Brian Bethune has published a good article on the historicity question for Macleans, a leading Canadian magazine. Titled Did Jesus Really Exist?, his article presents a pretty fair assessment of the debate (after summarizing recent developments in the field calling into question the reliability of memory). He doesn’t delve into the deeper levels (principally, what did Paul mean by “Brothers of the Lord” or being “made of a woman” or “of the sperm of David”?). But he summarizes where things stand. And like me ten years ago, he finds the historicity defenders have a surprisingly, indeed perplexingly weak case.
Around the same time, doctoral candidate in religious studies Raphael Lataster published a peer reviewed journal article summarizing the case in more detail. Titled It’s Official: We Can Now Doubt Jesus’s Historical Existence, and published in Think (by The Royal Institute of Philosophy), Vol. 15.43 (Summer 2016), pp. 65-79, it’s a good summary of his book Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate among Atheists. None of his more speculative stuff is in there. Every point he makes is entirely correct.
In both cases, the truth of what they report significantly rests with the extremely poor responses of historicity defenders. Once again it’s starting to look like they have no good responses to make (this became evident even in my debate with Craig Evans in Georgia a few weeks ago, which I’ll blog about soon). Ehrman seems not to have given Bethune any good answers. And the only books the entire field has produced in defense of historicity really do phenomenally suck—and in all the ways Lataster documents.
The responses to these two articles so far are absurd. They even make the defense of historicity look embarrassing and ridiculous. Which shouldn’t be so easy to do. But alas, two authors definitely accomplish said marvel…
McGrath on Lataster
In response to Lataster’s peer reviewed article, regular historicity clown James McGrath did not respond under peer review (just as he hasn’t ever done), but published a silly rant on his blog instead. Which is duly torn down and exposed as the manipulative rhetoric it is by Neil Godfrey at Vridar (The Trivial Fallacies of a Hostile Anti-Mythicist).
Like a pouting child, McGrath first complains about the supposedly poor writing style of the Think article. Sorry, I don’t see it. To the contrary, what McGrath calls “a mediocre undergraduate essay” is actually what the rest of the world calls good, concise, clear writing. Here is a random sample from the article illustrating this supposedly awful style; judge for yourself:
Ehrman’s confidence in the sources that he has established ad nauseam as being absolutely terrible stems from the many written sources behind them. Please note that these written sources are apparently not the—extant—texts of the Old Testament, the Jewish intertestamental literature, or various Pagan myths. No, these written sources happen to be ones that cannot be scrutinised and no longer exist, if they ever did. Sources like Q, M, and L (note that scholars don’t even agree that the very popular Q source existed, as evidenced by the likes of Austin Farrer, Michael Goulder, and Mark Goodacre).
That Ehrman assumes such hypothetical sources existed is not even the worst of it. While I would prefer appealing to foundational sources that we do have access to (like the Old Testament scriptures), it is certainly possible that the Gospels made use of other sources, which are no longer accessible. However, Ehrman somehow assumes their reliability, without any argument. Quite appropriate given the state of the sources that do exist, Ehrman is unable to convince readers of these non-existing sources’ authors, authorial intent, composition dates, genre, or authenticity. Had they existed, these hypothesised foundational texts could have been allegories, parables, or works of outright fiction. Ehrman then moves on from the apparently innumerable hypothetical written sources to proclaim that they stemmed from even earlier oral sources.
Lambasting an article’s “style” as “undergraduate” is a fallacy of poisoning the well. It is a dirty tactic of attempting to discredit the author’s legitimate credentials as a graduate student, on a point completely irrelevant to the article’s content. McGrath should be ashamed of even attempting this. But I have established repeatedly that he is a liar who has no shame. So I shouldn’t be surprised.
This is also, of course, a red herring fallacy: one is supposed to judge according to the arguments, not whether you aesthetically appreciate the author’s style. It’s especially embarrassing that Maurice Casey’s style was far worse, and in actually substantive ways, yet McGrath praised it to the skies. So McGrath can’t even be honest about his own literary taste.
