The late Professor GA Wells, at the beginning of his paper "The Historicity of Jesus," published in 1986 in the collection Jesus in History and Myth (ed by Hoffmann and Larue), notes that the question of whether or not Jesus existed was hotly debated early in the 20th century, and that those who were less than certain that Jesus existed -- a position now referred to as "mythicism" -- made mistakes in 3 major areas: 1) They over-emphasized similarities between the biography of Jesus and those of pagan gods; 2) they were overly ready to disregard as interpolations any passages in primary materials which were inconvenient to their arguments; and 3) they often badly erred in dating those primary texts. Besides these 3 classes of errors, the tone of the debate was regrettably polemical and lacking in the sober detachment necessary for productive scholarly inquiry of any sort. Because the mythicists argued their case badly, Biblical scholars concluded that it was certain that Jesus had existed.
And it's all happening again in the early 21st century: people who have doubts about Jesus' historicity are making the same kinds of mistakes, and the tone of the debate is usually deplorable, and Biblical scholars -- although, now just as 100 years ago, their tone often isn't any more dignified or productive than anyone else's -- are pointing to the mythicists' poor performance as proving that Jesus actually did exist.
I find it flabbergasting that so many people, including so many highly-trained experts, are (for at least the 2nd time around now) taking the fact that one side of a question is being ineptly arguing as proving the other side. If detectives investigating a crime listen to a raving fool who has one theory of the crime, do they conclude, because the man is a raving fool, that the case has been solved, and that the solution is the opposite of whatever the raving fool said? I certainly hope not. I would hope they would, instead, take a position such as that the statement of the raving fool, by itself, proved little or nothing about the case one way or the other, and continue to investigate.
Except that, carrying the analogy back from police work to New Testament studies, I still maintain that serious investigation of the question by the experts must begin before it can continue. Although the experts maintain that the issue has been thoroughly investigated, I still can't see where that investigation is, or when it was, let alone whatever it is which makes them all so convinced that the investigation is complete.
If you google bollinger paulkovich you will find many references, in news articles, blogs, discussions and what have you, to the particularly, spectacularly inept mythicist Michael Paulkovich, and to 2 of my blog posts about his ineptitude, the Open Letter, my first reaction to hearing that Paulkovich had claimed to have studied the work of 126 ancient authors looking for mentions of Jesus, and 126 Writers, written the next day when I had found the list of those 126 people. Most of these mentions refer to me as "atheist blogger Steven Bollinger," which is an accurate description: I am an atheist and I am a blogger. Occasionally some of these people -- including Paulkovich himself -- refer to me as a Christian, assuming, apparently, that only a Christian could have any criticism of any expressing any doubts that Jesus existed. Quite often, I'm referred to as supporting the historicist position, the position that Jesus certainly existed, which is also erroneous: I'm a mythicist, I'm far from convinced that Jesus existed.
But why should that mean that I think that everything said by everyone else who isn't convinced that Jesus existed is pure flawless genius?
Obviously it means nothing of the sort, unless you're a moron, or not paying attention, or both.
There are a lot of people out there spending a lot of time debating whether or not Jesus existed who are either morons, or not paying a lot of attention to the things they're spending so much time debating, or both. Even those references to me as "atheist blogger Steven Bollinger," although accurate, imply that it's amazing that any atheist would go to the trouble of criticizing a mythicist.
And look, I myself deplore harsh polemical tone, only to indulge in it just a few short paragraphs later. Except that I am not taking that tone in the conventional manner, which would be to use it only against those on the other side of the mythicist/historicist divide -- no, I'm potentially prepared to sneer at almost anyone who says anything at all about Jesus, whether skeptical or credulous. (The late Professor Wells still gets a pass -- for now. And it must be pointed out that he converted from mythicist to historicist, although his historicism remained so minimal that many of his readers and fans never noticed it.) It seems that most of the people debating Jesus's existence are not detached at all: they want the side they're arguing to turn out to be correct. Not so much with actually confronting the evidence with open minds, as if they were -- you know: scholars or something. I would feel great satisfaction if the question were ever definitively resolved one way or the other: I would feel great schadenfreude, directed at either one side, or the other.
Showing posts with label historicism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label historicism. Show all posts
Saturday, August 26, 2017
Monday, January 9, 2017
Intellectual Laziness: The Sad Case Of Michael Paulkovich And Myself
The two first posts I wrote concerning Michael Paulkovich's claim to have studied 126 ancient historians, looking for evidence of Jesus' existence, which I posted here back in September 2014, continue to be the two most-discussed, most-viewed, most-linked things I have written. They both continue to generate pageviews on my blog. And that's great. I was about to describe them as "most-read" along with "most-discussed" and "most-linked" and so forth, but the thing is, I don't know how carefully-read those posts have been. And not reading written works or just skimming them, and then acting as if you familiar with their contents, is the theme of this post.
First, there's Paulkovich: he claims to have studied 126 ancient historians, looking for evidence of Jesus' existence, but he hasn't: he has listed 126 names. But of those 126 people, few are actually historians. There are writers of fiction, physicians, lyric poets, people who died before Jesus was born, 4 writers who actually do mention Jesus, and more than 40 of whose writing nothing has survived, so much for Paulkovich's claim of having studied it. That's a particularly spectacular case of intellectual laziness, as is Free Inquiry's having published Paulkovich's piece and their continuing to defend it to this day.
Then there are the many people, other than the editors of Free Inquiry, who have taken Paulkovich's word when he says that he has studied historical texts written by these 126 people. And those who take his word when he describes himself as an historian and Biblical scholar. All of those people who assume that Paulkovich's assertions are sound, who haven't gone to the trouble of checking them. And sweet Lord Vushnu, you don't have to check Paulkovich's list of 126 names very extensively before you start to notice that something is wrong. (If Paulkovich is an historian, I'm a freakin' unicorn.)
Among the people who have described Paulkovich as having done devastating damage to the case for Jesus' historicity is Jerry Coyne, one of the world's most highly-respected biologists, but when it comes to his rep as an authority on ancient history, not so highly-respected anymore, along with fellow big-time, no foolin' biologists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. Besides being some of the world's leading biologists, Coyne, Dawkins and Myers are also New Atheists, which among other things means they don't know much about ancient history and seem determined to stay that way. They would never accept any statement about biology whatsoever, made by anyone whatsoever, by an unknown or a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, as uncritically as Coyne accepted Paulkovich's claims about ancient historians.
Coyne may now know better about Paulkovich, someone may have been able in the meantime to explain to him what's up there, but if so, I haven't heard about it yet.
Besides Coyne, many others have assumed that Paulkovich knows what he's talking about when it comes to ancient historians. I hope that not many of them are also academics, but I have no idea how many of them may be.
All of the above has been perfectly clear to me all along.
So. Then comes me, with my blog posts concerning that list of 126 names, and a lot of people have praised those two posts of mine and linked them and so forth.
But how many of the people who have been so enthusiastic about my blog posts have checked my work? I'm complaining because people have uncritically accepted what Paulkovich says, but how many people who accept what I say about Paulkovich are just as uncritical?
Before we even get to the question of whether readers have checked my facts, it's been clear all along that many people have commented on my posts without having read them carefully at all: for instance, because they describe me as convinced that Jesus existed and/or a believing monotheist, although I state in those posts that I am an atheist and that I'm not sure whether or not Jesus existed. These are mostly people who defend Paulkovich, and apparently assume that pious Christian belief is the only reason anyone could have for having any problem with him.
Those are obvious cases. But today it suddenly hit me that most of the people who take my side against Paulkovich probably haven't checked my work any more thoroughly than those who take Paulkovich's side have checked his. If they had checked my work at all, then they would've given an indication of it in their comments underneath those countless online articles and blog posts. They would've given an indication by saying: Bollinger is right, person X -- fill in the blank: has no writing which survives, or, wrote only fiction, or wrote only about medicine, or actuallly does mention Jesus, etc.
And a few people have made such comments, and I've had some very rewarding online discussions with them. But for the most part it's people saying: look here, Paulkovich has made a great case that Jesus never existed, against people saying, look here, Bollinger has made a compelling case that Paulkovich doesn't know what he's talking about.
And all sides are choosing their authority -- Paulkovich, or me, or someone else -- for no sounder reason than because that authority is saying what they want to believe is true.
It just dawned on me very recently how rare it has been, in this entire controversy over Jesus' historicity, for someone to actually go to any trouble at all of actually digging into the source texts and doing a little research for themselves. Hearing arguments about who wrote this or that text, and when, and whether or not it may have been altered, by mistake or on purpose. Actually attempting to figure out how reliable this or that modern or ancient authority might be. Weighing the non-literary evidence. Considering opposing points of view while attempting to keep an open mind. And then reaching their own conclusions rather than just accepting someone else's, and actually basing those conclusions on ancient evidence rather than contemporary politics.
Well, it's a shame when people don't do all of that, because that's the fun stuff in the study of ancient history.
First, there's Paulkovich: he claims to have studied 126 ancient historians, looking for evidence of Jesus' existence, but he hasn't: he has listed 126 names. But of those 126 people, few are actually historians. There are writers of fiction, physicians, lyric poets, people who died before Jesus was born, 4 writers who actually do mention Jesus, and more than 40 of whose writing nothing has survived, so much for Paulkovich's claim of having studied it. That's a particularly spectacular case of intellectual laziness, as is Free Inquiry's having published Paulkovich's piece and their continuing to defend it to this day.
Then there are the many people, other than the editors of Free Inquiry, who have taken Paulkovich's word when he says that he has studied historical texts written by these 126 people. And those who take his word when he describes himself as an historian and Biblical scholar. All of those people who assume that Paulkovich's assertions are sound, who haven't gone to the trouble of checking them. And sweet Lord Vushnu, you don't have to check Paulkovich's list of 126 names very extensively before you start to notice that something is wrong. (If Paulkovich is an historian, I'm a freakin' unicorn.)
Among the people who have described Paulkovich as having done devastating damage to the case for Jesus' historicity is Jerry Coyne, one of the world's most highly-respected biologists, but when it comes to his rep as an authority on ancient history, not so highly-respected anymore, along with fellow big-time, no foolin' biologists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. Besides being some of the world's leading biologists, Coyne, Dawkins and Myers are also New Atheists, which among other things means they don't know much about ancient history and seem determined to stay that way. They would never accept any statement about biology whatsoever, made by anyone whatsoever, by an unknown or a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, as uncritically as Coyne accepted Paulkovich's claims about ancient historians.
Coyne may now know better about Paulkovich, someone may have been able in the meantime to explain to him what's up there, but if so, I haven't heard about it yet.
Besides Coyne, many others have assumed that Paulkovich knows what he's talking about when it comes to ancient historians. I hope that not many of them are also academics, but I have no idea how many of them may be.
All of the above has been perfectly clear to me all along.
So. Then comes me, with my blog posts concerning that list of 126 names, and a lot of people have praised those two posts of mine and linked them and so forth.
But how many of the people who have been so enthusiastic about my blog posts have checked my work? I'm complaining because people have uncritically accepted what Paulkovich says, but how many people who accept what I say about Paulkovich are just as uncritical?
Before we even get to the question of whether readers have checked my facts, it's been clear all along that many people have commented on my posts without having read them carefully at all: for instance, because they describe me as convinced that Jesus existed and/or a believing monotheist, although I state in those posts that I am an atheist and that I'm not sure whether or not Jesus existed. These are mostly people who defend Paulkovich, and apparently assume that pious Christian belief is the only reason anyone could have for having any problem with him.
Those are obvious cases. But today it suddenly hit me that most of the people who take my side against Paulkovich probably haven't checked my work any more thoroughly than those who take Paulkovich's side have checked his. If they had checked my work at all, then they would've given an indication of it in their comments underneath those countless online articles and blog posts. They would've given an indication by saying: Bollinger is right, person X -- fill in the blank: has no writing which survives, or, wrote only fiction, or wrote only about medicine, or actuallly does mention Jesus, etc.
And a few people have made such comments, and I've had some very rewarding online discussions with them. But for the most part it's people saying: look here, Paulkovich has made a great case that Jesus never existed, against people saying, look here, Bollinger has made a compelling case that Paulkovich doesn't know what he's talking about.
And all sides are choosing their authority -- Paulkovich, or me, or someone else -- for no sounder reason than because that authority is saying what they want to believe is true.
It just dawned on me very recently how rare it has been, in this entire controversy over Jesus' historicity, for someone to actually go to any trouble at all of actually digging into the source texts and doing a little research for themselves. Hearing arguments about who wrote this or that text, and when, and whether or not it may have been altered, by mistake or on purpose. Actually attempting to figure out how reliable this or that modern or ancient authority might be. Weighing the non-literary evidence. Considering opposing points of view while attempting to keep an open mind. And then reaching their own conclusions rather than just accepting someone else's, and actually basing those conclusions on ancient evidence rather than contemporary politics.
Well, it's a shame when people don't do all of that, because that's the fun stuff in the study of ancient history.
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
G A Wells Is No Longer A Mythicist
Since this post has to do in large part with clarity and its lack, let me begin by explaining once again how I define historicism and mythicism, and by warning my readers that others may not always define these terms exactly the same way I do.
Historicism is summed up in the last 3 words of Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist, which would have made a much better, much less-misleading title for the book: "Jesus certainly existed."
Mythicism contains every other possible viewpoint on the matter: if you're convinced that Jesus never existed, you're a mythicist. if you're not sure whether he existed or not, like me and many of the most prominent mythicists, you're a mythicist.
In the 1970's and 1980's G A Wells was a mythicist, someone who said that it wasn't certain that the stories of Jesus were based on a real person.
In the 1990's he changed from a mythicist to an historicist, convinced that these stories began with an actual 1st-century Galilean preacher.
Many people have not noticed Wells' change from mythicism to historicism and continue to refer to him as a mythicist. Up until this post, I mistakenly referred to him as a mythicist, not having noticed his change. mea culpa. Last week, in the comments to my post 126 Writers Who, According To Michael Paulkovich, Should Have Mentioned Jesus If Jesus Existed, the irascible Tim O'Neill said to me that Wells has switched from mythicism to historicism, that he has become convinced that the hypothesized Q document, drawn upon by the authors of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, was based upon the life and teachings of a real person. I quoted a passage from Wells' 2004 book Can We Trust the New Testament? which, to me, seem to indicate that Wells had still been a mythicist when he wrote it.
O'Neill said, of the very same passage, that it demonstrated that
Wells abandoned the Mythicist position and admitted that the evidence is best explained by a historical figure.
That's right: I read a passage by Wells, and to me it seemed to say that he was a mythicist; O'Neill saw the very same passage and said it confirmed what he was saying: that Wells was now an historicist.
I decided that I had better read some more material by Wells before responding to Tim. So I read his book Cutting Jesus Down to Size, published in 2009, and sure enough, Wells not only said that he now believed that the Q document was based on an actual person. He also said:
"This is the position I have argued in my books of 1996, 1999, and 2004, although the titles of the first two of theses -- The Jesus Legend and The Jesus Myth -- may have mislead potential readers into supposing that I still denied the historicity of the Gospel Jesus." (Cutting Jesus Down to size, p 15)
Well, I had been, in fact, mislead. But I was hardly the only one: besides "potential readers," whoever wrote the book-jack blurb of The Jesus Legend, which begins: "Did Jesus actually exist as a historical personage[...]", as well as Wells' colleague R Joseph Hoffmann, who wrote the book's Foreword, which begins: "It is no longer possible to dismiss the thesis that Jesus of Nazareth never existed as the 'marginal indiscretion of lay amateurs,' (to paraphrase a sentence once imposed on Matthew Arnold’s biblical criticism by his theological critics). The direction of biblical criticism since Albert Schweitzer's day has circled back with dizzying regularity to the implied question of Jesus's existence but has sought without success to answer it." -- were either misled, or themselves seriously misleading, concerning Wells' place on the mythicist-to-historicist spectrum, or so it seems to me, harrumph harrumph.
