Magnificent Obsession by David Robertson (a response, Part 1)

Dear D,

I've been reading your book "Magnificent Obsession" and I'd like to make a few comments on it. I'm writing this "review" (OK, so really its a response) in the form of a letter, mostly because your book chapters are written in letter format, but also because I think its quite likely that (unlike most of the book reviews I do on this blog) you might actually read this and will probably respond. (Yes, your reputation does precede you!) 

You might not remember me, but I've been in your church in Dundee on a few occasions (not for quite a few years now) as I'm friends with some of your congregation, both current and former members. 

As you'll see if you browse the previous posts on this blog, I've been a practicing and committed Christian since my teens in the 1980s, but over the past decade or so I've wrestled with a lot of issues to do with faith, belief, God, Jesus, the bible, and how all of them fit into reality. I started with the agenda of simply wanting to know the truth, in the hope that the truth would, indeed, set me free. Over the past decade, however, I (along with the readers of this blog) have witnessed a progressive and ongoing erosion of my faith. This wasn't intentional from the outset, but is rather the honest re-evaluation of my beliefs in the light of my study of the bible, and various books, writings and discussions on both sides of the 'God debate'. 

Anyway, all this by means of introduction. Lets get to thinking about your book. 

You seem, at the outset, to imagine yourself to have a different agenda to other apologists, and perhaps a different audience too, but I have to say that, much like almost all apologetics, this book is most likely to be read by those who are already (Evangelical) Christians and will serve to reinforce their already established beliefs. Of course, I expect a small number of non-Christians and atheist/agnostic types might read it too, but mostly for the challenge of 'debunking' it; I'm not sure they'll be swayed too much. The book is also being read by folk like me, somewhere in the middle ground, who've heard you on the Unbelievable show a few times... 

In Chapter 1, "Man", you aim to show that Jesus is (not was) a real person. As real to you as your own wife is. I once expressed similar sentiments myself, but came to realise that the comparison is not good. I can (literally) see my wife, I can (literally) hear her speaking to me, I can (literally) touch her. Occasionally I trust my feelings regarding her and she has to point out that I've completely misread what she says or what she wants. My feelings can be wrong, and frequently are. But with Jesus, all we have is an (unchanging) book, our feelings and our interpretative framework. If our feelings or interpretation are wrong, we have no way of knowing this. If our feelings come entirely from chemical impulses in our physiology, we have no way of distinguishing this from the 'promptings' of the Holy Spirit, if such exist. This is not analogous to a relationship with a person. A person can correct you even when your feelings are wrong.

But considering that this is apparently the stated intent of Chapter 1, you move rather rapidly from the subjective experience of Jesus now to the (slightly) more solid ground of the historical Jesus. Your evidence and reasoning here are not new, or particularly compelling, and you do quite a lot of appealing to authority, but anyway, on to the evidence. 

You present three pieces of non-biblical evidence for the historical Jesus. You mention Serapion, without presenting what he said. Probably just as well, as the evidence is very weak. He (writing at an unknown time between the destruction of Jerusalem and the 3rd century) mentions the execution of a Jewish "wise king" and nothing else. No name, no location, and the text suggests this occurred immediately before the destruction of Jerusalem. This might have nothing to do with Jesus, yet you suggest this is evidence. You also quote the rather late evidence of Tacitus. All this really tells us is that, by the beginning of the 2nd century, there were "Christians" who believed in a Christ who had been crucified by Pilate. These beliefs were attested some three or four generations after the alleged event. Nobody doubts that there was Christian belief in the 2nd century. This isn't evidence for any actual events occurring some 90 years earlier than the document was written. Even supposing that Serapion was referring to Jesus, all these two sources really give us is evidence for two things:

1. that there was a man, known as "Christ", who was executed, and
2. that there was a Christian religion in the early 2nd century.

I have to say that neither of these facts is particularly controversial. Almost everyone who knows anything about Christianity, but is not a Christian, will happily endorse both these statements.

You also quote the disputed passage from Josephus. Most 'critical' scholars appear to think that this is at least partially a Christian forgery. Origen certainly knew nothing about this passage, so some suggest it was added after his time. Josephus, whose job more or less required him to consider Vespasion as "lord", would never have said that Jesus was the Christ or Messiah, so that line -at least- is a Christian insertion. Given that, this passage only really shows that later believers in Christ were willing to change documents they copied to fit their own agendas. It gives us no information about a historical person. And that's really all there is outside of the Bible...