McGrath then proceeds to slander all mythicists as hacks who should never get hired. Without presenting any basis for that conclusion. The argument is circular logic: mythicism is false because no professors propose it; therefore no one who proposes it should ever be allowed to be a professor. This is actually a threat. Even the title of McGrath’s blog post is a threat (“Can Mythicism Kill Your Career?” hint hint): if any peer sides with us, they should get fired and their career should be destroyed. This is called an ad baculum fallacy. McGrath has resorted to it before. And was rightly shamed for it by famed emeritus professor Philip Davies. And here he is, still doing it. Disgusting.
It’s also false. Several sitting professors believe our case has merit. But it is true in the sense that threatening your peers works (I know professors who won’t publicly admit they think we have a point, out of fear for their career). This is all the quality of argument historicity defenders have left: we can’t refute you, so we will destroy the career of anyone who takes your side—so we can claim no one takes your side. (And when some take your side despite our threats, we will lie and keep saying no one takes your side.) That tells you all you need to know about the value of the “consensus” in Jesus studies.
Does McGrath even attempt anything resembling an actual rebuttal to anything Lataster actually said? Not really. But here are the candidate performances for the judges…
Do You Have Any Actual Arguments Please?
McGrath claims Lataster contradicts himself.
Just within the first couple of pages, Lataster described Ehrman’s book Did Jesus Exist? as an attempt to prove the historicity of Jesus, but soon afterwards he quotes Ehrman himself insisting that proof is not what historical study offers in relation to ancient figures.
Score? Zero. Lataster actually said that Ehrman failed to prove historicity likely. And Ehrman actually did say historicity is certain. He wrote in DJE, “The reality is that whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist. That is what this book will set out to demonstrate.” So, Lataster correctly states Ehrman’s thesis (almost verbatim), and correctly notes anyway that Ehrman does qualify that as a (presumably very high) probability. So Lataster’s charity and accuracy as a critic, somehow becomes “contradicting himself.”
That is called lying, James McGrath.
McGrath then claims Lataster is inconsistent.
Deducing the possibility or likelihood of earlier sources based on evidence from the sources we have is not the same as merely imagining sources for which we have no evidence whatsoever. And I wonder whether he discussed his argument in this section with his one-time co-author Richard Carrier, who appeals to hypothetical earlier versions of the Ascension of Isaiah in his arguments.
Score? Zero. Lataster never describes the thesis this way. Nor does this address Lataster’s actual argument. This is therefore a straw man fallacy.
Indeed, note key differences:
We actually have The Ascension of Isaiah. In multiple manuscripts. I do not posit a hypothetical source for it. I posit the actual document we have. I can speculate about what sources it may have had (Paul, after all, appears to quote it), or what was in the sections removed (I have lots of ideas about that). But the sections I argue from? We actually have them. And the sections that have been added? That they were added is not only a mainstream conclusion, but it is demonstrated by their absence from manuscripts we actually have! (I also, incidentally, do not assign much weight to this document. McGrath consistently ignores this fact, because the AscIs disturbs the fuck out of him.)
This is not at all like Q. Even less like the completely imaginary M and L (McGrath, being a liar, conveniently “forgets” that Lataster is talking about all of these, not just Q). We do not have Q in any form. No manuscript of it exists. We do not know what all was in it, how it was prefaced, or even if it preceded Mark rather than being a redaction of Mark (because there is no non-circular argument that there was no Mark-Q overlap). It is purely hypothetical. (The arguments for it also wildly suck.)
A correct analogy to what Ehrman is doing with Q, L, and M is what Lataster says: Ehrman posits that they all said what he wants them to have said, and he wants them to have said things that verified Jesus existed, therefore Jesus existed; so consistency entails we then get to posit that what the Ascension of Isaiah said is what we want it to have said, therefore Jesus didn’t exist! The method is absurd. Which is why we don’t use it. But Ehrman does.
By Ehrman’s ridiculous methodology, we can conclude that the Ascension of Isaiah explicitly said Jesus didn’t exist. But instead, because we actually use sound methods, we only conclude the original depicted Satan crucifying Jesus in outer space because the remaining actual text (not hypothetical text, but the actual text as we have it) says that’s exactly what the missing section would say. That’s not hypothesis. That’s fact.
And then, even after all that, we classify this evidence in the Isaiah text as weak. We don’t settle a ridiculous certainty on it like Ehrman does with his invented sources.
So McGrath is again not being honest about our argument.
Oh. And, yes. That’s it. Those are all of his arguments. Seriously. That’s it. This is what stands for a defense of historicity.