In Cutting Jesus Down to Size, Wells repeatedly complains about both historicists and mythicists having misunderstood his position, and it would be hard, I should think, to read this most recent book of his and still be unclear on the matter. On p 327 Wells, complaining about P R Eddy and G A Boyd still thinking he's a mythicist, says that he belongs in their category 2: people who believe "that Jesus did exist but, as Bultmann argued, 'the reports we have of him are so unreliable and saturated with legend...that we can confidently ascertain very little historical information about him.'"
I apologize for my part in spreading the misconception that Wells has remained a mythicist, and I hope this clears that up.
And in case anyone was wondering: although Wells is no longer a mythicist, and hasn't been for 2 decades, I still am. It still seems to me that the default position of academia regarding Jesus is to assume that he existed, and to take any fairly reasonable hypothesis about how this may have been the case as evidence that it was the case. It still seems to me that there is much special pleading and begging the question going on here. I still have not experienced anything remotely resembling an "Aha! it DOES make sense, what they're saying when they insist Jesus existed!"-moment.
Not even close. Not any closer when Wells says so than when anybody else says it.
So: Wells was the last mythicist known to me whom I felt was doing solid work, except that he wasn't doing what I thought since the 80's. Now it turns out he's just one more historicist doing solid work, and I disagree with him on this one issue. I am isolated and embarrassed here. This exhaustion I'm feeling right now: is this anything like what Hoffmann has referred to as "Jesus fatigue"? (No, probably not.) In any event, I don't really feel like throwing myself wholeheartedly and full-time into Jesus Studies, to straighten this all out once and for all if no-one else will.
For now I think I'd rather spend some time boning up on my Livy. Unlike Q, his missing 106.95 books are much more than merely hypothesized. They did exist, and some part of them may well exist still.
Historicism is summed up in the last 3 words of Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist, which would have made a much better, much less-misleading title for the book: "Jesus certainly existed."
Mythicism contains every other possible viewpoint on the matter: if you're convinced that Jesus never existed, you're a mythicist. if you're not sure whether he existed or not, like me and many of the most prominent mythicists, you're a mythicist.
In the 1970's and 1980's G A Wells was a mythicist, someone who said that it wasn't certain that the stories of Jesus were based on a real person.
In the 1990's he changed from a mythicist to an historicist, convinced that these stories began with an actual 1st-century Galilean preacher.
Many people have not noticed Wells' change from mythicism to historicism and continue to refer to him as a mythicist. Up until this post, I mistakenly referred to him as a mythicist, not having noticed his change. mea culpa. Last week, in the comments to my post 126 Writers Who, According To Michael Paulkovich, Should Have Mentioned Jesus If Jesus Existed, the irascible Tim O'Neill said to me that Wells has switched from mythicism to historicism, that he has become convinced that the hypothesized Q document, drawn upon by the authors of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, was based upon the life and teachings of a real person. I quoted a passage from Wells' 2004 book Can We Trust the New Testament? which, to me, seem to indicate that Wells had still been a mythicist when he wrote it.
O'Neill said, of the very same passage, that it demonstrated that
Wells abandoned the Mythicist position and admitted that the evidence is best explained by a historical figure.
That's right: I read a passage by Wells, and to me it seemed to say that he was a mythicist; O'Neill saw the very same passage and said it confirmed what he was saying: that Wells was now an historicist.
I decided that I had better read some more material by Wells before responding to Tim. So I read his book Cutting Jesus Down to Size, published in 2009, and sure enough, Wells not only said that he now believed that the Q document was based on an actual person. He also said:
"This is the position I have argued in my books of 1996, 1999, and 2004, although the titles of the first two of theses -- The Jesus Legend and The Jesus Myth -- may have mislead potential readers into supposing that I still denied the historicity of the Gospel Jesus." (Cutting Jesus Down to size, p 15)
Well, I had been, in fact, mislead. But I was hardly the only one: besides "potential readers," whoever wrote the book-jack blurb of The Jesus Legend, which begins: "Did Jesus actually exist as a historical personage[...]", as well as Wells' colleague R Joseph Hoffmann, who wrote the book's Foreword, which begins: "It is no longer possible to dismiss the thesis that Jesus of Nazareth never existed as the 'marginal indiscretion of lay amateurs,' (to paraphrase a sentence once imposed on Matthew Arnold’s biblical criticism by his theological critics). The direction of biblical criticism since Albert Schweitzer's day has circled back with dizzying regularity to the implied question of Jesus's existence but has sought without success to answer it." -- were either misled, or themselves seriously misleading, concerning Wells' place on the mythicist-to-historicist spectrum, or so it seems to me, harrumph harrumph.
In Cutting Jesus Down to Size, Wells repeatedly complains about both historicists and mythicists having misunderstood his position, and it would be hard, I should think, to read this most recent book of his and still be unclear on the matter. On p 327 Wells, complaining about P R Eddy and G A Boyd still thinking he's a mythicist, says that he belongs in their category 2: people who believe "that Jesus did exist but, as Bultmann argued, 'the reports we have of him are so unreliable and saturated with legend...that we can confidently ascertain very little historical information about him.'"
I apologize for my part in spreading the misconception that Wells has remained a mythicist, and I hope this clears that up.
And in case anyone was wondering: although Wells is no longer a mythicist, and hasn't been for 2 decades, I still am. It still seems to me that the default position of academia regarding Jesus is to assume that he existed, and to take any fairly reasonable hypothesis about how this may have been the case as evidence that it was the case. It still seems to me that there is much special pleading and begging the question going on here. I still have not experienced anything remotely resembling an "Aha! it DOES make sense, what they're saying when they insist Jesus existed!"-moment.
Not even close. Not any closer when Wells says so than when anybody else says it.
So: Wells was the last mythicist known to me whom I felt was doing solid work, except that he wasn't doing what I thought since the 80's. Now it turns out he's just one more historicist doing solid work, and I disagree with him on this one issue. I am isolated and embarrassed here. This exhaustion I'm feeling right now: is this anything like what Hoffmann has referred to as "Jesus fatigue"? (No, probably not.) In any event, I don't really feel like throwing myself wholeheartedly and full-time into Jesus Studies, to straighten this all out once and for all if no-one else will.
For now I think I'd rather spend some time boning up on my Livy. Unlike Q, his missing 106.95 books are much more than merely hypothesized. They did exist, and some part of them may well exist still.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
An Ironic Incident And An Attempt To Do Better
I'm not convinced that Jesus existed. I think maybe he did, or maybe that someone (leading candidate: St Paul) made him up, or had a dream about him and concluded he was real; or maybe that the nonfictional John the Baptist gradually morphed, in the minds of several people, into a mythical character, Jesus. The overwhelming majority of academics who specialize in the New Testament and related fields insist that Jesus existed. The problem I have with them is that they seem unwilling even to discuss the possibility that he never existed. Several times on this blog, I've characterized the response of many of them toward people who aren't convinced that Jesus existed as, "We're right, you're wrong, shut up!" And I've complained that this sort of response does not amount to an argument. I've complained about the unwillingness to discuss the matter.
This morning, it suddenly occurred to me that "I'm right, you're wrong, shut up!" is exactly what I said to someone in my previous post on this blog, in which I responded to someone who'd said that there are 5h-century Viking maps of Canada.
That's ironic. And I shouldn't do exactly the same thing I complain about other people doing. So, does that mean that I'm going to explain in this post in painstaking detail why I'm so sure that the assertion that there are 5th-century Viking maps of Canada is mistaken? No, not right now, because that would require some effort. Hard work made me quit. But I'll provide some references to the work of some other people. For example, there is this book, also linked in yesterday's post:
Does this embarrassing ironic incident make Jesus' existence seem more likely to me? Also no. Does it give me more sympathy for the academics who are convinced Jesus did exist, and respond to us who aren't convinced by saying, "We're right, you're wrong, shut up!" ? Yes.
I'll try not to repeat yesterday's behavior. I'll try to improve upon it with this:
Am I aware of any plausible evidence of Europeans sailing to the Western Hemisphere as early as the 5th century AD? No. (That's how I should participate in debates: not by saying, "You're wrong! Get out!" but by saying: "I am unaware of any plausible evidence which supports what you're saying." That's not merely nicer: it's also much more precise. It is open for the possibility that there may be evidence of which I am unaware. Such openness is the way to be.)
Now, when we come to the 6th century, I am aware of some things: namely, St Brendan and some other Irish monks sailed west from Ireland, and as far as I can see, no one knows with anything approaching certainty how far west they journeyed. Samuel Eliot Morison's book The European Discovery of America: the Northern Voyages, AD 500-1600 is an excellent introduction to the subject, and has superb bibliographies following each chapter, with a heavy emphasis on the primary sources. Morison is completely convinced that the Vinland Map is a fake.
Morison also wrote an excellent book about the southern voyages, ie, Columbus and those who followed him.
This morning, it suddenly occurred to me that "I'm right, you're wrong, shut up!" is exactly what I said to someone in my previous post on this blog, in which I responded to someone who'd said that there are 5h-century Viking maps of Canada.
That's ironic. And I shouldn't do exactly the same thing I complain about other people doing. So, does that mean that I'm going to explain in this post in painstaking detail why I'm so sure that the assertion that there are 5th-century Viking maps of Canada is mistaken? No, not right now, because that would require some effort. Hard work made me quit. But I'll provide some references to the work of some other people. For example, there is this book, also linked in yesterday's post:
Does this embarrassing ironic incident make Jesus' existence seem more likely to me? Also no. Does it give me more sympathy for the academics who are convinced Jesus did exist, and respond to us who aren't convinced by saying, "We're right, you're wrong, shut up!" ? Yes.
I'll try not to repeat yesterday's behavior. I'll try to improve upon it with this:
Am I aware of any plausible evidence of Europeans sailing to the Western Hemisphere as early as the 5th century AD? No. (That's how I should participate in debates: not by saying, "You're wrong! Get out!" but by saying: "I am unaware of any plausible evidence which supports what you're saying." That's not merely nicer: it's also much more precise. It is open for the possibility that there may be evidence of which I am unaware. Such openness is the way to be.)
Now, when we come to the 6th century, I am aware of some things: namely, St Brendan and some other Irish monks sailed west from Ireland, and as far as I can see, no one knows with anything approaching certainty how far west they journeyed. Samuel Eliot Morison's book The European Discovery of America: the Northern Voyages, AD 500-1600 is an excellent introduction to the subject, and has superb bibliographies following each chapter, with a heavy emphasis on the primary sources. Morison is completely convinced that the Vinland Map is a fake.
Morison also wrote an excellent book about the southern voyages, ie, Columbus and those who followed him.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Once More About Mythicism
It seems to be in the news again, at least in the small-pond news of New Testament scholars and we mythicists who aggravate them so much, so I'll take the opportunity to state my position at present.
Typically, academic Biblical scholars describe mythicists as amateurs and nuts. Unfortunately, they're right, with some rare exceptions such as G A Wells, and -- of course -- myself. But just because a lot of people argue a position ineptly does not mean that the position itself is unsound.
Those writing the news and quoted in the news -- and not just the journalists who are not Biblical scholars, but sometimes the academic scholars as well -- often repeat the erroneous view that mythicists are convinced that Jesus did not exist. But mythicists such as Robert Price, Richard Carrier, G A Wells and myself are not convinced that Jesus did not exist: we are all just none of us convinced that he did exist. [PS, 9 January 2018: Actually, G A Wells (22 May 1926–23 January 2017) ceased to be a mythicist some time before 2000; but the difference between himself and a mythicist remained so small that almost no-one noticed it.] And we all agree that the academic mainstream of Biblical scholarship is much too opposed to debating the matter. They, the academic Biblical scholars, are the pros. They're the ones with the advanced training. They are the people ideally qualified to investigate whether or not Jesus existed. And they're simply not investigating it. Four centuries ago, almost everyone assumed that Abraham was an historical figure, and that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Today, we don't assume that either Abraham or Moses is historical, and before the discovery of the Tel Dan stele there were some doubts about David as well, and their remains quite a bit of controversy over whether David's kingdom was anywhere near as large as described in the Bible. And all of that is due to the efforts of these very same Biblical scholars, the very same ones who are not subjecting the question of Jesus' historical existence to the same kind of scrutiny.
Typically, the academic Biblical scholars aren't nuts. But many of them are religious believers, and many more are somewhat reluctant to upset religious believers, and this may have something or everything to do with why they aren't asking (in spite of the title of that book by Bart Ehrman), Did Jesus exist? but rather continuing to routinely assume that he did, and go from there.
We mythicists don't all agree about much else other than that Jesus' historical existence has not been firmly established. What follows is my own position. Other mythicists disagree with some or all of it, so don't assume that I'm speaking for anyone else but myself. For their positions, read their books and their blogs.
With one possible exception, there are no known mentions of Jesus written earlier than Paul's letters and at least 3 of the 4 Gospels. That one possible exception is the Gospel of Thomas. Assuming that those who date Thomas to the 30's are wrong -- a very safe assumption in my opinion -- the earliest mentions of Jesus are from Paul, who by his own admission only saw Jesus "in a vision," whatever that means: in a dream, or a daydream, or an hallucination, or does it simply mean that Paul made Jesus up?
In my opinion, the only significant evidence we have at this time about whether or not Jesus existed is the New Testament. All that Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus have to tell us is about the existence of Christians, which is not the same as the existence of Jesus. The good news is that we just keep on finding more and more ancient texts. Mostly in Egypt near the Nile, but also some as far east as Mesopotamia. So, more evidence may turn up at any time. But in the meantime, it seems to me, only the New Testament can help us figure out whether or not Jesus existed. And I honestly don't see how it alone can answer the question conclusively one way or the other.
The problem with the New Testament as history, obviously, is that so much of it is legend. But we can't conclude from that that it's entirely legend and that Jesus is a fictional character. I like to compare the New Testament to the Nibelungenlied. Both contain a high percentage of legend. In the case of the Nibelungenlied we have a great deal of historical material about the same time and place, and because of that other historical material, we know, for example, that Etzel in the Nibelungenlied is an historical person: he's Attila the Hun. If we didn't have as much of that other historical material, we would have to rely much more heavily on the Nibelungenlied in trying to understand the history of 5th- and 6th- century central Europe. Because of the lack of other historical material, we have to rely very heavily on the New Testament when trying to understand the history of 1st-century-AD Judea and Galilee, because it comprises a very great portion of all the written evidence we have, and when it comes to the life of Jesus, it comprises almost all of the significant evidence we have.
Another comparison I find helpful is to compare Jesus to Achilles. In my opinion, there's about as much reason to assume that one existed as the other. This, of course, will cause academic Biblical scholars to point at me and laugh and laugh, because they think it's so obvious that Jesus existed. But it still isn't obvious to me, and they shouldn't laugh so much, because their job is to explain stuff to people like me, and as yet none of them has begun to convince me that it's obvious and certain that Jesus existed.
I'm not so upset about it. I'm a 54-year-old autistic man who wasn't correctly diagnosed until the age of 45, so I'm quite used to being laughed at for all sorts of reasons. And laughter is a physically healthy thing. Who am I to begrudge it them?
But they haven't convinced me, and that's their job. To convince me, or to admit that the matter is not yet settled. When it comes to Jesus, the academic Biblical scholars -- with a few exceptions -- are not doing their jobs.
Typically, academic Biblical scholars describe mythicists as amateurs and nuts. Unfortunately, they're right, with some rare exceptions such as G A Wells, and -- of course -- myself. But just because a lot of people argue a position ineptly does not mean that the position itself is unsound.
