The easiest thing in the world is self-deceit; for every man believes what he wishes, though the reality is often different.

—“Demosthenes”. Wikiquote.

I concur with all of that.

It’s a good point that ignorance is no longer a sufficient explanation these days.

There is also a resistance to finding or listening to information, even when it’s readily available. This most commonly comes from an assortment of what I call “trap beliefs,” whereby someone convinces themselves of some false belief (“nothing ever reported by a liberal newspaper is true”; “nothing coming from an atheist can be true”) that traps them in other false beliefs, by preventing them from even accessing or processing falsifying information in the first place.

This is a symptom of clinical delusion. And it is disturbing that it is very, very common in modern populations. It might always have been; we just can more starkly see it now, because with global access to the internet we have removed the “control” of poor access to information, allowing us to “see” that that wasn’t the causal factor all along. Beliefs are primarily desire-driven, not evidence-driven. And that’s the central problem.

I suppose as a writer I shouldn’t be surprised to consider that the answer could easily be “We’ve learned a ton of new ways to write coherently, including having better research tools, trying to avoid using prop characters, playing with genre, and not being taught only a few ways of creating”. Still, at the risk of continuing to anachronize by putting myself into the shoes of writers who didn’t have the tools I have and borrowing from what I know about the Buddhist literature, I wouldn’t be surprised if a constraint on their creative output was expectations that came about because of their goals. First of all, if you want to do Just So stories to establish facts about your cosmology or your cultic practices, that actually limits the range of your potential forms: third-person remains the easiest way of doing it. Second, as you’ve suggested, the Gospels were probably intended to be able to include ideas taught in such a way, like parables or individual speeches, that could be told as miniature stories by missionaries. (Christians themselves brag about how good of a teacher Jesus is in the Gospels, pointing out that Jesus often poses ideas in response to questions that aren’t closed answers but are more open-ended or are stories that let the audience arrive at the conclusion himself, etc., and they have a point… which could be because a tradition remembered a good teacher they had, or because good writers knew how to write a good teacher). Third, they probably also had to write within the genre range that could be possibly understood by a group of people with very mixed levels of literacy and power (since they were a counter-culture group), and that would be accepted as a story about a god. I bet if one looks at each structural limitation on their writing based on their goals, there’s probably a very solid reason why they wrote what they did… which of course is again an indication that the Gospels are totally useless to arrive at real history, because virtually every choice that’s made has at least one function that isn’t about honestly communicating history or remembering a tradition or a master.

CC in your debate pointed to Plato, and what I found hilarious about that is that Plato is an incredible example of someone who took his beloved master who probably (though not necessarily) actually existed and then filled that master’s mouth with all sorts of garbage. Ancient people were perfectly happy to use both real and mythical people as puppets for ideologies, once they found a literary form that worked for them. The Buddhists did the same: Koans, sutras, and stories would often invoke the Buddha even though there’s no way that the original Buddha told that particular story. It’s just that Buddhists cared more about trying to preserve some degree of history, and don’t have an a priori reason to necessarily treasure the original teacher over all others, so they would keep stories and traditions from people who weren’t Siddhartha (or whoever/whatever group founded the faith) and there was greater attention to trying to keep track of the actual traditions. (Of course, the fact that Buddhism split into sects indicates that this didn’t work either!)

But, yeah, obviously at this point it’s very difficult to figure out the creative process of people dead for more than a millennium.

Regarding Q: What always struck me about it wasn’t only that it was such a bad argument for it existing at all but also that the reasoning just explodes your number of possible causal entities. That’s why there’s also M and N and what not. If there’s one hidden source text, why not two, or three, or four? It’s actually much more reasonable to think, especially under historicity but even under mythicism, that all of these authors were drawing upon stories that had worked in their own missionary experience, their own reading of scripture and interpretations from rabbis, etc. Cults always do this: Scientology had to come from a more “secular” tradition of the auditing before they retooled it with mystic nonsense, and ideas like body thetans have now been absorbed into the New Age. They’re always seeking out new ideas and remixing them, and it’s not even a lie (usually) that they think the idea was authentically within their tradition, because cult members very often think they’re on the right track and so if they encounter an idea that sounds right to them they will just absorb it and assume that it must be another indication of the truth of their religion.

