M. David Litwa’s new book How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (Yale 2019) argues the authors of the Gospels “deliberately shaped myths about Jesus into historical discourse to maximize their believability for ancient audiences.” In other words, they made their myths look like histories, because that’s what the pagans around them were doing. I agree. Indeed, opposite what we’d expect if Jesus really existed, this tendency grew over time. Mark writes his biography like a fable; then Matthew tries to make Mark’s story look as historical as the Pentateuch; Luke then tried to make it look like the more rational pagan histories; and John finally essentially damns all who don’t believe what he’s telling them is literally true.
This is of course a dangerous thesis to defend, as it admits the stories of Jesus the Gospels encapsulate began as myths and were only later dressed up as histories. So to avoid ridicule and exile from his peers, it’s vitally important that Litwa affirm to them that he isn’t arguing Jesus began as a myth; just the stories about him, see. So he throws into his book a rather irrelevant digression attacking mythicism—in which he reveals he doesn’t understand what mythicists argue, nor knows any of the evidence for it they’ve published under peer review. In other words, once again a historicist denounces mythicism, after having read nothing about it, and getting little of it right. This is not how to argue for historicity.
Here I won’t review the rest of Litwa’s book. I’m sympathetic to its project, but whether his defense of it holds up will take me a more careful and thorough read to really say. Here I will only address his digression on the unrelated thesis of whether Jesus himself existed (pp. 22-45), which is not directly relevant to his book’s thesis (that could stand as correct whether Jesus existed or not).
Bad Start
Litwa starts by summarizing the deranged, un-peer-reviewed pop market book by Maurice Casey, which very much did not engage with any peer reviewed Jesus mythicism at all, and consisted mostly of ignorant, bizarre rants and name calling. A serious scholar would notice this, and thus stay well clear of even mentioning it. Nothing more need be said on the point here (see the above link). Litwa at least dismisses Casey as only targeting amateurs, not serious scholars, which Litwa says he will now address; but then goes on about Bauer, a scholar whose work and perspective is so obsolete I can no more fathom why he’d be singled out for any mention today than, say, Couchoud or Drews. This is not modern peer reviewed theory. So why address it?
After burning several pages to no use on those subjects, Litwa turns his attention to Brodie, the rare example of a believing Christian (indeed, a Catholic) who, still today, concludes there was no historical Jesus, that he was a mythic symbol from the start. For which he has been silenced and exiled by the Catholic Church. But though Brodie published a personal memoir that described why he came to these conclusions, he never really published a peer reviewed study of those conclusions. He was shut up before he could. So he’s not the best advocate to turn to as an exemplar. It’s only the worse that, since his case appeared only in the context of a memoir not a thesis, it’s actually not a very well vetted or well-thought-out thesis. His doubt about Paul’s historicity is implausible, for example, and his doubts about Jesus incomplete in their formulation. I think his case needed to be honed under the critical eye of a more direct peer review to reach a more refined and defensible state. So I won’t have much to disagree with Litwa here.
Indeed, I especially agree with Litwa when he says:
Brodie is right about many things. He is right, for instance, to question whether the evangelists offer anything like reliable historiography. Their knowledge of Palestinian geography might be like Vergil’s knowledge of Trojan geography (that is, based on reports, not experience). Their social memory generated about Jesus does not necessarily mean that there was a man behind the memory. Their use of oral tradition is often presumed and unverifiable (since all oral knowledge has perished). Furthermore, Brodie is right that the description of Jesus in early Jewish and Roman authors does not provide any more information than what is in the gospels. (It is likely that these writers depended on the gospels.)
Amen. But then Litwa commits the standard cognitive error of only assessing the weak examples Brodie gives for the derivation of the stories of Jesus from the Septuagint, and then assuming that assessment holds equally for all of Brodie’s strong examples as well. This is a common fallacy among historicists, and is a very unsound way to do history. Consequently, Litwa simply doesn’t even address Brodie here. He merely straw mans him and moves on. (Just as many do to Dennis MacDonald’s work; and, ironically, I’m sure many will do to Litwa’s work.)
That’s half of all the pages Litwa devotes to the subject, and still he has not actually offered any critique of mythicism as a thesis. He merely repeats truisms, such as that it “might” be that there is some historical Jesus material amidst all the myth, which we all agree with. But that doesn’t get us to “there probably is” some such material. The confusion of “maybe” with “probably” is perhaps the historicist’s most common fallacy. Even worse when they incorrectly attribute that fallacy to mythicism, which does not in fact depend on it: we are content to say much of the Gospel material’s historicity is unknown. Which means: we don’t know it’s ahistorical; we also don’t know it’s historical. Unlike historicists, we simply admit we can’t do anything with evidence like that. You cannot argue to the known from the unknown.
The remaining ten pages Litwa then directs at me.
Worse End
Of the ten pages devoted to me, Litwa literally burns the first two (a fifth of his critique) to developing the bizarre thesis that I believe I experienced a literal demonic attack by Yahweh and this has driven me on a crusade to destroy the historicity of Jesus. It’s hard to even describe this without laughing; or worrying about Litwa’s sanity. But from a strictly analytical perspective, what has any of this to do with the evidence for or against the historicity of Jesus? Beats me.
Litwa seems to want to contrive some sort of weird genetic fallacy, which, as best as I can reconstruct it, is supposed to go something like this: “Carrier thinks he battled a demon [no, I don’t; neither then nor now]; he thinks that demon was Yawheh [no, I don’t; neither then nor now]; therefore he thinks Christianity [!?] is demonic [um, only a Christian would think that Yahweh was a Christian]; therefore he is blindly attacking Christianity by disingenuously challenging the historicity of Jesus,” when, in actual fact, I have adamantly and repeatedly told people you cannot do this. The non-existence of Jesus is simply not a usable argument against Christianity itself. The irony is that Litwa had just gotten done pointing out that just such a genetic fallacy is invalid (p. 24). Yet, he burns two whole pages making such an invalid argument here (pp. 33-35). Face, meet palm.
The really strange thing is that to construct this bizarre, totally bonkers argument, Litwa clearly researched and read so as to quote mine my books not on the historicity of Jesus. Yet when it comes to critiquing my books on the historicity of Jesus, he fails to even correctly describe their contents, and acts like I didn’t argue several things there that in fact I did. He thus basically just skimmed, and that incompetently, the one book he is actually supposed to be critiquing. There is almost no better proof of the bankruptcy of the current consensus than that historicists act like this when defending it.
Litwa concludes this portion of his case with “Carrier’s thinking is rationalistic, black and white, and seemingly untouched by developments in postmodern philosophy over the past thirty years.” He gives no examples of any of these things being the case. Anyone who knows my work in philosophy and history will be scrunching their eyebrows by now. Litwa’s description of it could hardly be more inaccurate. And as he presents zero evidence for it, his case is also wholly unempirical. Welcome to how inept Christian historians have become.