Those writing the news and quoted in the news -- and not just the journalists who are not Biblical scholars, but sometimes the academic scholars as well -- often repeat the erroneous view that mythicists are convinced that Jesus did not exist. But mythicists such as Robert Price, Richard Carrier, G A Wells and myself are not convinced that Jesus did not exist: we are all just none of us convinced that he did exist. [PS, 9 January 2018: Actually, G A Wells (22 May 1926–23 January 2017) ceased to be a mythicist some time before 2000; but the difference between himself and a mythicist remained so small that almost no-one noticed it.] And we all agree that the academic mainstream of Biblical scholarship is much too opposed to debating the matter. They, the academic Biblical scholars, are the pros. They're the ones with the advanced training. They are the people ideally qualified to investigate whether or not Jesus existed. And they're simply not investigating it. Four centuries ago, almost everyone assumed that Abraham was an historical figure, and that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Today, we don't assume that either Abraham or Moses is historical, and before the discovery of the Tel Dan stele there were some doubts about David as well, and their remains quite a bit of controversy over whether David's kingdom was anywhere near as large as described in the Bible. And all of that is due to the efforts of these very same Biblical scholars, the very same ones who are not subjecting the question of Jesus' historical existence to the same kind of scrutiny.
Typically, the academic Biblical scholars aren't nuts. But many of them are religious believers, and many more are somewhat reluctant to upset religious believers, and this may have something or everything to do with why they aren't asking (in spite of the title of that book by Bart Ehrman), Did Jesus exist? but rather continuing to routinely assume that he did, and go from there.
We mythicists don't all agree about much else other than that Jesus' historical existence has not been firmly established. What follows is my own position. Other mythicists disagree with some or all of it, so don't assume that I'm speaking for anyone else but myself. For their positions, read their books and their blogs.
With one possible exception, there are no known mentions of Jesus written earlier than Paul's letters and at least 3 of the 4 Gospels. That one possible exception is the Gospel of Thomas. Assuming that those who date Thomas to the 30's are wrong -- a very safe assumption in my opinion -- the earliest mentions of Jesus are from Paul, who by his own admission only saw Jesus "in a vision," whatever that means: in a dream, or a daydream, or an hallucination, or does it simply mean that Paul made Jesus up?
In my opinion, the only significant evidence we have at this time about whether or not Jesus existed is the New Testament. All that Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus have to tell us is about the existence of Christians, which is not the same as the existence of Jesus. The good news is that we just keep on finding more and more ancient texts. Mostly in Egypt near the Nile, but also some as far east as Mesopotamia. So, more evidence may turn up at any time. But in the meantime, it seems to me, only the New Testament can help us figure out whether or not Jesus existed. And I honestly don't see how it alone can answer the question conclusively one way or the other.
The problem with the New Testament as history, obviously, is that so much of it is legend. But we can't conclude from that that it's entirely legend and that Jesus is a fictional character. I like to compare the New Testament to the Nibelungenlied. Both contain a high percentage of legend. In the case of the Nibelungenlied we have a great deal of historical material about the same time and place, and because of that other historical material, we know, for example, that Etzel in the Nibelungenlied is an historical person: he's Attila the Hun. If we didn't have as much of that other historical material, we would have to rely much more heavily on the Nibelungenlied in trying to understand the history of 5th- and 6th- century central Europe. Because of the lack of other historical material, we have to rely very heavily on the New Testament when trying to understand the history of 1st-century-AD Judea and Galilee, because it comprises a very great portion of all the written evidence we have, and when it comes to the life of Jesus, it comprises almost all of the significant evidence we have.
Another comparison I find helpful is to compare Jesus to Achilles. In my opinion, there's about as much reason to assume that one existed as the other. This, of course, will cause academic Biblical scholars to point at me and laugh and laugh, because they think it's so obvious that Jesus existed. But it still isn't obvious to me, and they shouldn't laugh so much, because their job is to explain stuff to people like me, and as yet none of them has begun to convince me that it's obvious and certain that Jesus existed.
I'm not so upset about it. I'm a 54-year-old autistic man who wasn't correctly diagnosed until the age of 45, so I'm quite used to being laughed at for all sorts of reasons. And laughter is a physically healthy thing. Who am I to begrudge it them?
But they haven't convinced me, and that's their job. To convince me, or to admit that the matter is not yet settled. When it comes to Jesus, the academic Biblical scholars -- with a few exceptions -- are not doing their jobs.
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Does It Matter If Jesus Existed?
Of course it matters. If it didn't matter to so many people we wouldn't discuss it so much.
The question is: how important is it? Many people, historicists and mythicists alike, Christians and atheists and others, seem to think that nothing could be more important: if it were ever proven that Jesus never existed, they seem to think, it would remake our world, from the ground up, in a flash.
These people who believe that the proof of Jesus' non-existence would be cataclysmic don't seem to me to have thought it through very far.
Let's look at the case of evolution. Since well before Charles Darwin's time, it has been plain that the nature and origin of life on Earth do not correspond at all to Biblical accounts. And yet, this has not led to an overthrow of Judaism and Christianity: on the contrary, fundamentalists still do not believe in evolution, and scientifically-literate practicing Jews and Christians have had remarkably little trouble in convincing themselves that the Bible never said what it clearly says, and that believers never took it as literally as they clearly all did until a few hundred years ago.
It's much harder to prove the absence of an historical person 2000 years ago than to prove his or her historical reality. Then again, never have so many people been so obsessed with one possibly-historical person as there are with Jesus. The amount of attention paid to him isn't comparable to that paid to anyone else. The usual standards of difficulty of proof or disproof may eventually be swamped by this tidal wave of attention. So let us say for the sake of argument that some day soon it will somehow be conclusively proven, as conclusively as it's been proven that Piltdown Man was a hoax, that Jesus of Nazareth was invented whole by Paul of Tarsus or created in hindsight out of unclear memories of John the Baptist or what have you, that the person himself is shown to be as legendary as his miracles and resurrection. What will happen?
Why should we believe that people will suddenly behave differently than they have in the past? The fundamentalists don't believe that evolution happens just because some biologists have explained that it does. Why on Earth would they be more receptive to historians showing that Jesus didn't exist?
And as for the moderate and the politically-progressive, academically-up-to-speed believers: they have quite calmly kept their beliefs in the face of evolutionary theory by maintaining that the stories in Genesis of the Creation and the Flood are metaphors, or camp-fire stories handed down from generation to generation and never taken all that seriously until all of a suddenly in 19th-century America the Biblical literalsts somehow very suddenly got it all wrong. Why should we expect a smaller amount of faith-saving mental acrobatics if and when Jesus is proven never to have existed? They will tell themselves and each other that Jesus was understood to be just a story all along -- or whatever else they have to tell themselves in order to be able to continue to believe whatever it is that they want to believe.
Although the progressive believers for the most part, and very, very nearly 100% of the academic Biblical scholars and Christian theologians, still firmly maintain that Jesus existed, even the ones who say that all the stories of miracles are legendary (and often have varying absurd positions about no-one ever having really believed those stories anyway -- until the 19th century in the US when millions of fundamentalists somehow managed to pull firm literalist beliefs out of their butts all at once), even the ones who don't believe in God -- although these latter ones have been much more reluctant to call themselves what they are -- atheists -- since Richard Dawkins started to behave like a jackass and put all this stink on the term "atheist" -- although even these Christians, or "2/3 Christians," as Nietzsche called them, still say that they are quite certain that Jesus existed, and tend to rather impolitely mock all doubts -- even they seem to be starting to hedge their bets a little, as more and more of the stories of the early Christians are proven to be legends, and are beginning to say that it doesn't MATTER whether Jesus existed or not, that what matters is the allegorical worth of the stories about him.
In short, although they still firmly maintain that there is no doubt that Jesus existed, they are already laying the ideological groundwork for the case that they may be proven wrong, by emphasizing more and more that "it doesn't matter" if he existed: what matters is the symbolic worth -- whatever that worth might be; it tends to vary quite a bit from progressive theologian to progressive theologian -- of the legendary stories about him. Christians suddenly switched from believing the stories in the Bible literally to maintaining that no-one ever believed them literally. If they could do that, why would it be at all difficult to suddenly switch from saying that it's certain that Jesus existed to saying everyone understood all along that he was a fictional character in those parables known as the Gospels, and that only those pesky fundamentalists, since just very recently, had ever believed in anything like "Gospel truth."
Monday: "Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and at peace with Eastasia." Tuesday: "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia." And only an occasional Winston Smith among the progressive faithful has any qualms or doubts that all is well. That sniveling creep and snitch George Orwell may have fooled millions of readers into thinking that his novels were realistic depictions of Communist regimes, but the Soviet Union actually never was much like that. The parallels between 1984 and Christianity, on the other hand, are many and striking, although, astonishingly, apparently quite unintentional on Orwell's part.
Many naive New Atheists seem to believe that if can be proven that Jesus never existed, superstition will shatter and crash to the ground and a Golden Age of Reason will begin, their descriptions of which sound very much like their families' descriptions of the Millennium. The New Atheist apple has often landed not nearly as far from the fundamentalist tree as it thinks.
I tend to agree, upon reflection, with those who say that it would make little change in the world, at least not right away. I just wish they wouldn't constantly interrupt discussions of Jesus' historicity to say that they don't care about it, because I do care -- not for the sake of huge sudden changes in the world which I don't see coming. I personally am interested in the question of the historical Jesus the same way that I would be interested in any other historical question. I'm interested in history, in trying to determine what happened at such and such a time in such and such a place, for its own sake, in somewhat the same way that theoretical mathematicians enjoy their equations and formulae for their own sake. I just find it interesting to attempt to learn what happened. And if possible to improve the historical record, to make it more accurate and/or more detailed. Some people like detective novels, some like comic books, some like quilts, some like boats. I like old manuscripts and inscriptions and mosaics and other ancient artifacts, and they happen to be what may possibly eventually clarify the historical Jesus question.
The question is: how important is it? Many people, historicists and mythicists alike, Christians and atheists and others, seem to think that nothing could be more important: if it were ever proven that Jesus never existed, they seem to think, it would remake our world, from the ground up, in a flash.
These people who believe that the proof of Jesus' non-existence would be cataclysmic don't seem to me to have thought it through very far.
Let's look at the case of evolution. Since well before Charles Darwin's time, it has been plain that the nature and origin of life on Earth do not correspond at all to Biblical accounts. And yet, this has not led to an overthrow of Judaism and Christianity: on the contrary, fundamentalists still do not believe in evolution, and scientifically-literate practicing Jews and Christians have had remarkably little trouble in convincing themselves that the Bible never said what it clearly says, and that believers never took it as literally as they clearly all did until a few hundred years ago.
It's much harder to prove the absence of an historical person 2000 years ago than to prove his or her historical reality. Then again, never have so many people been so obsessed with one possibly-historical person as there are with Jesus. The amount of attention paid to him isn't comparable to that paid to anyone else. The usual standards of difficulty of proof or disproof may eventually be swamped by this tidal wave of attention. So let us say for the sake of argument that some day soon it will somehow be conclusively proven, as conclusively as it's been proven that Piltdown Man was a hoax, that Jesus of Nazareth was invented whole by Paul of Tarsus or created in hindsight out of unclear memories of John the Baptist or what have you, that the person himself is shown to be as legendary as his miracles and resurrection. What will happen?
Why should we believe that people will suddenly behave differently than they have in the past? The fundamentalists don't believe that evolution happens just because some biologists have explained that it does. Why on Earth would they be more receptive to historians showing that Jesus didn't exist?
And as for the moderate and the politically-progressive, academically-up-to-speed believers: they have quite calmly kept their beliefs in the face of evolutionary theory by maintaining that the stories in Genesis of the Creation and the Flood are metaphors, or camp-fire stories handed down from generation to generation and never taken all that seriously until all of a suddenly in 19th-century America the Biblical literalsts somehow very suddenly got it all wrong. Why should we expect a smaller amount of faith-saving mental acrobatics if and when Jesus is proven never to have existed? They will tell themselves and each other that Jesus was understood to be just a story all along -- or whatever else they have to tell themselves in order to be able to continue to believe whatever it is that they want to believe.
Although the progressive believers for the most part, and very, very nearly 100% of the academic Biblical scholars and Christian theologians, still firmly maintain that Jesus existed, even the ones who say that all the stories of miracles are legendary (and often have varying absurd positions about no-one ever having really believed those stories anyway -- until the 19th century in the US when millions of fundamentalists somehow managed to pull firm literalist beliefs out of their butts all at once), even the ones who don't believe in God -- although these latter ones have been much more reluctant to call themselves what they are -- atheists -- since Richard Dawkins started to behave like a jackass and put all this stink on the term "atheist" -- although even these Christians, or "2/3 Christians," as Nietzsche called them, still say that they are quite certain that Jesus existed, and tend to rather impolitely mock all doubts -- even they seem to be starting to hedge their bets a little, as more and more of the stories of the early Christians are proven to be legends, and are beginning to say that it doesn't MATTER whether Jesus existed or not, that what matters is the allegorical worth of the stories about him.
In short, although they still firmly maintain that there is no doubt that Jesus existed, they are already laying the ideological groundwork for the case that they may be proven wrong, by emphasizing more and more that "it doesn't matter" if he existed: what matters is the symbolic worth -- whatever that worth might be; it tends to vary quite a bit from progressive theologian to progressive theologian -- of the legendary stories about him. Christians suddenly switched from believing the stories in the Bible literally to maintaining that no-one ever believed them literally. If they could do that, why would it be at all difficult to suddenly switch from saying that it's certain that Jesus existed to saying everyone understood all along that he was a fictional character in those parables known as the Gospels, and that only those pesky fundamentalists, since just very recently, had ever believed in anything like "Gospel truth."
Monday: "Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and at peace with Eastasia." Tuesday: "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia." And only an occasional Winston Smith among the progressive faithful has any qualms or doubts that all is well. That sniveling creep and snitch George Orwell may have fooled millions of readers into thinking that his novels were realistic depictions of Communist regimes, but the Soviet Union actually never was much like that. The parallels between 1984 and Christianity, on the other hand, are many and striking, although, astonishingly, apparently quite unintentional on Orwell's part.
Many naive New Atheists seem to believe that if can be proven that Jesus never existed, superstition will shatter and crash to the ground and a Golden Age of Reason will begin, their descriptions of which sound very much like their families' descriptions of the Millennium. The New Atheist apple has often landed not nearly as far from the fundamentalist tree as it thinks.
I tend to agree, upon reflection, with those who say that it would make little change in the world, at least not right away. I just wish they wouldn't constantly interrupt discussions of Jesus' historicity to say that they don't care about it, because I do care -- not for the sake of huge sudden changes in the world which I don't see coming. I personally am interested in the question of the historical Jesus the same way that I would be interested in any other historical question. I'm interested in history, in trying to determine what happened at such and such a time in such and such a place, for its own sake, in somewhat the same way that theoretical mathematicians enjoy their equations and formulae for their own sake. I just find it interesting to attempt to learn what happened. And if possible to improve the historical record, to make it more accurate and/or more detailed. Some people like detective novels, some like comic books, some like quilts, some like boats. I like old manuscripts and inscriptions and mosaics and other ancient artifacts, and they happen to be what may possibly eventually clarify the historical Jesus question.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
You Can't Talk To Some People -- Or At least You Shouldn't
When you've become convinced that someone isn't listening, and that talking to them would be a waste of your time, what remains? Talking about them.
There are two people here who, I'm convinced, wouldn't listen to me if I tried to get through to them. The first quotes one of the more far-fetched passages in the Bible and seems to have no doubt that it's 100% true -- because it's in the Bible.
The second, who seems to have the opposite problem, replies to the first:
"Why is it that not one independent historical source ever mentions any of these things happening? Possibly because they didn't happen, and once again the wholly babble is a lie? Hmmm."
Oh, it makes me angry, how stupid this "the Bible is a lie" talking point is! All the more stupid because the people parroting it think of themselves as the voice of reason, as rationality incarnate. A collection of over 60 texts, with dozens of authors, is not "an" anything, it is more than one thing. It shows you how these two idiots are the flip side of one another, this all-or-nothing approach to the Bible. To the one it's absolutely all true, to the other it's absolutely all "a lie."
