The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Paul the Uncertain
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Re: The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

Post by Paul the Uncertain »

Neil
When I say we cannot ask certain questions of certain types of data I meant that we cannot meaningfully ask certain questions.
The best I can make of this line of argumentation is that you are pointing to the practicality for any mortal to choose which problems to work on, and that problems with a lot of evidence to pore over will be predicatbly attractive. Fine. That's what attracts you, it seems. Interesting problems that few people are working on will also be attractive to some people. If allowed to do so, a balance will probably emerge, loosely coordinating the community's efforts.

And that, by the way, is why I am interested in the collective performance of communities as a whole, and not only in the individual performances of each community member. Division of labor provably allows the realized productivity of a coordinated whole to exceed the sum of the potential productivities of its uncoordinated parts.

(There are also less happy collective phenomena, like the personnel analog to "Gresham's Law." That may help to explain phenomena like the emergence of guild behavior in some specialized domains. Who knows? That might help bust up the guild.)

Anyway, back to free questioning. For example, I read what purports to be a letter from Paul, and while doing so, I take an interest in whether or not Paul's Adam was a real person. Hakeem has raised that question in a nearby post. That is, was Paul's Adam literally the first human being, singular?

As it happens, I know that the answer to that question is no ("know" meaning that I estimate the contrary not to be seriously possible, despite being logically possible - like "WW II didn't happen").

I know this because that isn't how multicellular speciation works. In other words, I have reached the ultimate end-state of contingent confidence, and done so prioristically. Of course, how speciation works is supported by a mountain of evidence and a fair bit of mathematics. Its application to the historicity of Adam, however, is entirely prioristic.

Crucially, I need to assume that God didn't intervene twice to get my species started. I have zero evidence for that proposition, and I may be wrong. Many people disagree; Paul seems to be one of them. Mine is a prioristic belief.

If true, however, then combined with what the analyzed evidence shows about all speciation, then there was no Adam in Paul's sense. The only thing the evidence of Paul's letters contributes to that conclusion is to define the initial hypothesis space. Thanks, Paul.

So, in your recent example, maybe that's all the news story will end up contributing to whatever I learn about the figure's childhood, a definition of whose childhood I'm inquiring about. Or, if you prefer, the story allows me to identify reasonable questions while avoiding conversations with rocks about fish.

Note also that the way to solve the Adam problem was to leave the silo of historical method. The analyst left the study of the human past altogether, finding the answer by looking into fruit flies versus slime mold. Ah, there's the answer. (Of course, as soon as somebody did that, it became a bona fide part of the "study of the human past." Odd, therefore, that your experts in methodology don't seem to ponder domain-independent aspects of their enterprise. Carrier really does have a point.)
We cannot meaningfully ask of a birth certificate when the person died.
I am reading this in the early morning, and fortunately had finished my coffee. Neil, IRL, I do geneaology. I don't have much experience "asking of" rocks, but birth certificates? Oh, yeah, I know about them.

Assuming I'm starting from your mention of a news article, I suddenly know the subject's date of death to within a century, and have a high confidence estimate to within a few decades. Plus, I now know where to start looking for a death certificate (since the existence of the birth certificate implies that the person spent at least part of his or her life somewhere and when vital statistics were maintained - which I didn't know until now).

How in the name of Godfrey, looking at any birth certificate, am I unreasonable to formulate the questions, Has this person died? If so, when and where? And, in the bargain, I am supposed to fail to apply such heuristics as "if you add 120 years to the birth year, then you have a true upper bound on the death year," with near- WW II level confidence.

I can't reasonably do that? Bull. Total and complete bull.
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MrMacSon
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Re: The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

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hakeem wrote: Wed Sep 13, 2017 8:11 pm The Christian faith is directly based on non-historicity.
neilgodfrey wrote: Wed Sep 13, 2017 10:46 pm Christianity was started ... with a belief in a heavenly/spiritual -- i.e. mythical -- Jesus.
I agree with both these statements.

neilgodfrey wrote: Wed Sep 13, 2017 10:46 pm
So when it comes to Jesus, I am quite open to any sound, evidence-based arguments that are presented ... Unfortunately, I don't know of many works about Jesus that are grounded in the fundamentals of sound historical methods1.
1 Nor do I --- There can't be grounded 'works' without primary, contemporaneous sources.