I've read thorough and compelling analysis of these passages in the 'new-atheist' literature, and your brief mention of them here does not provide enough reasoning to make me reconsider these passages as having anything useful to say about the historical person of Jesus. So to find him we have to trust the New Testament.

Of course, you do trust the NT accounts, without really giving your readers much justification for doing this. A serious historian can't take a book which claims a man walked on water or transmuted water into wine as being a reliable historical document. Our first approach must be one of scepticism, but you jump over this and assert that there is "no substantive reason to doubt" that these documents are eye-witness testimony. Well, to even the casual observer there are loads of reasons to doubt this, firstly the outrageous claims in the books, then the fact that they appear to have copied each other and changed bits of the things they copied to fit their own agendas, and also the fact that Jesus in the 4th gospel sounds almost nothing like the Jesus of the other three.

Now I'm not following the "nineteenth century paradigm of 'miracles don't happen'" here, I began all this firmly believing in the miracles and it was through a study of the unreliable reportage in the gospels that I ever came to doubt them.

Finally, in this first chapter, you (rather oddly) jump to the subject of the virgin birth. If this happened, as you say, it would define history. But two contradictory birth stories don't really make a very strong case. Yes, the authors of Matthew and Luke both appear to believe that Jesus was virgin born, but Mark, John, Paul and the other writers of the NT don't mention it, so it doesn't appear too foundational for them. You conclude with a couple of anecdotes of prodigals returning to faith. Yes, it happens. Hindus also become Muslims, Christians become Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. Anecdotes prove nothing.

So the odd thing in chapter 1 is that you don't support your main claim, that Jesus is real, with even a single anecdote from your own experience. We end this chapter having established that Jesus might have been a real person and that some people, some time after his lifetime believed outrageous things about him. What you haven't yet provided is any evidence that these outrageous claims are actually true.

In Chapter 2, you turn to the subject of "Miracles". You start off by poo-pooing the atheist caricature of blind faith. Fair enough. I know plenty of Christians who believe stuff because of the evidence of their experiences. You have a headache, somebody prays for you, the headache goes away, you have evidence that prayer for healing works. Of course the cause-effect chain might not be as clear cut as it appears to the believer, but to deny experience is pointless. But Christian faith is not, as you say, merely 'based on knowledge', it is based primarily on the bible and then, somewhat secondarily, on an interpretation of the evidence perceived through a biblical mindset. I've blogged before about the lack of a negative feedback loop in the Christian mindset. You pray, God answers, faith is boosted. You pray, no answer, faith is not diminished. Whichever way you slice it, if positive experiences boost faith and negative ones do nothing, then the net effect will always be to boost faith, even if the positives are only coincidence. Anyway, I seem to be straying away from what you said in your book.

The question at hand regards God. If there is a God (or there are gods) then miracles must be considered a possibility. Although, I must say even if there is a God, that doesn't necessarily imply that there must be miracles. So we can't simply assume that miracles can't or don't happen. Fine. I agree. Evidence for miracles amounts to evidence for God, not necessarily your God, but let's not go there just now.

Miracles might happen today. Miracles might have happened in the past. Either way, what constitutes evidence for a miracle? One thing that doesn't - in itself - provide any evidence for a miracle having occurred is somebody telling a story that a miracle occurred. By their very nature, miracles are rare events. Made up stories are rather common. So even if there are real miracles, the balance of probability is that any story claiming a miracle occurred is most likely fiction. The bible doesn't get special pleading here. The stories recorded here of miracles are probably fiction unless they can be verified somehow.

And there's the problem the apologist faces, we have no verification mechanism to prove miracles in the past. We could prove (some of) them if they occur now, but not the ones in the past. We have no evidence, only stories.

Did Jesus perform miracles? Well, the stories say so. His followers several generations later believed that he did. But that is no evidence. Throughout the 1980s and 90s there were hundreds if not thousands of people who believed that Elvis was still alive. Today there are thousands of folk who believe that the American government destroyed their own buildings on 9/11 2001. Widespread belief does not make a claim true. And holding a belief within a short period after the event does not make it any more likely to be true.

The historian only has probability to deal with. If something occurs today, there's a good chance it happened in the past. If miracles happen today, we can believe they happened in the past too. That is the 'principle of analogy'. We know that people are apparently healed by faith healers today, so we can assume that this happened in the past as well. We know there are exorcists who apparently cast out demons today, so we can assume this happened in the past as well. We know that people cannot walk on water, so we must assume that this cannot have been possible in the past. Jesus could well have been know as a healer and exorcist. He maybe even had a reputation as a miracle worker. But we have no access to what happened, so cannot conclude the truth of the stories.

