evidence that we now have. His reputation as a reformer, a restorer of tradition, comports especially well with the more favorable situation that we know obtained with the decline of Assyria
Correlation is not a proof. Dever lists in a table what is explicitly proven by archaeology at the time of Josiah:
In the same table he lists as “Probable; Evidence Ambiguous”
Josiahʼs attempted reforms; consulted temple scroll; maintained Judah even if vassal; Josiah slain in battle, 609
So archaeology, according to his own analysis, does not confirm the historicity of the Joshua narrative. Nonetheless, he proceeds to set forth a list of correlations with the biblical account — as if correlations can ever be anything more than correlations. (Compare the correlations with historical data of any historical novel.)
He begins on page 11:
It is the reign of Josiah (648–609) that is best correlated with the archaeological evidence that we now have. . . .
Numerous studies of these intriguing reform measures attributed to Josiah have been published, but few have paid any attention to possible archaeological correlates—that is, to a possible real-life context in the late seventh century. Most scholars have focused on whether the reform was successful, many assuming that the reforms claimed are simply too fantastic to be credible. The fact is, however, that we have good archaeological explanations for most of the targets of Josiahʼs reforms. For instance, we know what high places (bāmôt) are, and we have a number of examples of them, perhaps the most obvious example being the monumental one at Dan.
No-one denies the biblical authors were familiar with the various popular cults of the day. Simply finding evidence of these brings us no closer to finding any support for the historicity behind the narrative of Josiah and the discovery of Deuteronomy.
We have many altars in cult places and private homes, large and small. We even have an example of the altar on the roof in the debris of a building destroyed at Ashkelon in 604.
The sacred poles and pillars are easily explained, even in the Hebrew Bible, as wooden images or live trees used to represent the goddess Asherah symbolically. The tree iconography has now been connected conclusively with the old Canaanite female deity Asherah, whose cult was still widespread in Iron Age Israel, in both nonorthodox and conformist circles (above).
The weavings, or perhaps “garments” or even “curtains,” for Asherah (Hebrew bāttîm) remain a crux. Renderings by the Septuagint, the Targumim, and later Jewish commentaries suggest a corrupt Masoretic Text, but woven garments for deities and tent-like hangings for sacred pavilions are well known in both the ancient and modern Middle East.
The phrase “heavenly hosts” needs no archaeological explanation, since it clearly refers to the divine council well documented at Ugarit and in the Hebrew Bible. The reference to the “horses and chariots of the Sun” recalls examples that we have of terra-cotta horse-andchariot models from the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. In the Ugaritic texts, Baal is the “Cloud Rider” who flies across the heavens daily as the great storm god, imagery that is even applied to Yahweh in Psalms.
The Topheth in the Kidron Valley (a rubbish dump and place of abomination in any case) is readily explained by the famous sanctuary of Tanit at Carthage, where infant sacrifice was the usual rite, and there the Phoenician god was indeed Molech.
Of the various “pagan” deities condemned—Baal, Asherah, Ashtoreth of Sidon, Kemosh of Moab, and Milkom of Ammon—all are well known, as is their iconography and to some degree their cult practices.
It is not only the description of the specifics of the religious situation in Josiahʼs time that is realistic in the light of the current archaeological data. The general context of cultural and religious pluralism in the seventh century is an amalgam well illustrated by the archaeological data that we have summarized above, beginning already in the eighth century. That context helps to answer the question raised above about whether the Deuteronomistic Historiansʼ original version fits in the actual historical-cultural setting of the seventh century in Judah. It can be shown in many ways that it does but in other ways that it does not, even though the written version could have been almost contemporary (the question of an older oral tradition cannot be resolved).
It is instructive to set the central themes and ideals of the Deuteronomistic program as summarized above alongside a general description of the realities of life in seventh-century Judah as illuminated by the archaeological evidence here.
And that’s it. All Dever’s archaeological evidence has managed to do is to tell us that there is no evidence for Josiah’s reforms as per the biblical narrative. No-one has questioned the polytheistic/poly-Yahwist cult prevalent throughout Judah/Samaria/Negev/Syria. The biblical narrative assumes that most of the population did not practice “biblical Yahwism”. The whole point of the narrative is to give some historical context to the book of Deuteronomy.
One may reply that the biblical narrative exaggerated and the reforms were not so successful after all, but it won’t really do to imagine all sorts of reasons why we still do not have the evidence for the historicity of the narrative. We will always need independent evidence to confirm the narrative. Until we have it we cannot validly work on the assumption that we will one day find the evidence we know “must be there somewhere” to justify our dating of the sources.
Dever’s words above are a classic instance of the very problem Davies was addressing. The archaeological evidence is interpreted through the assumption that there is a historical core in the biblical narrative. Without the biblical narrative there is simply no grounds in any of the evidence cited by Dever that would lead anyone to suspect the event of Josiah’s reforms.
by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 2:54 pm
—oo0oo—
Is the above not enough to demonstrate that the DH is built on circularity?
In response to the post that I copied here, one consistent critic of Russell Gmirkin’s thesis in particular (and of the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the creation of the Hebrew Bible more generally) posted the following response:
Elephantine is the site of a Persian era garrison settlement of Jews in Egypt. For an discussion of the relevance of this site for the dating of the Old Testament texts see the post re Elephantine Jews.
I had referred to the Elephantine remains here, pointing out that some scholars have suggested the Documentary Hypothesis (that assumes a long pre-Hellenistic history for much of the Hebrew Bible) would never have gained any traction if the the Elephantine papyrii had been discovered earlier.
My response:
That is logically correct. But the Elephantine remains, in the absence of remains pointing in the opposite direction, do “indicate” (as per the Opening Post) the absence of any knowledge or regard for the Pentateuch. They certainly do not support the conventional dating.
Nor are the Elephantine remains entirely irrelevant to the question:
. . . the Elephantine community stood in contact with Jerusalem. Although Elephantine was located on the traditional southern border of Egypt, it was not an isolated outpost on the fringe of the world. The Nile was navigable all the way from the Nile delta to Elephantine. A journey from Elephantine to Jerusalem might take approximately one month. In comparison, according to the Bible it took Ezra around four months to travel from Babylon to Jerusalem. In terms of travel time, the Judaeans in Elephantine were much closer to Jerusalem than was the priest-scribe who is often accorded great importance in the (re-)formation of Judaean religion in the Persian period. Whereas this may indicate potential contact and demonstrate that the historical-geographical conditions for travelling between Elephantine and Jerusalem were more favourable than those between Babylon and Jerusalem, it is also evidenced by documents from Elephantine that there was actually a two-way contact between Jerusalem and Judah (and Samaria). Not only did the Judaeans in Elephantine know the names of the tenuring governors of Judah and Samaria (in this case, even the names of the sons of the governor) and the high priest in Jerusalem (cf. A4.7 par.), they also wrote letters to them and even got a reply (although the Judaeans in Elephantine regret that the Jerusalem high priest and his colleagues did not respond to their initial letter).
Fourth, the Elephantine documents are contemporary sources and probably even more representative of the lived and practiced Yahwism of the Persian period than are the biblical texts. . . .
Granerød, Gard. Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period: Studies in the Religion and Society of the Judaean Community at Elephantine. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. pp. 4ff
What Wellhausen wrote in 1921 about Elephantine continues to be the view of those who hold to conventional pre-Persian dates for the various literary sources that were melded to compose the Pentateuch.
Just a few years after the discoveries of the documents of the Jedaniah communal archive, Julius Wellhausen characterised the community as a “merkwürdiger Überrest des vorgesetzlichen Hebraismus.” In his view, the community located at the border between Egypt and Nubia adhered to its “altes Wesen.” Wellhausen regarded the Judaeans in Elephantine to be standing “noch auf der vorgesetzlichen Stufe,” in contrast to the elite of postexilic Judah. In his view, the Judaean community at Elephantine represented a “fossiler Überrest des unreformierten Judentums.”
Granerød, Gard. Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period: Studies in the Religion and Society of the Judaean Community at Elephantine. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. p. 18
Do you have a comment on the circularity of the conventional dating of works like E, J, the Deuteronomist?
by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:00 am
—oo0oo—
The above should suffice. But on the off-chance that my interlocutor is reading these posts I had better be sure to be absolutely fair and include his every word that he wrote in response to my arguments. The remainder of this post is included for that reason alone, though the extract from P.R. Davies might be of more general interest.
—oo0oo—
To which I replied:
The Hellenistic provenance can be argued without reference to the Elephantine finds. It is the absence of evidence not only at Elephantine but elsewhere, especially in the region of Canaan, that does make the Hellenistic argument (on other grounds) possible, however.
The argument for a Hellenistic provenance stands quite independently of Elephantine. The Elephantine finds were introduced as supporting evidence.
I would be interested to know if you have a comment about the critical grounds for criticism of the conventional dating of the earliest sources for the OT — the circularity of the argument and lack of independent supporting evidence. Example, the logic of the argument for Deuteronomy being composed in the time of Josiah? or the logic of the argument for other material being composed in the Babylonian captivity or even in the time of the Persian empire?
and in hope of getting into some nitty gritty of exactly how Elephantine finds could be relevant, I asked:
Would you be interested in discussing the Elephantine finds and their specific relevance to the knowledge of “some Torah books” in the Persian era in another thread if I open it up?
by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:00 am and 7:07 am
—oo0oo—
Alas, there was to be no further attempt to explain how the Elephantine evidence had any relevance to the Hellenistic date of what became the biblical writings. Instead, SG appeared not to have followed the demonstration of how circular reasoning lay at the root of conventional dating of the Hebrew Bible and insisted that the claim of circularity was nothing more than a presumption, an assertion.