Information or narratives cannot even be categorised as a secondary source when they're not based on a primary source.

There are plenty of indications in the commentaries of so-called Church Fathers that they either struggled with the notion of Jesus being human or discussed why he had to be human: to give his 'self-sacrifice' more meaning to believers in him.

.
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MrMacSon
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Re: The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

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Paul the Uncertain wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:04 am ... I read what purports to be a letter from Paul, and while doing so, I take an interest in whether or not Paul's Adam was a real person.
I take an interest in whether Paul was a real person or not.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

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neilgodfrey wrote: Wed Sep 13, 2017 9:44 pmWhen I say we cannot ask certain questions of certain types of data I meant that we cannot meaningfully ask certain questions. We cannot meaningfully ask of a birth certificate when the person died. We know that a birth certificate cannot answer that question so that's what I mean when I say we cannot ask certain questions of certain data. It is as pointless asking a birth certificate for the date of someone's death as it is to ask a rock for the meaning of its life.
I suspect this is just a poor example on your part of what you are trying to say, but the way you write this makes it sound as if the birth certificate were completely unrelated to the date of the person's death. It makes it sound as if you were not excited, in your quest to determine the date of death, to have found the birth certificate. But surely you would be. With the birth certificate, you would now lack only the testimony of a friend or family member or two to the effect that the person died at age 65, for example. Or perhaps evidence that the person lived to at least a certain age (perhaps a form, for example, indicating that s/he applied for something only the elderly qualify for), which would narrow the range down considerably. Or, if even the century of the person's death previously eluded one, surely the birth certificate would narrow down the possibilities. The birth certificate is not a negligible gain in potential knowledge for the date of a person's death; on its own, sure, you are dead in the water on the specifics; but historians are free to triangulate and deduce from multiple sources of information. (Again, you can probably come up with another example to make your point.)
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Bernard Muller
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Re: The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

Post by Bernard Muller »

to Neil,
But you were joking, right? Do tell me you were joking. My "shit", surely you knew, referred to the debate itself. You did understand that, didn't you...
If it was so, you should have written, "the shit of mythicism versus historicism".
So you DO argue that Jesus founded Christianity, then. Not many critical scholars accept that view. I didn't realize you argued that Jesus founded a new religion.
I recall saying Jesus was credited to have founded Christianity, and that Jesus, or rather the last year of his life was the ignitor providing the spark which started Christianity.
Anyway, if you want clarification, I took great pain to explain the role of Jesus (and Pilate, & John the Baptist, and others after his crucifixion, foremost Paul) in http://historical-jesus.info/hjes3x.html
I introduced that page as: "A common mortal (a "son of man"), who talked about "the good news" of the coming Kingdom, died as "king of the Jews" (short digest on (my) historical Jesus Here).
A major faith is about to be born."

If the only Jesus we know of in the records was the historical Jesus then we would not have Christianity. Christianity was started, I think most critical scholars and inquirers would agree, with a belief in a heavenly/spiritual -- i.e. mythical -- Jesus.
I think I understand your point: Christianity was started from a heavenly/spiritual --i.e. mythical -- Jesus. You must be referring to the earliest documents known about Christianity, the Pauline epistles, where Paul certainly based the Christian faith on a heavenly Jesus (that is what he was supposed to be in Paul's present times).
But I cannot ignore, as you seem to be doing, that, in order to resurrect, one has to die. And where else than on earth as a human (as suggested by Paul: http://historical-jesus.info/19.html)? Furthermore, Paul indicated (several times) Jesus had been a human (also Tacitus & Josephus), and also, Christian apostles preceded him.
My study if from the human Jesus up to Paul's last year of his preaching (which I set in 57 CE): http://historical-jesus.info/t58.html
It looks to me you intend to consider only the beginning of Christianity by Paul, and not earlier, followed by later developments.
If it is the case, we would overlap only on Paul's public life. And according to your view about the origins of Christianity, my study would be a prequel (with some overlap about Paul at the end) of your idea on when Christianity started.

