The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

[neilgodfrey]

to Neil,

Tim is a real devil, isn't he. He takes a passage that makes perfectly clear sense to everyone and that fits entirely within the Acts-Eusebian paradigm and doesn't need to go beyond any nice simple, clear-cut assumptions that the text we read is a translation of just what Paul wrote back in the 50s CE with no corruption over the centuries through the war-zones of ideological transmission, and that needs none of the gumpf from me that brings the above model into question by contextualizing the data that lies beyond the letter itself -- -- Tim does all of that just to confuse the issue, the devil

I cannot believe that somebody like you, full of smarts and knowledge, do not see the enormous weaknesses of Tim's arguments in http://vridar.org/2016/01/16/the-functi ... tians-119/.
It seems when you see something which opposes the historicity of Jesus your critical power goes to a dead zero.

Cordially, Bernard

Okay, you claim to see weaknesses in his arguments, but all you have done is set up your own views without engaging with Tim's arguments. You simply ignore his argument and replace it with your own. That is not how one demonstrates the weakness of another's argument.

BUT BUT BUT ... can I pause here for a moment. The point is not the rights or wrongs of Tim's analysis, but the fact that he was applying such an analysis at all, and bringing to bear the questions he did to the text. That is what historians need to do and do do (except in biblical studies, all too often).

Tim might be wrong and his conclusions found erroneous, and that's fine. I have no problem with that. My own methods might well be found to have serious shortcomings in the post I pointed to (but you seem not to have bothered with). No doubt I will find points to change my mind about over time.

I have no problem at all in admitting that Galatians 1:19 was indeed written by Paul in the 50s. I have my doubts for reasons I stated in my post, but I am quite willing to be shown I am wrong.

But if you want to make your own case as a substitute for anything else, you need to actually engage with the alternative. Simply ignoring other arguments by restating your own view only indicates you do not like (or do not really understand, or have not bothered to read) the opposing arguments.



P.S. ....
(You do know, I trust, that most mythicists do in fact accept Galatians 1:19 as genuinely by Paul. So why you keep throwing out some "mythicist" accusation I do not know. If you want to know where my doubts about the authenticity of the passage arose, they arose from a book by an author who was arguing AGAINST mythicism!)

[neilgodfrey]

The problem is that almost any ancient text treated sufficiently critically will become ambiguous/undecipherable.

Just a postscript for the record, I argue very much against postmodernist views that reduce texts to endless ambiguities etc. I reject those methods and their assumptions. My methods are very conservative when it comes to the handling of evidence. But the way evidence is handled in biblical studies is so free and loose that we can see many biblical historians quite happy to bring postmodernist perspectives to bear on the texts. They enable all sorts of sins to be wreaked upon them.

[DCHindley]

The problem is that almost any ancient text treated sufficiently critically will become ambiguous/undecipherable.

Just a postscript for the record, I argue very much against postmodernist views that reduce texts to endless ambiguities etc. I reject those methods and their assumptions. My methods are very conservative when it comes to the handling of evidence. But the way evidence is handled in biblical studies is so free and loose that we can see many biblical historians quite happy to bring postmodernist perspectives to bear on the texts. They enable all sorts of sins to be wreaked upon them.

I don't know any "postmodernists" who do what you think they do. Drawing attention to the subjective nature of interpretation (past evidence is interpreted from the POV of the modern critic), and warnings to be on guard for falling into the trap of self-confirming assumptions, is not at all the same as giving up on any possibility to know something true about historical events, or as you seem to suggest, think in consequence that "anything goes."

DCH

[Kapyong]

Gday Bernard Muller and all

to Kapyong,
I agree with most of what you said but Christianity did not wait for the earliest Christian texts to be written in order to start. Paul himself said there were Christian apostles before him.

Thankee Bernard I agree we often agree.

Sure, we can say it started before Paul, I spoke loosely;
but my point stands - the foundation of the faith is the books - not on the persons IN the books, who are otherwise unknown.

So Peter, John, Luke, etc., named by Paul are real persons but Jesus, also named by Paul, as a crucified Jew would not be a real person!

Well,
have you noticed a difference in the way Paul refers to Jesus Christ in the texts, compared to how he refers to everyone else ?

• How would you characterise that difference ?
• What do you think it means for their relative historicity ?