—oo0oo—
I hoped a little more detail might dispel the notion that Davies merely asserted circularity instead of demonstrating how it happens in actuality. This was, after all, a newly constructed “Academic Discussion forum” with clear rules for exchanges so I still held hope that SG would respond in a scholarly manner.
I know what the proposed sources for the Torah books are. The problem I am trying to note is that the conventional dating of sources such as J, E, D, P is circular and therefore invalid.
The point about circularity is not a mere assertion or presumption. It is demonstrated in the links I posted in the OP.
Here is what Davies wrote in 1992, and I think it deserves a response:
So far, historical research by biblical scholars has taken a different and circular route, whose stages can be represented more or less as follows:
1. The biblical writers, when writing about the past, were obviously informed about it and often concerned to report it accurately to their readers. A concern with the truth of the past can be assumed. Therefore, where the literary history is plausible, or where it encounters no insuperable objections, it should be accorded the status of historical fact. The argument is occasionally expressed that the readers of these stories would be sufficiently knowledgeable (by tradition?) of their past to discourage wholesale invention.
2. Much of the literature is itself assigned to quite specific settings within that story (e.g. the prophetic books, dated to the reigns of kings of Israel and Judah).13If the biblical literature is gene rally correct in its historical portrait, then these datings may also be relied upon.
3. Even where the various parts of the biblical literature do not date themselves within the history of its ʻIsraelʼ we are given a precise enough account in general to enable plausible connections can be made, such as Deuteronomy with the time of Josiah, or (as formerly) the Yahwist with the time of David or Solomon, Psalms with a Jerusalem cult. Thus, where a plausible context in the literary history can be found for a biblical writing, that setting may be posited, and as a result there will be mutual confirmation, by the literature of the setting, and by the setting of the literature. For example, the Yahwistʼs setting in the court of Solomon tells us about the character of that monarchy and the character of that monarchy explains the writing of this story.
4. Where the writer (ʻredactorʼ) of the biblical literature is recognized as having been removed in time from the events he14 describes or persons whose words he reports (e.g. when an account of the history of ʻIsraelʼ stretches over a long period of time), he must be presumed to rely on sources or traditions close to the events. Hence even when the literary source is late, its contents will nearly always have their point of origin in the time of which they speak. The likelihood of a writer inventing something should generally be discounted in favour of a tradition, since traditions allow us a vague connection with ʻhistoryʼ (which does not have to be exact) and can themselves be accorded some value as historical statements of the ʻfaithʼ of ʻIsraelʼ (and this will serve the theologian almost as well as history).
Each of these assertions can be encountered, in one form or another in the secondary literature. But it is the underlying logic which requires attention rather than these (dubious) assertions themselves. That logic is circular. The assumption that the literary construct is an historical one is made to confirm itself. Historical criticism (socalled) of the inferred sources and traditions seeks to locate these in that literary-cum-historical construct. The placement of sources and traditions in this way is then used to embellish the literary account itself. This circular process places the composition of the literature within the period of which the literature itself speaks. This is precisely how the period to which the biblical literature refers becomes also the time of composition, the ʻbiblical periodʼ, and the biblical literature, taken as a whole, becomes a contemporary witness to its own construct, reinforcing the initial assumption of a real historical matrix and giving impetus to an entire pseudo-scholarly exercise in fitting the literature into a sequence of contexts which it has itself furnished! If either the historicity of the biblical construct or the actual date of composition of its literature were verified independently of each other, the circle could be broken. But since the methodological need for this procedure is overlooked, the circularity has continued to characterize an entire discipline—and render it invalid.
The panoply of historical-critical tools and methods used by biblical scholars relies for the most part on this basic circularity.
Davies, Philip R. In Search of “Ancient Israel.” Sheffield Academic Press, 1992. pp 35-37
So you can see it is not a mere assertion of presumption. It is demonstrated.
by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 8:36 am
—oo0oo—
Alas, SG appeared to be impervious to registering any possibility that conventional wisdom might have an insecure foundation and curiosly claimed that the extract from Davies (above) was a “caricature”!
—oo0oo—
I had mixed feelings about that response. At least he recognized that the reasoning being described was invalid. But how did he fail to understand that it is in reality how the conventional dating argument has been made?
But still, with new rules in a new forum, surely participants would soon find their feet…..
Placement of the TF: 1st disturbance: Resistance to Pilate’s attempt to smuggle imperial images into Jerusalem 2nd disturbance: Resistance to Pilate’s expropriation of Temple funds 3rd “disturbance”: Jesus and his followers 4th disturbance: Shameful Isis priests bring destruction on themselves and their temple 5th disturbance: Criminal Jews lead to expulsion of Jews from Rome
Despite the hopes I expressed in my previous post I simply cannot complete even one more response to Tom Schmidt’s Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Instead, I will place here my draft that addresses only one small part of Schmidt’s rationale for finding the Jesus account placed in the midst of various disturbances. Better to half-fulfil a promise than to come up with a complete blank. Please keep in mind that the following is a copy of my draft. Normally I would take time to tidy up the wording and structure.
Tom Schmidt writes (my bolded highlighting):
First, its placement. In the Antiquities, the TF [i.e. the Testimonium Flavianum, the Flavius Josephus’s testimony about Jesus] is situated amid five different stories of uproar, all of which tell of murder, intrigue, blasphemy, and other wrongdoing. Given the context, it is unlikely that a Christian scribe would have risked associating Jesus with such themes by inserting the TF amid a litany of evildoers and disturbances, as the author of the TF pointedly does.(Schmidt 2025, 128)
Sounds reasonable. But then I recall reading the following:
The Christian movement itself was doubtless a θόρυβος [“disturbance”], the greatest disturbance of all . . . [T]he Christian movement was so obviously a disturbance of the first magnitude, as it is represented in the New Testament . . .(Thackeray 2007, 140f)
With that perspective in mind, surely a Christian scribe who was pretending to be Josephus would consider it most appropriate to place the Jesus passage in the middle of disturbances that horrified or at least were noted by a Jewish author. Thackeray does not suggest a Christian did add the account there but by acknowledging its appropriateness from the perspective of a non-Christian Jew he does allow for one to think even a Christian impersonating Josephus would likewise consider its place among other disturbances in the time of Pilate quite suitable.
Even so, the account about Jesus and his followers is not depicted as a disturbance. Any notion of a disturbance must come from the reader’s knowledge of how “the Christian movement” was “represented in the New Testament”.
Further — it is just as reasonable to suggest that a Christian scribe would relish placing his Gospel-informed Jesus in a position to suggest his power to unsettle the Jewish rulers.
Note: one must know both the canonical gospels and Acts to see this episode as a “disturbance” and so justify its “placement” among somewhat comparable episodes.
Schmidt argues that because in Josephus we read that Jesus was crucified, it logically follows that Jesus must have been a subversive, a rebelitious, and the reader is meant to conclude that he created some kind of disturbance. But that is not what we read in Josephus’s text. The passage does not describe any kind of disturbance initiated by Jesus. Disturbance has to be read into the passage, not out of it.
On the contrary, the passage in Josephus leads any reader ignorant of the New Testament to wonder why Jesus was crucified given that it infers that Jesus’ followers felt renewed spiritual inspiration after the crucifixion, and that the crucifixion accelerated their movement rather than handicapped it.
Finally, one enduring aporia in New Testament scholarship concerns the question of why Jesus was crucified. Pilate, a figure who is historically cruel and unintimidated by mobs, in the gospels yields to mob pressure to crucify a man he knows to be innocent – even though that mob had days earlier venerated the same Jesus. Religious leaders, who in historical accounts are known for their popular sympathies, in the gospels hate Jesus because he does good. If we assume the gospels are trying to hide the “real reason” for the crucifixion to protect theological interests, then we would surely be right to expect an independent historical record, one written by a Jew/Judean whom the gospels represent as the enemies of Jesus, would explain for us exactly why Jesus was crucified.
But no. The Josephan account knows nothing more than the Gospels. The Josephan account is just as mysterious as the gospels. It leaves the reason for the crucifixion unexplained.
I’d like to think that I will post 5B later this year/early next year.
Postscript on the seditious Jesus hypothesis:
To veer off into another question – of course the crucifixion of Jesus is at its core a theological event, not an historical one. Its reason is theological. As such, it is constructed narratively around the Jewish Scriptures that point to a saving figure who must take on all the sins of his people, to suffer their worst humiliations and weaknesses, to be despised as a nobody, as an evildoer, even as a rebel. The motifs are theological, not historical. The rebel-bandit-robber motif is as consistent with the interests of the authors as are the miracles and resurrection. And this is where the current “seditious Jesus hypothesis” collapses at the starting post.
Schmidt, T. C. 2025. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thackeray, H. St John. 2007. Josephus: The Man and the Historian. With George Foot Moore and Samuel Sandmel. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger.