Cordially, Bernard
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neilgodfrey
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Re: The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

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Paul the Uncertain wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:04 am Neil
When I say we cannot ask certain questions of certain types of data I meant that we cannot meaningfully ask certain questions.
The best I can make of this line of argumentation is that you are pointing to the practicality for any mortal to choose which problems to work on, and that problems with a lot of evidence to pore over will be predicatbly attractive. Fine. That's what attracts you, it seems. Interesting problems that few people are working on will also be attractive to some people. If allowed to do so, a balance will probably emerge, loosely coordinating the community's efforts.
That's not what I'm saying in the sentence of mine that you quote. I am not addressing the quantity of evidence or data at all.

We have lots of variants of the story of Red Riding Hood. Lots of data about Red Riding Hood. Now we can, technically, approach this data and ask about the historical Red Riding Hood that it all derives from. Or we can assess that the type of data we have -- all of it fairy tales or modern jokes -- does not allow us to meaningfully ask about the historical Red Riding Hood.

We cannot meaningfully ask what a Walter Scott novel tell us about the "historical Robin Hood" because Scott's novel Ivanhoe presents an entirely fictional Robin Hood who is created to fulfil plot requirements. We can technically ask about the historical Robin Hood but we cannot meaningfully expect to learn anything about a historical Robin Hood from a novel in which the character has an entirely fictional existence. I actually have a scholarly study of Little Red Riding Hood written by Catherine Orenstein. Orenstein does not ask about the historical RRH because of the nature of the very abundant evidence.
Paul the Uncertain wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:04 amAnd that, by the way, is why I am interested in the collective performance of communities as a whole, and not only in the individual performances of each community member. Division of labor provably allows the realized productivity of a coordinated whole to exceed the sum of the potential productivities of its uncoordinated parts.
This is how scholarship tends to work.
Paul the Uncertain wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:04 am Anyway, back to free questioning. For example, I read what purports to be a letter from Paul, and while doing so, I take an interest in whether or not Paul's Adam was a real person. Hakeem has raised that question in a nearby post. That is, was Paul's Adam literally the first human being, singular? . . . . .

I know this because that isn't how multicellular speciation works. In other words, I have reached the ultimate end-state of contingent confidence, and done so prioristically. Of course, how speciation works is supported by a mountain of evidence and a fair bit of mathematics. Its application to the historicity of Adam, however, is entirely prioristic.
I have no idea what the above second paragraph means. I don't even bother to ask if Paul's Adam was a real person because I know enough about modern science, evolution, to know not even to bother asking such a question.

Paul's Adam serves an entirely theological function, so for Paul Adam is a theological construct. That is very evident from the text.

Paul the Uncertain wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:04 am Crucially, I need to assume that God didn't intervene twice to get my species started. I have zero evidence for that proposition, and I may be wrong. Many people disagree; Paul seems to be one of them. Mine is a prioristic belief.
Again, I don't think this line of reasoning is necessary. It seems to be adding unnecessary complications. What is this "God" construct doing there? I don't know what that term means in this context. God in Genesis is nothing but a literary-fictional character.
Paul the Uncertain wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:04 amIf true, however, then combined with what the analyzed evidence shows about all speciation, then there was no Adam in Paul's sense. The only thing the evidence of Paul's letters contributes to that conclusion is to define the initial hypothesis space. Thanks, Paul.
All of this seems to be quite unnecessary complication. We know there was no historical Adam for very elementary reasons -- if we know the fundamentals of evolution. We know Paul's construct is a heritage from the religious beliefs of his day.

No need to make it complicated.

Paul the Uncertain wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:04 am Note also that the way to solve the Adam problem was to leave the silo of historical method.
No, I did not set aside "historical methods" -- because the historical methods I used are in principle no different from any real-world investigative methods. Ask for corroboration; look for sources of ideas, data, etc. It's really quite simple. We have at hand the clear documentation of the source of Paul's reference to Adam. That's not in doubt. We also know from clear evidence that there was no historical Adam anyway, not that such information makes any difference to what Paul wrote or the source of Paul's concept of Adam.