Who talks that way about a book by one author, let alone a compilation of works by many different authors?
In this case, the Bible verses quoted as Gospel truth are actually from one of the Gospels and have to do with one of the less-believable details of the Biblical account of Jesus' life, and the New Atheist was dutifully responding with the party line: "No historical sources mention Jesus."
So why is this, hmm? Could it be that Jesus never existed?
Yes, hmm? it could be that Jesus never existed. But one of the long list of things which these smug hmm? -ers don't want to hear is that very few non-New-Testament sources say anything at all about Judea and Galilee between 6 BC and AD 40, and one of those sources, Josephus, does mention Jesus, and not just in the discredited Testamonium Flavianum that they're always talking about because it's been discredited, but in a second passage as well.
They don't want to hear it. They don't want to have an intelligent conversation about 1st-century Judea and Galilee, they wouldn't recognize such a conversation if it slapped them in the face.
There are two people here who, I'm convinced, wouldn't listen to me if I tried to get through to them. The first quotes one of the more far-fetched passages in the Bible and seems to have no doubt that it's 100% true -- because it's in the Bible.
The second, who seems to have the opposite problem, replies to the first:
"Why is it that not one independent historical source ever mentions any of these things happening? Possibly because they didn't happen, and once again the wholly babble is a lie? Hmmm."
Oh, it makes me angry, how stupid this "the Bible is a lie" talking point is! All the more stupid because the people parroting it think of themselves as the voice of reason, as rationality incarnate. A collection of over 60 texts, with dozens of authors, is not "an" anything, it is more than one thing. It shows you how these two idiots are the flip side of one another, this all-or-nothing approach to the Bible. To the one it's absolutely all true, to the other it's absolutely all "a lie."
Who talks that way about a book by one author, let alone a compilation of works by many different authors?
In this case, the Bible verses quoted as Gospel truth are actually from one of the Gospels and have to do with one of the less-believable details of the Biblical account of Jesus' life, and the New Atheist was dutifully responding with the party line: "No historical sources mention Jesus."
So why is this, hmm? Could it be that Jesus never existed?
Yes, hmm? it could be that Jesus never existed. But one of the long list of things which these smug hmm? -ers don't want to hear is that very few non-New-Testament sources say anything at all about Judea and Galilee between 6 BC and AD 40, and one of those sources, Josephus, does mention Jesus, and not just in the discredited Testamonium Flavianum that they're always talking about because it's been discredited, but in a second passage as well.
They don't want to hear it. They don't want to have an intelligent conversation about 1st-century Judea and Galilee, they wouldn't recognize such a conversation if it slapped them in the face.
Thursday, November 5, 2015
The Anti-Paulkovich: Ken Ammi's List Of 237 Texts Which DO Mention Jesus
Ken wrote a comment on my post examining Paulkovich's list of 126 people who allegedly didn't mention Jesus, and included a link to his blog post listing 237 texts, a list he seems to have published in 2010. (WHY are my posts on Paulkovich suddenly getting a surge of readership more than a year after I posted them? Did Paulkovich get the Presidential Medal of Freedom or something?) Ammi's list is less silly than Paulkovich's -- but of course that's setting the bar very low.
Paulkovich listed the names of some ancient people and claimed to have read their written work and found it very suspicious that none of them mentioned Jesus. All that Paulkovich's list proves is that he is a charlatan and a buffoon: more than 40 of the people on his list left no written work which Paulkovich could have studied. 4 actually do mention Jesus and/or Christians. Most of the rest are not historians, and perhaps a handful would have had some reason to mention anything which happened in Judea or Galilee in the time when Jesus is said to have lived. None of them were there during that time.
Now that's what I call a low bar. But it looks to me as if Ammi has cleared it easily.
Paulkovich automatically discounted all Christian writers. Ammi's list includes mostly Christian writers. Paulkovich counted up 126 people. Ammi lists 237 texts. Those texts are written by somewhat less than 237 people. For example Tertullian wrote 35 of them. Clement of Alexandria wrote 14. Hippolytus of Rome wrote 11.
Ammi counts the Gospel of Marcion as 6 texts instead of 1. That's rather strange. Still, it looks as if he's listed 230 or so texts written up until around AD 250 which do mention Jesus. That's a far, far more scholarly feat than Paulkovich's.
Still, I don't think that Ammi has proven anything about the historical Jesus. A legendary Jesus can account for the New Testament, and the New Testament can account for the rest of the items on Ammi's list. In Ammi's comment he writes: "Furthermore, the number refers to the texts and not to each manuscript behind each text. Counting each manuscript would also take us well beyond the 237 total." That's true. And it would have been even more spurious, just as Ammi's presentation of 237 texts is already somewhat spurious in counting texts rather than authors, counting Tertullian 35 times instead of once, for example, and in listing each and every text produced before AD 250 which mentions Jesus without asking of each one whether it tells us anything about Jesus which we didn't already know from the New Testament -- if, that is, the New Testament describes a man named Jesus and not a mythical creature.
To be clear: I think that texts later than the New Testament can possibly tell us something about the historical Jesus. Possibly. But I think that the burden of proof is upon him declaring that Marcion, for example, or the Epistle of Barnabas, gives us historical information about Jesus, and not just about the author and possibly also about the Christians with whom the author was acquainted. We don't count up all of the early written references to Achilles and claim that each one strengthens the case for Achilles' historicity, nor should we.
Paulkovich listed the names of some ancient people and claimed to have read their written work and found it very suspicious that none of them mentioned Jesus. All that Paulkovich's list proves is that he is a charlatan and a buffoon: more than 40 of the people on his list left no written work which Paulkovich could have studied. 4 actually do mention Jesus and/or Christians. Most of the rest are not historians, and perhaps a handful would have had some reason to mention anything which happened in Judea or Galilee in the time when Jesus is said to have lived. None of them were there during that time.
Now that's what I call a low bar. But it looks to me as if Ammi has cleared it easily.
Paulkovich automatically discounted all Christian writers. Ammi's list includes mostly Christian writers. Paulkovich counted up 126 people. Ammi lists 237 texts. Those texts are written by somewhat less than 237 people. For example Tertullian wrote 35 of them. Clement of Alexandria wrote 14. Hippolytus of Rome wrote 11.
Ammi counts the Gospel of Marcion as 6 texts instead of 1. That's rather strange. Still, it looks as if he's listed 230 or so texts written up until around AD 250 which do mention Jesus. That's a far, far more scholarly feat than Paulkovich's.
Still, I don't think that Ammi has proven anything about the historical Jesus. A legendary Jesus can account for the New Testament, and the New Testament can account for the rest of the items on Ammi's list. In Ammi's comment he writes: "Furthermore, the number refers to the texts and not to each manuscript behind each text. Counting each manuscript would also take us well beyond the 237 total." That's true. And it would have been even more spurious, just as Ammi's presentation of 237 texts is already somewhat spurious in counting texts rather than authors, counting Tertullian 35 times instead of once, for example, and in listing each and every text produced before AD 250 which mentions Jesus without asking of each one whether it tells us anything about Jesus which we didn't already know from the New Testament -- if, that is, the New Testament describes a man named Jesus and not a mythical creature.
To be clear: I think that texts later than the New Testament can possibly tell us something about the historical Jesus. Possibly. But I think that the burden of proof is upon him declaring that Marcion, for example, or the Epistle of Barnabas, gives us historical information about Jesus, and not just about the author and possibly also about the Christians with whom the author was acquainted. We don't count up all of the early written references to Achilles and claim that each one strengthens the case for Achilles' historicity, nor should we.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
The Last Temptation Of The Mythicist
Or at least the latest temptation for this mythicist, to stop being a mythicist and say, "Okay, there was an historical Jesus, they're just debating his background and characteristics and what he actually did or didn't say and do."
"They" in this case would be a lot of academics, almost every single one of whom expresses no doubt about Jesus' existence. R Joseph Hoffmann, author of this fine blog as well as several fine books, has not yet, to my knowledge, become a strict historicist and said that it is certain that Jesus existed, but he expresses much less doubt about it than he did decades ago. And he's unusual among academics in expressing any doubt at all. Price expresses doubt, but unfortunately Price is a dingbat who seems a century or so behind current research. And Carrier, yeah, well, applying Bayes' Theorem to Jesus' existence is ridiculous, period. Besides these two, the academics make their cases on the basis of primary texts. They're familiar with the relevant manuscripts. They keep up with the relevant journals. Of course they do: their papers fill the relevant journals.
"They" include Barbara and Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo M Martini and Bruce Metzger, the editors of a critical edition of the Greek New Testament, known as the Nestle-Aland (Eberhard Nestle published the 1st edition of this version of the New Testament in 1898; they're up to the 28th revised version now.) for which they examined thousands of Greek and Latin manuscripts, plus some Greek and Latin (printed) editions, plus Syriac and Coptic editions to a great degree, and Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopic and Old Church Slavonic editions to a lesser degree, and if you're new to this sort of thing, all that fine print at the bottom of every page of the Greek text gives the sources for every word of the text, as well as the major variations -- the most significant differences in some manuscripts and editions from what is in their text. Those abbreviations are the ones they give in the introduction to the most important of those manuscripts and to all of those editions. Usually, in an edition of an ancient text, there's plenty of room at the front of the book to list all of the sources from which the edition was made. Since there are so many sources in this case, only a couple of hundred of the most important of the manuscripts are listed in the introduction. There's a complete list at the back of the book, which mentions where each manuscript was used. There's also a list of the minor variations between editions at the back. Two lists, actually: one list of minor variations in manuscripts and one of minor variations in editions.
Iss a Ding.
You got all that? No? Well, what I'm saying is that critical editions like this are the shiznit: if you're serious about knowing what the experts currently know about what is in the New Testament and how it got there, you learn Greek and you get the latest Nestle-Aland, and in those latest scholarly journals you will find things like praise or criticism of the Nestle-Aland, plus research which will influence things like future editions of the Greek New Testament and the Vulgate and the Hebrew Old Testament and the Septuagint and the Georgian and Armenian translations of the Bible, and so on and on and on and on. If you want to keep up with the big kids in this field your Greek and Hebrew better be very, very good, and you should be good in Latin and Syriac, too, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to be very good at Coptic, and to be at least -- at least -- a little bit familiar with Ethiopic and Georgian and Gothic and Old Church Slavonic, and...
Not to mention those modern journals, which contain papers in English and German and French and Italian and Spanish and other modern languages.
These are the leading historicists. The leading mythicists, on the other hand, base their work on...
*sigh*
...well, usually on somewhat less than that.
And that's why I'm sometimes tempted to say, "Okay, I'm convinced that Jesus existed."
Except that the experts haven't convinced me that they've really allowed the question into their minds. That's just one except, but it's a huge one. As huge as except's get.
Wrong Monkey Broken Record Time: The experts need to investigate whether or not Jesus existed.
The experts who are fluent in 4 or more of those ancient languages, and somewhat familiar with between 4 and WOW more. Plus a bunch of modern languages. Who are all keeping up with and criticizing each other's work. I'm not an expert. But I'm close enough to expertise to tell who the experts are. It's those genius hardworking dedicated polyglots who unfortunately keep telling the rest of us to move along, nothing to see here. Who aren't doing one entirely crucial part of their jobs.
"They" in this case would be a lot of academics, almost every single one of whom expresses no doubt about Jesus' existence. R Joseph Hoffmann, author of this fine blog as well as several fine books, has not yet, to my knowledge, become a strict historicist and said that it is certain that Jesus existed, but he expresses much less doubt about it than he did decades ago. And he's unusual among academics in expressing any doubt at all. Price expresses doubt, but unfortunately Price is a dingbat who seems a century or so behind current research. And Carrier, yeah, well, applying Bayes' Theorem to Jesus' existence is ridiculous, period. Besides these two, the academics make their cases on the basis of primary texts. They're familiar with the relevant manuscripts. They keep up with the relevant journals. Of course they do: their papers fill the relevant journals.
"They" include Barbara and Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo M Martini and Bruce Metzger, the editors of a critical edition of the Greek New Testament, known as the Nestle-Aland (Eberhard Nestle published the 1st edition of this version of the New Testament in 1898; they're up to the 28th revised version now.) for which they examined thousands of Greek and Latin manuscripts, plus some Greek and Latin (printed) editions, plus Syriac and Coptic editions to a great degree, and Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopic and Old Church Slavonic editions to a lesser degree, and if you're new to this sort of thing, all that fine print at the bottom of every page of the Greek text gives the sources for every word of the text, as well as the major variations -- the most significant differences in some manuscripts and editions from what is in their text. Those abbreviations are the ones they give in the introduction to the most important of those manuscripts and to all of those editions. Usually, in an edition of an ancient text, there's plenty of room at the front of the book to list all of the sources from which the edition was made. Since there are so many sources in this case, only a couple of hundred of the most important of the manuscripts are listed in the introduction. There's a complete list at the back of the book, which mentions where each manuscript was used. There's also a list of the minor variations between editions at the back. Two lists, actually: one list of minor variations in manuscripts and one of minor variations in editions.
Iss a Ding.
You got all that? No? Well, what I'm saying is that critical editions like this are the shiznit: if you're serious about knowing what the experts currently know about what is in the New Testament and how it got there, you learn Greek and you get the latest Nestle-Aland, and in those latest scholarly journals you will find things like praise or criticism of the Nestle-Aland, plus research which will influence things like future editions of the Greek New Testament and the Vulgate and the Hebrew Old Testament and the Septuagint and the Georgian and Armenian translations of the Bible, and so on and on and on and on. If you want to keep up with the big kids in this field your Greek and Hebrew better be very, very good, and you should be good in Latin and Syriac, too, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to be very good at Coptic, and to be at least -- at least -- a little bit familiar with Ethiopic and Georgian and Gothic and Old Church Slavonic, and...
Not to mention those modern journals, which contain papers in English and German and French and Italian and Spanish and other modern languages.
These are the leading historicists. The leading mythicists, on the other hand, base their work on...
*sigh*
...well, usually on somewhat less than that.
And that's why I'm sometimes tempted to say, "Okay, I'm convinced that Jesus existed."
Except that the experts haven't convinced me that they've really allowed the question into their minds. That's just one except, but it's a huge one. As huge as except's get.
Wrong Monkey Broken Record Time: The experts need to investigate whether or not Jesus existed.
The experts who are fluent in 4 or more of those ancient languages, and somewhat familiar with between 4 and WOW more. Plus a bunch of modern languages. Who are all keeping up with and criticizing each other's work. I'm not an expert. But I'm close enough to expertise to tell who the experts are. It's those genius hardworking dedicated polyglots who unfortunately keep telling the rest of us to move along, nothing to see here. Who aren't doing one entirely crucial part of their jobs.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Jews And Jesus And Mythicists
"Jews in general do not believe that Jesus actually existed!"
Bullshit! One example of the many, many, many bits of bullshit produced by New Atheists and mythicists (people who doubt whether Jesus ever existed).
I myself am a mythicist: I'm not sure whether or not Jesus existed. I don't think there's anything wrong with investigating whether or not Jesus existed. Furthermore, I think that mainstream academic Biblical scholars are much too closed-minded to the possibility that Jesus never existed. But most of the most-prominent mythicists today are going about their historical investigations in a hopelessly inept way.
And the one follows from the other: when the pros, in this case the mainstream academics, refuse to investigate a very interesting question and declare that the case is closed when it's not, that leaves the amateurs, and that leads to predictably amateurish results.
And in this case it reinforces the theory that New Atheists and mythicists are predominantly ex-fundamentalist Christians, and hicks: if they'd ever MET any Jews and/or read some books written by Jews, both of which urbane and cultured Goyim are wont to do from time to time, the subject of Jewish attitudes toward Jesus would have naturally come up at some time or another.