McGrath neither mentions nor even attempts a rebuttal to any of Lataster’s actual arguments in Think.
Let me repeat that. Because it is fucking appalling—and tells you all you need to know about how bankrupt the case for historicity is:
McGrath neither mentions nor even attempts a rebuttal to any of Lataster’s actual arguments in Think.
Instead McGrath closes with more pointless remarks about aesthetics, more threats against our careers, more well poisoning, a referral to an unrelated article by Tim Hendrix (who didn’t address my case for historicity), and of course dishonestly “forgets” to mention my rebuttal to that anyway, and then even endorses (literally fucking endorses!) the stupid apologetics argument that there is as much evidence for the historicity Jesus as there is of my historicity.
And we still take historicity apologetics seriously because why?
Tors on Bethune
Meanwhile, Christian apologists flipped their shit over the Macleans article. Dozens of articles lambasting it appeared online, some even featuring Islamophobia (“Shame on you, you’d never question the existence of Mohammed on Ramadan!” Because Christians envy the piety of violent Islamic radicals). Some even speculate that I paid Bethune off…because my book can’t possibly have been convincing and inadequately answered by Ehrman (it’s clear no one suggesting this read my book, either; they don’t actually care to find out whether the arguments are any good, because they just can’t be, just can’t…).
None of those attack articles even mentioned much less addressed any of the actual arguments we have. They just ranted in pearl-clutching shock at how absurd and shameful it was that anyone would ever publish such a thing. Some throw in a straw man or two. Some couldn’t get passed the fact that memory and oral transmission aren’t reliable (a mainstream view now in the Jesus studies field). Some direct their readers to apologetics books written years before mine—evidently unaware that there is now a peer reviewed book from a respected biblical studies press that those previous tirades did not address.
But for one exception. An elaborate rebuttal to the Macleans article was published by John Tors, a Christian apologist who threw up a raving verbose bucket of fundamentalism that isn’t even worth a detailed rebuttal. But for everyone’s benefit, I shall give you an annotated commentary a couple days from now.
I don’t have access to Think, but, somewhat irrelevantly to Lataster’s article, I clicked on the table of contents, and saw that the preceding article is titled “A GOD EXISTS” (“I argue that normative reasons (reasons to do and believe things) are powerful evidence that a god exists. “), and the following is titled “WHY SAME-SEX MARRIAGE IS UNJUST” (“Heterosexual union has special social value because it is the indispensable means by which humans come into existence. What has special social value deserves special recognition and sanction. Civil ordinances that recognize same-sex marriage as comparable to heterosexual marriage constitute a rejection of the special social value of heterosexual unions, and to deny such special social value is unjust.”)
Ouch.
It’s good to have the best cases in print of bad ideas so you know you aren’t refuting a straw man.
This would be true of Lataster’s article as well. Were it refutable. Yet, McGrath doesn’t even engage his argument, much less refute it.
Ironically, of course, McGrath probably totally approves the first article you mention. And being a liberal I assume he would argue against the second. Although I wonder how. Given what his Bible says.
“Ehrman’s confidence in the sources that he has established ad nauseam as being absolutely terrible stems from the many written sources behind them.”
McGrath may have read this first; it’s the opening sentence and, well, it is clumsily formulated.
Although, having thought about it, it occurs to me that having those particular papers in the journal as well as the Lataster one might well have been a deliberate editorial decision, so that said editors can deflect criticism that they have some sort of anti-religious bias. “As can be clearly seen, we have no bias against the religious. Any historicists are free to submit any rebuttals that they might wish, and will not be rejected on ideological grounds.”
I believe generally that Think‘s entire concept is to publish the best thought pieces on controversial subjects. So I wouldn’t assume the juxtaposition is deliberate.
It seems the challenge for historicists appealing to Q, M, L, etc. is now to demonstrate that the evidence for these hypothetical sources doesn’t rely on historicism as a (possibly unacknowledged) premise. If they can’t stand alone without relying on a presumption of historicism, they can’t support historicism (without becoming circular, of course).
The problem with deep-seated consensus views that haven’t been previously challenged is that they can go unnoticed as unstated assumptions in fundamental, foundational research. And if it is a necessary premise for the subsequent findings (such as Q, M, L), such findings will necessarily appear to confirm the premise.