Paul the Uncertain wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:04 am
We cannot meaningfully ask of a birth certificate when the person died.
.....
Assuming I'm starting from your mention of a news article, I suddenly know the subject's date of death to within a century, and have a high confidence estimate to within a few decades. Plus, I now know where to start looking for a death certificate (since the existence of the birth certificate implies that the person spent at least part of his or her life somewhere and when vital statistics were maintained - which I didn't know until now).
I said that we cannot meaningfully ask of a birth certificate when a person died. Surely it is clear that I am saying that the birth certificate does not tell us that information. Yes, of course if we have lots of other information to call upon then we can know when a person died. But the birth certificate alone does not tell us that information.

Ditto with historical research. Maybe sometimes a collection of different documents can tell us something that any single one of them cannot. No problem. That's fundamental in any type of research or fact-finding exercise.
Paul the Uncertain wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:04 am How in the name of Godfrey, looking at any birth certificate, am I unreasonable to formulate the questions, Has this person died? If so, when and where? And, in the bargain, I am supposed to fail to apply such heuristics as "if you add 120 years to the birth year, then you have a true upper bound on the death year," with near- WW II level confidence.

I can't reasonably do that? Bull. Total and complete bull.
I don't know if you are simply pulling my leg or are serious.

Of course we can wonder anything we want. I have tried to make it clear that we cannot meaningfully ask certain questions of certain types of data. If a birth certificate is all we have we cannot meaningfully ask of that birth certificate to tell us the date of a person's death. We need to collect other data to give us the answer to that question.

There are many questions we'd like answered about the ancient world but we simply don't have the data to enable us to answer many of those questions.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

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Ben C. Smith wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 6:42 am
neilgodfrey wrote: Wed Sep 13, 2017 9:44 pmWhen I say we cannot ask certain questions of certain types of data I meant that we cannot meaningfully ask certain questions. We cannot meaningfully ask of a birth certificate when the person died. We know that a birth certificate cannot answer that question so that's what I mean when I say we cannot ask certain questions of certain data. It is as pointless asking a birth certificate for the date of someone's death as it is to ask a rock for the meaning of its life.
I suspect this is just a poor example on your part of what you are trying to say, but the way you write this makes it sound as if the birth certificate were completely unrelated to the date of the person's death. It makes it sound as if you were not excited, in your quest to determine the date of death, to have found the birth certificate. But surely you would be. With the birth certificate, you would now lack only the testimony of a friend or family member or two to the effect that the person died at age 65, for example. Or perhaps evidence that the person lived to at least a certain age (perhaps a form, for example, indicating that s/he applied for something only the elderly qualify for), which would narrow the range down considerably. Or, if even the century of the person's death previously eluded one, surely the birth certificate would narrow down the possibilities. The birth certificate is not a negligible gain in potential knowledge for the date of a person's death; on its own, sure, you are dead in the water on the specifics; but historians are free to triangulate and deduce from multiple sources of information. (Again, you can probably come up with another example to make your point.)
Yes, the birth certificate, as a birth certificate, as a discrete document, in the context of my discussion, is completely unrelated to a person's death. It is a document that records the details of one's birth. So I think that is a very good example of what I was trying to say.

You are going way beyond the point I was attempting to address.

I meant nothing more nor less than the point that certain types of data allow us to meaningfully ask only certain types of questions. Full stop.

Yes, if I were investigating the life of someone important to me, and I found a birth certificate, etc etc etc --- all of that, yes yes yes. But that's not the point or situation I was addressing. I was trying to narrow it down to point to what is surely a simple truism: we cannot meaningfully ask of a rock how it came to be there.
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Re: The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

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Bernard Muller wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 7:32 am to Neil,
But you were joking, right? Do tell me you were joking. My "shit", surely you knew, referred to the debate itself. You did understand that, didn't you...
If it was so, you should have written, "the shit of mythicism versus historicism".
I feel like I am being supervised by North Korean word-police.