But one document puts out some hope that this was not just a tradition of some kind but a possibly well-policed, authentic tradition that has one document they could possibly ever find. It’s a hypothesis that’s almost hand-designed to find what the scholars want.

I have become skeptical of mere ignorance as being a substantial explanation for the adherence to dogmatic views. If it were true that the mere availability of information was a central factor rather than one of many, the Internet age would have been the era that its greatest proponents hoped it would be, one of breaking down of intellectual barriers and convergence toward truth.

At the minimum, the person in the pews who accepts what a preacher says isn’t motivated to check those facts in the Internet era. There’s credulity, often from having been in an environment from birth, and there’s also a sense that rocking the boat undermines the community, but there’s also people just holding onto beliefs they want to be true. Like you said, people will respond with special pleading (“That’s not Biblical”, as if they had some single unifying way of establishing what is rather than merely following some dogma) and out-group bias.

It’s true that if you do consciousness raising, you will start to peel off the actually ignorant, but it’s rare that a person holds a view simply because they’ve only heard one side of a story and will correct it once they see the facts and figures. Rather, we tend to hold onto beliefs within our worldview, and it takes us seeing enough of that worldview’s core assumptions being wrong (and being able to dispense with some tribalism and behave with integrity) to be able to change our minds on some things. And that’s even rational to some extent: If our worldview is that a certain group of people are more likely to be untrustworthy, we shouldn’t take their arguments as seriously, ad hominem fallacies aside.

Oh yes, Q is their woobie precisely because historians need it to anchor their claims of historicity; with often outlandish ancillary claims, such as that it was originally written in Aramaic and we therefore “have” that Aramaic original and it was therefore written by eyewitnesses in the 30s AD—something Bart Ehrman literally said. Q is always a historicity MacGuffin. If it stopped being that, advocates would quickly lose interest in defending it.

This is true even in reverse: many mythicists “craft” and then depend on Q for the opposite conclusion; e.g. Doherty unnecessarily rooted his entire thesis in an incredibly elaborate Q theory, which I completely stripped out in my defense of his model in OHJ because it was not historically defensible. And on the other end of the spectrum as well: Christian apologists need Q to be true because if it’s not, that entails Matthew and Luke are making a vast ton of shit up, which is a much worse thing for them to admit to than that they plagiarized two prior Gospels. So they defend the lesser evil. Their last castle.

If historians didn’t need their outlandishly contradictory and barely defensible theories of Q for anything they have staked their careers on, Q would have been abandoned as an interpretive framework decades ago. It’s like with transphobes: the real meat of the issue is always in the question, “Why do you even care?” Not in the nuts and bolts of whether their beliefs are true, but why they need them to be. Once you go there, all becomes revealed.

-:-

“Were they just so wedded to the literary form of Aesop/Odysseus/etc. that they couldn’t do something like forging an autobiography? Did they just need that “Jesus as third-person exemplar of missionaries” so badly?: This is a good question. True fake histories almost don’t exist in the ancient world, as in a fake history engineered to look in every particular like a real one. Indeed, the only example we have is late: the latter half of the Historia Augusta, composed during the decline of the Empire. In that, the first several chapters are authentic histories (not great ones—methodology is crap—but at least honest ones); then suddenly they are all fake, yet keep maintaining the same appearance of the earlier ones, complete with quoting documents (that now don’t even exist). This has perplexed historians for centuries (we have no idea what the author(s) of these books was on about; just about the only plausible theory is that they were commissioned to write this as an extension of Suetonius for a rich patron, got bored or ran out of time, and just spun out the last half of the book confident their patron would never actually check any of their work).

Ancient authors were better at forging epistles, although even there they kind of sucked at it. You can often tell a forgery from a lot of telltale “bad liar” features in them, e.g. the correspondence of Abgar and Jesus doesn’t look at all realistic, nor even does the correspondence of Seneca and Paul, and 3 Corinthians reeks of absurdity in every aspect of its construction and context next to 1 and 2 Corinthians.