I'm astonished that you take the words of Quadratus as true. He claims that there are 'some' (i.e. more than one) who had been raised from the dead by Jesus still alive some 90 years later. Unless they were infants at the time of their resurrections, it is almost inconceivable that this story is true, and even then it is highly doubtful. This first apologist is doing the same as many of his successors - exaggerating and embellishing his story to try and persuade his audience.

You do the same. You speak of 'hundreds' at the funeral of Lazarus. Where is that in the bible? In John 11v31 it implies that all those present for the resurrection of Lazarus had previously been in the house of Mary and Martha. They must have had a very big house!

Citing the 5000 who were fed or the hundreds who witnessed Lazarus being raised as evidence is just silly. We have no access to these people, we have no names, we have no independent testimony. They are just part of the story. As Robert M. Price frequently points out, using the characters in the story as supporting evidence is much like arguing for the existence of the Emerald City using the evidence of the Yellow Brick Road; of course there must be an Emerald City, where else would the Yellow Brick Road go? Even the first readers of the gospels had no way of finding any of the alleged witnesses, they were too late and probably too far away (some say Mark was most likely written in Rome, some claim Matthew was written in Antioch, almost everyone agrees that John was written late, and so on). If they couldn't confirm the miracle claims, what hope have we got?

The problem we face is that miracles don't happen today. Sure, healings happen, but not resurrections, walks on water, miraculous multiplications of food, etc. I've never seen good evidence for them. You don't claim they do. So we have a problem. We simply cannot verify unique events in history.

You build a theology of why Jesus might do miracles, but all this is built on the presupposition of the Christian God and Christian theology. Given that this is is the question we are actually trying to answer, your reasoning seems a bit circular, much like the accusation you point at some atheists out there.

Blimey, this response is getting quite long, and we're only 20% of the way through the book. Sorry about that, but you can't really respond to an entire book in just a few words.

Moving on we get to Chapter 3, "Messenger". Handily enough, after playing the nazi card, you begin this chapter with a summary of the book so far. You admit you're building a cumulative case, and assume the reader has accepted that Jesus was a real historical person, the bible accounts are accurate history and that miracles are possible. As you can tell from what I've said above, I don't accept these foundations of your cumulative case. 

You assert that the message of Jesus is the same as the message of the Old Testament, without discussing any specific passages, which is a bit sloppy. If you're making a case for something, you actually need to make the case. Then you cite Richard Bauckham as if that settles the 'eyewitnesses' argument. It really doesn't. I've read Bauckham and remain unconvinced. 

But the question remains, where did the teaching come from if not from Jesus? True, this is a problem for the skeptic. Maybe it originates from one man. Maybe Jesus, maybe someone else. Maybe it's a collection of sayings from multiple sources. There is no compelling reason to assume it all must have come from one man. And your argument that it couldn't have been the disciples as they were 'unlettered men' is fallacious - none of the gospels claim to be written by anyone in particular and only church tradition links the names to the gospels. It is clear that some of the gospels were written by very educated men, perhaps men who could have fabricated an inspiring central character for their writings.

You assume (rather than demonstrate) that the teaching attributed to Jesus originated from him. You briefly discuss the 'problematic' passages and talk about interpreting the bible with the bible. Basically this means you can explain away the bits of the bible that you don't like or are plainly nonsense, using the bits of the bible that you like, or which seem more reasonable. If the bible is an edited collection of various sayings by diverse people it would make perfect sense that there would be some disagreements in the text and some contradictions in there. It is only your presupposition that won't let you view it this way. 

There is an exceptionally clear command from Jesus in the gospel - give everything you have to the poor. It is clear and unambiguous, so why do I not know any Christians who have done this (yes, I know of one or two, but these are the exception rather than the rule)? It is because most Christians find ways to get around this by reading stuff into the context (so it doesn't apply to me!). All Christians 'pick and choose' the verses they like and 'interpret' the verses they don't like accordingly. If your starting point is the gospel of Matthew, you end up in a very different place than if your starting point is the letter to the Romans. This is why there are so many different denominations - they each hold a different set of passages as 'primary' and let those interpret the 'secondary' passages, but the choice of primary versus secondary is rather arbitrary.

But what is the message? Well, you side-step this and ask the reader to read the bible. Then you stop being an apologist for a bit and turn into a preacher - rather than defending the gospel message, you simply present it. So there's not much more to say about this chapter. I'll move on to the next chapter, which is pretty meaty, in the next post.