I get that nobody is necessarily eager to go back and revisit and revise the cases for Q, M and L under strict historicity agnosticism. It must kind of suck to entertain the idea that decades of work, possibly including important elements of one’s own work, need to be torn down, thrown out and restarted from the ground up.
I agree that the case for such hypothetical texts is weak and the erstwhile consensus is also crumbling. After reading Goodacre’s The Case Against Q and your OHJ, I think the fundamental tenants of consensus early Christianity and synoptic studies is in a fucking shambles.
And it’s increasingly clear (to me, at least) that the consensus is flawed because of the unsupported and unacknowledged premises inherited from centuries of reading the Gospels at face value. Even after scholars started examining the NT critically, Mark still gets the benefit of the doubt, and Matthew’s and Luke’s copy-paste job still isn’t being held against them.
For example, in your debate with Justin Bass, he claimed that the discrepancies around the Empty Tomb story independently vouched for the reliability of the common non-contradictory element (the Empty Tomb itself), which is bullshit. There is only one “Empty Tomb” element: Mark’s. Matthew and Luke simply copied it, and John’s version is so late that it almost certainly hearsay of Mark’s version (via Luke, most likely).
But notice the unacknowledged premise: there must have been an actual event around which different witnesses remembered the other details differently. [You know, small-time shit like whether there were angels, stones magically moving, guards getting smote…] Yet Mark’s is the only account; the rest is redaction.
Even if one accepts Q (which I don’t), claiming M and L as source documents with lineage (via oral tradition) back to a historical Jesus is pure wishful thinking. There’s no need for them, other than to backfill the “multiple attestations” lost by recognizing Matthew and Luke as copies of Mark. Admitting that they could just as easily be making shit up to suit their theology means recognizing Mark as the sole foundational pillar of the entire Gospel complex. Knocking off the flying buttress of Q threatens to collapse the whole thing in a cataclysmic runaway metaphor.
I think I’ve heard you say it before referring to McGrath that his own personal religion is interfering with his analysis. I think that’s true, and it seems to me he’s doing what he claims mythicists are doing – he resorts to strategies used by YECs and global warming deniers…notably, ignoring facts that hurt his position and cherry picking.
tim hendrix has a review of OHOJ out. Would you be responding to it?
https://www.scribd.com/doc/305750452/Richard-Carrier-s-On-the-Historicity-of-Jesus#download
Oh wow! No one told me about that going up last month.
Yes, definitely!
It may take a few weeks (I’m still on tour, and moving soon, and I have two recent debates to blog about, plus else). But eventually.
I do not see how ANY biblical scholar could avoid the reality of your hypothesis and reasoning in ” On The Historicity of Jesus.” Peer reviewed , full of documented evidence . No “hypothetical sources “… Very solid…!!!!
(Wasn’t St. Augustine peer-reviewed?)
Richard, I know this has nothing to dowith you, but Ijust have to express my outrage that the article summarizing Lataster’s book ($20) costs $15!!!
THIS IS RIDICULOUS!!!
Welcome to the new corporate greed model of academics. Yep. Fuck those guys.
Note that Lataster gets not a dime of that money. Journals rip us off, by stealing our work, and making six figure salaries for fat cat assholes. But alas, we have to publish in them to establish audience, respectability, and the verification of peer review.
The only justice in it is that usually (I hope this is also true for Think) our contracts let us republish our own articles under some condition or other, which lets us either make them available for free (sometimes after a certain amount of time has passed), or finally earn a royalty on our labor.
This was the function of my book Hitler Homer Bible Christ. All my peer reviewed journal contracts allowed me to republish my articles in “an anthology of my own works.” So now you can get hundreds of dollars of articles, for just twenty or so bucks. And I actually get paid something for my work.
Calling people “ridiculous” and “liars” and whatnot, while upbraiding them for calling others “undergraduates” and engaging in well poisoning… Is that how it’s done?
When someone is a liar, we get to say so. I have documented the fact here and elsewhere. That is not well poisoning; that’s an actual substantive point. Surely you know that demonstrating the fact that someone is lying is not a fallacy. It’s an argument. A very directly relevant argument.
And when someone repeatedly does this, it is in actual material fact ridiculous. And being that it is ridiculous because of a substantive failure to argue honestly, its being ridiculous is again a valid and applicable point.