I think it's easy to see where these doofuses could have made this mistake: it's not clear whether or not Hebrew writings from the early centuries mention Jesus. Jesus (Joshua) is a very common name, it's not crystal-clear whether or not one of the mentions of a Jesus/Joshua in these ancient Hebrew texts refers to the same person the Christians have in mind. Now add a huge confirmation bias on the part of the mythicists, and you're ready to make the premature leap from their being no mention of Jesus in those writings, to Jews believing that he never existed. Especially if you also completely ignore things like the Papal bull of 1554 which ordered all references to Jesus to be removed from the Talmud and other Jewish historical texts.
Another possibility is the huge premature leap from over-eager mythicists hearing that Jews reject the claim that Jesus was the Messiah, to hearing what they want to hear, in this case: that Jews reject Jesus' historicty altogether.
I'm sure that there are some Jews who don't believe Jesus existed. I wonder how many of them first got that notion from the same mythicists who are now triumphantly exhibiting them as alleged proof that Jews in general don't believe Jesus existed.
Bullshit! One example of the many, many, many bits of bullshit produced by New Atheists and mythicists (people who doubt whether Jesus ever existed).
I myself am a mythicist: I'm not sure whether or not Jesus existed. I don't think there's anything wrong with investigating whether or not Jesus existed. Furthermore, I think that mainstream academic Biblical scholars are much too closed-minded to the possibility that Jesus never existed. But most of the most-prominent mythicists today are going about their historical investigations in a hopelessly inept way.
And the one follows from the other: when the pros, in this case the mainstream academics, refuse to investigate a very interesting question and declare that the case is closed when it's not, that leaves the amateurs, and that leads to predictably amateurish results.
And in this case it reinforces the theory that New Atheists and mythicists are predominantly ex-fundamentalist Christians, and hicks: if they'd ever MET any Jews and/or read some books written by Jews, both of which urbane and cultured Goyim are wont to do from time to time, the subject of Jewish attitudes toward Jesus would have naturally come up at some time or another.
I think it's easy to see where these doofuses could have made this mistake: it's not clear whether or not Hebrew writings from the early centuries mention Jesus. Jesus (Joshua) is a very common name, it's not crystal-clear whether or not one of the mentions of a Jesus/Joshua in these ancient Hebrew texts refers to the same person the Christians have in mind. Now add a huge confirmation bias on the part of the mythicists, and you're ready to make the premature leap from their being no mention of Jesus in those writings, to Jews believing that he never existed. Especially if you also completely ignore things like the Papal bull of 1554 which ordered all references to Jesus to be removed from the Talmud and other Jewish historical texts.
Another possibility is the huge premature leap from over-eager mythicists hearing that Jews reject the claim that Jesus was the Messiah, to hearing what they want to hear, in this case: that Jews reject Jesus' historicty altogether.
I'm sure that there are some Jews who don't believe Jesus existed. I wonder how many of them first got that notion from the same mythicists who are now triumphantly exhibiting them as alleged proof that Jews in general don't believe Jesus existed.
Monday, July 20, 2015
Albert Schweitzer, Mythicist
Rudolf Augstein, who died a few years ago, was best known as the publisher and editor in chief of Der Spiegel, Germany's most influential news magazine. Augstein also wrote a huge bestseller, Jesus Menschensohn (Jesus Son of Man), first published in the 1970's, in which he both points out how the work of Biblical scholars has made room for doubts about whether Jesus existed at all, and accuses those scholars of saying different things to the public than what they say privately, or in academic writings which are so full of jargon that the general public can't understand them. Anyway, either Augstein misquotes Albert Schweitzer in this book, or Schweitzer was a mythicist (in the sense that Schweitzer was not entirely convinced that Jesus existed, which is how the term seems to be used by Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan); according to Augstein, Schweitzer, in his book Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, wrote:
"Das moderne Christentum muss von vornherein und immer mit der Möglichkeit einer eventuellen Preisgabe der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu rechnen." ("Modern Christianity, right from the beginning and always, must reckon with the possibility that the belief in the historicity of Jesus might eventually have to be abandoned.")
Crossan and Ehrman can't be unfamiliar with Schweitzer's book, can they? It's only just the most famous and standard work ever published in their field.
Ah, but they'll say that Bultmann settled it all, sometime after Schweitzer's magnum opus was published. Ask them where and when and how exactly Bultmann settled it all, and they'll get angry. And you won't get a sensible answer. You'll be told that it happened around the 1930's and to buzz off. You might well also be told that the sentence Augstein quoted from Schweitzer does not mean what it appears to mean.
Not that Crossan and Ehrman are any worse in this regard than most New Testament scholars. Maybe it's somewhat less cuckoo in some parts of Europe, because of popular books like Augstein's, and also because there might be more academic mythicists (defining mythicists as all the people who aren't entirely sure that Jesus existed, and say so right out loud in public) in Europe than in the US, although they're a minority over there as well. Apparently a poll of German adults in the 1990's found that 9% of them weren't sure that Jesus existed. Was that more or less than in the US?
Ah but of course there's always the confusion of the theological with the historical every time this topic is raised in public. Did those 9% mean that there never was a Jesus of Nazareth, that someone made him up, or just that Jesus wasn't the miracle-working, resurrected Son of God? In the debate I'm trying to have with people like Crossan and Ehrman -- trying, but they don't want to discuss it, they'd rather compare me to a conspiracy theorist or Holocaust denier -- approximately 100% of those on both side, both those who are sure that Jesus existed and those who aren't, believe that Jesus wasn't the miracle-working, resurrected Son of God. The stuff about God and the miracles, etc, all of that is a theological question. I'm talking about an historical one. If your answer is, "Sure, there was a dude named Jesus, but he wasn't the miracle-working, resurrected Son of God," then you're on Crossan's and Ehrman's side, and Schweitzer and Augstein and I are on the opposing side. Because we're not sure that there was a dude named Jesus who formed the basis of the New Testament stories even though he was completely non-magical. (I keep explaining the distinction between the theological and historical discussions over and over in this blog, because it seems that a very great many people see this historical discussion going on all over the place these days, and think it's the theological discussion. I have nothing against people having that theological discussion. It's just a different discussion than this one.)
It's cuckoo in part because it's the very same Biblical scholars such as Crossan and Ehrman, with their researches showing us how we have less and less reason to believe that the historical Jesus resembles the Jesus of the New Testament, who have led people to pose the perfectly reasonable question about whether Jesus existed at all. They've led us to that question, and now they're angry at us for asking it.
And in denial, apparently, about how Schweitzer asked the question 100 years ago. And about how David Friedrich Strauss practically came right out and asked it 180 years ago in his book Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (and was immediately asked to take a long, long vacation from his university post), even though Strauss' work has become much, much more popular and uncontroversial among Biblical scholars over the course of the past 180 years.
"Das moderne Christentum muss von vornherein und immer mit der Möglichkeit einer eventuellen Preisgabe der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu rechnen." ("Modern Christianity, right from the beginning and always, must reckon with the possibility that the belief in the historicity of Jesus might eventually have to be abandoned.")
Crossan and Ehrman can't be unfamiliar with Schweitzer's book, can they? It's only just the most famous and standard work ever published in their field.
Ah, but they'll say that Bultmann settled it all, sometime after Schweitzer's magnum opus was published. Ask them where and when and how exactly Bultmann settled it all, and they'll get angry. And you won't get a sensible answer. You'll be told that it happened around the 1930's and to buzz off. You might well also be told that the sentence Augstein quoted from Schweitzer does not mean what it appears to mean.
Not that Crossan and Ehrman are any worse in this regard than most New Testament scholars. Maybe it's somewhat less cuckoo in some parts of Europe, because of popular books like Augstein's, and also because there might be more academic mythicists (defining mythicists as all the people who aren't entirely sure that Jesus existed, and say so right out loud in public) in Europe than in the US, although they're a minority over there as well. Apparently a poll of German adults in the 1990's found that 9% of them weren't sure that Jesus existed. Was that more or less than in the US?
Ah but of course there's always the confusion of the theological with the historical every time this topic is raised in public. Did those 9% mean that there never was a Jesus of Nazareth, that someone made him up, or just that Jesus wasn't the miracle-working, resurrected Son of God? In the debate I'm trying to have with people like Crossan and Ehrman -- trying, but they don't want to discuss it, they'd rather compare me to a conspiracy theorist or Holocaust denier -- approximately 100% of those on both side, both those who are sure that Jesus existed and those who aren't, believe that Jesus wasn't the miracle-working, resurrected Son of God. The stuff about God and the miracles, etc, all of that is a theological question. I'm talking about an historical one. If your answer is, "Sure, there was a dude named Jesus, but he wasn't the miracle-working, resurrected Son of God," then you're on Crossan's and Ehrman's side, and Schweitzer and Augstein and I are on the opposing side. Because we're not sure that there was a dude named Jesus who formed the basis of the New Testament stories even though he was completely non-magical. (I keep explaining the distinction between the theological and historical discussions over and over in this blog, because it seems that a very great many people see this historical discussion going on all over the place these days, and think it's the theological discussion. I have nothing against people having that theological discussion. It's just a different discussion than this one.)
It's cuckoo in part because it's the very same Biblical scholars such as Crossan and Ehrman, with their researches showing us how we have less and less reason to believe that the historical Jesus resembles the Jesus of the New Testament, who have led people to pose the perfectly reasonable question about whether Jesus existed at all. They've led us to that question, and now they're angry at us for asking it.
And in denial, apparently, about how Schweitzer asked the question 100 years ago. And about how David Friedrich Strauss practically came right out and asked it 180 years ago in his book Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (and was immediately asked to take a long, long vacation from his university post), even though Strauss' work has become much, much more popular and uncontroversial among Biblical scholars over the course of the past 180 years.
Thursday, July 16, 2015
The Historical Jesus And The Absence Of Contemporary Writing About Him
This is to a certain extent a re-hashing of things I've already written in this blog: in this post, for example, which is just a summary of the Cambridge Ancient History, 1st ed, vol X: The Augustan Empire, 44BC -- AD70 4th, corrected printing, 19666, pp 866-876. Perhaps I've done a poor job of explaining this. (Perhaps I've done a magnificent job, and no-one has paid any attention. Yeah. That sounds more like it.) Oh well, once more into the breech:
THERE IS NOTHING STRANGE ABOUT OUR HAVING NO CONTEMPORARY WRITING ABOUT JESUS, BECAUSE WE HAVE ALMOST NO WRITING AT ALL FROM THAT TIME AND PLACE. SORRY ABOUT SHOUTING LIKE THIS, BUT IT'S REALLY CRUCIAL FOR ME TO GET THIS POINT ACROSS.. Contemporary observers may have written a great deal about Jesus, if he existed. It seems to me that if he existed, whatever else he may have been, he probably was pretty interesting.
But that's not the point, because however much was written about him by eyewitnesses, that's exactly how much has gone missing in the meantime. If 5 eyewitness accounts were written about Jesus, then that's how many eyewitness accounts of him have gone missing: 5. If 4,386 eyewitness accounts were written about him, then exactly 4,386 such accounts are now unknown to us.
And there's nothing suspicious about all of those accounts having gone missing, because almost everything written in Galilee and Judea during Jesus' lifetime has gone missing. Almost everything written by anyone about anyone or anything. The only exception I know is the Pilate Stone. Here's the entire text carved into that stone which has not eroded away over 19 centuries:
TIBERIEUM (...) TIUS (...) ECTUS IUDA (...)
And there's nothing at all suspicious about so little written material having survived from that time and place, when you look at how little writing has survived from the entire Roman Empire (see linked blog post above).
Let's take the example of Livy, hands-down the most highly-regarded historian among the ancient Romans. In scarcely any other time and place on Earth has an a historian been so universally well-respected as Livy was by his contemporaries. He wrote a long history of Rome, 4 times longer than the Bible, including both the Old and New Testaments. It covered Rome from the legends of its beginnings up until 9 BC. About 1/4 of that work is now known to us. I and a few other wild-eyed crackpots dream of finding the other 3/4. You know how much of it has been dug up in the past 200 years? This much:
[------ .e(m) [----- ing]ens [ei era]nt ha[u]t pro[cul G]abiis [u]rbe. cu[m] [Ga]uios nouos exer[cit]us indictus [e]sset ibique centuriati milites essent, cum duob(us)milib(us) pe[ {.} ]ditum profect[u]s in agru(m) suom cons[ul?] and g[-------] ar[------] se[d] reaps[a nega]tam eo [[e]]dicto f[acturum] quoa[d inuissu suo in pr[ovi(n)-] cia maneat, et [si] pergat dicto non parar[e], \[s]e/ [i]n praese(n)tem habiturum imper[i]um. Fabius, [acc]eptus mandatis-----]
You're welcome. (The parts in parentheses are guesses where the text -- on parchment in this case -- is hard to read or gone altogether.)
How many of the authors of the Roman Empire wrote things which we now don't have? The answer to that is easy: all of them. Every single one. Julius Caesar, Vergil, Ovid, Tacitus, Horace, Plautus -- all of them. In many cases, we have lost everything except their names, mentioned by other authors, but even that much is sometimes very important to our understanding of the history of the Roman Empire, because that's how little we have to work with. (See linked blog post above again.)
That's the state of the remains of the writings of the authors the Romans cared about most. Authors who lived in or close to the city of Rome. They didn't care much about Galilee and Judea, which makes it less suspicious that anything written there during Jesus' lifetime has survived (except the Pilate Stone).
Another thing which makes it much less suspicious still is that the Romans crushed a rebellion in Jerusalem in AD 70 and destroyed the Temple, the center of life for many people in the city, and the center of writing. There probably was quite a bit of interesting written material in Jerusalem in AD 69 which was already gone forever by AD 71.
People talk about the written records of the trial of Jesus. I don't know how many official written records of trials the ancient Romans kept. I do know how many such records we have today -- none. Not just none of Jesus' trial, not just none of any trials in Jerusalem -- none of any ancient Roman trials, period. And that's why it's not suspicious that we don't have any official written records of Jesus' trial. Okay? So can we please finally just move on about that one? (Yeah, I'm acting like people have read this post all the way to the end. I'm a cra-zeee dreamer!) (I must mention again that I used to be one of those people who prattled on about "detailed official Roman records," before I got a clue. I'm sincerely sorry about that. Even back then, some people assumed that I knew what I was talking about.)
IF YOU WANT TO LEARN ABOUT ANCIENT HISTORY, THE CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY (1ST EDITION, 12 VOLUMES, OR 2ND EDITION, 14 VOLUMES) IS AN EXCELLENT PLACE TO START!
THERE IS NOTHING STRANGE ABOUT OUR HAVING NO CONTEMPORARY WRITING ABOUT JESUS, BECAUSE WE HAVE ALMOST NO WRITING AT ALL FROM THAT TIME AND PLACE. SORRY ABOUT SHOUTING LIKE THIS, BUT IT'S REALLY CRUCIAL FOR ME TO GET THIS POINT ACROSS.. Contemporary observers may have written a great deal about Jesus, if he existed. It seems to me that if he existed, whatever else he may have been, he probably was pretty interesting.
But that's not the point, because however much was written about him by eyewitnesses, that's exactly how much has gone missing in the meantime. If 5 eyewitness accounts were written about Jesus, then that's how many eyewitness accounts of him have gone missing: 5. If 4,386 eyewitness accounts were written about him, then exactly 4,386 such accounts are now unknown to us.
And there's nothing suspicious about all of those accounts having gone missing, because almost everything written in Galilee and Judea during Jesus' lifetime has gone missing. Almost everything written by anyone about anyone or anything. The only exception I know is the Pilate Stone. Here's the entire text carved into that stone which has not eroded away over 19 centuries:
TIBERIEUM (...) TIUS (...) ECTUS IUDA (...)
And there's nothing at all suspicious about so little written material having survived from that time and place, when you look at how little writing has survived from the entire Roman Empire (see linked blog post above).