Cheers,

R.

The Historical Evidence for Jesus

I recently read G.A. Wells's book "The Historical Evidence for Jesus", which was written back in the early 80s. Considering some of the books I have read in the past few years, this was basically 'more of the same' with a few interesting nuances and insights along the way.

Wells believes that there was no historical person at the origin of the Jesus stories. Rather he, along with a number of other 'mythicists' hold that the gospel stories are myths made into history, rather than history wrapped in legends.

The book is exhaustive and goes into all the relevant 1st and 2nd century writings, as well as going completely off at a tangent and asking questions about the Turin Shroud. But when its on track, the book is interesting, even if much of this has been said in other ways many times since then (and a few before). 

Wells sets out a timeline of the early writings, beginning with the letters of Paul, then going through some of the later epistles, including some non-canonical ones, the gospels, the church fathers, and so on. 

The strongest part of his argument is in the parts he talks about Paul. It is quite clear from this analysis that Paul (or whoever wrote the 'authentic' Pauline epistles) says very little about any historical Jesus. The highlights of this are those passages where Paul is writing to whichever church and issuing advice for right living, etc. Sometimes, indeed most of the time, he does not claim these instructions come from Jesus, and there are several instances of things Paul is trying to convince his readers of where it would have been very useful if he could have quoted Jesus, but doesn't. But funnily enough, in the gospels, Jesus addresses those issues in clear and unambiguous ways. Wells's case is that if Paul knew of these sayings, he would have used them. He doesn't use them, so he didn't know them. Which suggests either that there was a lot about Jesus that Paul simply didn't know, or that those stories about Jesus were not in circulation at the time of Paul, perhaps because those stories about Jesus had not been devised yet.

In this I am convinced, it is clear that Paul had no knowledge of some of the gospel stories. Does that mean there was no historical Jesus? No it does not. It only means that Paul did not know the stories and, assuming he had interactions with Peter and James, as claimed in the epistles, it suggests that they did not know or did not pass on those stories.

So I am convinced that the gospel stories grew and developed after the time of Paul, and that Paul does not know or care much about a historical Jesus. I remain to be convinced that there was no Jesus.

The first quest of the Historical Jesus... and Christian models of Jesus

I've been slowly working my way through the audio version of Albert Schweitzer's "The Quest of the Historical Jesus" (1906), which you can get for free from Librivox.org. I'm nearly at the end of it. Its quite long winded, but comprehensive, thorough and fascinating. It is basically an exhaustive (but not exhausting) critical survey of pretty much everything published in the 19th century on the question of the Historical Jesus. In audio form it comes in at over 21 hours of listening, which is about three weeks' worth of commuting for me.

As I've said before (see this post and other posts tagged with 'Historical Jesus'), the quest for the Historical Jesus is an attempt to strip away the layers of faith from the gospel stories to uncover the real, historical character who was the basis of the Christian religion. The quest is based on the somewhat shaky assumption that some of the gospel material is truth and some of it is fiction.

As I've said before, ad nauseum, on this blog, there is no reliable method for testing any passage in the bible to determine whether or not it is true. If there was, this question (and many others) would have been solved long ago. 

What is clear from Schweitzer's survey is that the quest for the Historical Jesus is really all about starting with the assumption that the bits you can't believe in the bible are, necessarily, false, and the rest is probably true. From that, you whittle away at the passages until a figure emerges, who looks and sounds a bit like a possible historical figure, but actually generally represents the best aspirations of the quester himself. In other words, people go looking for Jesus and are surprised to find their own reflection there.

On the basis of this survey, 19th century Christianity was fixated on a few questions that don't seem to be debated in the church these days. These include: (i) Synoptic gospels vs. John - most of the questers seemed to believe that either John or the Synoptics was 'true', but not both equally, so they would pick the one they preferred and interpret the other through this. (ii) Miracles vs. Naturalism - many Christian questers in the 19th century appeared to have issues with the idea of miracles, OK, for some of them the resurrection was probably true, but the other stuff couldn't be. If anything, the 19th century church sounds a lot more 'rational' than the church is today. I can't help but think that 19th century Christianity in general, and the theologians in it in particular, were a much more mixed bag than current Christianity and current theologians. Christians today probably assume that the church in years gone by was either much as it is today (worship styles aside), or was more 'orthodox' in years gone by, whereas there is an assumed liberalisation of the church today. On the basis of this survey through the church a couple of hundred years ago, the opposite would seem to be the case. People seeking Jesus have always been finding a Jesus who mirrors some aspect of their own culture.