By contrast, elementary writing style is completely irrelevant to the merits of an argument.
…even should it have been the case—it isn’t; McGrath is again lying.
So you need to decide what your values are. Do you think elegant lying is to be praised and endorsed, but inelegantly saying the truth is to be ignored? Or, more shocking still, do you actually think they are the same thing?
Make your decision.
And we will judge your character appropriately.
Fixed.
Richard
I’m reading the OHJ – you mention Kennedy / Lincoln points of commonness.
How about the 1898 novel by Morgan Robertson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futility,_or_the_Wreck_of_the_Titan
which ‘anticipates’ the Titanic catastrophe on 15 April 1912?
This neutralises any ‘causation’ at play as with prophecies/gods and Jesus.
ie whot Philo says of the logos/ Jesus Christ has bupkis bearing on actual historicity.
Thank you.
Then you ignored the argument I demonstrated with the Lincoln-Kennedy case.
Why are you using an argument I already refuted, and even citing the refutation, and yet still not even aware that it was a refutation, or why the refutation applies?
It’s of course doubly bogus not only because of the argument I made about the Lincoln-Kennedy case (which is even vastly more impressive) but also because of the principles of prophecy established even by Christian apologists themselves: obvious anticipations don’t count as prescient. As the author of the novel himself said, “the similarities were explained by his extensive knowledge of shipbuilding and maritime trend,” including the naming trends of vessels and the hubris of attempting unsinkable designs. On this principle, see Newman on Prophecy as Miracle.
(You are also confused. This only pertains, one supposes, to the reference class evidence, e.g. the Rank-Raglan identity. It does not apply to the Philo evidence. The Philo evidence establishes the existence of an archangel identified with an OT figure named Jesus with several very strange attributes, and that this predated Christianity within the same religion Christianity arose from. Unlike maritime trends, there is no way the Christians could have independently invented all the same very strange attributes for their Jesus, and not have known there already was a Jesus with those attributes in their already Jewish angelology.)
Not ignor’d the argument: just hadn’t got to it. But thank you for the clarification.
Speaking of confusion, not sure I understand your explication of
why Paul says for Jews Christ Crucified is a σκάνδαλον 1 cor 1. 23 hence an aversion
– Is Paul of a sect that revels in this as he does with Christ being a κατάρα ?
Is this analogus to when some pepl appropriate the ‘N’ wurd – but others might be scandalised by it?
There’s a thred in OHJ of Paul’s ‘revelations’; ‘visions’ – seems Paul was ill (temporal lobe epilepsy like Muhammad ) Heard V S Ramachandran?
Or even John Allegro and magic mushroom cult. Poor git – good skolar but career wipt out. nine the less – must’v been a fun guy….
Illness and drugs possible but not necessary. I cover the options in detail, with the science and cited scholarship, in OHJ 4, Element 15.
I discuss the meaning and context of 1 Cor. 1:23 in OHJ 12.4.
I’m only slightly well read in religion and I defeated McGrath on his own blog on this very subject.
Astonishing. People really can delude themselves.
Hi, I think there might be a problem with my main account, comments do not seem to be submitted as usual (this also happened previously). If my comment did make it to moderation please just disregard this message. I wanted to write:
Hi,
I am having a discussion with user “Zbykow” on this thread:
http://vridar.org/2016/04/15/what-does-probably-mean-to-historians-and-forecasters/#comments
Who out of the blue hinted he is in fact you:
The issues you are struggling with are known and are addressed in the book, if you understand the reasons and disagree then you should argue them directly instead of reinventing the wheel. Thanks for the invitation, I’m not sure I feel like registering another account, but I’ve taken a look and noticed somebody already suspects I am Carrier. I’m not going to deny nor admit, but i guess that means my English doesn’t suck that bad after all.
I wonder if you could confirm if this is your account or not?
Nope. Not me.
(And for resolving tech issues, there is a link at the top menu for submitting those. Give them as much information as you can so they can diagnose and fix whatever has happened.)
Thanks for your reply. If this comment (from my main account) fails to make it through moderation I will consider contacting tech support.
I meant “to” not “through” moderation (the previous comments just disappeared without being marked as “in moderation”). And it appears things are working again.
This one came through fine. Though I didn’t see the other (except as you sent by the proxy account of course).