I will continue writing posts in response to Thomas Schmidt’s Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence so this post is a quick interjection before I have the time to write more fully about another Jesus hypothesis that appears to be being widely discussed at the moment — the hypothesis that Jesus was an anti-Roman rebel, a seditionist, in particular, the following book:
Bermejo-Rubio, Fernando. 2023. They Suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jewish Anti-Roman Resistance and the Crosses at Golgotha. Fortress Academic.
(We met Fernando Bermejo-Rubio as recently as my last post, by the way, where I examined his citational support for Josephus writing a negative passage about Jesus.)
The reason I am jumping in early at this time is to flesh out (just a little) some responses I have made in discussions relating to other posts. It’s been a long time since I posted about historical methods, especially as they relate to Jesus, so consider this a brief reminder or recap.
Bermejo-Rubio repeats a common assumption:
As Justin Meggitt has rightly observed, “to deny his existence based on the absence of such evidence, even if that were the case, has problematic implications; you may as well deny the existence of pretty much everyone in the ancient world.”
I responded to Justin Meggitt’s claim back in 2020. It is available here:
Evidence for Historical Persons vs Evidence for Jesus
A few of my other posts addressing the same question of how we know about ancient persons and whether the evidence for Jesus is comparable to anyone else:
Other statements by Bermejo-Rubio that struck me as misguided:
After all, although some biographies of ancient historical characters such as Alexander the Great and the emperor Augustus contain quite a few mythical elements in their framework, it does not justify our disputing in principle the historicity of the characters themselves . . .
That point is answered in the above posts. When historical figures are overlaid by others — and even by themselves — with mythical trappings (e.g. Alexander as Dionysus, Hadrian as Hercules), we can see clearly where the real human is distinct from the mythical propaganda image.
Inconsistencies and Incongruities are a Common Element among Mythical Figures
Another:
Had Jesus been a construct created out of whole cloth, the accounts about him would presumably have been far more homogeneous. The fact that our sources are systematically inconsistent and are riddled with incongruities is better explained if we assume that a real character on the stage of history was modified in the later tradition.
Sarah Iles Johnston explains why the inconsistencies in mythical gods and heroes have made them so appealing and believable.
Quite the contrary. It is real historical figures that emerge with fair measures of consistency; it is the mythical characters who are riddled with contradictions and incongruities. In fact it is the inconsistencies that are part of the enticing mystery and allure make such figures so attractive and believable! See
And one page that sums it all up in a simple table:
The Bible — History or Story? — where I sum up the error at the base of so much biblical studies by distilling the main points of Philip Davies pivotal publication.
But for now — back to work on some other aspects of Thomas Schmidt’s argument for Josephus making a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Christian origins. . . .
(By the way — questions of historicity and authenticity do arise in classical studies, too. I look forward to posting a few instances and comparing how they are approached by ancient historians and scholars with a primary focus on biblical studies.)
Biblical scholars are not a unique species. Though many of them do seem to be unaware that they are presenting a one-sided view of the evidence, and indeed they are often blind to the logical flaws in their arguments, but they are not alone. As I recently posted here:
I have in the past few months discovered that this is not a flaw restricted to biblical scholars. I have encountered the same wishful thinking and flawed methods of argument among Classicists who desperately seem to want a certain first hand account of a Christian martyr, and woman as well, to be authentic. So I have to have a bit more understanding of the foibles of biblical scholars, I guess.
Below is my essay that illustrates exactly how some Classicists in a certain niche area of study display some of the same kinds of flaws as biblical scholars. The blemishes too easily come to the fore when scholars believe they are face to face with the earliest evidence for Christian origins and therefore want to find ways to accept a core base of those sources as authentic — rather than accept the fictional character that is normally associated with that kind of evidence.
Perpetua was a female Christian martyr in Carthage in the year 202 CE. You can read a little about her and the account of her last days attributed to her on Wikipedia. I will add a few side boxes to supplement my original essay where I think it might make it more useful for general readers. (The original essay was submitted as an assignment task in a course I am currently undertaking at Macquarie University.)
How Historians Have Engaged With Perpetua’s Account of Her Final Days in The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity
It seems a wise principle that the burden of proof rests on those who doubt or reject the textual data from antiquity, not on those who accept them. . . . [T]he proof must be provided by those who question the ancient data.[1]
In response to the above words of Vinzent Hunink, this essay seeks to demonstrate that several arguments for the authenticity of Perpetua’s authorship of her prison experiences in The Passion Of Saints Perpetua And Felicity (Passio) are flawed logically and lack the independent support historians normally rely on to establish ancient claims. In doing so I will refer to alternative approaches of other historians. By authenticity I mean the proposition that the author of Perpetua’s account in the Passio was the historical Perpetua martyred at Carthage around 203 CE.
Hunink provides three grounds for accepting the authenticity of Perpetua’s prison diary:
(a) its “marked stylistic features and personal details”, (b) Hunink’s inability to imagine a reason for it not being written by Perpetua, (c) and the Passio’s statement that Perpetua wrote her account.[2]
In objecting to doubts whether Perpetua was an actual author, he writes
there should be grave, compelling reasons to make us reject the evidence from antiquity as far as authorship is concerned.[3]
Hunink is here equating “the textual/ancient data” (i.e. the written document) from which we build a hypothesis (i.e. that it was authored by such-and-such) with the “evidence” called upon to test that hypothesis. It is circular to claim that the data explained by our hypothesis itself is the evidence that confirms our hypothesis. This particular protest against doubts is logically flawed.
Jacqueline Amat’s critical edition and discussion of the Passio is widely cited and a work to which scholars have been said to owe a “permanent and immeasurable debt” for its “outstanding” contribution.[4] I will therefore refer repeatedly to her work. Amat stresses the authenticity of Perpetua’s account by appealing to
(a) its independently verified historical context;
(b) its literary style; (c) and the realism of her dreams.
Amat thus recognizes the importance of providing an independently verifiable and datable historical context:
= Severus ordered the persecution of all new converts. The arrest of Perpetua and her companions therefore fits within a policy of repression against catechumens.
Sévère ordonnait de poursuivre tous les nouveaux convertis. L’arrestation de Perpétue et de ses compagnons s’insère donc dans une politique de répression des catéchumènes.[5]
Amat points to Eusebius, the Historia Augusta, and works by J. Moreau and W.H.C. Frend to learn of this specific repression. Unfortunately none of these references provides the external support Amat seeks. Eusebius has been judged (a) as relying more on his ability to invent a history “the way it should have been” according to his apologetic perspectives[6] and (b) as being motivated for personal reasons to dwell on multiplying and glorifying instances of martyrdoms.[7] Moreau and Frend use tentative language when speaking of the edict: “Les modalités d’application de l’édit de 202 sont mal connues dans le détail”;[8] “Eusebius was largely ignorant of events in the west”, “for the sake of dramatic effect”, “do not contradict”, “ring of truth”, “balance of probabilities”, “falls short of proof”, “relatively truthful”, “circumstantial evidence”.[9] By identifying this edict with the one reported of Severus in Historia Augusta, moreover, Amat contradicts the statement by Timothy Barnes that it is “demonstrably fictitious”.[10] This is striking since Amat relies on Barnes in the same journal of the previous year to establish her next point. By overlooking studies from the 1960s that address reasons to doubt the historicity of the Severus decree, even concluding it “to be an historical fiction”,[11] Amat’s reading of the evidence is over-selective. Finally, thePassio itself indicates that Perpetua was deeply knowledgeable in the Bible so one must wonder if she had been the kind of new convert the decree supposedly targeted.
The next independently attested item cited is the matching of Perpetua’s date of martyrdom with the birthday of Geta, information that arguably could only have been known to a contemporary of Perpetua given the state-ordered erasure of all memory of Geta after his death. While Amat relies on the argument of Barnes here,[12] Ellen Muehlberger points out that Barnes’ case is based on one manuscript that differs from others.[13] Amat appeals to J. A. Robinson’s surmise that copyists removed the name Geta in light of the damnatio memoriae.[14] Like Hunink, Amat is effectively claiming as evidence for the hypothesis the data the hypothesis claims to explain – that Passio was composed in the time of Geta. A genuinely independent assessment of the hypothesis (assuming that the name Geta was in the original work) would also compare other possible explanations that posit the flavour of historicity being a literary artifice – as provided by Thomas Heffernan:
[T]he redactor is at pains throughout the narrative to provide historical veracity . . . so as to promote [Perpetua’s] value as being equal to the “old examples of the faith” . . . . The allusion to Geta thus complements the redactor’s historicizing intent, which is to legitimate the New Prophecy among his fellow communicants.[15]
Ironically, in making this point, Heffernan attributes to Perpetua an authentic voice behind words that conflict with it—an inconsistency more easily explained by a single author.
The final appeal to independent verification for the authenticity of thePassio is the assertion that Perpetua’s contemporary Tertullian mentions it.[16] Tertullian may indeed have known of thePassio but his actual words can only be taken as a reference to the text if one already assumes that it existed in his time:
= How is it that Perpetua, most valiant martyr, saw only martyrs there in her vision of paradise on the day of her passion, unless it is because the sword that guards the gate of paradise yields to no one except those who have died in Christ, not in Adam?