While thinking this over, I realised that this is - essentially - what all Christians do, whether or not they are seeking the 'historical' Jesus. Everyone who believes anything about Jesus, consciously or not, prioritises some bible passages over others (I've said this before too). For most believers its not a question of whittling away the false to reveal the true, but it is more a question of emphasising some aspects and diminishing the others, in order to form a 'working model' of Jesus in their minds. This process of diminishing some aspects and emphasising others is necessary to iron out the inconsistencies, conflicts and contradictions that are actually in the bible. It is impossible to create a 'working model' of Jesus taking all statements about him as being equally valid, but if you can emphasise some and diminish others, then a plausible model of Jesus can emerge. Someone you can really believe in. Someone you can persuade yourself originates in the bible and walked the roads of 1st century Palestine. Someone you can ask WWJD? about. 

The more I think about this, the more I see that this is what most Christians I know actually do. This is why there are so many different denominations of Christianity - each one emphasises different aspects from the others, and diminishes different other aspects. This is why the Jesus of Pentecostal Christianity is vastly different to the Jesus of liberal Anglicanism. Each denomination creates a working model of Jesus that emerges from its own preconceived ideas. None of these is actually the 'real' Jesus, the 'biblical' Jesus or the 'historical' Jesus. They are all, at best, flawed models of Jesus. And none of them can accurately show us what the 'real' Jesus, if there ever was one, was or is actually like. 

Bart Ehrman, multiple attestation and probability

I've just listened to the entire 12 hour audio book of Bart Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?" which someone posted on YouTube. I transferred it to my iPod, and listened to it while commuting, of course.

I don't have too much to say about the book. I totally understand why many folks in the "Mythicist" camp are angry at this book, as it does seek not only to counter their arguments, but also makes a number of ad hominem attacks on them, individually, specifically, by name. But I'm not going to defend them here, they've gone as far as to write a whole book in response. I might read that eventually, but I'm in no hurry...

I also don't dispute the central thesis of this book. I'm reasonably convinced that there really was a 'historical Jesus' and that Christianity, at least in part, is based on some of his teachings and actions. I also believe, as explained in this book, that an awful lot of legends have been added to the historical core of Christianity, such that the modern religion is almost certainly something that the 'historical Jesus' wouldn't recognise at all.

But the main thing that annoyed me with Ehrman's book was the sloppy thinking at the centre of his reasoning. During his ad hominem attacks on the mythicists, he made a big deal about the fact that most mythicists (with the exception of Robert M. Price and Richard Carrier) do not have postgraduate degrees in relevant disciplines, and so (in his thinking) the arguments by these people can be largely dismissed. For Ehrman, appropriate qualifications are essential. It is odd, therefore, when he wades into the field of probability - something that he has no postgraduate education in - and bases the main points of his argument on probability judgements. He does not appear to understand how probability works.

The core of Ehrman's reconstruction of the historical Jesus is based on the criterion of Multiple Attestation - put simply this is taken to mean that if a story about Jesus or a teaching attributed to Jesus is attested in multiple independent sources, then it is more likely to be true or authentic than one which is not. Ehrman builds a library of stories and sayings that are multiply attested and concludes that these are most likely historically authentic.

Hang on, do you see what he did there? He takes a statement of relative probability (that Story A, which is attested in two independent sources, is more likely than Story B, which is found in only one source), and assumes it to be a statement of absolute probability. In other words, he seems to equate "more likely than" with "certainly happened". This is very sloppy thinking! An event that has a one in a thousand chance of having happened is more likely than an event which has a one in a million chance of having happened - a thousand times more likely in fact - but both events are still extremely unlikely. Relative probability tells us nothing without some quantification of absolute probability. Just because a story appears in multiple sources, doesn't mean it actually happened. It merely means that more people wrote it down.

Another annoying aspect of Ehrman's reasoning is the way he invents independent sources. I actually can't remember all the sources he claims, but his list of independent sources includes:

Mark; Q; M; L; John; Traditions in Paul; Traditions in Acts; Traditions in non-Pauline epistles; Revelation; and various non-scriptural sources.

