Forgive me for raising one criticism in an otherwise very commendable essay by Peter.
My concern relates to the message in the following passages:
However it is not really the historical method to go about completely discounting every possible testimony as false. It must be admitted as offering a degree of positive evidence for the historicity of Jesus, even if the testimony might be false.
They say that quantity has a quality all its own. Is it not at least interesting that in the first half of the second century (if not earlier) we witness such an explosion of written material regarding Jesus, his story and sayings? Again, as we mentioned in the discussion of Tacitus, this kind of evidence is far from conclusive but it may at least meet the standard of prima facie evidence. It is the kind of thing that should put the shoe on the other foot and require us to have good reason for doubt about the historical existence of Jesus.
Anyone being fair about the matter should admit that this brings the historicity of Jesus to the status of “some positive historical evidence.” If there were absolutely zero evidence against, then we’d have to give the balance of evidence to the historicity of Jesus. No doubt the failure of some skeptics to make these kinds of admissions proves frustrating in this discussion. It is perfectly alright to have a high evidentiary standard and to judge that the historicity of Jesus does not make it. It is perfectly alright to have considered the entire case in the round and to judge the evidence against the historicity of Jesus to be better than the evidence for. But it is just a bit off to attempt to argue that there is nothing at all, zero degrees Kelvin, to give heat to the positive case for the historicity of Jesus and thus to declare that the balance of evidence is simply nil-nil.
What I think is overlooked when such statements are made is
a point made by Niels Peter Lemche recently in response to Eric Cline's newest publication,
1177:
What I was really referring to was the traditional craft of the historian: Source criticism. It is the alpha and the omega of an historian’s craft. Then we can put everything else on top of that. . . . But few archaeologists (including also people such as Israel Finkelstein) have had the training in textual analysis which has been a must in historical research since the days of Barthold Niebuhr c. 1810.
One can find
online the sort of thing Lemche sees as the sine qua non of historical method since Niebuhr:
But the consideration that the early history, such as it has come down to us, is impossible, must lead us to enquire whether the earliest annals are deserving of credit. Our task now is to prove that the earliest history does contain imposslbilitics, that it is poetical, that the very portions which are not of a poetical nature, are forgeries, and, consequently, that the history must be traced back to ancient lays and to a chronology which was invented and adapted to these lays at a later period. (Neibuhr, Lectures on The History of Rome, p. 1)
And Neibuhr is addressing work that has all the appearance of being a genuine (by ancient "definitions") historical narrative.
I believe one cannot validly place content found in a work by, say, Tacitus, alongside content found in a canonical gospel, and consider the two "historical evidence" that needs comparison and evaluation.
We need first of all to establish that our sources were ever intended to contain "historical evidence". One sees the assumption regularly in historical Jesus studies that the gospels must be read as "historical reports" despite all their theological and metaphorical spin. Stevan Davies, for example, uses the language of "report" (connoting the idea that information is being relayed with some sort of historical or newsworthy belief -- even if mistaken or deluded or false) scores of times in his new work
Spirit Possession and the Origins of Christianity. He speaks throughout of the "reports of Jesus' activities" even in places where other scholars have seen entirely "midrashic" or theological or "parabolic" narratives.
I have made the following analogy before to try explain this point. Police can receive reports about a murder from persons calling them, from old files, from other files and information sent by outside authorities, etc. All of these would be worthy of investigation as genuine "reports". But to come across a manuscript of a story alone that purports to be a report of a murder is a nonstarter. Context and provenance of the source is everything. Lemche's textual analysis is also a fundamental part of source criticism. If textual analysis can establish the entirely literary character of the manuscript it is even less of a nonstarter.
Yet many biblical scholars do not work this way and I think it is a mistake for anyone else to buy into their methods. Some scholars even say that the job of the "historian" is to bypass analyses of the structure and nature of the text itself and try to peel away that surface dirt and find history "behind" the text.
Historians normally give some credence to a source when they can have some knowledge of its provenance (meaning knowledge of who produced it, and something about whoever that was, their interests etc), of its sources, and also some independent corroborating evidence. Taken for granted, here, is an understanding of a sources genre (a historiography, an epic, a letter, etc). Genre alone can be deceiving, though, as many scholars have been learning in relation to Herodotus. The "father of history" appears to many in fact to have "lied" about inscriptions he supposedly saw, places he supposedly traveled to and people he supposedly spoke with, etc.
If we don't have these things then that does not mean our source does not contain historical information but it does mean we have no way of knowing if it does at all until we do the sorts of analysis Lemche and Niebuhr spoke of. In other words it cannot be used either way, either for or against.
If analysis of the document (necessarily by comparison with other evidence) does lead us to have some general idea of when and where it was produced and something about the kind of writing it is (genre) then it can be used as historical evidence. But all of this information may only allow us to validly use it as evidence for something of the beliefs, culture, ideas at the time of its author/audience. Its narrative contents cannot be used as "reports" of past events unless other criteria (mentioned above) are met.
I don't believe any of this is "hyperscepticism" (whatever that's supposed to mean). It's how historians generally treat their sources routinely. Maybe that's the problem: they do so so routinely that the method is taken for granted and rarely spelled out and is thus easily forgotten and overlooked. Since it seems that historians just intuitively know what narratives to treat as sources for past events, it appears that when it comes to a history so embedded in our cultural consciousness as Christian origins that would-be "historians" simply assume their major documents are also intuitively "historical sources". Michael Grant is a classic example of this error. When he came to writing about Christian history he jettisoned all the taken-for-granted methods of historians and embraced
in toto the assumptions and methods of the theologians.
In their more reflective moments theologians know this fallacy. Sanders, Allison and Davies have all conceded that their starting point for their study of a historical Jesus is necessarily based on a circular argument: in short, the gospels tell us Jesus was X and we know this because Jesus was X and the Gospels confirm this.
Back to the OP and the best case for historicity ----
A best case in my view would understand the fundamentals of how (nonbiblical) historians (at least ideally) treat their sources. They would not make unsupportable or circular assumptions about them. The best case would not rest on invalid treatment of sources. It would seek to explain the sources we have given what we know (or don't know) of their literary character and provenance.
Bizarre as it would seem to many here, that would mean that someone like John Spong poses one form of a "best case" argument by declaring that only a truly great individual could have inspired virtually completely mythical tales. In fact that's a thesis that could seriously be investigated.
"Memory theory" is a new thing now that is trying to uncover what we can most closely consider historical about Jesus. But as it is being applied today by LeDonne and Keith and others it is still based on the logically flawed criteria of embarrassment. LeDonne still appeals to those criteria as his starting point.
A best case scenario might attempt to apply memory theory to the literary evidence without any assumptions that need to be supported by logically fallacious criteria. I imagine this sort of inquiry would overlap with the one above.