Quomodo Perpetua, fortissima martyr, sub die passionis in reuelatione paradisi solos illic martyras uidit, nisi quia nullis romphaea paradisi ianitrix cedit nisi qui in Christo decesserint, non in Adam?[17]
That Tertullian confuses the dreams of Perpetua and Saturus in the Passio is forgiven by Amat and other scholars as normal human memory lapse. The data does not fit so it is forgiven and still interpreted as confirming the hypothesis. A more rigorous investigation ought to consider an alternative proposal that potentially has wider explanatory power: that Tertullian knew of a free-floating Perpetua story that was later written down. That alternative is able to explain not only Tertullian’s contradiction but also the apparent loss of thePassio until the time of Augustine who initially expressed doubts about its authenticity.[18]
Thus Amat’s attempts at setting a historical date and context for the Passio begin with the assumption that it contains an authentic historical account and then set aside contrary independent evidence and explanations.
To avoid circularity it is necessary to turn to relevant external or independent data. This is the approach of Ellen Meuhlberger:
On this point about Augustine — I failed to address the fact that Augustine is also evidence of public commemoration of Perpetua and Felicity being observed prior to his time. This failure could be seen as my own “lack of balance” in the discussion at this point.
The most valuable tool readers have to contextualize any text is its reception. . . . The first writer to make precise reference to Perpetua’s account is Augustine of Hippo . . . of the fifth century. . . .[19]
Not only do we have no indisputable evidence that the Passio existed until the fourth century, but when we do find it mentioned, it happens to express the ideas found in other texts of that later time:
. . . a text that expresses themes evidenced in the fourth and fifth centuries may well itself be a product of the fourth and fifth centuries.[20]
Since Robinson the primary argument that has reportedly swayed most scholars to embrace authenticity has been about Perpetua’s style.[21] But what is it about this style that convinces? For Amat, authenticity is demonstrated by “strikingly beautiful” words in the face of death, so beautiful that they “can hardly be considered apocryphal”:
= She is sustained by the certainty that at the moment of her passion Christ will be at her side, and this conviction inspires a very beautiful response—one that cannot be believed to be apocryphal (15.6).
Elle est soutenue par la certitude qu’au moment de sa passion le Christ sera à ses côtés et ce sentiment lui dicte une fort belle réponse, qu’on ne peut croire apocryphe (15, 6).[22]
Yet two pages earlier Amat had appealed to content far from beautiful as grounds for believing the work to be authentic:
= Saturus faces martyrdom with his flaws [namely, a pride that is somewhat too haughty and an intransigence that is somewhat too biting], and this is a sign of the narrative’s authenticity.
Saturus affronte le martyre avec ses défauts [sc. d’une fierté un peu trop orgueilleuse, d’une intransigeance un peu trop mordante] et c’est là un gage de l’authenticité du récit.[23]
So both beautiful and the less beautiful are felt to be signs of authenticity. Here we are surely encountering another instance where a case is “guided by a telos of confirmation, rather than exploration.”[24]
A different stylistic feature is identified as a marker of authenticity by Brent Shaw. Not strong beauty or the introduction of embarrassing character flaws but the plain, prosaic “simple reportage” of her experiences, an “unmediated self-perception, her reality” now becomes the stylistic evidence of authenticity:
Perpetua’s words . . . differ so much in the fundamental aspect of simple reportage from all other so-called “martyr acts” . . . . Hers is a direct account of actual human experience, a piece of reportage stripped of … illusory rhetorical qualities . . . . [T[here is something, perhaps ineffable, that marks her words as different in kind from any comparable piece of literature from antiquity.[25]
Amat saw both the sublime and the flawed as witnesses of authenticity; Shaw appeals to unadorned “simple reportage”. Yet in a footnote Shaw concedes that the simplicity and directness of the language could after all be “the result of conscious or semiconscious ‘rhetorical’ strategies as much as anything else”.[26] Such a concession surely undermines his main point that the simplicity of the account was the sure sign of it being of direct and unmediated reportage.
Even scholars who have discerned aspects of style that were not likely penned by Perpetua have still clung to the view of Perpetua being the ultimate author, suggesting that she knowingly left her words to be adapted by recorders or editors.[27] (See the quote at note 15 above.) Such scenarios look like ad hoc attempts to maintain a case for authenticity as appreciation for stylistic features has deepened since Robinson.
Eric Dodds is also convinced that Perpetua’s account is authentic by
(a) the simplicity of style, (b) it being “entirely free from marvels” (he overlooks the miraculous cessation of lactation) (c) and its dreams being “entirely dreamlike”.[28]
Where “another author”, the redactor, has provided an account that complements or comments on Perpetua’s statement both Dodds and Shaw cannot imagine that these additions might be part of a common project to produce the Passio.
[T]his unmediated self-perception, her reality, was subsequently appropriated by a male editor . . .[29]
[C]ertain incidents appear to have been introduced in order to provide a fulfilment of prophecy. . . .[30]
Shaw and Dodds, on the presumption of authenticity, thus treat Perpetua’s journal without reference to “the textual data” of the Passio’s whole.
Two scholars against whom Hunink was protesting when he appealed for a prima facie acceptance of the “textual data” actually are more consistent in their acceptance of that data than Dodds and Shaw. Shira Lander and Ross Kraemer accept the Passio as a literary unity and accordingly find a two-way dialogue between Perpetua’s story and its surrounding text that is suggestive of a unity Shaw and Dodds deny:
[T]he startling degree to which details of the Passio conform to the biblical citation of Joel 2:28–29/Acts 2:17–18 in the prologue . . . contributes to our concerns. It is possible, indeed perhaps tempting, to read the Passio in its present form as a narrative dramatization of this citation . . . . Many elements of the Passio conform closely to the particulars of this prophecy. . . . The extraordinary emphasis on Perpetua’s role as a daughter . . . . coheres exceedingly well with the characterization of the female prophets as daughters.[31]
Whether one accepts this interpretation or not, it can be acknowledged that it is firmly grounded on Hunink’s “textual data” itself. Surely any “textual data” can only be fully understood if read in the context of the literary heritage of its author, or with reference to texts independent of the one being studied. Authenticity is a proposition that needs to be argued, not assumed.
Hunink was focussed on the content of the Passio (e.g. noting the editorial claim that Perpetua wrote her own story). He failed to appreciate the way the Passio “worked” as a literary composition. As Megan DeVore noted, Hunink allowed the flaws in Erin Ronsse’s article to blind him from her more substantial point: its literary sophistication. Ronsse attempted to make this point by detaching it from the question of authenticity but the authenticity question could not be ignored.[32] DeVore takes the literary unity of the Passio much farther by identifying intertextuality with other early Christian texts and engagement with teachings and images in Clement of Alexandria and Hermas. It is the editorial frames that work with Perpetua’s account to create a “collective memory” because of their allusions to other early Christian literature. For DeVore (and as I mentioned above) a richer understanding of any literary work requires reading it in the context of other works of its era and in the light of ancient rhetorical theory.[33] DeVore even treats Perpetua as an authentic author,[34] but an argument for literary sophistication undermines the reasons others have believed in authenticity.
One detail illustrates how different assumptions lead to different conclusions over authenticity. Dodds was confident that Perpetua’s dream of being given cheese was a sure sign that the dream could not be “a pious fiction” since the image had no relevance to Christianity at the time.[35] DeVore, however, by widening the frame of reference through which we read the Passio shows that cheese did indeed have directly relevant Christian symbolic meaning in Clement’s Paedagogos.[36] The image was there to be deployed by Perpetua or any other author.
Peter Dronke illustrates the dilemma arising when simplicity of style is taken as the rationale for authenticity. Dronke cannot ignore “the writer’s artistry” but feels uncomfortable that he notices it at all. What is “artless” is “artistry”. He dares not praise it.
From the outset we see that Perpetua . . . is not striving to be literary. There are no rhetorical flourishes, no attempts at didacticism or edification. The dialogue is (I think deliberately) artless in its shaping . . . . [S]he was recording her own outer and inner world . . . with shining immediacy. . . . Where writing wells up out of such fearsome events, it seems impertinent, or shallow at best, even to praise the writer’s artistry. . . . [S]he did not try to make her experience exemplary.[37]
If “deliberate”, surely it cannot be said to be “artless”, and if it did not seek to be edifying, one must ask why it was read for edification among believers through the centuries.
Many authors have long understood the potential power of a simple narration and Dronke seems to be torn between being guiltily impressed by “the writer’s artistry” and a contradictory belief that it fundamentally really is what it strives to be without literary manufacture. But literary art with emotional impact does not have to be infused with baroque flourishes. It can appear very simple and natural. Megan DeVore shows how Perpetua’s account of herself coheres with literary principles set out by Aristotle. What appears brief and disjointed in the narrative – “lacking literary artifice”, one might say – can draw a reader in to appreciate the nobleness of Perpetua’s character:
While . . . narrative of section 9 seems prima facie to be little more than a disjointed rendering of two events, the seemingly laconic section relays a significant rhetorical antithesis and further develops the image of Perpetua for her audience.[38]
Perpetua’s dreams have also been viewed as evidence of authenticity, and again we find sometimes contradictory reasons in arguing for this case. For the Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz the authenticity of the dreams was seen in the fact that the images were not exclusively Christian:
= As for the authenticity of the visions . . . it may be pointed out that in all the visions not a single purely Christian motif appears; rather, they consist entirely of archetypal images that were common to the pagan, Gnostic, and Christian imaginative worlds of the time. . .