This is all very impressive, but Ehrman forgets that Q is a scholarly construct which may or may not have existed. If it did exist, then the claim is that both Matthew and Luke used some of it, in addition to Mark, when creating their own gospels. There is no claim that both of them used all of Q in their gospels, so it seems quite likely that one or both of them might have missed out bits of Q. This means that it is possible that some, if not all, of the M and L material was actually part of Q. In other words it is quite possible that Q, M and L are not independent. Given that this is a real possibility, which we cannot discount, we cannot claim that these are independent sources.

For what its worth, I'm reasonably convinced by the Farrer hypothesis, that Luke used Matthew and Mark when writing his gospel. In this way of thinking, M and Q are reduced to a single source, and Luke (including L?) is not independent of either of them.

How Ehrman manages to justify to himself that the traditions in Acts are independent of L is a mystery to me. Both were written by the same author, it is supposed. And under the Farrer hypothesis, these become not independent from Mark and Matthew.

So I think Ehrman completely overstates his case. Sure there are some stories that are genuinely multiply attested, but not half as many as Ehrman makes out.

While I basically agree with Ehrman's conclusions, I think his overly exaggerated claims of authenticity don't do his case much good. The same case could be built on more sober and reliable reasoning.

Myths and timelines...

I've been thinking over some apologetic lines of reasoning recently. I'll deal with them in more detail in future posts, but for now consider the following two statements:

1. Thirty years ago Perseus tamed and rode the flying horse Pegasus.
2. Yesterday Hercules captured the three headed dog Cerberus.

According to some lines of apologetic reasoning, the second of those statements is more likely to be true and accurate than the first. Apologists think that the closer the writing of the story to the date of the alleged event, the more likely it is that the description of the event is true. 

Well that sounds reasonable, at first glance, but I think if you consider the example given above, the line of reasoning is quite clearly flawed. Neither of those events happened (at least not in recent history!), so neither is more likely than the other. The timing of the writing about the event is entirely unrelated to the factual accuracy of the story. Or in other words, a mythical event remains a mythical event even if it is claimed to have happened in very recent history.

The same, presumably applies to eyewitness claims:

1. Thirty years ago I saw Perseus taming and riding Pegasus.
2. Yesterday I saw Hercules capturing Cerberus.

Which of those is more likely to be true?

So when it comes to the gospels, the apologists think they have won the argument if they can demonstrate that the (eyewitness?) gospel writers were doing their writing within a generation of the resurrection of Jesus. Surely a document written in 60AD, a mere 30 years after the resurrection, is going to be pretty accurate, certainly more accurate than a late document written in the early 2nd century? Well, not if the document describes an impossible or mythical event. If the resurrection didn't happen, and a book was written one day after the claimed date of the resurrection, then such a book would be no more likely to be true than one written yesterday.

All this basically to say that arguments for an early dating of the gospels prove nothing. 

All our experience tells us that in reality people can't walk on water, transmute water into wine, kill fig trees with a single word, and that executed men do not come back to life after being dead three days. All our experience tells us that these things can happen in fiction. A very, very early date for the gospels can never be sufficient evidence to prove that the impossible happened.

The Historical Jesus Spectrum

I've read a few books and listened to a number of debates and discussions on 'the historical Jesus' over the past few years. The debates are always frustrating. This morning I realised just why they are largely a waste of time. The problem is this, the two opposing viewpoints generally presented in these debates are too far apart on the spectrum of belief for anyone to ever have their point of view changed by them.

As I see it, the spectrum of belief in the historical Jesus and the gospel stories goes something like this:

1. The bible is completely accurate and therefore Jesus was and is the divine Son of God.
2. The bible stories are mostly accurate, although some minor mistakes and embellishments have got in there, due to the human writers, but all the essential stuff is true, therefore we can be sure Jesus was and is the divine Son of God.
3. The bible stories are based on what happened in history, but some legendary and mythical content has been added along the way. Jesus was and is the divine Son of God, and we can still learn all we need to know about him for salvation and righteous living from the gospel stories.
4. The bible stories are a heavily embellished history, but we can still see traces of the real Jesus in there, a holy man or prophet, sent by God, and we can learn how to live and how to approach God by following his teachings.
5. The bible stories are a heavily embellished history, but we can still see traces of the real Jesus in there, he was a good man who believed he was sent by God. He may even have believed he was in some way divine. Obviously some of the stories in the gospels are outright fictions and he couldn't have done all those miracles, but we can still learn something about right living from his good moral teaching.
6. The bible stories are a heavily embellished history, but we can still see traces of the real Jesus in there, he was a charismatic political leader who lead a movement against Rome and was executed as a consequence.
7. The bible stories are a collection of mythical stories and wise teachings which have been fictively attributed to Jesus, who was a real man in 1st century Galilee/Judea. But the legends almost completely obstruct our view of the real Jesus, so we don't really know who he was.
8. The bible stories, including tales of Jesus the saviour, are a collection of mythical stories. At some point these were historicised, but the character of Jesus was never a real person.