Finally Something Relevant?
Litwa reveals his incompetent failure to actually read my book On the Historicity of Jesus (despite claiming to have) right out of the gate with the statement that “Carrier does not completely deny Jesus’s existence” (which is true) because “In fact, he concedes that there is a one in three ‘prior probability’ that Jesus existed.” Um. No. It’s a one in three posterior probability. The mere prior probability is not the probability of a thing at all. It’s the probability before taking into account all the evidence. When I conclude there is indeed a one in three chance Jesus existed after all, that’s after considering all the evidence. Which is the posterior, not the prior. This is so carefully explained in the book (especially in chapters 1, 6, and 12) that there is no honest excuse for Litwa to make this mistake. It reveals he made no honest effort to even pay attention to my argument.
Continuing to prove this, Litwa then says “Carrier frequently appeals to what is called ‘the hero pattern’.” That phrase exists nowhere in my book (so why did Litwa put it in quotes?). Perhaps he meant my frequent reference to hero-types, but we can tell he doesn’t mean that because he thinks I only reference one, the Rank-Raglan mythotype. In fact, I describe numerous hero-types Jesus belongs to. Litwa seems completely unaware of this (or else deliberately conceals it from his readers). Okay. So he’s completely off the rails already. But what, at least, does he say about the Rank-Raglan type and my use of it?
Litwa resorts to the standard fallacy that ‘differences refute all similarities’—as if he has never read any postmodern philosophy of the last thirty years—or indeed studied any critical literary theory at all. Worse, I specifically rebut that fallacy in OHJ. What is his response to my rebuttal? He gives none. He evidently didn’t even read it, and thus doesn’t know I refuted him already. He also doesn’t address the one actual argument I base my use of the Rank-Raglan set on: that if it were not an indicative set (if, as Litwa avers, it was simply a phantom of random features only in the mind of modern scholars), the set should contain a considerable number of historical persons. Yet despite having over a dozen members, it contains not even one. That cannot be by random chance—except at such a low probability as to render the premise untenable; adopting it to defend historicity would thus render historicity even more improbable. Because in any valid argument, all probabilities in the premises commute to the conclusion.
It is so rare for any member of the Rank-Raglan set to be a historical person, that this is highly indicative that any member in that set we choose at random will not be historical. So that Jesus belongs to the set is a problem; one you can’t just handwave away. That problem would remain even if we didn’t have so large and clear a set to work from, as I’ve already explained before. It just allows us to make the point clearer: Jesus is one of the most rapidly and heavily mythologized people in history. And that rarely happened to real people. Not never happened; but so rarely that we need evidence Jesus is one of the exceptions; we cannot rest on a presumption that he was.
I’ve already addressed Litwa’s mistake as it already occurred in the hands of James McGrath, so I needn’t replicate that material here. I similarly dismantled the version attempted by David Marshall, who repeats yet more fallacies shared by Litwa—such as trying to deny Jesus was raised by one or more foster parents (in fact he was: Joseph), and many like errors, not paying attention to how many Rank-Raglan heroes also had similar variations as Jesus, necessitating the more careful definitions of the criteria I employed, which Litwa completely ignores.
Differences always exist among instantiations of tropes and mythotypes, and anyone who doesn’t know that is simply not competent to be discussing this. Jesus also belongs to many other myth-heavy sets; Rank-Raglan is only useful because it has the most members, and thus is the most reliable set to work from. And the math doesn’t lie; so handwaving won’t escape the statistical fact that you cannot explain why no historical persons fit the Rank-Raglan scale, other than by admitting that fitting it is indicative of a person more likely being mythical than historical. And if you want to argue the reverse, that fitting it makes a character more likely historical than mythical, you have to demonstrate that with data. Not unempirical armchair assertions. Litwa prefers unempirical armchair assertions. Which renders him incapable of arriving at any sound judgment regarding historical facts.
To illustrate how brazenly Litwa didn’t read the book he claims to be responding to, his only example of an actual mismatch in criteria in my construction of the Rank-Raglan set is this:
Claimed similarities are sometimes forced (the fudge factor). Carrier avers, for instance, that though Jesus failed to marry a princess, he took the church as his bride. Yet here we are on the level of Christian allegory, at second remove from the gospel stories.
Here is what I actually say about this in OHJ (emphasis added):
The only two elements Jesus does not score are the last I’ve listed: we cannot establish (21) that his parents were originally imagined as related or (22) that he ever married (much less the daughter of his predecessor). However, the peculiar absence of that last element practically advertises the fact that he does merit that element allegorically: from the earliest time Jesus was imagined to have taken the ‘church’ as his bride, which was indeed understood to be the ‘daughter’ of his predecessor (the nation of Israel). So in all honesty we could assign him that element as well. But as it is not ‘literal’ I will leave his score at twenty. Nevertheless, even then he is nearly the highest scoring person in history, next only to Oedipus; and if we granted that last element, he would be tied even with him for highest score.
So Litwa appears to be lying to his readers: he falsely implies I scored this element for Jesus, when I explicitly said I did not count this, and for exactly the reasons Litwa himself gives; and he does not tell his readers I outright said it was only allegorically true, exactly as Litwa himself says. So Litwa doesn’t address my actual scoring of Jesus; and he misleads his readers into thinking he did not just completely agree with me and thus actually has no argument here.
I think if any scholar did that to him he would be outraged. So why, then, is this what he did? Rather than address any of my actual arguments, he fabricated an argument I didn’t make, and made several assertions about it that are in fact what I also said, and then, though in fact he literally agrees with everything I said, he leads his readers to believe he caught me in an error—the error, evidently, of completely agreeing with Litwa. We are in bizarro land here. Why is this how Litwa chooses to argue? What is going on here?
The bottom line is, if Litwa wants to argue the prior probability that someone as mythologized as Jesus was actually historical is above 1 in 3, he needs to show us a set of people, whose total number comes to more than a handful, who are as mythologized as Jesus, and more than 1 in 3 of whom were genuinely historical. That is the only way Litwa can challenge my prior probability. That is the only legitimate, logically valid, empirically sound way to do it. So why do historicists never do it? Why won’t they do the actual, required, empirical work here? I would suggest it’s because they can’t: because there is no such set. So their presumption that there is is simply fantasy, not empirical history. But hey, it’s easy to prove me wrong, if indeed I am. Just present the evidence. Do the damned work. (And, please, do it correctly: see Jesus and the Problem of the Fraudulent Reference Class and What about the Rank-Raglan Mythotype?)