Was . . . [die] Echtheit der Visionen anbelangt . . . läßt sich . . . darauf hinweisen, daß in allen Visionen kein einziges rein christliches Motiv auftaucht, sondern lauter archetypische Bilder, die der damaligen heidnischen, gnostischen und christlichen Vorstellungswelt gemeinsam waren . . .[39]
For Shaw “there is no reasonable question of their authenticity”.[40] For Amat, the dreams are “realistic” and therefore they should not be deemed fabricated:
= But it must be emphasized that, like true dreams, they exhibit both syncretism and subjectivity. One can therefore dismiss the hypothesis that these accounts are fabrications. They undeniably bear the mark of lived memories.
Mais, il faut y insister, des songes véritables, elles ont le syncrétisme et la subjectivité. On peut donc écarter l’hypothèse . . . selon laquelle ces récits seraient des affabulations . . . . Ils portent indéniablement la trace de souvenirs vécus.[41]
Amat refers to Franz’s view but adds, contradicting Franz, that it is their Christian frames of reference that make them, in part, the evidence of their reality. Amat stresses the mix of lived experiences and “de souvenirs littéraires ou scripturaires” that supplant pagan associations:
= But pagan culture surfaces only faintly beneath its Christian and scriptural adaptation. . . . The scriptural elements are more allusive in Perpetua’s dreams: details drawn from the Apocalypse are joined to Jacob’s ladder, the serpent from Genesis, and the abyss from the Gospel of Luke.
Mais la culture païenne ne fait qu’affleurer sous son adaptation chrétienne et scripturaire. . . . Les éléments scripturaires sont plus allusifs dans les songes de Perpétue : les details issus de l’Apocalypse s’unissent à l’échelle de Jacob, au serpent de la Genèse ou à l’abîme de l’Évangile de Luc.[42]
It is natural to assume that a Christian martyr would have biblical images on her mind but in favour of Franz’s view is the point that Perpetua was apparently a new convert so it might be fair to question the extent of her biblical knowledge. Does Amat’s Perpetua know the Bible too well? While conflicting explanations do not per se negate authenticity, they invite scrutiny of potential confirmation bias.
In her discussion of the dreams it is difficult to tell if Amat is speaking for the beliefs of the authors and editors of thePassio or for herself and her audience when she writes:
= Such a mixture [i.e., of lived memories and scriptural memories] is characteristic of genuine dream manifestations. This observation in no way undermines the notion of revelation. The Spirit, in order to make itself heard, passes through all the images that lie within the dreamer’s consciousness.
[U]n tel mélange [sc. souvenirs vécus and de souvenirs scripturaires] caractérise les véritables manifestations oniriques. Ce constat n’entame nullement la notion de révélation. L’Esprit passe, pour se faire entendre, par toutes les images qui reposent dans la conscience des songeurs.[43]
If the latter, we can understand the pull of wanting Perpetua’s words to be historically authentic. But motive aside, it is widely understood that realism of description does not necessarily establish authenticity.[44]
One more facet in the study of the Passio that has been used to argue for a female author, and by implication the Perpetua of the diary herself,[45] is the motif of breast-feeding and lactation.
The Passio includes references to breastfeeding from a lactating woman’s point of view; . . . symptoms . . . including anxiety, pain, and engorgement . . .[46]
The references certainly express a “woman’s point of view”, but the question of authenticity of Perpetua’s account is not necessarily tied to the gender of the author. On the other hand, Dova also observes that “there is a wealth of evidence about wet-nursing in Perpetua’s time”, so it is reasonable to expect that some men were quite aware of what it involved. More significant, however, are Perkins and DeVore noting that imagery of nursing mothers and infant feeding was well established in early Christian writings:
[E]mphasis on lactation and parturition . . . are so rhetorically pertinent to the discourse of the period in Carthage as evidenced by Tertullian as to make suspect the women’s authenticity as real persons.[47]
I suspect that, in her references to nourishment and lactation, Perpetua participates far more in common symbolic imagery than in a personally cathartic diurnal divulgence.[48]
For a good number of scholars the Passio is a unique document, a primary source to inform us directly of the mind of a martyr and of a woman in the third century Roman empire,[49] as well as being an inspiration for all, especially for women, as a testimony of courage and independence of spirit.[50] These are strong reasons for wanting an ancient source to be both unique and authentic. Other historians have warned against the professional hazards of being seduced into accepting sources as historically reliable[51] and naively embracing texts at face value.[52]
I have attempted to single out a few areas where scholars take different approaches to reading the Passio. My focus has been on what I consider to be some of the shortcomings underlying an acceptance of Perpetua’s account as “authentic”. I have sought to do this by identifying flawed reasoning, a tendency to find confirmation of authenticity in various textual and independent data without examining alternative explanations for the same data, a failure to address the rhetorical methods that create the emotional impact on reading the Passio, and a limited appeal to the literary context of the early Christian centuries.
Notes
[1]Hunink, “Did Perpetua Write Her Prison Account?,” 150, 152.
[2]Hunink, 150, 152.
[3]Hunink, 150.
[4]Farina, Perpetua of Carthage, 6f.
[5]Amat, Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité suivi des Actes : Introduction, Texte Critique, Traduction Commentaire et Index, 21.
[6]Droge, “The Apologetic Dimensions of the Ecclesiastical History,” 506.
[7]Grant, Eusebius as Church Historian, 165.
[8]Moreau, La Persécution du Christianisme dans L’Empire Romain, 81.
[9]Frend, “A Severan Persecution? Evidence of the « Historia Augusta »,” 470.
[10]Barnes, “Tertullian’s ‘Scorpiace,’” 130.
[11]Kitzler, From Passio Perpetuae to Acta Perpetuae : Recontextualizing a Martyr Story in the Literature of the Early Church, 15, note 59.
[12]Barnes, “Pre-Decian Acta Martyrum,” 509–31.
[13]Muehlberger, “Perpetual Adjustment: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Entailments of Authenticity,” 323.
[14]Robinson,The Passion of S. Perpetua, 25.
[15]Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, 76f.
[16]Amat, Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité suivi des Actes : Introduction, Texte Critique, Traduction Commentaire et Index, 20.
[17]Tertullian, “De Anima,” LV 4.
[18]Muehlberger, “Perpetual Adjustment: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Entailments of Authenticity,” 325–27.
[19]Muehlberger, 333.
[20]Muehlberger, 338.
[21]Butler, The New Prophecy and “New Visions,” 47. Butler sees both Robinson’s and Shewring’s analysis of style as paving the way for the near consensus on authenticity, but Robinson is discussed as the lead figure.
[22]Amat, Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité suivi des Actes : Introduction, Texte Critique, Traduction Commentaire et Index, 35.
[23]Amat, 33.
[24]Muehlberger, “Perpetual Adjustment: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Entailments of Authenticity,” 324.
[25]Shaw, “The Passion of Perpetua,” 19, 22, 45.
[26]Shaw, 20, note 50.
[27]Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, 76; DeVore, “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing,” 236.
[28]Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, 49f, 52.
[29]Shaw, “The Passion of Perpetua,” 20f.
[30]Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, 49.
[31]Lander and Kraemer, “Perpetua and Felicitas,” 984.
[32]Ronsse, “Rhetoric of Martyrs,” 385.
[33]DeVore, “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing,” 36ff.
[34]DeVore, 230–31.
[35]Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, 51.
[36]DeVore, “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing,” 147.
[37]Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete, 1, 6, 16f.
[38]DeVore, “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing,” 172f.
[39]Franz, “Die Passio Perpetuae. Versuch Einer PsychologischenDeutung,” 411.
[40]Shaw, “The Passion of Perpetua,” 26.
[41]Amat, Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité suivi des Actes : Introduction, Texte Critique, Traduction Commentaire et Index, 42.
[42]Amat, 42, 45.
[43]Amat, 42.
[44]Johnson, “Third Maccabees: Historical Fictions and the Shaping of Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Period,” 196f; Van den Heever, “Novel and Mystery: Discourse, Myth, and Society,” 93f; Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies, 23–28.
[45]Cotter-Lynch, Saint Perpetua across the Middle Ages, 19.
[46]Dova, “Lactation Cessation and the Realities of Martyrdom in The Passion of Saint Perpetua,” 260.
[47]Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era, 160.
[48]DeVore, “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing,” 125.
[49]Rader, “The Martyrdom of Perpetua: A Protest Account of Third-Century Christianity,” 2f; Shaw, “The Passion of Perpetua,” 12f.
[50]Perkins, “The ‘Passion of Perpetua’: A Narrative of Empowerment,” 838.
[51]Finley, Ancient History, 21.
[52]Clines, What Does Eve Do To Help?, 164.
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Barnes, Timothy D. “Pre-Decian Acta Martyrum.” The Journal of Theological Studies XIX, no. 2 (1968): 509–31.
———. “Tertullian’s ‘Scorpiace.’” The Journal of Theological Studies 20, no. 1 (1969): 105–32.
Butler, Rex D. The New Prophecy and “New Visions”: Evidence of Montanism in the “Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas.” Patristic Monograph Series 18. Washington (D. C.): Catholic university of America press, 2006.
Clines, David J. A. What Does Eve Do To Help?: And Other Readerly Questions to the Old Testament. Sheffield, England: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 1990.