The problem with debates between Christian scholars and atheist scholars is that Christians, by definition, must hold to one of the first three options on this list, while atheists, by definition, must discount the top four options. Generally debates are between someone holding to Option 1 or 2 and someone holding to Option 5 or 6. But these viewpoints are sufficiently far apart on the spectrum that there is almost no common ground between them. The only really meaningful debates on the topic of the historical Jesus are between those holding to options 4, 5 or 6. That is, it is only people who agree to a high amount of embellishment that can reasonably debate these points, Christians are pretty much excluded from meaningful debate on this topic, and thus the conclusion that Jesus was actually divine in some way is pretty much off the table.

The thing is, I really don't care which option out of 5 to 8 is true, or which option out of 1 to 3 is true. But I really do care whether the truth lies in options 1 to 3 or in options 5 to 8. Option 4, being a very uncertain place, when it comes to Jesus, is not something I want to conclude, because where would that get me? Yes there is a God, but no Jesus wasn't his Son. Yikes. I'll leave that possibility alone for now.

For me, the only thing that matters about the 'historical' Jesus is this: Was he the Son of God or not?

If he wasn't the Son of God, it doesn't matter to me if he existed or didn't. It doesn't matter to me if he was a political leader, an apocalyptic prophet or a freedom fighter. It doesn't matter to me whether or not he believed he was the Son of God or not. If he wasn't actually the real Son of the real God, then I really don't care who he was.

But if he was the real Son of the real God, then this fact should influence everything in my life.

So my problem with all the debates, discussions and books on the Historical Jesus is this - none of them helps me decide whether or not the gospel stories contain the truth.

But I am persuaded that there are errors and human embellishment in the gospels, so Option 1 is off the table for me. So the battle ground is really on Options 2 and 3. If it can be shown that the embellishments and fictions in the gospel stories are in the minority, then the possibility that Jesus was and is the Son of God is still a live option.

I've read, seen and heard plenty of stuff that suggests that the majority of material in there is legendary. But its only a suggestion, not a 'beyond reasonable doubt' proof.

Then again, I've not heard any particularly compelling case for the authenticity of the apparently legendary material in the gospels, so the balance of evidence seems to be supporting the skeptical side. But its just not conclusive for me.

And that bugs me.

Proving History?

So I finished reading Richard Carrier's book "Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus" which I mentioned in the previous post.

A few things to say about Richard Carrier before I make comments on this book in particular:

1. Carrier is an intelligent guy who thinks things through in greater detail than many people do.
2. He also comes across as quite arrogant in interviews and in some of the things he writes.
3. His logic appears to be sound and his conclusions generally appear to be justifiable.
4. He has a clear idea of who his audience is, and tailors his writings to that specific audience.

Starting with that final point, I don't think I am the audience Carrier is writing to in this book. In many of the books by 'new atheists' which I have read, I've realised that the authors are generally 'preaching to the deconverted', as it were, and are not realistically expecting many believers to be reading their books. 'New atheism' books are aimed to give ammunition to atheists. Of course, the flipside of that is that most apologetics books are aimed at Christians to reinforce their beliefs, and not to try to convince atheists to believe...

So, point number one in this review, I don't think any Christian is going to be swayed by the arguments made in this book, even if they (the arguments, that is) are logical, justified and, indeed, correct. But, of course, this book doesn't really set out to sway anyone with its conclusions about history, the main point of this book is to demonstrate to its (mostly non-mathematically inclined) audience that the mathematical technique of Bayes's Theorem is appropriate in historical investigation, and furthermore is the best method to use in historical investigation. I think the book manages to do that, but as conclusions go, its not a very exciting one. The much more exciting and dramatic conclusion comes in Carrier's next book, which isn't out yet.

As a side note, I'm glad that Carrier settled on consistent use of "Bayes's Theorem" rather than "Bayes Theorem", which I find acceptable, or "Bayes' Theorem", which is clearly not acceptable to anyone who understands grammar. Of course, he abbreviates it to "BT" for most of the book, which gets around the problem of the apostrophe. But anyway...