Historicists Love the Possibiliter Fallacy
In Proving History (index) I describe the fallacy of possibiliter ergo probabiliter, “possibly, therefore probably.” As I mentioned above, it’s one of the most common fallacies historicists rely on. We see this again when Litwa admits I’m right about the meaning of 1 Corinthians 2:8 (a concession that will horrify most historicists), then immediately leans on a possibiliter fallacy to rescue historicity from that concession:
Paul says that the “rulers of this age” crucified “the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8), and these rulers are probably daimonic agents. One should not exclude the view, however, that we have a double entendre: “rulers” refers to both human and daimonic persons.
We don’t exclude that view, Dr. Litwa. We can allow it an equal probability: there is a 50/50 chance Paul is or is not including human agents in this remark. On the a fortiori side of my argument, for the entire collection of material in the Epistles that could refer to Jesus’s “deeds in life” I assign a 75% probability if he existed and a 100% probability if he did not, but this would not much change if we extracted this single passage and assigned it a straight 50/50 odds (meaning, it’s just as likely to be what Paul would write, whether Jesus really existed or not). Nevertheless, a 75/100 odds would represent why this, when placed in conjunction with the whole of Paul’s letters, is evidence against and not for historicity: this is a really weird way to refer to the Roman authorities executing Jesus, the same Roman authorities whom Paul argues never did anything but God’s will (in Romans 13). That Paul never clearly references Romans ever doing the deed is weird. And weird means, by definition, infrequent. And infrequent means, by definition, improbable. Anyone who does not admit this is not being logical.
Moreover, Paul cannot simply mean the Romans here, as the Romans did not possess the esoteric cosmic knowledge Paul attributes to the killers of Jesus: had they known its magical effects on the universe (defeating the power of death for all humankind), they would not have killed Jesus. That can’t describe the Romans. They neither knew nor believed such blood magic nonsense. And they hardly would have stopped a holy sacrifice the performance of which would save them from death—if they really knew it would, the very knowledge Paul says the killers of Jesus did indeed possess. That’s simply not the Romans. It can only mean the demons, as Litwa admits. They are the only ones who want to thwart God’s plan to defeat death. The Romans had no such interest; nor would have had, even if they knew and believed all this magical stuff about the cosmos.
So to get “Romans” out of 1 Corinthians 2:8 requires adding an elaborate supposition not in evidence: that Paul also thought these demons somehow fooled the Romans into doing their bidding unwittingly. That’s not in the text. Nor anywhere in the 20,000 words Paul wrote. Yes, he could have imagined that. But without evidence he did, you cannot assert that he did. You cannot invent a fact out of a speculation. It’s speculation in, speculation out. If to get Romans out of this passage you have to speculate an elaborate thesis nowhere in evidence, in order to defend the historicity of Jesus, then the historicity of Jesus is itself only a speculation. For everything in the premises commutes to the conclusion. If a conclusion relies on a speculated premise, the conclusion can only be a speculation, too.
It would be different if we didn’t need this passage to defend historicity. If we could leave it at “it’s 50/50” which speculation holds, and therefore “it’s 50/50” which conclusion follows, and these exhaust all possible conclusions, then all’s fine. But that leaves us at “it’s 50/50 whether Jesus existed on this evidence alone,” and that doesn’t get us to “Jesus probably existed.” It only gets us to “we don’t know if he did.” It would similarly be different if we had evidence Paul would or did think this way. In other words, if it wasn’t merely a speculation; or if we could prove Paul would always have thought this regardless of the historicity of Jesus; or any such line of reasoning. But all that requires evidence. Not speculation. You have to do the work. Like pretty much all historicists, Litwa doesn’t believe in doing the work.
The bottom line is: Litwa has no evidence that Paul thought Romans or Jews or even humans were in any way the killers of Jesus. Yet he won’t admit this. Instead, he invents speculations, and pretends he just presented facts. This is why I doubt Jesus existed. Because if he did, this is not how historians would be defending it.
Not Reading Is Irresponsible
Litwa repeatedly shows he did not read the very book he claims to be rebutting. That is unprofessional and irresponsible as a scholar. Another example of this appears when Litwa complains that “how the daimons actually affixed a spiritual being to a spiritual cross and how this spiritual being could die is not explained.” False. It is explained repeatedly and in detail in OHJ (as I’ve pointed out before). Why does he not know that? Why does he not know what that explanation is? Why does he have no response to that explanation? Why did he lie to his readers by claiming an explanation that is extensively covered in OHJ is not in OHJ at all? Why does the historicity of Jesus have to be defended with lies?
Similarly, Litwa says such silly things as “Trees do not grow in the sky,” somehow not knowing, in fact, they did: the entire Garden of Eden was located in the Third Heaven, according to the very scheme endorsed by Paul in his report of a visit there in 2 Corinthians 12. As Hebrews explains, everything on earth has a counterpart in the heavens. And as the Ascension of Isaiah explicitly states, there is also a counterpart to everthing on earth in the firmament. Everything would include trees, thrones, castles, soil—everything. I again have an entire section on this in OHJ, with abundant evidence and citations. Why does Litwa not know this? There is only one possible explanation: he wasn’t being truthful when implying he read my book.
“Likewise,” Litwa says, “crosses do not hover in the heavens,” evidently unaware of all the ancient reports of entire armies and thrones and gardens ‘hovering in the heavens’, “they are sunk in the soil,” evidently unaware of all the soil ancient Jews believed could be found in many levels of the heavens, particularly in the firmament, the zone of all corruption. “Men of flesh dwell on earth,” Litwa insists. Except when they don’t: many a human sorcerer and sage could fly (or even, like Isaiah or Elijah, be carried by angels or other creatures), and Philo reports the firmament was full of beings of mortal flesh residing at all levels.
Anyone who actually read OHJ, rather than lied about doing so, would know that the evidence establishes that even if Jesus died cosmically, he did so wearing a mortal body of flesh (Philippians 2). Not “a spiritual” body. That he had only before and after his incarnation. Not during. That’s the whole point: he had to wear one, so that he could be sacrificed, so he could atone eternally for all sins (Hebrews 9). Which means he was also killed physically, not “spiritually.” He was killed upon a stake, one of the copies of things in the heavens and the firmament that are found on the earth—as Hebrews explains, as the Ascension of Isaiah explains, and as abundant Jewish literature attests was widely believed. All as extensively explained, with cited and quoted evidence, in OHJ (Chapter 5, Element 38; especially in the context of Elements 34-37). Why does Litwa not know any of this?