Kapyong

[neilgodfrey]

The problem is that almost any ancient text treated sufficiently critically will become ambiguous/undecipherable.

Just a postscript for the record, I argue very much against postmodernist views that reduce texts to endless ambiguities etc. I reject those methods and their assumptions. My methods are very conservative when it comes to the handling of evidence. But the way evidence is handled in biblical studies is so free and loose that we can see many biblical historians quite happy to bring postmodernist perspectives to bear on the texts. They enable all sorts of sins to be wreaked upon them.

I don't know any "postmodernists" who do what you think they do. Drawing attention to the subjective nature of interpretation (past evidence is interpreted from the POV of the modern critic), and warnings to be on guard for falling into the trap of self-confirming assumptions, is not at all the same as giving up on any possibility to know something true about historical events, or as you seem to suggest, think in consequence that "anything goes."

DCH

By saying "endless ambiguities" I admit I overstated things. But Chris Keith and Richard Bauckham are two who come immediately to mind as ones who appeal explicitly to postmodernism as the key to how they interpret and use texts. Both go way beyond anything I think Hayden White attempted, to the extent I am aware of White's writings.

Drawing attention to the subjective nature of interpretation, warnings against self-confirming assumptions, -- these concerns long pre-date postmodernism. They have to some extent been part and parcel of modern historical methods ever since Ranke, and most certainly since Collingwood. If that's all the postmodernists drew attention to they would not be doing anything different from what historians have always done and been well aware of.

[neilgodfrey]

is not at all the same as giving up on any possibility to know something true about historical events,

Andrew suggested something similar. I don't know what I have said that leads anyone to think I am talking about "giving up on any possibility to know something true about historical events."

Not at all.

Maybe the confusion comes where I do suggest that we cannot merely assume a narrative is sourced from the historicity of persons and events touched on in the narrative itself. That is a circular process and an invalid assumption. It only gets worse if we assume another factor behind it all -- oral tradition -- without any evidence for that additional hypothetical, too. (The literary quirks that some scholars have suggested are pointers to an oral source -- e.g. groups of threes, alliteration -- are all well-known literary devices and not exclusive to orality.) If we had no evidence for any other sources (e.g. literary ones) we would be really up in the air without a paddle flogging a dead horse. But that's not the situation, fortunately.

I do not imply that we can know nothing about the past. What I am saying is that we have something all the more concrete and certain as evidence about the past: the text or narrative itself. That is evidence for what someone believed and wrote, for what some people were interested in hearing and repeating and interpreting, etc. That's pretty exciting evidence that tells us a lot about early Christianity. It also opens up many questions, of course, too. How was that narrative received by others in our data? When was it received? By whom? How does it appear in the context of other narratives, etc etc etc.....?

That sort of inquiry is about real events for which we have immediate evidence. We are not forced back into circularity by assuming that a narrative is about real people and events (except some of the people with questionable names and some of the events involving the supernatural are not real) and trying to use a range of ultimately circular or question-begging criteria to decide which events and persons were real -- and with everyone coming up with different conclusions.... (And the Chris Keiths and Richard Bauckhams get even worse by jettisoning those criteria and/or relying upon nothing but "the readers' obligations to accept written testimony" in their place!)

That's not how history works anywhere else as far as I am aware.

[neilgodfrey]

Just once more on the suggestion that postmodernism alerted the field to subjectivity in interpretation of evidence .....

In my senior high school years we studied modern history with the positivist model of Toynbee's thesis (challenge and response) as our foil. Everything we studied we were led to read through Toynbee's model: a civilization or culture reaches a certain level, faces severe challenges and its fate is then determined by how it responds to those great challenges. Could we validate Toynbee's thesis? That was pure positivism: get the facts, interpret the facts and see what "laws" or "principles" could be determined from those "facts". (Of course we were high school kids and we had no notion of the concept of "positivism" then. That only dawned on us later when we went to university to study history further.)

But the point is, even with that history course thoroughly immersed in positivism, we were constantly preparing debates. We were taught to ask questions and acknowledge how very differently the evidence could be interpreted. Not even positivism meant "only one correct way to get THE FACTS" -- or "only one correct interpretation of THE FACTS". As I said, we were constantly engaged in preparing for debate questions about our topics, and engaging in debates.