Let's take the example of Livy, hands-down the most highly-regarded historian among the ancient Romans. In scarcely any other time and place on Earth has an a historian been so universally well-respected as Livy was by his contemporaries. He wrote a long history of Rome, 4 times longer than the Bible, including both the Old and New Testaments. It covered Rome from the legends of its beginnings up until 9 BC. About 1/4 of that work is now known to us. I and a few other wild-eyed crackpots dream of finding the other 3/4. You know how much of it has been dug up in the past 200 years? This much:
[------ .e(m) [----- ing]ens [ei era]nt ha[u]t pro[cul G]abiis [u]rbe. cu[m] [Ga]uios nouos exer[cit]us indictus [e]sset ibique centuriati milites essent, cum duob(us)milib(us) pe[ {.} ]ditum profect[u]s in agru(m) suom cons[ul?] and g[-------] ar[------] se[d] reaps[a nega]tam eo [[e]]dicto f[acturum] quoa[d inuissu suo in pr[ovi(n)-] cia maneat, et [si] pergat dicto non parar[e], \[s]e/ [i]n praese(n)tem habiturum imper[i]um. Fabius, [acc]eptus mandatis-----]
You're welcome. (The parts in parentheses are guesses where the text -- on parchment in this case -- is hard to read or gone altogether.)
How many of the authors of the Roman Empire wrote things which we now don't have? The answer to that is easy: all of them. Every single one. Julius Caesar, Vergil, Ovid, Tacitus, Horace, Plautus -- all of them. In many cases, we have lost everything except their names, mentioned by other authors, but even that much is sometimes very important to our understanding of the history of the Roman Empire, because that's how little we have to work with. (See linked blog post above again.)
That's the state of the remains of the writings of the authors the Romans cared about most. Authors who lived in or close to the city of Rome. They didn't care much about Galilee and Judea, which makes it less suspicious that anything written there during Jesus' lifetime has survived (except the Pilate Stone).
Another thing which makes it much less suspicious still is that the Romans crushed a rebellion in Jerusalem in AD 70 and destroyed the Temple, the center of life for many people in the city, and the center of writing. There probably was quite a bit of interesting written material in Jerusalem in AD 69 which was already gone forever by AD 71.
People talk about the written records of the trial of Jesus. I don't know how many official written records of trials the ancient Romans kept. I do know how many such records we have today -- none. Not just none of Jesus' trial, not just none of any trials in Jerusalem -- none of any ancient Roman trials, period. And that's why it's not suspicious that we don't have any official written records of Jesus' trial. Okay? So can we please finally just move on about that one? (Yeah, I'm acting like people have read this post all the way to the end. I'm a cra-zeee dreamer!) (I must mention again that I used to be one of those people who prattled on about "detailed official Roman records," before I got a clue. I'm sincerely sorry about that. Even back then, some people assumed that I knew what I was talking about.)
IF YOU WANT TO LEARN ABOUT ANCIENT HISTORY, THE CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY (1ST EDITION, 12 VOLUMES, OR 2ND EDITION, 14 VOLUMES) IS AN EXCELLENT PLACE TO START!
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
The Historical Jesus -- And Caesar, Alexander, Socrates -- And Achilles
Historicists -- people who say there's no doubt Jesus existed (without necessarily making any supernatural claims about him) -- say that the number and the early date of the written witnesses to Jesus' existence are extremely impressive, and they're right. They go on to say that this makes Jesus' existence as certain as that of Socrates or Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar -- and they're wrong.
We have no contemporary written accounts of Jesus' life. Historicists promptly point out that we have no contemporary written sources for the life of Alexander either, and they're right. They point out further that the oldest surviving written account of Alexander comes nearly 300 years after his death, while Paul began to write the letters which became part of the New Testament with twenty years or so Jesus' death, and they're right again, assuming Jesus existed. However, the oldest surviving written accounts of Alexander which we have can be traced back clearly to accounts written by specifically-identified contemporaries. New Testament scholars are still looking for Q.
Unlike either Alexander or Jesus, several contemporary written accounts of both Socrates and Caesar exist, including books Caesar himself wrote. But it's not the number or date or even authorship of the written accounts of Jesus which separate him most decisively from Socrates, Alexander and Caesar. It's the quality of those writings. The preponderance of the supernatural. For the other three we have sources which concentrate on things they said and non-natural things they did like waging battles. Every early source of Jesus' life concentrates on the supernatural: miracles and resurrections and such.
We know what Socrates, Alexander and Caesar looked like, because we have sculptures which portray three identifiable people: an ugly, pot-bellied, balding, bearded guy; a handsome young man with a thick mane of curly hair and big spooky eyes (we know what Alexander's Dad looked like too); and a bald guy with a long skinny neck and thin lips, neither particularly handsome nor ugly.
Further evidence of Alexander's existence is several centuries' worth of Hellenistic culture from northwestern India to Egypt; of Caesar's, the Roman Empire. In their two cases the amount of history which would have to be un-written and then re-written to account for their non-existence is vast. In the case of both Socrates and Jesus, their impacts upon the world came entirely from the words of a small number of people who greatly admired them. Including, in Socrates' case, at least 2 specifically-indentifiable writers who knew him personally. Plus a 3rd contemporary writer who made fun of him. 0 contemporary writers in Jesus' case. And the earliest writer about Jesus saw him -- in a vision. Whatever that means.
We have no idea what Jesus looked like. Or Achilles. As in Jesus' case, no written account of Achilles' life is not so full of the supernatural that to describe his life with no supernatural elements doesn't require a complete re-write.
I think it's quite possible that there was an historical Achilles, a mighty Greek warrior who fought at Troy around the time that there might have been an historical Moses (about whose physical appearance we have no clue, the stories about whom are filled with the supernatural). I'm far from able to prove Achilles' historical existence. And yet an entire great culture, Socrates' culture, Alexander's culture, assumed that Achilles existed, and depended to a degree upon assumption like that. Alexander took a copy of the Iliad with him as he went conquering nations. He is supposed to have read and re-read it more than any other book. Even Caesar's culture, to a lesser degree, thought of Achilles as having been very real, and gave him a big role in their version of the history of the world.
I think that theories of an historical Achilles, of an historical Moses and an historical Jesus have much in common. Each of their stories is very important in the religious life of various civilizations. Each one of them might really have existed. Their stories had to begin somehow. Throw the story of King Arthur in there too, all of the above applies equally to him.
But leave Socrates and Alexander and Caesar out of this, because we know they existed.
We have no contemporary written accounts of Jesus' life. Historicists promptly point out that we have no contemporary written sources for the life of Alexander either, and they're right. They point out further that the oldest surviving written account of Alexander comes nearly 300 years after his death, while Paul began to write the letters which became part of the New Testament with twenty years or so Jesus' death, and they're right again, assuming Jesus existed. However, the oldest surviving written accounts of Alexander which we have can be traced back clearly to accounts written by specifically-identified contemporaries. New Testament scholars are still looking for Q.
Unlike either Alexander or Jesus, several contemporary written accounts of both Socrates and Caesar exist, including books Caesar himself wrote. But it's not the number or date or even authorship of the written accounts of Jesus which separate him most decisively from Socrates, Alexander and Caesar. It's the quality of those writings. The preponderance of the supernatural. For the other three we have sources which concentrate on things they said and non-natural things they did like waging battles. Every early source of Jesus' life concentrates on the supernatural: miracles and resurrections and such.
We know what Socrates, Alexander and Caesar looked like, because we have sculptures which portray three identifiable people: an ugly, pot-bellied, balding, bearded guy; a handsome young man with a thick mane of curly hair and big spooky eyes (we know what Alexander's Dad looked like too); and a bald guy with a long skinny neck and thin lips, neither particularly handsome nor ugly.
Further evidence of Alexander's existence is several centuries' worth of Hellenistic culture from northwestern India to Egypt; of Caesar's, the Roman Empire. In their two cases the amount of history which would have to be un-written and then re-written to account for their non-existence is vast. In the case of both Socrates and Jesus, their impacts upon the world came entirely from the words of a small number of people who greatly admired them. Including, in Socrates' case, at least 2 specifically-indentifiable writers who knew him personally. Plus a 3rd contemporary writer who made fun of him. 0 contemporary writers in Jesus' case. And the earliest writer about Jesus saw him -- in a vision. Whatever that means.
We have no idea what Jesus looked like. Or Achilles. As in Jesus' case, no written account of Achilles' life is not so full of the supernatural that to describe his life with no supernatural elements doesn't require a complete re-write.
I think it's quite possible that there was an historical Achilles, a mighty Greek warrior who fought at Troy around the time that there might have been an historical Moses (about whose physical appearance we have no clue, the stories about whom are filled with the supernatural). I'm far from able to prove Achilles' historical existence. And yet an entire great culture, Socrates' culture, Alexander's culture, assumed that Achilles existed, and depended to a degree upon assumption like that. Alexander took a copy of the Iliad with him as he went conquering nations. He is supposed to have read and re-read it more than any other book. Even Caesar's culture, to a lesser degree, thought of Achilles as having been very real, and gave him a big role in their version of the history of the world.
I think that theories of an historical Achilles, of an historical Moses and an historical Jesus have much in common. Each of their stories is very important in the religious life of various civilizations. Each one of them might really have existed. Their stories had to begin somehow. Throw the story of King Arthur in there too, all of the above applies equally to him.
But leave Socrates and Alexander and Caesar out of this, because we know they existed.
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
The Historical Jesus And Global Warming
I believe this video was made in 2012, shortly after the publication of Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist?
In the video, Ehrman incorrectly states that no-one teaching at an accredited university in one of the "relevant fields" -- ancient history, Biblical Studies, etc -- doubted that Jesus existed, and compared this to the overwhelming consensus among meteorologists that global warming exists and is man-made.
Ehrman was incorrect when he said that none of the academics in ancient history or Biblical Studies or related field had doubts about Jesus' existence -- but he was close enough to correct. If we're going to stick with Ehrman's analogy of global warming, then as far as I can tell, the percentage of the academics who doubt Jesus' existence is lower than the percentage who doubt that global warming exists and is cause by humans.
But the question is: how similar is Biblical Studies to meteorology? One figure I've heard is that 3 percent of meteorologists do not agree that global warming is happening and is man-made. The thing is, there are extremely wealthy interests who fund a lot of these 3 percent -- oil and gas and coal companies. And shocking as this is, they seem to fund most, or all, of the 3 percent, and none of the 97 percent who agree with all of the rest of us who have been conscious for the past few decades and noticing the weather.
There are extremely wealthy interests who fund Biblical Studies too: religious institutions. In my opinion, it's a lot harder to tell whether a Biblical scholar is insincere about Jesus than whether a meteorologist is being insincere about global warming. Global warming and its causes are so obvious. It's so hard, if not actually impossible, to find someone who is both a highly-qualified meteorologist and a global-warming skeptic who has never taken money from oil companies either directly, or indirectly, through lobbyists and think tanks run by oil companies.
You know something that's not hard to find? Religious believers and theologians among the ranks of Biblical scholars. It's no longer unusual to find atheists and agnostics among them, but the atheists and agnostics often do seem very reluctant to come right out and say that that's what they are. Ehrman is unusually open about his agnosticism for a Biblical scholar.
Meteorologists are the academic successors of Galileo. Biblical scholars are the successors of the people who threatened to torture Galileo unless he recanted what he'd said about what he'd seen in the sky. That doesn't mean that Biblical scholars today tend to be would-be Inquisitors. But I think it's perfectly legitimate to ask how open they have been, since Galileo's time, to views which have challenged traditional Christian views. Did they lead the way in questioning the existence of Adam & Eve, and then the existence of Abraham, and then Moses, and then (pre-Tel-Dan-Stele) David, and now Jesus, or have they tended to stand in the way of open inquiry?
It's legitimate to ask how much huge financial interests may have nudged scholars in one direction or another, whether it's oil companies nudging meteorologists in the direction of expressing climate change skepticism or religious institutions nudging Biblical scholars in the direction of saying they're certain that Jesus existed. It's also legitimate to ask how much a climate of belief and theology has hindered Biblical scholars' objectivity and good common sense.
One thing is certain: once we go from academia to the general public, Ehrman's analogy between climate-change skeptics and mythicists (people who are less than certain that Jesus existed) falls apart altogether. In the general public the two groups are almost entirely mutually exclusive. I can't recall ever meeting someone who had doubts both about climate change and about Jesus' existence. Climate-change skeptics tend to be religious believers and to have a skeptical attitude toward science in general. Mythicists tend to be highly literate scientifically. Often they are professional scientists. And they tend to have a skeptical attitude toward Biblical scholarship.
Which is a real shame, as I have emphasized over and over in this blog, because the Biblical scholars are the experts in their field. I'm not accusing the Biblical scholars of ineptitude nor of dishonesty. And furthermore, when Ehrman accuses the mythicists of cluelessness, he's right about most of them. (Most of us, I should say.)
I'm accusing Ehrman and his fellow Biblical scholars (with a few exceptions) of not considering the question of Jesus' existence. I'm accusing them of claiming that the issue has been settled, when in fact the experts have barely begun to examine the issue.
In the video, Ehrman incorrectly states that no-one teaching at an accredited university in one of the "relevant fields" -- ancient history, Biblical Studies, etc -- doubted that Jesus existed, and compared this to the overwhelming consensus among meteorologists that global warming exists and is man-made.
Ehrman was incorrect when he said that none of the academics in ancient history or Biblical Studies or related field had doubts about Jesus' existence -- but he was close enough to correct. If we're going to stick with Ehrman's analogy of global warming, then as far as I can tell, the percentage of the academics who doubt Jesus' existence is lower than the percentage who doubt that global warming exists and is cause by humans.
But the question is: how similar is Biblical Studies to meteorology? One figure I've heard is that 3 percent of meteorologists do not agree that global warming is happening and is man-made. The thing is, there are extremely wealthy interests who fund a lot of these 3 percent -- oil and gas and coal companies. And shocking as this is, they seem to fund most, or all, of the 3 percent, and none of the 97 percent who agree with all of the rest of us who have been conscious for the past few decades and noticing the weather.
There are extremely wealthy interests who fund Biblical Studies too: religious institutions. In my opinion, it's a lot harder to tell whether a Biblical scholar is insincere about Jesus than whether a meteorologist is being insincere about global warming. Global warming and its causes are so obvious. It's so hard, if not actually impossible, to find someone who is both a highly-qualified meteorologist and a global-warming skeptic who has never taken money from oil companies either directly, or indirectly, through lobbyists and think tanks run by oil companies.
You know something that's not hard to find? Religious believers and theologians among the ranks of Biblical scholars. It's no longer unusual to find atheists and agnostics among them, but the atheists and agnostics often do seem very reluctant to come right out and say that that's what they are. Ehrman is unusually open about his agnosticism for a Biblical scholar.
Meteorologists are the academic successors of Galileo. Biblical scholars are the successors of the people who threatened to torture Galileo unless he recanted what he'd said about what he'd seen in the sky. That doesn't mean that Biblical scholars today tend to be would-be Inquisitors. But I think it's perfectly legitimate to ask how open they have been, since Galileo's time, to views which have challenged traditional Christian views. Did they lead the way in questioning the existence of Adam & Eve, and then the existence of Abraham, and then Moses, and then (pre-Tel-Dan-Stele) David, and now Jesus, or have they tended to stand in the way of open inquiry?
It's legitimate to ask how much huge financial interests may have nudged scholars in one direction or another, whether it's oil companies nudging meteorologists in the direction of expressing climate change skepticism or religious institutions nudging Biblical scholars in the direction of saying they're certain that Jesus existed. It's also legitimate to ask how much a climate of belief and theology has hindered Biblical scholars' objectivity and good common sense.