Irresponsibly not reading the book he is critiquing leads Litwa to make statements that almost look like outright lies, such as when he says “Carrier at one point speculates that an earlier version of the text” of the Ascension of Isaiah “was available to Paul,” and then claims my “speculation is baseless—an attempt to down-date a text to serve an argument.” At no point do I use this speculation as a premise in any argument. To the contrary, I explicitly reject doing so, declaring unequivocally that “the earliest version in fact was probably composed around the very same time as the earliest canonical Gospels were being written,” and thus not ‘before Paul’ (pp. 36-37). There is no way Litwa can know what I said about this, and not know what I said about this—unless he only skimmed, and did not read, any argument I made about this. It also looks a lot like lying to claim my speculation “is baseless.” I give several arguments for it; that’s called a basis (pp. 47-48). Litwa offers no rebuttal, nor even mentions there is an argument to rebut. Yet I still point out, in the footnote there, that Paul and the Ascension might instead each be quoting a lost Apocalypse and not each other. Hence I acknowledge that the mere possibility Paul knew a version of the Ascension is too speculative to use as evidence. And so I don’t. Litwa falsely (whether dishonestly or incompetently) claims the opposite.
Similarly, Litwa claims that I “did not address any of Norelli’s arguments” for the “pocket gospel” depicting the Jews killing Jesus being an interpolation in the Ascension of Isaiah. That’s not actually true (see M. David Litwa, the Ascension of Isaiah, and the Problem of Incompetent Scholarship). As far as I can tell, the case I do make for it does counter Norelli’s. But since Litwa won’t tell us what my case was, or what Norelli’s was, or what in Norelli’s case my case doesn’t already answer, what use is there in Litwa even mentioning any of this? This is again irresponsible, lazy, and completely useless to everyone. Indeed Litwa is so inexplicably careless here that he claims “on earth…the angels crucify Christ” in this “pocket gospel,” when no such thing happens—which is precisely what contradicts the earlier text. Unlike what the angel tells Isaiah earlier on, the interpolated text unequivocally says “the children of Israel” were roused “against” Jesus, “not knowing who He was, and they delivered Him to the king and crucified Him.” How does Litwa not know what the very text he is talking about says? Or why it’s peculiar—after supposedly having read my list of all the things that are, in fact, peculiar about it?
It’s just all the more galling that Litwa doesn’t even notice (or admit?) that the impact I allow the Ascension of Isaiah to have on the probability of the historicity of Jesus is so minuscule as to essentially assign it no effect upon it (as I explain in my critique of Kamil Gregor’s similarly missing this obvious point; I have since explained it again, in response to Litwa subsequently saying many other completely false things about the Ascension of Isaiah). This is another strange but common thing historicists do: they ignore all the data I assign significant weight to (and thus actually derive my conclusion from), and instead obsessively focus on minor trivia (like what I say about the Ascension of Isaiah) that I allow to have almost no effect at all upon my actual conclusion. Why?
Confusion Reigns
Litwa then inexplicably says “Carrier repeatedly makes an appeal to James George Frazer’s category of ‘dying and rising gods’.” I never once mention Frazer, and never use his list of such gods or his criteria for them. Litwa also inexplicably says “Carrier leaves unexplained” how the Inanna myth could influence Christianity thousands of years later; in fact in OHJ I discuss that very issue several times, including its evident influence on second-temple Judaism, the continuance of the cult in Tyre right into the Roman era, Roman-era evidence of its associated resurrection myth of Tammuz, the evident influence of the Inanna myth on other resurrection cults demonstrably thriving in the Roman period, and much else besides (index, “Inanna” and “dying-and-rising gods (concept of)”).
Litwa then even more confusingly claims “the category” of dying and rising gods “is now defunct insofar as it designates a god strictly identified with the seasonal growth cycle,” evidently unaware of the extensive discussion in OHJ, with cited texts and scholarship, showing that those agricultural myths had by then been converted into personal salvation myths, in the form of the mystery religions that Christianity emulated in too many ways to be coincidental. How did Litwa miss literally my entire discussion of dying and rising gods, yet somehow know I discussed dying and rising gods?
It’s all the weirder when Litwa admits:
The chief point of similarity between Christ and these deities is not that they rise again but that they suffer. Their suffering is not just any suffering but the calamitous, shameful, even grotesque suffering that excites both wonder and pity.
This is literally identical to a point I make repeatedly in OHJ (pp. 115, 168, 186, 212). Why does Litwa not know that? Litwa also does not seem to have any coherent idea of how I even made use of the fact that a dying-and-rising personal-savior mytheme was all the rage precisely in the era and empire in which Christianity began. Where in any of my calculations does it even affect my assessed probability of the historicity of Jesus? What objection does Litwa actually have to my actual use of this data?
Even more confusingly, Litwa even agrees with me, quoting Jaime Alvar (whom I literally cite in OHJ, though his name came to be misspelled at some point in the editing process), declaring that:
Triumph over human destiny is made possible through divine suffering. Alvar observes, “That is why the [Greek] mysteries [rites performed in secret] needed divinities who had had some experience of something like the human condition, had themselves lived historically, so that they could function as models.”
As Alvar could explain to Litwa, not a single one of those suffering saviors actually existed historically. Alvar is literally giving Liwa the reason why they came to be historicized—and it’s the very same reason Jesus would be. And Litwa quotes this approvingly—evidently clueless to the fact that he’s making my case here, not rebutting it. Litwa weirdly does this again when he says “Carrier fails to note that ancient Romans never seemed to have questioned the existence of Romulus” and “Jews in antiquity apparently never denied that Daniel lived.” Yet Litwa admits Romulus and Daniel likely didn’t live. Somehow he doesn’t realize this actually verifies my point.
Litwa similarly inexplicably claims “few Mediterranean gods actually die; even fewer die and rise,” as if I did not in fact only list those gods for whom I could cite actual direct evidence of their deaths and resurrections in extant myths. I’ve since organized that evidence into a blog. And I do not include Attis among them in OHJ, despite Litwa implying I did; and contrary to Litwa accusing me of falsely claiming it, I cited evidence that Osiris did ascend to and rule from heaven (not the underworld) in elite mythology. Similarly, Litwa straw man’s my case by contrasting Jesus with Homer—completely ignoring the more apt parallels in John Frum, Ned Ludd, and Roswell that I actually used. No, Jesus is not that much like Homer. That’s an irrelevant observation. Do you know what is a relevant observation? How similar Jesus is to Ludd and Frum. So why does Litwa never address this, nor even mention it?
Likewise, Litwa tries to make much of the name of Jesus as evidence for historicity—yet never mentions or addresses what I said about that very same point (such as in Chapter 6 of OHJ); like, for example, that it is, in fact, suspicious to have God’s savior named “God’s savior.” In just the same fashion, Litwa argues “Paul…considered Jesus to be a real human being” because he said “Jesus was ‘born of woman’ and was ‘of the seed of David'” and so “He had a real human mother with a real human ancestor,” as if Litwa didn’t know I actually address these passages, extensively! He attempts no rebuttal to anything whatever I said about them. He simply pretends I never mentioned them. (Litwa also confuses here “real human” with “human on earth,” as if I didn’t extensively explain in OHJ why those are not synonymous.)