Probably the best “fake history” we have in the Christian tradition (apart from, of course, the History of Eusebius, which mixes fake and real history to achieve its propagandistic purpose, but that is late in the production of Christian literature) is Luke-Acts. Yet notice that its author knew to include some trappings of real history (relative dating an event; a procedural preface; etc.), yet failed to make them believable (unlike Luke’s, real prefaces include actual details, e.g. the author identifies themself and why they are to be trusted, and if they mention their sources there, they’ll name and evaluate them for the reader; and real historians employed relative dating frequently, whereas Luke does it just a couple times at the start and then forgets to keep doing it, and the most notable time he does it, to date the ministry of John the Baptist, he uses a sneaky handwave to trick the reader into thinking he has dated the ministry of Jesus, when actually he hasn’t; etc.).

Luke will quote documents (probably fake) and date events by naming magistrates (he picks this back up in Acts at some points), definitely trying to make his book look and sound like a history, but with so many oddities deviating from expected authentic style as to give away that it’s fake. In the end he emulates more features of ancient novels than histories. He just couldn’t keep away from all the rhetoric and literary allegorism and structure his school taught him to employ in telling stories.

Was this deliberate? They wanted the savvy to be able to tell this, in agreement with what Origen describes as the method of double truth (one, the literal, for the ignorant masses; the other, the allegorical and actually correct, for the elite). Or was this because they just weren’t smart enough to actually realize what they needed to do to write an actually convincing fake history? Or perhaps, they were too smart for their own good; given magnificent tools in school for fabricating stories, they couldn’t “put them down” and just write an authentic-sounding history instead. Schools didn’t really teach anyone to do that; they taught storytelling and rhetoric, not the distinctions between authentic and well-researched history, and propaganda.

I don’t know. All I can observe is the effect: they didn’t do a very good job of fabricating histories (or even forging letters). They were too busy crafting ingenious literary structure and messaging. Whether intentionally or indicative of failure. This is evident even in the Testimonium Flavianum, whose author made little to no effort emulating Josephus’s actual discourse style, but composed an absurdly fawning and barely informative and uncontextualized encomium of Christian belief by riffing on the structure of the Emmaus Narrative in Luke. A competent forger would not have produced such a piece of crap. But there it is. Josephus was rolling in his grave not because they were doctoring his text, but doctoring it so amateurishly.

As to why Jesus is the only person actually given any personality in the Gospels, yes, that is a feature of mythography generally (e.g. compare the Lives of Aesop and of Moses, where every other character orbiting the hero is a cardboard cutout or central casting trope). But it was not too different even in real bios, which also focused heavily on the titular figure, and everyone they interact with is only described in reference to the antagonist’s thoughts and interests, as either assistants or foils to their story, in minimal detail.

“Has anyone done an Ehrman-type analysis of all of our extant literature from within a reasonable time period of the Gospels and did a list of character traits that come from each source?” : Not that I know of; as in, not all in one place. There are scattered studies or discussions of particular aspects (e.g. Ehrman has written some pages here and there on how scribes altered the Angry Jesus that appears in the early manuscripts of the canon into Nicer Jesus, sometimes by simply altering a single word in a verse, as attitudes about the ideal hero-god changed).

But if you are interested, a valuable analogous study is Valerie Tarico’s psycho-historical analysis of why many ANE gods (Yahweh included) are all the same in their personality and character—and, it happens (not by coincidence), to exactly resemble the actual behavior and propaganda of the most successful despots of the same period and region (“God’s Emotions,” in The End of Christianity).

The upshot is that the character of mythical heroes is always a portrait of the ideals of the communities worshiping them; and socio-politically, that was often the same (in who or what was revered and considered “perfect”), so mythical heroes often look alike in personality. To the extent, even, that you can sometimes date and provenance (geographically and socially) the origin of myths by the character ideals represented in them. And sometimes you even see explicit “corrections,” e.g. the Aeneid emulates Homer so as to “fix” the then-considered-backwards values Homeric heroes exhibit, “updating” the character portrait of the ideal hero to suit Roman sentiments (I cover some of this in OHJ, Ch. 10.2 and my study of cross-cultural heroism in Hitler Homer Bible Christ).

Thus, for example, that Jesus only ever displays anger, righteous arrogance, annoyance, and reluctant duty (and never actual compassion, much less humor; the only time he ever cries, is selfishly for himself) is because that was the actual ideal of the time, among the wing of Christianity that gained political power and generated all subsequent extant sects (all others were eclipsed out of the picture and driven extinct). All Jesus’s depicted talk of pacifism (e.g. the Sermon on the Mount) did not represent any character values of the authors, it was entirely an ascetic apocalyptic proceduralism (you are a wimp, unlike Jesus, therefore you should refrain from doing anything lest you fuck it up and get damned; just wait it out and you’ll get to trample the ashen skulls of your enemies in short enough time—with the actual objective of keeping the masses in line and thus “solving” social strife as a “problem”).