But to be genuinely neutral I should have written, rather, "the shit of mythicism versus the shit of historicism", yes? Or should I have put "shit of historicism" before "shit of mythicism"? But then I'd be putting more emphasis of the shit of historicism than on the shit of mythicism, yes? How could I express the point in a strictly neutral way, Bernard? :-)
Bernard Muller wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 7:32 am I think I understand your point: Christianity was started from a heavenly/spiritual --i.e. mythical -- Jesus.
My point is that I believe we need to work with the Jesus we have, the Jesus on the pages of the texts, the textual Jesus. We cannot deny that Jesus. That is the Jesus we need to explain. He is the only one a historian has to work with. Recall the biblical studies error illustrated by McGrath in the following model:
diagram.jpg
diagram.jpg (64.86 KiB) Viewed 4684 times
Jesus is not found behind the text. The text is not a clear glass to look through. He is found, rather, in the mosaic of the text and that's where he needs to be explained and understood.
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Re: The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

Post by Paul the Uncertain »

Neil
does not allow us to meaningfully ask about the historical Red Riding Hood.
Nothing bars me from brewing up a hypothesis space and seeing what I can do with it. As a personal matter, it doesn't impress me as a worthwhile use of my resources. That's no problem for anybody else.
We cannot meaningfully ask what a Walter Scott novel tell us about the "historical Robin Hood" because Scott's novel Ivanhoe presents an entirely fictional Robin Hood who is created to fulfil plot requirements.
OK. I personally don't know that, but if you say so, then the question is meaningful, and the answer is "nothing."

Well, nothing is an exaggeration, since if I can date the novel, and if there was a Robin Hood, then he apparently existed and became well-known before then. If the novel has traceable antecedents, then the upper bound may get tighter and tighter as I trace them. That's not the only way the novel could contribute to a powerful body of evidence or serve as a source of investigative leads that helps search for one.

Recall that in your report example, I don't know that you didn't find the "news item" in the Daily Planet. I grant that your telling me that might diminish my interest in the question, but it doesn't prevent me from asking it. Meh - wouldn't it be cool if a real news story was referenced in Superman? Some people would think so.
Orenstein does not ask about the historical RRH because of the nature of the very abundant evidence.
I don't follow. Abundant evidence about what? The existence (yes or no) of some real root RRH? If so, who cares whether she asked the question or not? Apparently she can answer it, so let me do the honors: Yes or No?
This is how scholarship tends to work.
We agree on something.
I don't even bother to ask if Paul's Adam was a real person because I know enough about modern science, evolution, to know not even to bother asking such a question.

Good for you. The issue was: knowing only X, are there questions which refer to some aspect of X, which I cannot reasonably (later changed to meaningfully) ask?
Paul's Adam serves an entirely theological function, ...
That's not dispositive of whether Adam exists, though. As soon as I discover that Paul didn't invent Adam, which he didn't, then what use Paul makes of an available character becomes uninformative about how the character became available.
Again, I don't think this line of reasoning is necessary.
Of course not. It suffices, though, and that's all I need.
No need to make it complicated.
But it might be fun to make it persuasive outside of the elect.
because the historical methods I used are in principle no different from any real-world investigative methods.
No, yours are domain dependent and not anytime, to name two things that are different. One will do it.
I don't know if you are simply pulling my leg or are serious.
Yes you do. You give me a birth certificate, and I start asking about all common vital records. I do this all the time, Neil. The idea that I cannot or ought not do so is total bull.
We need to collect other data to give us the answer to that question.

We need other data to give us a better answer to that question. Meanwhile, an actuary's probability distribution over all seriously possible years after YOB-1 is an answer.

Meaningful? Money changes hands routinely on just that basis. People buy life insurance for newborns. Actuaries can't price those policies? Neil, they do it.
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Re: The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

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Paul the Uncertain wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 5:15 pm Neil
does not allow us to meaningfully ask about the historical Red Riding Hood.
Nothing bars me from brewing up a hypothesis space and seeing what I can do with it. As a personal matter, it doesn't impress me as a worthwhile use of my resources. That's no problem for anybody else.
I am not sure I understand you.

If you take seriously fanciful speculations without any basis in the data itself (but based only on your own fanciful imaginations about anything that might conceivably be related somehow to the data) then we have no common ground to discuss questions relating data and methods in any field of research.

You certainly are free to brew up any fanciful notions you like about the data under review, but serious inquiry requires certain proven methods and procedures that can be justified by more than simply saying "I am free to imagine whatever I like".

Criminal investigators and courtroom testing of evidence do not allow for brewing up any old hypothesis. There really are certain rules of inquiry that must be followed. Same applies to the field of archaeology. And archival research. And journalism.
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