Litwa is supposed to be a competent and responsible scholar. He’s supposed to actually look at my evidence and sources, and address what I actually said, to know what I actually said, and the evidence I presented for it. He’s also supposed to acknowledge how many instantiations of a trope we need to indicate its popularity, and whether I met that standard—and indeed whether he ever has. So why didn’t he? Why did he make several completely ignorant, easily disprovable assertions? Why didn’t he, instead, check first?
It’s as if historians completely abandon all responsibility, all competence, everything their studies and degrees are supposed to have taught them to do, as soon as they have to defend the historicity of Jesus. Why?
Conclusion
Litwa wants Jesus to be special, because “His death” was uniquely “a conscious sacrifice, an act of substitution,” which has no relevance to what the dying-and-rising trope tells us or what use I make of it—every instantiation of which varies in details from every other; tropes exist in shared commonalities, not in the distinctions that make each instantiation of a trope unique. Christianity is a syncretism of pagan and Jewish salvation ideology; what does not come from one, comes from the other. And indeed this detail isn’t at all novel: Litwa is somehow completely ignorant of the fact that I document in OHJ the Roman mythology of devotio and Jewish martyrdom legends that already perfectly captured what the Jesus myth replicates in the idea of self-sacrifice (pp. 76, 209-14, 430-31).
There is nothing new in Christianity, a point Litwa in the end even concedes. And yet his desperate need to make Jesus special still cripples his abilities as a scholar. And I do not merely assert this; you have just seen a whole battery of evidence demonstrating it.
Litwa did not read my book and never responds to any of its actual arguments, even my arguments for the trivia he obsesses over—far less still my arguments for determining the actual probability of historicity, not a single one of which Litwa shows any knowledge of, or makes any response to. He just strings together an incoherent list of bizarre, confused ad hominems, genetic and possibiliter fallacies, littered with countless false statements about what is and is not in On the Historicity of Jesus. He never checks evidence, or even knows that it exists, even though I carefully document and cite it abundantly. And not even once does he present any evidence whatsoever that Jesus existed.
This is what passes for a defense of historicity.
Should anyone wonder why the more honest among us are starting to doubt it?
This is a lovely long article that I will read and enjoy over a few sessions, but having got as far as the possibiliter fallacy I HAVE to tell you which senior Roman Catholic has recently discovered the value of critiquing its use in an argument…yes indeed it’s Cardinal George Pell. In this interview with Andrew Bolt from ABC Australia, he talks about the danger of concluding that just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s probable.
He’s not talking about anything claimed by the Bible, though…
https://youtu.be/3OX2aUvG51I
Thank you once again, Richard! You make so many great points! Now I have to wonder whether “Martin” in “My Favorite Martian” was a human on earth or a real human!
Wasn’t he neither? I mean, he wasn’t any kind of human. He was an extraterrestrial.
Maybe I don’t know the backstory or lore to that show though. If they proposed that he had his mind “installed” in a human body (human DNA, organs, etc.), then it would be analogous to Jesus. And then he would be both a human on earth and a real human (within a certain meaning). This would describe earliest Christianity if Jesus really existed (as they still indeed believed he was a space alien merely wearing a human body manufactured for him, per Philippians 2). If Jesus didn’t exist, then that would mean one of those two descriptors likely must be dropped: he was a real human (same alien-wearing-manufactured-body) but never a human on earth (he never descended that far from the heavens, but only near to—unless you count earth orbit as “on earth”).
Thanks for this detail. I’m curious about one thing, if it’s not too personal to answer. Did Litwa entirely invent your hallucination being about ‘Yahweh’ or did he cherry-pick that from something I haven’t seen or read (or perhaps forgot) about the content of your sleep-deprived hallucination in the Coast Guard? I haven’t read his book, but that seems to cross a line from ordinary intellectual dishonesty if he just made the whole thing up.
He made the whole thing up. And yes, this is outrageously dishonest.
My Coast Guard experience (related elsewhere) was explicitly described as of the Tao, not Yahweh, and as a good experience (no demons involved, nor anything to do with Christianity or the Bible). Litwa correctly describes this, so he clearly wasn’t confused about it. My demon experience (related in The Empty Tomb, as Litwa quotes sentences from verbatim and cites even to page number, so he clearly actually read it) never mentions any of this Yahweh stuff Litwa says it did.
So, liar.
Hence the question we have to ask is:
Why are historicists so desperately prone to lying when this subject comes up?
Your book is so packed with unfamiliar information they must experience a number of memory dumps when they read it.
It does not matter, quote the parts of his scholarship that are valid (the Jesus myth got historicised in the Gospels) and ignore the rest.
The notion that doctrines alleged to have come from real people with real lives are not affected by whether or not they were real people strikes me as conventional wisdom that is false. If there was no real Jesus who was really executed by the Roman prefect, then all doctrines that hold “Christianity” rejects worldly power is affected. The historicity of Jesus is a valid ad hominem argument.
I’m not sure what you mean. Can you explain further?
The people who like to pretend Christianity doesn’t make supernatural claims have to explain not just where the alleged ethical doctrines come from but why they should be labeled Christian. A historical Jesus is an origin.
I used the example of Jesus being executed by Roman oppressors as justification for claims that Christianity was against oppression. But if there was a physical person named Jesus who had something to do with religion, it isn’t even certain he was executed by Romans. And you can pick any supposedly favorable trait you wish, such as a claim that Jesus was antinomian and cite him as authority. (Or you can make up a saying that saying the Law will be completely fulfilled.) A physical person is a more convincing justification for being a Christian than appealing to moral philosophy. It seems to be especially useful in ignoring other traditions’ moral teachings.
I think it’s badly overestimated how important supernatural claims are to actual popular Christianity, as opposed to academic representations. But even the majority of refined theologies I think need to imagine a real Jesus to stay specifically Christian. Thus, mythicism can play a role in refuting Jesus as a genuine authority. That is, as a valid ad hominem argument. Or, if you prefer, a demonstration of a fallacious appeal to authority.
It occurs to me that my belief that pretty much any fallacy can sometimes constitute a valid argument may be the source of confusion.
Okay. I see what you mean now. Yes, that is a factor: people need a historical Jesus to ground their moral beliefs they believe come from him, because of the fallacious assumption that if they didn’t come from him, they can’t be correct or special somehow. Even Dennis MacDonald does this, and more illogically, and he’s essentially a Christian atheist.