Cotter-Lynch, Margaret. Saint Perpetua across the Middle Ages: Mother, Gladiator, Saint. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016.
DeVore, Megan. “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing: Perpetua Reconsidered.” Ph.D., University of Wales Trinity Saint David (United Kingdom), 2015.
Dodds, Eric R. Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1965.
Dova, Stamatia. “Lactation Cessation and the Realities of Martyrdom in The Passion of Saint Perpetua.” Illinois Classical Studies 42, no. 1 (April 1, 2017): 245–65.
Droge, Arthur J. “The Apologetic Dimensions of the Ecclesiastical History.” In Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism, edited by Harold W. Attridge and Gohei Hata, 492–509. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.
Dronke, Peter. Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Farina, William. Perpetua of Carthage: Portrait of a Third-Century Martyr. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2008.
Finley, M. I. Ancient History: Evidence and Models. New York: Viking, 1986.
Franz, Marie-Louise von. “Die Passio Perpetuae.VersuchEinerPsychologischen Deutung.” In Aion: Untersuchungen Zur Symbolgeschichte, 387–496. Zürich: Rascher, 1951.
Frend, W. H. C. “A Severan Persecution? Evidence of the « Historia Augusta ».” In Forma Futuri. Studi in Onore Del Cardinale Michele Pellegrino., edited by Michele Pellegrino, 470–80. Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1975.
Grant, Robert M. Eusebius as Church Historian. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1980.
Heffernan, Thomas J. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Hunink, Vincent. “Did Perpetua Write Her Prison Account?” Listy Filologické / Folia Philologica 133, no. 1/2 (2010): 147–55.
Johnson, Sara R. “Third Maccabees: Historical Fictions and the Shaping of Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Period.” In Ancient Fiction. The Matrix of Early Christian and Jewish Narrative, edited by Jo-Ann A. Brant, Charles W. Hedrick, and Chris Shea, 185–97. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005.
Kitzler, Petr. From Passio Perpetuae to Acta Perpetuae : Recontextualizing a Martyr Story in the Literature of the Early Church. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015.
Lander, Shira L., and Ross S. Kraemer. “Perpetua and Felicitas.” In The Early Christian World, edited by Philip F. Esler, Second., 976–95. London & New York: Routledge, 2002.
Moreau, Jacques. La Persécution du Christianisme dans L’Empire Romain. 1er Édition/3e Trimestre 1956. Paris: Presses Universitaires De France, 1956.
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Perkins, Judith. Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era. London & New York: Routledge, 2008.
———. “The ‘Passion of Perpetua’: A Narrative of Empowerment.” Latomus 53, no. 4 (October 1994): 837–47.
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I came across the following passage when looking into the question of whether a certain letter said to be by a famous ancient Roman woman was a forgery. It reminded me questions that have arisen among those debating whether a passage in Josephus is a partial or complete forgery (e.g. the Testimonium Flavianum — the passage about Jesus), or even whether entire New Testament letters are what they claim to be. The bolded highlighting and formatting is my own.
Also not unproblematic—and burdening the discussion with ambiguity—is the not uncommon tendency to handle the term “forgery” too summarily. The alternative between authenticity and forgery is too crude to capture more nuanced realities. It is also prone to introduce unchecked prejudices. The forger is often regarded from the outset as a bungler whose product reveals itself by its qualitative inferiority. While that is indeed possible and often the case, it need not necessarily always be so. The phrase “palpable rhetorical fabrication,” … is marked by its somewhat disparaging tone and is quite characteristic in this respect. On the other hand, this can lead to a situation where proof of quality is accepted as proof of authenticity—though the one by no means guarantees the other.
Finally, it must be remembered that not every literary fiction necessarily stems from an intentional intent to deceive. One need only point to speeches or letters in ancient historical works—though the same applies to rhetorical school exercises. But when a piece that was originally recognizable as fiction in its original context is removed from that context and transmitted as a fragment, it can then pose for later readers precisely the kind of problem whose complexity is no longer adequately addressed by the oversimplified alternative of authenticity or forgery.
Instinsky, Hans Ulrich. 1971. “Zur Echtheitsfrage der Brieffragmente der Cornelia, Mutter der Gracchen.” Chiron 1:177–90. https://doi.org/10.34780/HNT9-299I. pp 183f – ChatGPT translation
ChatGPT image — don’t look too closely for sensible design
Forgive me if this is old news and I am the last to learn about it, but anyone interested in Buddhism and Bayes’ Theorem as a tool for evaluating the historical status of the Buddha in a way somewhat comparable to what Richard Carrier has done with Jesus will want to read
Kingsley, John. “A Bayesian Analysis of Early Śramaṇic Origin Stories Part I: Historicity of the Buddha.” Master of Arts, Loyola Marymount University, 2022. https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/etd/1256/.
From the Introduction:
Because of the depth and time needed to complete a full Bayesian analysis of both the Buddha and Mahāvīra, this paper will focus mostly on the historicity of the Buddha, and offer further research suggestions for that of Mahāvīra. However, the main objective of this paper is not necessarily to prove, one way or another, that these figures did or did not exist. It is to simply provide a framework for the methodology that I think is most effective at forcing historians – and theologians – to deductively and empirically analyze the questions in their respective fields.
Consensus per se is not a reliable sign of rationality. It depends on how consensus is reached. All sorts of methods can yield consensus: brain-washing, the threat of the rack or burning at the stake, totalitarian control of the sources of information. Consensus reached by these means does not guarantee rationality. — Goldman
Recent discussions have sent me back to a second look at Aviezer Tucker’s Our Knowledge of the Past. (I posted about this book back in 2013.) A detail I had forgotten in the meantime is Tucker’s interesting explanations about when a consensus is more likely to be trustworthy than not. Here is part of what he writes:
In the real world, there is no universal consensus on beliefs because some people always dissent. There are still people who deny that the earth is round or that it revolves around the sun and others who deny that there was a Holocaust. This led philosophers who consider consensus to be philosophically valuable to attempt to prescribe whose opinions matter for determining whether or not there is a consensus on beliefs. Reliance on professional organizations or academic institutions, affiliations, and certifications is a tempting approach. If all professional astronomers agree that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, it must be because they have knowledge of the heavens and those who honestly dissent must be either ignorant or irrational. At their best, professional and academic institutions should indeed reflect the qualities that make consensus among their members significant as a possible indicator of knowledge. Still, this appeal to authority failed too often in history. Academic and professional institutions have proved themselves to be too susceptible to political threats and manipulation, economic dependence and graft, or the common biases of a class of people who share professional interests and often social background. The corruption of the German academic system under the Nazis, the rejection of relativity in physics, the destruction of psychology, anthropology, and historiography in favor of dark racist fantasies is just the most extreme example of the ever-present temptation of academic and professional institutions, even in previously excellent academic systems, to prefer their institutional, class, and professional interests to intellectual integrity. (33)
So what does Tucker advise given the fact that the consensus of authorities may not always be a reliable guide to the truth of a matter?
The alternative approach I present here does not have to rely on authority, nor does it require universal consensus. It merely requires unique noncoerced heterogeneity: It does not matter if some do not agree to a set of beliefs, as long as the people who do, are sufficiently different from each other to reject alternative hypotheses to the knowledge hypothesis, and those who dissent are sufficiently homogenous to support hypotheses that explain their dissent by particular biases. For example, the group that reached consensus on Darwinian evolution is uniquely heterogeneous, it includes people who are secular and religious, and of many different faiths. The community that upholds the alternative “creationism” is quite homogenous, composed exclusively of biblical fundamentalists, almost all of whom are American Protestants, though many American Protestants believe in Darwinian evolution. Their bias in favor of an anachronistic, historically insensitive interpretation of Genesis is the best explanation of their beliefs. (34)
I know many readers of this blog will be thinking of the consensus on the historicity of Jesus. In the light of the above, we may see a reason certain critics of the Christ myth theory attempt to portray “mythicists” as a singular group of Christian-hating atheists. By ignoring the broad spectrum of “mythicists” — atheists, Buddhists, prominent public intellectuals, and even faithful Christians and others who have expressed a high regard for Christianity — the mythicists are portrayed as a narrow, homogenous group with a unique hatred of Christianity and thus able to be comfortably dismissed.
Tucker says a reliable consensus must be uncoerced and sufficiently large. How large?
The heterogeneous group that reaches consensus must be sufficiently large to avoid accidental results. Small groups can never be sufficiently heterogeneous to exclude hidden biases. . . . If only four scientists work on a particular problem and they agree on a set of related beliefs, it does not imply that their agreement reflects common knowledge. The four may be a professor, her assistant, a former student, and an untenured member of faculty who needs her vote on the tenure committee. The minimal size of a significant consensus depends on local circumstances such as whether the people who develop a consensus are related socially, the nature of their relations, and whether they attempted to replicate the process that generated the beliefs or merely accepted the conclusions of others on faith or authority (Sarkar, 1997, p. 510). Usually, when the consensus involves hundreds of people who are geographically, institutionally, and professionally dispersed, it is safe to assume that it is large enough. If the consensus is on an esoteric topic, and only a handful of experts are competent or interested enough to reach the consensus, they may possess knowledge, but their consensus cannot function as an indicator of knowledge. It is necessary to follow their reasoning to evaluate the status of their beliefs. (34)
Those are three key features for “mere outsiders” to look out for when deciding whether they have a right to hold any reservations about a consensus among the experts:
The consensus is uncoerced;
The consensus is found among a “sufficiently large” and heterogenous group;
Dissenting voices are from a “sufficiently homogenous” group such that their biases are readily apparent.