One thing is certain: once we go from academia to the general public, Ehrman's analogy between climate-change skeptics and mythicists (people who are less than certain that Jesus existed) falls apart altogether. In the general public the two groups are almost entirely mutually exclusive. I can't recall ever meeting someone who had doubts both about climate change and about Jesus' existence. Climate-change skeptics tend to be religious believers and to have a skeptical attitude toward science in general. Mythicists tend to be highly literate scientifically. Often they are professional scientists. And they tend to have a skeptical attitude toward Biblical scholarship.
Which is a real shame, as I have emphasized over and over in this blog, because the Biblical scholars are the experts in their field. I'm not accusing the Biblical scholars of ineptitude nor of dishonesty. And furthermore, when Ehrman accuses the mythicists of cluelessness, he's right about most of them. (Most of us, I should say.)
I'm accusing Ehrman and his fellow Biblical scholars (with a few exceptions) of not considering the question of Jesus' existence. I'm accusing them of claiming that the issue has been settled, when in fact the experts have barely begun to examine the issue.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Bias Toward Assuming That Jesus Existed
Clearly, in our culture the topic of Jesus is not handled the way that other topics are. In a culture which has been built around Jesus for 1600 years (ca AD 400 being the time in which public expressions of non-Christian worldview started to be severely curtailed), it should come as no surprise that the discussion of the historical Jesus does not resemble that of the historical Achilles or Arthur.
So, while I'm not telling you anything new when I say that Jesus has a unique place in our culture, I think it might be helpful to try to constantly keep this uniqueness in mind when we're talking about Jesus' historicity or lack of it. Habits of thought and speech which have accumulated over the course of thousands of years, and reinforced by deviations from acceptable expression being punished by torture and death, are not going to be shed so easily. Indeed, I doubt that it's yet possible even to be conscious of the extent of those habits.
And in addition to the effect that Christianity has had on our entire civilization, there is the added fact that for most of the past 1600 years, the Christian clergy held a a very tight monopoly on our educational institutions. For a large portion of the Middles Ages in Western Europe it was rather rare that someone who wasn't a member of the clergy could read. See how many Medieval works of history or science or philosophy you can find, let alone theology proper, which don't begin with a mention of Jesus. Investigate the relationships between the leaders of universities and the Catholic Inquisitions and Protestant witch hunts. This tight hold has relaxed somewhat, but we still don't find it odd -- if and when we pause to think about it at all, that is -- that very many of our leading universities in the US are run by churches, or how often private grammar and high schools run by religious institutions are still thought of as the best ones. In the Middle Ages Christian theology was called the Queen of the sciences, and theologians were the heads of the universities. Today theologians are only sometimes the presidents and chancellors of universities. But the line between Biblical scholars and theologians is still either very blurry or non-existent at most American universities.
What I'm saying is: OF COURSE there remains a great bias in favor of the assumption that Jesus existed and against any examination of that assumption. Of course the study of Jesus is dominated by a last-ditch defense of powers and authorities which used to come close to those of monarchs in many cases, and which exceeded those of monarchs in many others, besides those instances in which the local Prince and the local Bishop were one and the same. Of course many alliances between secular political power and Christian power and academic power remain, some plain to see and others decently shielded from the light of day. And of course tradition will be much more powerful in faculties of theology and Biblical studies than in some other faculties.
Where I came in was: the topic of Jesus is discussed differently than other topics. It receives many times more attention than the topic of whether Odysseus really existed. Or Paris and Helen. No one bats an eyes if you ask whether there really was a Helen. It's not a traumatic subject to anyone these days, with the possible exception of a few dozen especially-passionate Classical scholars. People react completely differently to the topic of Jesus. Of course they do. They very often lose their composure and, temporarily, a bit of their minds, whether in a pro- or anti-Christian way.
And I do think that there's a sort of traditionalist last stand going on in the very places which should be in charge of doing away with it: the places where academics specialize in the study of the New Testament and Early Christianity and Jesus. I'd be lying if I told you that the reaction of the experts to doubts about Jesus' existence didn't seem different to me, not only from contemporary academia in general, but also the reactions of the very same Biblical scholars when the topic is anything else. Anything else at all: Abraham's existence, Moses' existence, David's existence, John the Baptist's existence, Jesus' actual words, his actual deeds -- every single imaginable topic except for the topic of Jesus' actual existence. Bring that up, and a lot of them go kind of nuts. And almost all the rest go completely nuts.
So, while I'm not telling you anything new when I say that Jesus has a unique place in our culture, I think it might be helpful to try to constantly keep this uniqueness in mind when we're talking about Jesus' historicity or lack of it. Habits of thought and speech which have accumulated over the course of thousands of years, and reinforced by deviations from acceptable expression being punished by torture and death, are not going to be shed so easily. Indeed, I doubt that it's yet possible even to be conscious of the extent of those habits.
And in addition to the effect that Christianity has had on our entire civilization, there is the added fact that for most of the past 1600 years, the Christian clergy held a a very tight monopoly on our educational institutions. For a large portion of the Middles Ages in Western Europe it was rather rare that someone who wasn't a member of the clergy could read. See how many Medieval works of history or science or philosophy you can find, let alone theology proper, which don't begin with a mention of Jesus. Investigate the relationships between the leaders of universities and the Catholic Inquisitions and Protestant witch hunts. This tight hold has relaxed somewhat, but we still don't find it odd -- if and when we pause to think about it at all, that is -- that very many of our leading universities in the US are run by churches, or how often private grammar and high schools run by religious institutions are still thought of as the best ones. In the Middle Ages Christian theology was called the Queen of the sciences, and theologians were the heads of the universities. Today theologians are only sometimes the presidents and chancellors of universities. But the line between Biblical scholars and theologians is still either very blurry or non-existent at most American universities.
What I'm saying is: OF COURSE there remains a great bias in favor of the assumption that Jesus existed and against any examination of that assumption. Of course the study of Jesus is dominated by a last-ditch defense of powers and authorities which used to come close to those of monarchs in many cases, and which exceeded those of monarchs in many others, besides those instances in which the local Prince and the local Bishop were one and the same. Of course many alliances between secular political power and Christian power and academic power remain, some plain to see and others decently shielded from the light of day. And of course tradition will be much more powerful in faculties of theology and Biblical studies than in some other faculties.
Where I came in was: the topic of Jesus is discussed differently than other topics. It receives many times more attention than the topic of whether Odysseus really existed. Or Paris and Helen. No one bats an eyes if you ask whether there really was a Helen. It's not a traumatic subject to anyone these days, with the possible exception of a few dozen especially-passionate Classical scholars. People react completely differently to the topic of Jesus. Of course they do. They very often lose their composure and, temporarily, a bit of their minds, whether in a pro- or anti-Christian way.
And I do think that there's a sort of traditionalist last stand going on in the very places which should be in charge of doing away with it: the places where academics specialize in the study of the New Testament and Early Christianity and Jesus. I'd be lying if I told you that the reaction of the experts to doubts about Jesus' existence didn't seem different to me, not only from contemporary academia in general, but also the reactions of the very same Biblical scholars when the topic is anything else. Anything else at all: Abraham's existence, Moses' existence, David's existence, John the Baptist's existence, Jesus' actual words, his actual deeds -- every single imaginable topic except for the topic of Jesus' actual existence. Bring that up, and a lot of them go kind of nuts. And almost all the rest go completely nuts.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
The Academics Haven't Convinced Me That Jesus Existed. With Very Few Exceptions, They Haven't Convinced Me That They've Really Begun To Investigate The Matter
Here we go again, round and round and round, getting all worked up, getting nowhere. Isn't it all just perfectly dreadful.
Historicists, people who believe that Jesus of Nazareth existed, including many atheists who don't believe any of the New Testament stories of supernatural things, often correctly point out that the great majority of academics are historicists. And they often correctly point out that most of the mythicists, the people who have doubts about Jesus' existence, are amateurs, and often do a spectacularly poor job of making the case that it's less than certain that Jesus existed. To be clear: mythicists don't merely doubt the supernatural stories about Jesus. They (we) are not convinced that those stories are even based on a real person, named Jesus, who came from Nazareth. We figure: so much of the New Testament is clearly legend, the existence of Jesus might be just one more legendary detail -- a rather small detail when one considers the proportional of legend in the New Testament.
I agree that there are a lot of zany mythicists. I've criticized some of them so harshly in this blog that some of them, apparently having stopped reading before the end of one post or another, have assumed that I am an historicist, or even a very devout Christian. So, for the billionth time and the 2nd time in this post: I'm an atheist and I'm not convinced that Jesus existed.
Yes, I've criticized some mythicists very harshly. I've also pointed out that the fact that some of them argue the mythicist case very poorly says nothing at all about the soundness or unsoundness of the case itself, the soundness or unsoundness of the position: it is not certain that Jesus existed.
There must be a term in formal logic for this sort of fallacy: the fact that A argues the case for 1 poorly does not say anything about the soundness or unsoundness of 1. Whatever logicians would call this fallacy, it's the primary argument of the historians.
Surprisingly, historicists who are also academic specialists in Biblical studies very often assert that the evidence for Jesus' existence is more extensive and solid than the evidence for the existence of Socrates or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. Surprisingly, because it's so obviously wrong: we have writings from 3 of Socrates' contemporaries, compared to 0 for Jesus. Besides Caesar's own writings we have those of his contemporaries Cicero and Sallust. We have likenesses of Socrates and Caesar and Alexander in the form of sculptures which were obviously based on real people. We know what each of them looked like. Not so with Jesus. And in the case of Caesar and Alexander there's the little detail of them having been the leaders of huge armies and huge states, which means that huge numbers of people would have had to have been silent about them being fictional.
And you know what? Just like the historicists pointing out unsound mythicist arguments doesn't prove that Jesus existed, my pointing out unsound historicist arguments doesn't prove he didn't exist. Far and wide here, no one is proving anything one way or another about whether Jesus existed.
Still, the fact that the academic consensus that Jesus existed is so solid impresses many people. And the consensus shouldn't just be dismissed. However, it is not quite proper to compare mythicists, people who challenge that consensus, to global warming deniers and Holocaust deniers, people who oppose the consensus of climatologists and historians of the 20th century respectively, as Bart Ehrman has done, because Biblical studies is not exactly the same as climatology and 20th century history. Biblical studies is problematic, as scholars say when they suspect that some nonsense may be afoot, screwing up the work of serious people. Biblical studies is not always distinguishable from theology: sometimes a person whom everyone would think of as a Biblical scholar has diplomas which say that his or specialty is theology, and sometimes a theologian has diplomas which say that he or she is a Biblical scholar. There is a certain amount of overlap.
And theology is certainly not at all like 20th century history or climatology. It simply isn't, and if you want to insist that it is, I have nothing to say to you about it. Instead, I'm trying to communicate with serious people here.
Christians theologians are the people who made the Dark Ages dark, who wiped out pagan religions, who tortured and killed fellow Christians for not being the proper sort of Christians and not believing the correct things about the way the world was. They imprisoned Roger Bacon, over academic differences. They killed people for saying that they believed Copernicus' theories. They threatened to torture Galileo, and kept him under house arrest for the last several years of his life. All over academic differences. They condemned Darwin's theories when they were new, although by that time, the mid-19th century, they were no longer allowed to torture and kill the people who disagreed with them. They were slow to come around concerning 20th- and 21stcentury physics. They're still interfering with stem-cell research.
I'm not claiming that present-day theologians want to torture and kill people who disagree with them. (Not all of them.) I also don't deny that, although they're very opposed to even discussing the question of whether or not Jesus existed, most of them presently do acknowledge that Adam and Eve and Noah and Abraham are mythical figures. Most of them. Many have even stopped arguing altogether for the existence of Moses.
But they haven't led the way in academic consensus, they've never been cutting edge and they're still not.
That's the theologians, though. Not the Biblical scholars, the very ones who have dismantled our belief in the literal truth of the earlier stories in the Bible, the very ones who've shown us that Bible, supposedly the inalterable word of God, has indeed gone through some revisions over the course of centuries.
Except that you can't always tell who's one and who's the other, who's a theologian and who's a Biblical scholar, and who's partly both. Except that sometimes it seems that the theology still corrupts almost every single scholar in the field. Times such as when people try to discuss Jesus' historicity, and the scholars almost all insist that that already has been thoroughly studied, and that Jesus' historicity has been solidly proven. And even more so when many of them go even farther than that and needlessly insult people for thinking that there could be any doubt, for merely wanting to discuss the question. I get a really unpleasant sense of being in the presence of traditionally-Christian, Medieval attitudes at such times.
Nobody's proven anything here. The academics haven't proven that Jesus existed. Not to me, anyway. Not yet. I certainly haven't proven that Jesus was made up by St Paul or someone else. But maybe, just possibly, I've gotten one or two people to begin to wonder whether the academic Biblical scholars sometimes cease to behave like 21st-century academics in fields like meteorology or chemistry or 20th-century history or physics or Classical studies or math, and begin to get a little Medieval, when the question of the Historical Jesus is brought up.
Historicists, people who believe that Jesus of Nazareth existed, including many atheists who don't believe any of the New Testament stories of supernatural things, often correctly point out that the great majority of academics are historicists. And they often correctly point out that most of the mythicists, the people who have doubts about Jesus' existence, are amateurs, and often do a spectacularly poor job of making the case that it's less than certain that Jesus existed. To be clear: mythicists don't merely doubt the supernatural stories about Jesus. They (we) are not convinced that those stories are even based on a real person, named Jesus, who came from Nazareth. We figure: so much of the New Testament is clearly legend, the existence of Jesus might be just one more legendary detail -- a rather small detail when one considers the proportional of legend in the New Testament.
I agree that there are a lot of zany mythicists. I've criticized some of them so harshly in this blog that some of them, apparently having stopped reading before the end of one post or another, have assumed that I am an historicist, or even a very devout Christian. So, for the billionth time and the 2nd time in this post: I'm an atheist and I'm not convinced that Jesus existed.
Yes, I've criticized some mythicists very harshly. I've also pointed out that the fact that some of them argue the mythicist case very poorly says nothing at all about the soundness or unsoundness of the case itself, the soundness or unsoundness of the position: it is not certain that Jesus existed.
There must be a term in formal logic for this sort of fallacy: the fact that A argues the case for 1 poorly does not say anything about the soundness or unsoundness of 1. Whatever logicians would call this fallacy, it's the primary argument of the historians.
Surprisingly, historicists who are also academic specialists in Biblical studies very often assert that the evidence for Jesus' existence is more extensive and solid than the evidence for the existence of Socrates or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. Surprisingly, because it's so obviously wrong: we have writings from 3 of Socrates' contemporaries, compared to 0 for Jesus. Besides Caesar's own writings we have those of his contemporaries Cicero and Sallust. We have likenesses of Socrates and Caesar and Alexander in the form of sculptures which were obviously based on real people. We know what each of them looked like. Not so with Jesus. And in the case of Caesar and Alexander there's the little detail of them having been the leaders of huge armies and huge states, which means that huge numbers of people would have had to have been silent about them being fictional.
And you know what? Just like the historicists pointing out unsound mythicist arguments doesn't prove that Jesus existed, my pointing out unsound historicist arguments doesn't prove he didn't exist. Far and wide here, no one is proving anything one way or another about whether Jesus existed.
Still, the fact that the academic consensus that Jesus existed is so solid impresses many people. And the consensus shouldn't just be dismissed. However, it is not quite proper to compare mythicists, people who challenge that consensus, to global warming deniers and Holocaust deniers, people who oppose the consensus of climatologists and historians of the 20th century respectively, as Bart Ehrman has done, because Biblical studies is not exactly the same as climatology and 20th century history. Biblical studies is problematic, as scholars say when they suspect that some nonsense may be afoot, screwing up the work of serious people. Biblical studies is not always distinguishable from theology: sometimes a person whom everyone would think of as a Biblical scholar has diplomas which say that his or specialty is theology, and sometimes a theologian has diplomas which say that he or she is a Biblical scholar. There is a certain amount of overlap.
And theology is certainly not at all like 20th century history or climatology. It simply isn't, and if you want to insist that it is, I have nothing to say to you about it. Instead, I'm trying to communicate with serious people here.