It’s all the worse that not only do we know most of what’s attributed to Jesus (like the Sermon on the Mount) didn’t come from him nor was unique to him (its teachings have parallels in Jewish thought centuries back and since), even if he existed, but many historicists posit the real Jesus was quite the contrary of what his believers would want, e.g. the zealot hypothesis (championed now by Bermejo-Rubio, and popularized by Reza Aslan, though it had been accepted as at least a plausible theory for decades before either came to it) holds that Jesus was in fact a violent revolutionary, justly execution for sedition, and his followers only subsequently whitewashed him as an unjustly executed pacifist.
But note here, these historicists are not sticking to a historical Jesus because they “need” his teachings to be anchored in his person. So other motives must be sought. James Crossley’s book Jesus in an Age of Terror might shed some light though it doesn’t address the zealot hypothesis specifically.
Your blog says, “Because in any valid argument, all probabilities in the premises commute to the conclusion.” I know that in an inductive argument, one works that out using Bayes’s theorem. If one has a deductive argument with a different probability in each of multiple premises, how do the probabilities commute to the conclusion? Could you give an example? (I tried asking this question a few weeks ago, but I bungled formulating the question.)
Section Not Reading Is Irresponsible, paragraph 2, lines 2-3: “the entire Garden of Eden was located in the Third Heaven, according to the very scheme endorsed by Paul in his report of a visit there in 2 Corinthians 12.” NRSV 2 Cor. 12:4 renders the word as “Paradise.” Is NRSV translation of the word incorrect? If not incorrect, what evidence shows that Paul equates Paradise with the Garden of Eden?
Maybe Dr. Carrier can correct me on this, but I think the answer is that Bayesian reasoning is the deductive underpinning to inductive reasoning. It is deductive, since it is mathematical. If the probabilities in the premises are correctly computed, then the conclusion (i.e. posterior probability) is valid. If the probabilities in the premises are also strongly warranted on background knowledge, then the concluded posterior probability is sound.
Thank you.
As Will noted already, the only deductive formula that validly works with probabilities is Bayes’ Theorem (or some other formula that reduces to Bayes’ Theorem in one language or another).
But to answer your question, the reason all probabilities in a deductive syllogism must commute to the conclusion is that this is how all logic works: everything in all the premises must always commute to the conclusion. Anything else is literally invalid.
For example, if you say:
Socrates is a man. (Minor premise)
All men are mortal. (Major premise)
Therefore Socrates is mortal. (Conclusion)
You can’t “choose” to “not” commute the word “all” in the major premise to the conclusion. Doing so would invalidate the entire syllogism. For instance, you can’t just “decide” that instead of “all” you will assume it’s “two thirds.” Because then the conclusion, “Socrates is mortal,” would be unfounded; because you have no premise saying which third Socrates is in (the two thirds who are mortal or the one third who aren’t). So the conclusion then becomes fallacious: it does not follow from the premises.
Now, really, “all” is a probability (it’s just a colloquial word for “100%”). And “Socrates is a man” also entails a probability (the sentence can only literally mean “There is a 100% chance Socrates is a man,” otherwise we again have an invalid syllogism: the conclusion does not follow, because you have no premise establishing which category Socrates is in: the “is a man” or “is not a man” category—for instance, if it’s “2 in 3 chance Socrates is a man” then the conclusion “Socrates is mortal” no longer follows because you haven’t said which set Socrates is in, the first two thirds, or the last one third).
So what is actually going on in all standard syllogisms is that we are assuming every premise has a probability of 100% (using words that hide this, like “all” in the major premise, or the comprehensive “is” in the minor premise), so that when we obey logic, and commute everything in the premises to the conclusion as all logic requires, we get the same probability there (“There is a 100% chance Socrates is mortal”).
That this is so unrealistic and artificial is why standard deductive logic actually doesn’t apply to real world empirical questions; we use it as a shorthand to reason through “if, then” statements (“if Socrates is a man, and if all men are mortal, then…”), but we make all kinds of mistakes when we forget we actually have no such premise as “There is a 100% chance Socrates is a man” and so on, and thus forget this is really just an “if, then” decision tree and not an actual epistemology.
Strictly speaking, if we started assigning non-total probabilities to premises, as in fact we must in real life (no one knows either this major or minor premise with exactly “100%” certainty; it’s just convenient to act like we do, because the converse probability is small enough to ignore), we get unusable results. For instance:
There is an 80% chance Socrates is a man.
80% of all men are mortal.
Therefore there is a 64% chance Socrates is mortal.
This is logically valid (the conclusion, including the 64%, necessarily follows from the premises; because all probabilities in the premises must always commute to the conclusion, as is mathematically obvious here: if two conditions each have an 80% chance, their conjunction has a 64% chance), but it succumbs to the fallacy of diminishing probabilities, because it fails to take into account the totality of evidence and its actual effect on the probability of the conclusion. Instead, using this formula, as you add premises, and thus as you add evidence for the conclusion, the probability of the conclusion actually goes down, the opposite of what is supposed to happen from adding evidence.
The error is that simply assigning premises, and only premises you arbitrarily decide to include, a probability, does not correctly represent a premise’s effect on the probability of a conclusion (in effect, you have to add a third, hidden premise to maintain validity: “And no other premises exist that affect the probability of the conclusion being true,” which premise is almost always false). Straight deductive syllogisms thus simply have no means of representing probabilistic empirical reasoning; except in a convoluted way that simply reduces to Bayes’ Theorem (which is actually the very thing Thomas Bayes discovered and hence why the theorem is still to this day named after him).
In the end, you can write a strict deductive syllogism that gets a sound result for the probability of a conclusion. But what you will find is that that convoluted structure simply is Bayes’ Theorem. In other words, there is no way to get a valid and sound conclusion about the probability of a proposition when those probabilities are anything other than 0 or 1, except in ways that always reduce again to Bayes’ Theorem.
And it was trying to come up with whatever convoluted way is needed to correctly calculate the probabilities of conclusions from evidence that led to the discovery of this very fact.
Having studied many logic books over the past 52 years and having never encountered the information in your reply in any of those books, I am extremely grateful for your patient, through reply to the question in the first paragraph of my comment! I’ll re-read it several times and save it. Awesome answer to my question!
Please reply to the questions in paragraph two of my comment.
One typo in line three of my 4/30/20, 6:07 PM comment: “through” should be “thorough.”
In my email, I received Dr. Carrier’s reply to the second paragraph of my 4/30/20, 12:07 PM comment. I don’t know why his reply is not on this page, but that reply is illuminating and thorough. I appreciate it.
A question for Dr. Carrier: when I followed the link (from your reply re Paradise) to Perseus, I clicked on Go but nothing happened. How can I use Perseus to access further information about Greek words? Admittedly, I am laughably computer challenged.
“.. this is really just an “if, then” decision tree and not an actual epistemology.”
Thanks for that explanation. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but that is a very illuminating distinction.