They look like a neat rule of thumb to me.
Goldman, Alvin I. “Foundations of Social Epistemics.” Synthese 73, no. 1 (October 1987): 109–44. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485444.
Tucker, Aviezer. Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Since I began drafting this post, Richard Carrier has responded specifically to some of my subsequent comments that were made in an exchange over what I, rightly or wrongly, understood to be some confusion about my view of Bayes’ theorem. He has not, as far as I see — again, I am open to correction and reminding — responded to the central argument of these posts. Further, I began posting a detailed review (scroll to bottom of the page for the reviews) of Carrier’s Proving History in 2012 but other questions arose that distracted me from that project after three posts. This series might be seen as an update on my views of Carrier’s application of Bayes’ theorem to history generally and Jesus in particular.
My position on the historical Jesus
To begin with, I think the only figures of Jesus of any relevance to the historian are
the Jesus in our early sources (especially the New Testament writings)
Attempting to “discover” a Jesus “behind” the sources through memory theory or other means (criteria of authenticity, form criticism) necessarily begins with the assumption that the stories told in the gospels have some kind of relationship with a historical Jesus. In other words, they assume a historical figure was the starting point of everything. (A passage found in a work by the Jewish historian Josephus, even if only partially authentic, can tell us nothing more than what was being said about Jesus some sixty years after he was supposed to have lived.)
My position regarding Bayes’ Theorem
One more point I should reiterate. I have said many times now that Bayes’ theorem is a fine tool to apply to many hypotheses. My point, though, is that I see little historical value in hypothesizing the existence or non-existence of Jesus per se. What is of historical interest is how Christianity emerged. A hypothetical Jesus or hypothetical non-Jesus alone doesn’t help us with that question. We simply don’t know if there was a figure identifiable as Jesus at or near the start of Christianity. The reason we do not know arises from the lack of independent and empirical data to establish his presence. Historical explanations can draw on hypothetical scenarios but when they do they can never be more than hypothetical proposals. I prefer that a historian works more modestly with what can be securely known and seeks to explain that much.
My position with respect to Richard Carrier’s historical methods
When Richard Carrier’s books Proving History and On the Historicity of Jesus first appeared I was intrigued by the Bayesian approach and in large measure rode with it. But what especially attracted me was the comprehensiveness of Carrier’s approach to the question that had at that time been a “hot topic” ever since Earl Doherty’s contributions. At the time I attempted to shelve some discomfort I felt over Carrier’s portrayal of “what historians do” and “how they do things” more generally. He seemed to me to be returning to a positivist view of history, a view that had largely been left in the margins especially since the mid twentieth century. One other discomfort I had was that I thought he was weakening his position and making himself too-easy-a-target for critics by adding new speculative arguments to those of Earl Doherty. I felt a stronger case and smaller target would have been made with less rather than more — with zeroing in on a selection of core arguments from Doherty rather than trying to cover everything that had been argued and adding even to that.
Though I have written many posts in favour of the application of Bayes’ Theorem to questions arising in biblical studies (and I have Richard Carrier to thank for introducing me to the usefulness of Bayes) I have also found myself in disagreement with some of Carrier’s views:
Ironically, in most of those cases, I think that it is Carrier who has dropped the Bayesian ball along with “rational-empirical” argument and it is yours truly who is using Bayesian reasoning to demonstrate where some of Carrier’s views are amiss.
At the time I held back my criticisms mainly because I did not want to be seen as part of what was then a hostile internet backlash against Carrier. But since I have recently been deeply re-engaging with the nature of historical knowledge and history itself I have felt the time is right to try to resolve some issues raised by Carrier’s work that originally left me a little uncomfortable.
Misapplied Conclusions from Bayesian Analysis
If we conclude from Bayesian reasoning that a historical Jesus is not likely to have existed, it tells us nothing useful. All it would mean is that if Jesus did exist there were many views expressed about him that gave rise to suspicions about his existence among later readers. He would not be the first.
No historical event is the same as another and no historical person is the same as another. Each and every historical event and historical person and circumstance is unique in some way. Hypotheses about the existence or non-existence of Jesus are hypotheses about a unique event.
But it is impossible to compute the frequencies of events that are unique. (Tucker, 136 — Tucker further notes, without comment, Carrier’s response to this problem, which is to assign a range of probabilities including subjective but informed probability estimates of experts — that is, measuring )
A Case Study
Carrier argues that even subjective expectations are ultimately (though perhaps hidden from one’s immediate consciousness) based on calculable frequencies of the same kinds of events:
Any time you talk about degrees of belief or certainty, just think about what you base that judgment on, and what facts would change your mind. Always at root you will find some sort of physical frequency that you were measuring or estimating all along. (272)
I am not so sure. Are “degrees of belief” or subjective “certainty” always or necessarily based on conscious or subconscious rational calculation? If so, there can be no such thing as “subjective” belief: every belief would be at some level a rational calculation based on relevant frequencies. I am not as confident as Carrier in the fundamental rationality of all subjective beliefs and expectations.
Alexander David Cooper – THE DEATH OF KING WILLIAM II. Image from https://clasmerdin.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-death-of-william-rufus-accident-or.html
Let’s take a unique historical event, one that Carrier discusses in Proving History, and examine his argument. The historical hypothesis here is that Henry I plotted to kill William II.
In our personal correspondence, C. B. McCullagh observed that to apply BT to questions in history
the hypothetical event has to be considered as a generic type, similar in some respect to others. That might worry historians, whose hypotheses are so often quite particular. For instance, consider how the hypothesis that Henry planned to kill William II in order to seize his throne explains the fact that after his death Henry quickly seized the royal treasure. The relation between these events is rational, not a matter of frequency. . . . (The example being referred to is discussed in C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 22.)
But, in fact, if the connection alleged is rational, then by definition it is a matter of frequency, entailed by a hypothetical reference class of comparable scenarios. To say it is rational is thus identical to saying that in any set of relevantly similar circumstances, most by far will exhibit the same relation. If we didn’t believe that (if we had no certainty that that relation would frequently obtain in any other relevantly similar circumstances), then the proposed inference wouldn’t be rational. Explaining why confirms the point that all epistemic probabilities are approximations of physical frequencies. The evidence in this case is that Henry not only seized the royal treasure with unusual rapidity, but that his succeeding at this would have required considerable preparations before William’s death, and such preparations entail foreknowledge of that death. Already to say Henry seized the royal treasure “with unusual rapidity” is a plain statement of frequency, for unusual = infrequent, and this statement of frequency is either well-founded or else irrational to maintain. And if that frequency is irrational to maintain, we are not warranted in saying anything was unusual about it. Likewise, saying “it would have required considerable preparations” amounts to saying that in any hypothetical set of scenarios in all other respects identical, successful acquisition of the treasure so quickly will be infrequent, and thus improbable, unless prior preparations had been made (in fact, if it is claimed such success would have been impossible without those preparations, that amounts to saying no member of the reference class will contain a successful outcome except members that include preparations). Again, the result is said to be unusual without such preparations, or even impossible; and unusual = infrequent, while impossible = a frequency of zero. Hence such a claim to frequency must already be defensible or it must be abandoned. Similarly for every other inference: making preparations in advance of an unexpected death is inherently improbable for anyone not privy to a conspiracy to arrange that death, and being privy to such a conspiracy is improbable for anyone not actually part of that conspiracy, and in each case we have again a frequency: we are literally saying that in all cases of foreknowing an otherwise unpredicted death, most of those cases will involve prior knowledge of a planned murder, and in all cases of having foreknowledge of a planned murder, few will involve people not part of that plan. If those frequency statements are unsustainable, so are the inferences that depend on them. And so on down the line.
Thus even so particular a case as this reduces to a network of generalized frequencies. And all our judgments in this case necessarily assume we know what those frequencies are (with at least enough accuracy to warrant confidence in the conclusion). We won’t know exactly the frequencies involved, but we know they must be generally in the ballpark stated, otherwise we wouldn’t be making a rational inference at all. (273f – my highlighting in all quotations)
Here Carrier notes as background knowledge that “considerable preparations” would have been required “before William’s death” for Henry’s actions to have succeeded. He confuses this background knowledge with “evidence” but understanding the complexities involved in asserting full control of the royal treasure is really background knowledge. That background knowledge forms the basis of the hypothesis that Henry murdered William. Carrier leaves this aside. He suggests that Henry’s ‘unusual rapidity’ in taking control reflects subconscious knowledge of how infrequently such events occur under normal circumstances. But I do not know how Carrier could verify that historians really do reflect on how many times a royal treasure has been taken over with such speed, or how often comparable “classes of events” have occurred. Carrier does not give examples of similar “reference class acts” with which to compare and I suspect most historians will need time to think before they could offer instances. Even if one did compile a list of comparable successions in an attempt to establish a reference class with which to compare Henry’s succession of William, historians would be hard pressed to tease out all factors that made each situation unique and to justify its relevance to the particular event of Henry’s replacement of William. Rather, it is simpler and more likely that historians who are informed of the political structures and scale of England at the time use that background knowledge to infer that the speed of Henry’s acts points to the likelihood of murder.