On the whole, this is not a very interesting book. It has interesting bits in it, and makes some interesting conclusions along the way, but I can't really recommend this to anyone as a good read. I doubt even Carrier thinks this book is particularly interesting, but it probably is required before we get to the meaty stuff in the next book. And therein lies the problem, this is clearly the build up to the much more interesting work which is to follow, and may be required reading to understand that second work, but by itself this is a bit dry.

I guess I should explain what Bayes's Theorem is. Put simply, it is a mathematical method for updating your beliefs in the light of new evidence. As used by Carrier, it is a method of assessing the probability of one or more historical hypotheses by considering one or more pieces of evidence. The method provides a framework for determining whether our confidence in a given belief (hypothesis) should be increased or decreased as new evidence presents itself. (I should note here that I have used Bayes's Theorem in my work for over a decade now, so I am fairly familiar with it, and thus am far from the target audience of this book.)

The point of this book is to convince the reader (who Carrier expects to be a non-mathematically inclined person with an interest in history) that Bayes's Theorem is a sound and justifiable method for coming to historical conclusions. He wants everyone to share this belief. If he gets everyone to share this belief, then everyone will have to accept any historical deduction he makes using Bayes's Theorem. And in the next book (I expect) he will end up using Bayes's Theorem to show that Jesus was not the Son of God and, furthermore, probably didn't exist. But in order for that argument to work, he has to get you to accept the method.

The fundamental problem in this kind of reasoning is this, that faced with an anti-Christian conclusion derived using Bayes's Theorem, the non-mathematically inclined Christian historian who accepted BT on the basis of this book will reject it again after the next book, because their acceptance of the truth of Christianity is so much stronger than their acceptance of the truth of Bayes, that the only conclusion they can come to is that Bayes's Theorem must be flawed, even if in some way that is not immediately apparent. So I fear that the end result of this will be an insufferably smug Richard Carrier, who knows - beyond reasonable doubt - that he has proved that Jesus didn't exist, and a bunch of Christians who have read this, who know that Carrier must be wrong.

But Carrier does an excellent job of demonstrating that Bayes's Theorem is a valid way of estimating historical probability, and a pretty good job of demonstrating that it is the best method of estimating historical probability.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book is Chapter 5, where he looks at the various criteria used by historians involved in the 'quest' for the 'Historical Jesus' and either demonstrates that each criterion reduces to Bayes's Theorem, or is invalid as a method. Thus the point is proved, Bayes's Theorem is the fundamental valid method underlying all other historicity criteria.

Taken one by one:

1. Dissimilarity: demonstrated to be invalid.
2. Embarrassment: similarly invalid. Carrier deconstructs this one at great length, indeed, it is the largest part of the chapter by far. Along the way, he makes a very interesting statement that I must investigate further sometime:
   "Its worth remarking here, ..., that everyone literate enough to compose books in antiquity was educated almost exclusively in the specific skill of persuasion: that is what all writing was believed to be for, and how all literate persons were taught to write." (page 134)
   Thus, everything in an ancient book was there for the purpose of convincing the reader of something, so nothing embarrassing which hindered this purpose would be included.
3. Coherence: shown to be invalid.
4. Multiple attestation: shown to be invalid.
5. Explanatory credibility: consistent with Bayes, but can only exclude, never confirm.
6. Contextual plausibility: similarly consistent with Bayes.
7. Historical plausibility: again, consistent with Bayes, but is incomplete.
8. Natural probability: consistent with Bayes, but doesn't make as strong a case as could be formulated with Bayes, so Bayes supersedes this method. 
9. Oral preservability: consistent with Bayes, but can only exclude.
10. Crucifixion (the theory has to explain why Jesus was deemed worthy of crucifixion): not valid.
11. Fabricatory trend: consistent with Bayes, but can only exclude.
12. Least distinctiveness: of limited use, but consistent with Bayes.
13. Vividness of narration: shown to be invalid.
14. Textual variance: invalid.
15. Greek context: invalid.
16. Aramaic context: invalid.
17. Discourse features: invalid.
18. Characteristic Jesus: invalid, as it relies on many of the above invalid methods.

Wow. I hadn't realised there were so many rubbish criteria in use by Historical Jesus scholars. Carrier shows that most of them are useless and the rest of them are poor-man's versions of Bayes, so to use Bayes directly is better than using any of them.

Anyway, I think I've said all I need to here. There's an interesting Jesus vs Daniel thing that I'll maybe pick up in a future post, but I'll not go into it here.

In summary, I agree with Carrier's conclusion: "Historians should be Bayesians". We'll see what happens when Bayes is applied directly to Jesus in the next book by Carrier.