To further elucidate the relationship of Bayesian reasoning to standard deductive logic, I had a question. Is it fair to say that the rules of inference in propositional logic are basically analogous to the rules of mathematics in Bayesian reasoning? The rules of mathematics are essentially just quantitative rules on inference?
Indeed. Famously so.
As to the second question, “Paradise” means “Garden.” It’s just the Greek word for garden (derived from Farsi centuries before).
This is a common problem with the way translators forget words have different valences now. Just translitterating Paradeison into Paradise is a bad translation, because it misleads the reader into thinking the original word had the same valence as “Paradise” does today. But the modern word Paradise has lost all connection to “Garden” as its meaning, and has instead been entirely taken up with existing in an alternative dimension in a happy state.
Which is another example of bad translation: “Heaven” today means another dimension for souls to reside, not a physical location in outer space, whereas that was never the case in antiquity. When they said Ouranos, they meant outer space: a physical location a measurable number of miles up from the surface of the earth. Thus when Paul says he (or whoever he is speaking of) was taken “up” to the “Garden” in the “Third Heaven” (a reference to the Life of Adam and Eve which explains that that is precisely where the Garden of Eden was that Adam and Eve literally fell from), he is talking literally: it’s a literal actual physical spot a certain number of miles up from the earth, that you could visit by flying or being carried or in a space ship if such you had (Lucian of Samosata imagined such ships, albeit as a joke). So using the English word “Heaven” all over the place in the Bible is deeply misleading to modern readers, for the same reason “Paradise” is.
‘ “In fact, he concedes that there is a one in three ‘prior probability’ that Jesus existed.” Um. No. It’s a one in three posterior probability. ‘
To be fair, you do adopt one in three as your a fortiori prior probability, don’t you?
Yes, but that isn’t the probability “that Jesus existed.” Which is my point.
Of course – but it’s not as simple as “um, no”, because his statement, in isolation, is correct.
But of course I’m nitpicking. As you show, the guy clearly hasn’t read the thing.
It must be rather dispiriting for you to see the number of reviewers who approach your work in such bad faith.
Still, just to make clear what I mean, the first two sentences of Chapter 6.8, the conclusion of the very chapter on prior probability, read literally as follows (removing the mathematical notations in brackets, which just restate the English; here, the bold text is in italics in the book itself):
I go on with a whole paragraph explaining that we still have to look at the evidence, and give an example of how evidence can easily overcome that prior, and ask whether that still yet happens for Jesus, and note that that is what the subsequent chapters will now examine. Chapter 12 (the conclusion of the whole book) then repeats all these same points in one place, and carefully distinguishes prior from posterior.
So literally the very sentence after I said “the prior probability” is “1 in 3” I said that is not the probability he existed. And then immediately explained why.
There is no other honest conclusion but that Litwa lied when he claimed he read my book.
“Litwa resorts to the standard fallacy that ‘differences refute all similarities’… Differences always exist among instantiations of tropes and mythotypes, and anyone who doesn’t know that is simply not competent to be discussing this.”
Didn’t Litwa make exactly this same point in his book ‘Iesus Deus,’ critiquing Raymond Brown’s discussion of the virgin birth motif in the ancient Mediterranean? So why does he now think you can’t apply the same logic to the hero-types?
Indeed I thought that too. I considered even making a point of that myself but as I’m in the middle of moving across country all my books are in storage so I couldn’t verify it.
I also suspect he reverses position elsewhere even in the book I’m responding to, but I haven’t had time to read the rest of it through (I have it in eform). But if I find he does indeed do this there, I’ll add the point here.
Thank you, Richard. Some good points here. I wonder if you might work them up and submit them as a review of the entire book to an academic journal?
I haven’t read the rest of the book yet, so it would take some time before I could submit a proper review of it. I’m here only addressing the one chapter, which isn’t really about your book’s thesis, which I probably agree with.
But I do intend later this year to write up an article for the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus that summarizes several published academic responses to On the Historicity of Jesus illustrating the oddity that they never seem to address what is actually in it. Your example of that will be included as a section.
OP per the authors of the Gospels: “they made their myths look like histories, because that’s what the pagans around them were doing.”
Per Litwa, “Just because Jesus once lived does not mean that the Christian representations of his life describe what happened.” —(p. 215).
I hope Dr. Litwa will follow up by reading Lataster’s Questioning the Historicity of Jesus ISBN 978-9004397934.
This 2010 article is the best argument I have read on why the focus on Jesus historicity (and the need that there be distinct sources) blinds scholars from proper analysis. A Marcan saying that confounded scholars is best explained as a reworking of Paul.
https://www.academia.edu/40714356/_New_Unfounded_Unworkable_and_Unnecessary_Thomas_Brodies_Critique_of_Oral_Tradition?swp=rr-rw-wc-38373354
But it will take a changing of the guard, the replacement of the old guard involved in the quest for a historical Jesus by a new guard avoiding that deadend like the plague.
The author of the article also point the need to attack unwarranted paradigms (such as Q) with siege machines (multi-volume thesis) rather than in 12-page paragraphs.
I’m only halfway through this post… eyebrows scrunching bigly. Where do such critics come from and can’t they do better than this?
Any plans to publish (here or anywhere) an examination of Norelli’s work? I’d like to hear your thoughts, in particular because his commentary (and translation) seems to be unavailable to English-only audiences.
I haven’t been able to acquire a copy to do that properly. There are also several books in which he alludes to or summarizes his thesis on this one point, and systematically assessing how his ideas evolved over time is a chore (see bibliography here).
I’ve looked one of his treatments over at a library but didn’t have time to systematically examine it. And that was years ago. I don’t recall which one it was I was examining. At most I could discern his argument depends on assumptions I already argue against in my analysis, so I never saw the need to address it directly. However, if you can get a copy of any one of the pertinent volumes to me somehow, I would take that as sufficient payment for blogging a proper analysis of his case in that volume against the pocket gospel being an interpolation (note his books don’t actually deal with that particular issue as but a subsection; so if you can maybe even get me just a scan of the relevant sections of any one or several of those works, that would do even better, just be sure what you send is the section containing his actual arguments, and not just a summary of his conclusions, which is of no use).
It’s a deal, I’ll see what I can do.
Awesome. Note that my business mailing address is soon to change. My currently listed PO box is not ideal. So to get any physical media to me, please email me to discuss the best route. Otherwise, all electronic media can be emailed thereto or transmitted by DropBox or GoogleDocs link etc.
Dr. Carriers example of a where a deductive syllogism commutes to the conclusion:
Socrates is a man. (Minor premise)
All men are mortal. (Major premise)
Therefore Socrates is mortal. (Conclusion)
Okay I think I get it. Let me give it a shot:
Jesus is God. (Minor premise)
God created all creatures. (Major premise)
Therefore Jesus created murder hornets. (Conclusion)
How did I do?