“do you think that things like the infancy Gospels actually lower his probability” : No. Because of my point about diminishing returns. He’s already so heavily mythologized even in Mark, that adding more ridiculous mythologization has no further effect on his probability of historicity.

This is just as true the other way around: the mythology built up around Alexander the Great reached eventually the absurdest of heights (eventually narrating him exploring the depths of the sea as a child in a glass diving bell where schools of fish paid homage to the future ruler of the world). But that was just more of what had already happened to his story. So it has no further effect on the probability (or improbability) of his historicity.

Once that mythologized, the prior probability of being mythical is just always the same. Alexander I’d assign a 1 in 3 prior (though not because he’s in the Rank-Raglan class, because he’s not, despite claims to the contrary; but the extent of his mythologization is comparably high). It’s just that we have vast evidence confirming his historicity, which reverses that 1 in 3 all the way to millions to 1, easily (despite scholars equating Alexander and Jesus, they are literal opposites in evidentiary status).

Yea it gets interesting trying to get into the psyche of Christian apologists and the basis of their beliefs and how they maintain those beliefs.

For the lay person it is often a matter of being intellectually isolated from facts about the Bible that they will never hear from their pastors (e.g. Gospels as being unreliable sources of historical events).

This was certainly well true before the Internet age.

And even today if they hear it from someone outside their group they simply don’t trust what they are saying because it is a view that is “not Biblical”.

They are trapped in that way.

Any then you have the intellectually dishonest. This can happen intentionally, or because their confirmation biases are so strong, or they are so attached to their beliefs that they NEED for them to be true. They can’t imagine (or accept) a world in which they are not true.

A non-religious example of the latter is a mother whose son has committed a horrible crime but she just can’t bring herself to believe (accept) the obvious truth that her son is guilty, because (in her mind) doing so would just destroy her world. So she just rejects it despite of all of the evidence.

Obviously also agreed on Reagan, I was just using him as an example of a person who was mythologized literally in his lifetime (though obviously nowhere near as substantially, though Trump actually gets close for the secular context if you look at the Q mythology and the people who depict him as literal Jesus and act like he’s a prophet). The problem is exactly that the biographies we have of Jesus are so obviously ahistorical that the best you can say (the point you belabored to CC which I do think he finally comprehended) is that any piece of information in it is has a 50-50 chance of being true.

(And I still think that’s being very charitable: when something is that propagandized, it’s actually reasonable to start assuming that anything that’s depicted is either outright fabrication or is true but has been reframed to the point that it’s effectively a different event. Which is why historians try using things like the criteria you point out they don’t have the evidence to deploy properly, like a criterion of embarrassment which hinges on you actually being able to prove that the detail was embarrassing to the person offering it which is exceedingly difficult to do with a countercultural cult. Lots of the criteria Jesus historians use are ones that, if they were applied logically validly, would raise the chance of something being true drastically).

And yes, I was excluding the documentary record for Reagan, imagining only that we had the most mythologized biographies available… but even that wouldn’t do it because anything besides outright lunatic fringe stuff wouldn’t do, so it would be like future historians had only Internet forum posts from far-right websites from 2066 (and even that still wouldn’t do it because far-right websites could be critical of Reagan, so it’d literally have to be only the Internet forum posts that fanatical Reagan fans curated).

And I do have to admit that the characterization of Jesus I was using comes from the canonical Gospels, which is very arguably a selection bias. So do you think that things like the infancy Gospels actually lower his probability somewhat in context of the other data, or again is that just an indication that he’s so heavily mythologized that you can write whatever you want about him?

That having been said, you do still see ideas that are being held constant. The Infancy Gospels read like Brightburn or some weird Superman fan fiction, but they still retain the idea of a precocious Jesus and a Jesus who can be kind of a dick to his enemies, they just turn that up to 11. Everything else you describe is still somewhat consistent with the Gospels. Has anyone done an Ehrman-type analysis of all of our extant literature from within a reasonable time period of the Gospels and did a list of character traits that come from each source?