It seems to me that even some biblical scholars do not understand what positivism is, especially with respect to history. It is not at all a digging up of "the one truth" of any particular fact and leaving it at that. It is about establishing universal principles ("laws") from the data -- and so obviously the principles one wants to demonstrate will influence one's interpretation of the facts.

The other interpretation we were exposed to was the Marxist one. That, too, was a positivist exercise -- with a different interpretation of the "facts" that led to different universal principles or laws (so-called) of history.

I long ago stopped subscribing to positivism. I don't believe there are any "laws" to be discovered in history. But in the meantime we have had E.H. Carr forcing historians to ask and consider what even a "historical fact" actually is. Interpretation is at the heart of that question. We have had Whig histories, Marxist histories, and so forth. Interpretations of the facts vary. Even the nineteenth century "father of modern history" Ranke understood the problem of subjective interpretation when reading archival documents.

If a postmodernist claims that postmodernism discovered the problem of interpretation on the part of the historian as he reads the sources, he is very naive and ill-informed, at best.

[neilgodfrey]

galatians.jpg (30.43 KiB) Viewed 4395 times

The above image, I suggest, indicates the model of interpretation of Galatians that is embraced by most scholars and their lay followers, Bernard included.

The model is simple, elegant, and easy to use. What we read in any part of Galatians is the word recorded by the apostle Paul in the 50s CE.

Unfortunately we have no way of determining from the same time what "brother of the Lord" or "James" refers to.

But we do have texts that appear in the record considerably later referencing brothers of Jesus and a claim that Jesus is Lord and to a James. We also have indications that Galatians and Paul were the target of considerable heated controversy in the second century, with claims and counterclaims about the original content of the Pauline texts under discussion. We have all of this debate whirling around in the middle of rival ideological and historical claims about the provenance and origin of the Christian message.

I suggest that the conscientious historian needs to address any part of Galatians within that context of ideological warfare and rival claims about Christianity's origins.

Now I hate to bring mythicism into this discussion because it's something I have attempted to avoid from the beginning, but it is something that others bring up over and over and over again -- indicating some bizarre obsession. But my own view of Galatians 1:19 has been influenced more by an anti-mythicist than by any mythicist author I know. I do not know of any mythicist who argues that Galatians 1:19 is an interpolation. None. The only argument I have read along those lines is by an anti-mythicist! That fact led me to pause and think about the broader contextual world of the contents of Galatians 1:19. The outcome is posted at Putting James the Lord's Brother to the Bayesian Test. Ignore the maths. Just look at the factors introduced into the argument.

Every book on how historians should work tells me that they need to test their documentary evidence with respect to provenance, authorship, etc. etc. etc. I suggest that just beginning along those lines involves a model that is more complex than the one portrayed in the images above.

I suggest that biblical scholarship's study of Galatians as a whole is represented by the model in the image above. I further suggest that the standard conventional interpretation of Galatians 1:19 needs revision. We need to apply literary analysis and a broader historical contextual analysis to Galatians 1:19 in order to arrive at the more valid interpretation of the accounting for that passage.

[Ben C. Smith]

By saying "endless ambiguities" I admit I overstated things. But Chris Keith and Richard Bauckham are two who come immediately to mind as ones who appeal explicitly to postmodernism as the key to how they interpret and use texts. Both go way beyond anything I think Hayden White attempted, to the extent I am aware of White's writings.

It is confusing to read this about Richard Bauckham. In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses he does concede at one point that postmodernism is "perhaps" intelligible in its challenge to an exaggerated sense of the historian's "independence of the past" — but in all other ways he seems to oppose postmodern readings of the text almost on principle:

Do schemata impede our access to what happens? On the contrary, they enable it. As Bruner and Feldman put it, "[N]arrative patterning does not 'get in the way' of accurate autobiographical reporting or interpreting, but rather provides a framework for both telling and understanding." Of course, misleading simplifications and distortions occur often enough, but we are well enough familiar with ways of challenging and correcting these. We know there can be no finally definitive account of any event, but we also know that there are better and worse accounts, accounts that are more or less faithful to what they seek to report. The theory of schemata is no warrant for a general distrust of memory or for dissolving memory in postmodern epistemological skepticism.

He also, as you can see there, seems to equate postmodern approaches with epistemological skepticism, which he fervently opposes throughout the book. In fact, since you brought up Collingwood, Bauckham appears to think of Collingwood as, if anything, too postmodern:

As in other fields, Enlightenment individualism has led to postmodern skepticism.