That’s a valid syllogism.
Although technically an enthymeme, given the implied premise “The phrase ‘all creatures’ includes murder hornets,” it’s not fallacious to allow this implied premise to be presumed.
The only noteworthy point that Litwa made is that Richard believes he experienced a demonic attack (something which is quite evident lol). But what’s funny is that Richard actually responded by saying that he doesn’t believe that LOL
On a more serious note, the fact that many historicists keep using the “differences refute the similarities” argument is indicative that they’re aren’t listening to what mythicists are saying; they’ve responded to this SO many times. Personally, I find it very uninspiring discussing with people who aren’t genuinely interested in learning what is true.
But the “possibility vs probability” fallacy is even worse; it’s a desperate attempt to defend one’s point of view.
Moreover, I wanted to ask a question about Romulus. Wasn’t he a real, historical figure who was also mythologized? Aren’t there stories about him being raised from the dead?
Romulus is a dying-and-rising God, yes. But no, he never existed. The story was invented hundreds of years after the fact and based on a Greek myth cycle involving a different pair of brothers. Romulus is essentially the Roman’s analog to Moses with respect to the foundation of Israel (complete with both being murderers; and in intertestamental legend, Moses also ascended to heaven alive and was regarded as semi-divine, a point discussed in Ehrman’s book about how Jesus became God).
I genuinely thought that Romulus was considered a historical figure. But now that you mention Bart Ehrman, I recall him suggesting in a video that Romulus was a historical figure. Don’t take my word for it though, I need to find the video to make sure I’m not misremembering.
Something that I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long time… How do historians determine whether ancient texts are depend on each other? If The gospels are independent of each other, then for me as a layperson that’s the most convincing argument for historicity, more convincing than Paul’s “brother of the Lord” reference.
Ehrman is not actually a historian, FYI. His degrees are in theology and New Testament textual criticism. So if he mistakenly said Romulus was a real person, but gave no evidence or citation for that claim, you should fact-check that claim with actual historians of ancient Rome, particularly who’ve published academic articles or monographs on archaic Roman history, or on Romulus specifically—such exactly as I cite on the point in On the Historicity of Jesus (pp. 225-26).
I re watched the video. He said “In Roman Legend Romulus was the founder of Rome”. So it’s my mistake.
I know about Ehrman’s credentials. I heard WLC criticize him for that too. Ironically, he’s not a historian either.
But I think if you have a degree in theology, you should at least know the basics of History. Theology I believe is a combination of history and philosophy.
Except theology does not really teach the skills of historical research. By your reasoning, every degree in every subject is “history” because every subject teaches you a history of the subject. But that’s not what doing history means. To be a historian means doing history, not merely knowing what some other historians have said about the subject you are expert in.
As such doing history is a set of particular skills of analysis and methodology and research, which you are trained and criticized in by an expert for many years at an advanced level. This kind of training is simply not a part of theology degrees. Moreover, to be an expert in a period requires years of focused and broad study on that period, including social history and literary history, spanning the culture and time. Theology focuses solely on Christian thoughts and writings in history, and does not teach a broad familiarity with any culture or period. It is thus not training people to be historians; much less, say, “historians of the Greco-Roman era.”
Which is not to say someone who isn’t a historian can’t sometimes do okay history. A biologist can, with effort, write some history of biology; but they might get things wrong, due to never actually being trained as a historian. One should therefore be cautious and fact-check any such history and not simply trust they know what they are doing. Likewise, Bart Ehrman sometimes does some good history (e.g. his work on ancient forgery), but I only know that because I’m a historian and I know he has the facts right in that study; I’m able to fact-check his claims, being an actual expert in doing history. But Ehrman also screws up a lot when discussing history or even historical methodology (I give examples here).
No, no you misunderstood. The reason why I said that theologians are versed in the fundamentals of historical research is not because they do some history, it’s because I thought they acquire the set of historical research skills you mentioned. Of course, doing some history doesn’t make you a historian for the reasons you mentioned. It would render the discipline of history somewhat redundant.
I checked the theological syllabus of some renowned universities, like Oxford, and I understood that students of theology study the basics of historical research and (I believe) are also required to learn one ancient language. So that’s what convinced me for the most part. But obviously I would admit that I’m not a historian and was making an assumption.
Also, I heard a debate moderator saying that WLC has a PhD in theology and another moderator saying that he has a PhD in history, and WLC never denied it. And I know that he only has one PhD. His PhD was on the HISTORICITY of the crucifixion of Jesus and since PhD is the highest degree you can get, again I wrongfully made the assumption that I made.
But I wanted to ask a question – do you have to learn ancient Greek to study the history of early Christianity? I love ancient history and especially that period but I don’t like learning languages. Although I speak modern Greek and would probably learn ancient Greek pretty fast. I tried reading a bit of ancient Greek and probably sounded like I understood what I was reading but for the most part I didn’t. I understood about 5-10%, max!
Thank you for linking me to your written debate with Ehrman. I’ve heard you refer to it a few times and wanted to read it. That’s probably the debate that gave him the impression that you’re too “mean”. LMAO!
Can you please list all the courses you found in “the theological [doctorate] syllabus of…Oxford” that relate to training in history and developing historical knowledge of ancient culture, society, and literature?
(Not just courses in a language; remember, just reading historical Christian literature is not “doing history”)
As to the question, “Do you have to learn ancient Greek to study the history of early Christianity?” the answer is yes if you want to claim to be an actual expert and not just an informed amateur. So it depends on what your goal is. Amateurs who want to get more informed needn’t, but could. I have a recommended syllabus for either approach here. But that’s just to learn established history, not develop skills as a historian. I teach a course on the latter online every month, and it comes with a complete syllabus for further study.
Regarding the University programs I personally checked, I was only referring to undergraduate. The two courses I found now are “History of the Church” https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/about/theological-studies and “History of Religions” https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listing/philosophy-and-theology?wssl=1
But I guess this go back to what you were saying that these courses aren’t focused on developing historical research skills.
Your courses are very affordable and there are a few I intend to take both in history and philosophy. I just can’t at this very moment. When I take them eventually, I want to be able to focus on them 100%.
Undergraduate degrees don’t train people to be historians at all. They just teach them history. Qualification as a researcher and independent authority is only properly achieved by a graduate program. That is in fact what graduate school is for.
But yes, taking courses in history is useful, and necessary but not sufficient to developing qualifying expertise.
So Yahweh sent some demons to attack you, huh? Is that what curled your hair? Is he making shit up to poison your well?
I’d like to testify to the fact that crosses fo hover in the sky
I’ve seen a white cross in the sky over Crimea in 1991
And I was not alone
And it was not a cloud