While typing up this post I was distracted by a news item about a woman being interviewed who said that she was told she had a “only a 10%” chance of contracting a certain terminal illness but now she had it. There was no longer any 10% business about it. Statistics and probabilities are relevant when dealing with effectively infinite numbers of factors. But historical contingency is not a probability event. It happens to a particular person with a certainty of 1 regardless of what the odds are in an infinite universe and there was no way to estimate in advance that that particular woman was going to get the illness. That that unfortunate person was part of a 10% subset within a population of many thousands was meaningless to her and her loved ones. A science body had produced statistics. This person experienced an historical event. Most historical events are unforeseen — except, as I keep saying, in hindsight.
Confusing History with Science
Geology and paleontology, for instance, are largely occupied with determining the past history of life on earth and of the earth itself, just as cosmology is mainly concerned with the past history of the universe as a whole. . . .
History is the same. The historian looks at all the evidence that exists now and asks what could have brought that evidence into existence. . . .
And just as a geologist can make valid predictions about the future of the Mississippi River, so a historian can make valid (but still general) predictions about the future course of history, if the same relevant conditions are repeated (such prediction will be statistical, of course, and thus more akin to prediction in the sciences of meteorology and seismology, but such inexact predictions are still much better than random guessing). Hence, historical explanations of evidence and events are directly equivalent to scientific theories, and as such are testable against the evidence, precisely because they make predictions about that evidence. . . .
[T]he logic of their respective methods is also the same. The fact that historical theories rest on far weaker evidence relative to scientific theories, and as a result achieve far lower degrees of certainty, is a difference only in degree, not in kind. Historical theories otherwise operate the same way as scientific theories, inferring predictions from empirical evidence—both actual predictions as well as hypothetical. Because actual predictions (such as that the content of Julius Caesar’s Civil War represents Caesar’s own personal efforts at political propaganda) and hypothetical predictions (such as that if we discover in the future any lost writings from the age of Julius Caesar, they will confirm or corroborate our predictions about how the content of the Civil War came about) both follow from historical theories. This is disguised by the fact that these are more commonly called ‘explanations.’ But theories are what they are. (46ff)
I have recently addressed historical positivism at
What Carrier is describing here is a “positivist” view of history. This is a notion of history that was more widespread up to the middle of the last century. One of its leading exponents was Hempel who argued that historians should be seeking to discover predictable cause-effect relationships. (Hempel took positivism a step further than Carrier by claiming actual “laws” in history could be found.) His colleague, Carnap, stressed the importance of probabilistic reasoning in such an endeavour. The view that history could aspire to be akin to the natural sciences in method grew out of the Enlightenment when there was burgeoning confidence that Reason and Empiricism could liberate humanity from the shackles of superstition and dogma. But positivist history has long since been under strong attack from many quarters.
It is this positivist approach to history that explains the relevance of Carrier’s use of Reference Class. The idea of a reference class is to generalize historical events or incidents so that they can be compared with one another as a common type. That means they are temporarily removed from their historical contingency and treated as sharing common features for the sake of comparison. The point is to isolate generalized cause-effect principles.
Strictly speaking, prior probability is the probability of getting a specific kind of h when you draw at random from a reference class of all possible h → e [hypothesis to evidence] correlations. Those correlations don’t have to be causal, although in history they usually are. Because, in history, we are almost always asking what caused e and proposing h as the answer (see chapters 2 and 3). I’ll thus focus mainly on causal hypotheses and explain how to ascertain prior probabilities in a way that can produce intersubjective agreement among expert historians, and when and why such a process is logically valid. Some critics of BT are skeptical of causal language in applying the theorem, but that’s fundamental to many theories, especially historical ones, since any statement about what happened in history reduces to a statement about what caused the evidence we have. And you can’t propose historical explanations without proposing causes. Historians do distinguish claims about what happened (or once existed) from claims about why it happened (or why it existed). But ultimately all claims about ‘what’ entail claims about ‘why.’ (229)
I pause and ask if that is so. Many historians may agree with the above, but even among those who do, I think most would be sceptical about any attempt to assess varying degrees of causal probability to any of the factors associated with an event. Understanding human behaviour is not so mechanical an enterprise. The example Carrier offers does to me come across as unrealistically mechanically causal and even positivist with a vengeance:
. . . a hypothesis that a religious riot was caused by prior beliefs of that community (such as an ancient prophecy) in conjunction with new events (such as the appearance of a comet) obviously proposes a causal relationship between those prior beliefs and the riot . . . (230)
Such a view of human nature in general and historical events in particular is not one I share. I doubt that many historians have ever concluded that there can ever be such a simplistic one-to-one cause-effect of a riot as “a belief” of some kind. I propose that where riots occur a range of conditions will normally be found to help us understand the what and the why.
I think the principle applies to most works of historians today. Few, I believe, would think they can reduce historical events to isolated or particular combinations of specific causes each bearing a certain probability factor in the final equation.
In another instance, this time in On the Historicity of Jesus, Carrier continues the same refrain: the existence of prophecies would in effect have caused would-be messiahs to seek martyrdom, so in such a context, Christianity “almost becomes predictable”.
God had promised that the Jews would rule the universe (Zech. 14), but their sins kept forestalling his promise (Jer. 29; Dan. 9), which would also create a motive for would-be messiahs to perform atonement acts, which could include substitutionary self-sacrifice (see Element 43), out of increasing desperation (Elements 23-26). Christianity almost becomes predictable in this context. (OHJ 71)
Admittedly Carrier relegates this statement to a footnote but it does further illustrate the simplistic cause-effect positivism approach he has to the question of Christian origins: prophecy — would have inspired (caused) — would be prophets — to do an atonement act like Jesus — Christianity conceptually predictable (law of cause and effect) in such a scenario. If there were historically verifiable prophets acting that way, most historians would prefer to seek a deeper understanding about why such behaviour emerged at that time and place than the mere existence of a prophecy rolled away in the scrolls.
A recent work of history that I read is Killing for Country by David Marr. Along with Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland and Libby Connor’s Warrior, I have been left with a deep sense of shame about white treatment of the indigenous population of my state and a strong political and social conviction of what we owe their survivors. Those historical works were not about “cause and effect” but about understanding and awareness. There will always be causal elements in any explanation but causes per se are not always what history is about.
Reference Class Revisited
As far as I understand Carrier’s approach, he introduces Reference Class in the question of the historicity of Jesus in order to establish a prior notion of how likely a certain idea of Jesus is the result of a generalized cause-effect class of events. This is an attempt, as I understand it, to introduce some kind of “scientific” validity to the study of history. If we understand the “scientific” approach as one that seeks to establish the general from the particular, this is the intended function of assigning Jesus to the Rank-Raglan hero class and drawing probabilistic inferences based on cause-effect principles found in that class.
The idea is that among figures found in a subset of the Rank-Raglan class few or none are known to be historical. The principle Carrier wants us to conclude from this is that stories of a certain type are “caused” by something other than a historical figure behind them.
If therefore we find Jesus within this subset of story types, then it logically follows that those stories about him likewise owe their existence to something other than an actual historical figure of Jesus.
I agree that in principle — and it is the principle that counts — that is a correct conclusion. Lord Raglan himself expressed the same point:
If, however, we take any really historical person, and make a clear distinction between what history tells us of him and what tradition tells us, we shall find that tradition, far from being supplementary to history, is totally unconnected with it, and that the hero of history and the hero of tradition are really two quite different persons, though they may bear the same name. (The Hero, 165)
Further, I think a good many biblical scholars will also agree that what we read in the gospels about Jesus is in large measure unconnected with a historical Jesus. Many argue that the stories that arose about Jesus were fabricated to meet the needs of later generations.
In other words, the reference class itself is irrelevant to the question of the historicity of Jesus. It is a misguided attempt to establish a quasi-scientific or positivist approach to history by establishing a principle that transcends the uniqueness of each historically contingent event and person.
The mythical stories about Jesus tell the historian something important to the interests of early Christianities but as Lord Raglan pointed out by implication — those stories of themselves cannot have any relevance to the question of whether there was some kind of historical Jesus at the start of it all. If we think otherwise we would need to argue the case with evidence.
Of course, many other biblical scholars are quick to deny this point and will claim “memory theory” and “triangulating” “gists” of gospel stories and sayings can help them see “through a glass darkly” some outline of the historical Jesus. But such notions are founded entirely on the assumption that Lord Raglan was wrong and that the stories did evolve from a historical person.
We simply have no way of knowing if “a historical Jesus” existed. There are many interesting studies that explain the New Testament sources emerging from within the historical, philosophical and literary milieu of the day without appealing to a hypothetical role for a historical Jesus. We don’t need to over-reach and try to “prove” anything within any margin of probability. Hypothetical notions relating to the existence or nonexistence of Jesus cannot help the historian produce any serious reconstruction or understanding of Christian origins. Let’s be content with what we cannot know and focus on what we do know. Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus, especially its Backgound/Context section, offers many areas for further study. As I pointed out above, I think there are some areas where even Carrier can more consistently and profitably apply Bayesian analysis.
Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 2012.
Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014.
Tucker, Aviezer. “The Reverend Bayes vs. Jesus Christ,” History and Theory 55, no. 1 (February 1, 2016): 129–40.