In its attempt to cut loose from testimony altogether Collingwood's theory does not correspond to what historians generally do. However, it — or the kind of extreme individualist epistemology it embraces — can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform about events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense.

Instead, Bauckham sides with Ricoeur, whom he characterizes as having adequately answered certain postmodern claims about historical facts:

For a more adequate philosophical account of historiography than Collingwood's, we may turn to Paul Ricoeur's major recent work Memory, History, Forgetting.

....

Confronted with the postmodern claim that "facts" have only a linguistic existence, Ricoeur proposes a critical realism that must revert from the historian’s narrative to the testimony in which it has its roots. Documentary proof — whereby the historian establishes the "facts" — has testimony at its very heart. In the end, testimony is all we have. For the historian, the testament, as a record of memory, is bedrock.

So can you clarify what you mean when you say that Bauckham explicitly appeals to postmodernism as the key to how he interprets and uses texts?

[Bernard Muller]

to Neil,

You read critically the documents, but you do not apply literary analysis to the documents to test them and discover what sorts of documents they really are.

So what sorts of documents are they really, more so 'Galatians" and the deemed authentic 7 Pauline epistles?
What did you find? Share that with us.
As for me I made considerable study on them and determined:
1) Only 7 epistles are authentic as from Paul (it took me months of thinking & analysis before deciding to remove 'Colossians' whole).
2) 3 of these (canonical) epistles are actually a combination of 3 shorter epistles.
3) All these epistles (except Philemon) have interpolations, which I took great pain to explain, for each one, with several to many arguments (more so for the Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians & Galatians epistles).
4) Thanks to internal evidence from the epistles and Acts, I was able to determine their dating & sequencing and also from the same evidence, the main events in Paul's second & third journey. Of course everything is entwined but everything fit: editing, dating, sequencing and events.
May I add that the overall result is not favorable to Christian faith, but I did not get to that by design.
As for Paul, again and only through his epistles, I studied the man and drew conclusions not in his favor.
Most of all that is explained & documented in my website & blog.

You would not assume that a popular anonymous publication about a long-ago murder was a true record of a true event unless you applied various tests to it. The tests typically applied to the epistles and gospels in the NT fall very far short of the tests that are applied by classicists to ancient documents. They apply literary analysis and contextual tests so thorough that they even conclude that a document by a well-known author that purports to be a true biography of that author's teacher may in fact be about a fictitious teacher! That suggests a pretty tight standard of analysis, and when I suggest the same standards be applied to NT works, I am told I am being too extreme, etc.

Thank you for the lecture. But how does that translate for Paul? Do you think he existed or not? Do you think he wrote these epistles?
And I am also applying literary analysis and looking for contextual texts, up to whatever depth these texts allow me to go.

On what criteria or through what test did you conclude that the words in Galatians 1:19 are authentic to the pen of Paul writing in the 50s CE?

- Because that is written in all ancient manuscripts which carry that part of Galatians, even with Jesus having brothers was not popular from the 2nd century.
- Idealistically for Christians, it would have been preferable to have Jesus with no siblings, for stressing is uniqueness and not have people suspecting Mary was impregnated the same way than for his siblings.
But we see the opposite in Paul's letters and the gospels.
- "Brothers of the Lord" also appears in the Corinthians letters, but are in a separate group of the other apostles and Cephas/Peter.
- Paul repeatedly said or inferred Jesus had human parents and was fully human. And according to statistics, it is very likely that an adult Jewish man had siblings.
- Paul had to indicate which "James" he met then, because at the time, there was another important James in the church of Jerusalem, the brother of John. Important, because later, he was the first target of a persecution (and then executed) (according to Acts, which I do not have reason to reject for that fact).

But as far as I am concerned, I see no reason or opening to explain Christian origins with a historical Jesus. That does NOT mean I deny a historical Jesus.

But only if you are very fuzzy about the very origin of Christianity or deny the generally admitted dating of Paul epistles or take as interpolations every evidence pointing to a historical Jesus in the Pauline epistles.
BTW, can you explain your idea for Christian origins without a historical Jesus, who regardless, made it in the Pauline epistles (as very important, because of crucified as Christ, according to Paul) and the gospels?

Cordially, Bernard