Christians theologians are the people who made the Dark Ages dark, who wiped out pagan religions, who tortured and killed fellow Christians for not being the proper sort of Christians and not believing the correct things about the way the world was. They imprisoned Roger Bacon, over academic differences. They killed people for saying that they believed Copernicus' theories. They threatened to torture Galileo, and kept him under house arrest for the last several years of his life. All over academic differences. They condemned Darwin's theories when they were new, although by that time, the mid-19th century, they were no longer allowed to torture and kill the people who disagreed with them. They were slow to come around concerning 20th- and 21stcentury physics. They're still interfering with stem-cell research.
I'm not claiming that present-day theologians want to torture and kill people who disagree with them. (Not all of them.) I also don't deny that, although they're very opposed to even discussing the question of whether or not Jesus existed, most of them presently do acknowledge that Adam and Eve and Noah and Abraham are mythical figures. Most of them. Many have even stopped arguing altogether for the existence of Moses.
But they haven't led the way in academic consensus, they've never been cutting edge and they're still not.
That's the theologians, though. Not the Biblical scholars, the very ones who have dismantled our belief in the literal truth of the earlier stories in the Bible, the very ones who've shown us that Bible, supposedly the inalterable word of God, has indeed gone through some revisions over the course of centuries.
Except that you can't always tell who's one and who's the other, who's a theologian and who's a Biblical scholar, and who's partly both. Except that sometimes it seems that the theology still corrupts almost every single scholar in the field. Times such as when people try to discuss Jesus' historicity, and the scholars almost all insist that that already has been thoroughly studied, and that Jesus' historicity has been solidly proven. And even more so when many of them go even farther than that and needlessly insult people for thinking that there could be any doubt, for merely wanting to discuss the question. I get a really unpleasant sense of being in the presence of traditionally-Christian, Medieval attitudes at such times.
Nobody's proven anything here. The academics haven't proven that Jesus existed. Not to me, anyway. Not yet. I certainly haven't proven that Jesus was made up by St Paul or someone else. But maybe, just possibly, I've gotten one or two people to begin to wonder whether the academic Biblical scholars sometimes cease to behave like 21st-century academics in fields like meteorology or chemistry or 20th-century history or physics or Classical studies or math, and begin to get a little Medieval, when the question of the Historical Jesus is brought up.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Things I've Been Called To My Face
Skinny, fat, Big Guy, ugly, Stretch, a tall thin man, fatass, okay-looking, cute, gorgeous, Zitface, guy with a sweet scarred-up face and big cow eyes, young man, old man, man, a real man, strong as an ox, not a real man, my man, man, kid, a bear, Snuggle Bear, hey you, kid, a writer, an actor, a saxophonist, the janitor, the groundskeeper, Mr Bollinger, Sir, Professor, a terrible singer who can't stay anywhere near on-key for more than six bars or so, an historian, a philosopher, an enigma, a phony, pretentious, extremely boring, silly, serious, sensitive, insensitive, crazy, extremely sane, gentle, an Asperger, autistic, a genius, an idiot, very smart and very dumb at the same time, a freak, a pothead, a drunk, an alcoholic, a great alcoholic in my own right (this was at an AA meeting), the leading contender for the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, a novelist, a blogger, a volunteer, a Volunteer (in the sense of having attended the University of Tennessee at Knoxville), Next!, The Wrong Monkey, Steve, Stevie, Steven, Stephen, Stefano, Étienne, Stephan, Steve-o, Steverino, the Steve-Meister, Steve-Man, Tom, The Human Zit, weird, interesting, a Donald E Westlake fan, a Joseph Heller fan, a Thomas Pynchon fan, a William Gaddis fan, a Heinrich Boell fan, a former Heinrich Boell fan, someone who finds Heinrich Boell both great and terrible, a Peter Handke fan, a former Peter Handke fan, a Padgett Powell fan, a Barry Bonds fan, an Alfred Doeblin fan, a Jimmy Jackson fan, a Nietzsche fan, a Jarious Jackson fan, a Steven Runciman fan, a Sloterdijk fan, a Schopenhauer fan, an Adorno fan, a cat person, a dog lover, King Pong (a 7 year stretch without losing a single game of ping pong), a dancing machine, a punk rocker, an old punk rocker, a weirdo, a burnout, a loser, someone who will never amount to a sack of shit, someone who'll be a big success in whatever field he chooses, a space cadet, Dream Weaver, Bitch, Pretty Boy, Clint Eastwood, James Woods, Cate Blanchett's secret boyfriend (Okay, no one has ever called me that to my face. As far as I know I'm the only one who ever called me that), an atheist, an atheist who's dared to take on Paulkovich (as if that required daring), a secret Christian or Muslim pretending to be an atheist, a mythicist (correctly), an historicist (incorrectly), an amateur Latinist, that guy who can't stand Cicero for some reason, that guy who's afraid of moose, a Yankee, a Gringo, cool, tough as nails, weak, brave, cowardly, hey Batter Batter Batter, a good baserunner, a right fielder, ninth in the batting order, ein Arschloch, esse, homeboy, home fries, buddy, pal, Sweetheart, my frent, Cool Steve.
Friday, January 30, 2015
Michael Paulkovich Has Dedicated A Page Of A Website To Me
Here it is.
I couldn't be more pleased. When people think of Michael Paulkovich, they should think of me. Oh, there are so many people to thank, and the orchestra's playing me off already... Thanks, Mom! I love you!
PS: Toward the bottom of Paulkovich's Bollinger-page:
I don't know why he is so desperate for a mythical figure to have actually existed, and all the sources Bollinger used to "prove" Jesus are poor - either known forgeries, or simply moot (too late to be even remotely compelling to prove a historicity).
He took the trouble to dedicate this entire long page to me, and he still hasn't noticed that I'm a mythicist, not sure whether Jesus existed or not.
I couldn't be more pleased. When people think of Michael Paulkovich, they should think of me. Oh, there are so many people to thank, and the orchestra's playing me off already... Thanks, Mom! I love you!
PS: Toward the bottom of Paulkovich's Bollinger-page:
I don't know why he is so desperate for a mythical figure to have actually existed, and all the sources Bollinger used to "prove" Jesus are poor - either known forgeries, or simply moot (too late to be even remotely compelling to prove a historicity).
He took the trouble to dedicate this entire long page to me, and he still hasn't noticed that I'm a mythicist, not sure whether Jesus existed or not.
Friday, January 2, 2015
Why Am I So Angry At Michael Paulkovich?
That's what some people want to know. I'll keep trying to explain. (Some people have urged me to just let it all go. Hahaha. Haha. Hahahaha. No, I won't be doing that.)
I suppose it can't hurt to keep repeating, near the beginning of each of these rants, what many people seem to keep overlooking: not only am I an atheist, I'm far from certain that Jesus ever existed. I'm not criticizing Paulkovich for saying that Jesus never existed, I'm criticizing him for not knowing his ass from a hole in the ground about ancient Judea and Galilee and the question of Jesus' historicity, while trying to pass himself off as some sort of expert.
Actually, I'm angrier at the people who publish Free Inquiry than I am at Paullkovich. Someone described Paulkovich's article about "the 126 silent historians" as a striking example of sloppy thinking and sloppy research. But I don't think that what Paulkovich did here was research at all. Him posing as a researcher, and Free Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism continuing to stand behind him, is an insult to all actual researchers in ancient Greek and Latin, including the sloppy amateur ones like me. Sloppy research would have been if he had actually studied the writing of some ancient writers, and then drawn some dubious conclusions from that study. Mis-translated a few Greek and Latin words, not understood some obvious issues of context, things like that. In the case of 40-some of his 126, it's obvious that he didn't study their writing because there is no writing left to be studied. If he had actually read the Latin version of the story of Jason and the Argonauts, or another writer's book on architecture, or the Satyricon, the only surviving work of Petronius -- the same Satyricon upon which Fellini based his movie of the same name -- or the half-dozen verses of love poetry which are all that remain of the work of another writer on his list of 126, etc, etc, he would have known that there was no reason to expect to find Jesus mentioned in those works, and furthermore, he would've realized that anyone who was actually familiar with those writers would know that it was ridiculous to look for mentions of Jesus in their work. He would've realized that he'd be exposing himself as a charlatan posing as someone who'd done some research.
If he had taken the trouble to actually do some research into the extent of all the surviving work of ancient Greek and Latin authors, he would've realized that there are barely 126 historians among them, let alone 126 who mentioned Judea or Galilee, let alone 126 who would've mentioned a wandering preacher with all of 12 followers, who was one of the many people Pontius Pilate had crucified. He would've learned that apart from the Bible and some of the Old and New Testament Apocrypha and the Dead Sea Scrolls and Josephus, there's very little surviving ancient writing of any kind from that time and place, and that it's very big news among actual contemporary historians whenever any little scrap of more is found.
I'd really like to know just exactly how Paulkovich came up with that list, and where he got the notion that it was a list of 126 HISTORIANS. I'm picturing him gathering information from sources like jesusneverexisted dot com and the blogs and books of some of the wackier mythicists. There's simply no way he could've come near anything resembling a reliable reference work, or conferred with anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Roman Empire and its literature, and still come up with that list. Perhaps he thinks that most people familiar with ancient Greek or Latin are a part of the Plot. I'm just speculating here. It's actually very difficult for me to imagine just how that list of 126 names came to be, and just exactly how Paulkovich came to believe that historical writing from all 126 of them had survived.
And yes, there is also the little detail that it is extremely well-known, even among mythicists, that 4 of the people on his list, Josphus, Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the Younger, actually do mention Jesus and/or Christians.
And that the first 3 of those 4 actually are historians, quite unlike most of the 126, showing that the rate of "silence" of ancient historians about Jesus is actually rather low.
And yes, there is also the little detail about how Paulkovich bases his assumptions about what would have had to have been written about Jesus if he'd existed, on the Bible's claims about Jesus. That is to say, if Jesus had really healed all of those people and risen from the dead and so forth, more people would've noticed. Either Paulkovich is being inconsistent here in looking for evidence of a supernatural Jesus, or I have been wrong in assuming that Paulkovich is an atheist who doesn't believe in the supernatural. Whatever. At this point of silliness I don't much care anymore. But to some people, this assumed inconsistency apparently is a big deal.
And of course all of this still leaves the question untouched of how those responsible for the publication of Free Inquiry managed to miss all of this.
Well, at least Paulkovich didn't claim that there were newspapers in ancient Jerusalem, and that big stacks of them are still lying around, along with detailed records of every criminal case which came before Pilate -- all very suspiciously free of any mention of Jesus. There actually are some people, aside from the religious believers in Jesus' miracles and resurrection, who are running around making claims about Jesus and the historical record which are even more ridiculous than Paulkovich's. (Unless I'm giving him too much credit, and he actually does make such claims in his book. I haven't read his book.)
There's nothing particularly unusual about Paulkovich. There are very many people talking and writing about the historicity or lack of historicity of Jesus without having more of a clue on the subject than he does. It's mysterious to me that so much energy is expended flapping their gums about it, and such a tiny fraction of that much energy learning about what they're constantly yapping about. It's mysterious, and it makes me angry. And it makes me that much more angry when we're talking about people who claim to value rationality and free inquiry and knowledge and solid research so highly.
I suppose it can't hurt to keep repeating, near the beginning of each of these rants, what many people seem to keep overlooking: not only am I an atheist, I'm far from certain that Jesus ever existed. I'm not criticizing Paulkovich for saying that Jesus never existed, I'm criticizing him for not knowing his ass from a hole in the ground about ancient Judea and Galilee and the question of Jesus' historicity, while trying to pass himself off as some sort of expert.
Actually, I'm angrier at the people who publish Free Inquiry than I am at Paullkovich. Someone described Paulkovich's article about "the 126 silent historians" as a striking example of sloppy thinking and sloppy research. But I don't think that what Paulkovich did here was research at all. Him posing as a researcher, and Free Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism continuing to stand behind him, is an insult to all actual researchers in ancient Greek and Latin, including the sloppy amateur ones like me. Sloppy research would have been if he had actually studied the writing of some ancient writers, and then drawn some dubious conclusions from that study. Mis-translated a few Greek and Latin words, not understood some obvious issues of context, things like that. In the case of 40-some of his 126, it's obvious that he didn't study their writing because there is no writing left to be studied. If he had actually read the Latin version of the story of Jason and the Argonauts, or another writer's book on architecture, or the Satyricon, the only surviving work of Petronius -- the same Satyricon upon which Fellini based his movie of the same name -- or the half-dozen verses of love poetry which are all that remain of the work of another writer on his list of 126, etc, etc, he would have known that there was no reason to expect to find Jesus mentioned in those works, and furthermore, he would've realized that anyone who was actually familiar with those writers would know that it was ridiculous to look for mentions of Jesus in their work. He would've realized that he'd be exposing himself as a charlatan posing as someone who'd done some research.
If he had taken the trouble to actually do some research into the extent of all the surviving work of ancient Greek and Latin authors, he would've realized that there are barely 126 historians among them, let alone 126 who mentioned Judea or Galilee, let alone 126 who would've mentioned a wandering preacher with all of 12 followers, who was one of the many people Pontius Pilate had crucified. He would've learned that apart from the Bible and some of the Old and New Testament Apocrypha and the Dead Sea Scrolls and Josephus, there's very little surviving ancient writing of any kind from that time and place, and that it's very big news among actual contemporary historians whenever any little scrap of more is found.
I'd really like to know just exactly how Paulkovich came up with that list, and where he got the notion that it was a list of 126 HISTORIANS. I'm picturing him gathering information from sources like jesusneverexisted dot com and the blogs and books of some of the wackier mythicists. There's simply no way he could've come near anything resembling a reliable reference work, or conferred with anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Roman Empire and its literature, and still come up with that list. Perhaps he thinks that most people familiar with ancient Greek or Latin are a part of the Plot. I'm just speculating here. It's actually very difficult for me to imagine just how that list of 126 names came to be, and just exactly how Paulkovich came to believe that historical writing from all 126 of them had survived.
And yes, there is also the little detail that it is extremely well-known, even among mythicists, that 4 of the people on his list, Josphus, Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the Younger, actually do mention Jesus and/or Christians.
And that the first 3 of those 4 actually are historians, quite unlike most of the 126, showing that the rate of "silence" of ancient historians about Jesus is actually rather low.
And yes, there is also the little detail about how Paulkovich bases his assumptions about what would have had to have been written about Jesus if he'd existed, on the Bible's claims about Jesus. That is to say, if Jesus had really healed all of those people and risen from the dead and so forth, more people would've noticed. Either Paulkovich is being inconsistent here in looking for evidence of a supernatural Jesus, or I have been wrong in assuming that Paulkovich is an atheist who doesn't believe in the supernatural. Whatever. At this point of silliness I don't much care anymore. But to some people, this assumed inconsistency apparently is a big deal.
And of course all of this still leaves the question untouched of how those responsible for the publication of Free Inquiry managed to miss all of this.
Well, at least Paulkovich didn't claim that there were newspapers in ancient Jerusalem, and that big stacks of them are still lying around, along with detailed records of every criminal case which came before Pilate -- all very suspiciously free of any mention of Jesus. There actually are some people, aside from the religious believers in Jesus' miracles and resurrection, who are running around making claims about Jesus and the historical record which are even more ridiculous than Paulkovich's. (Unless I'm giving him too much credit, and he actually does make such claims in his book. I haven't read his book.)
There's nothing particularly unusual about Paulkovich. There are very many people talking and writing about the historicity or lack of historicity of Jesus without having more of a clue on the subject than he does. It's mysterious to me that so much energy is expended flapping their gums about it, and such a tiny fraction of that much energy learning about what they're constantly yapping about. It's mysterious, and it makes me angry. And it makes me that much more angry when we're talking about people who claim to value rationality and free inquiry and knowledge and solid research so highly.
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