If I understand it right, they are saying that modern scholarship confirms that the Gospels avoid certain obvious failure modes—eg being written hundreds of years after the fact, wildly contradicting each other on important points, and erring on simple points of geography and history—and that someone would’ve called them on it if they just blatantly made things up—therefore the Gospels can be assumed mostly true. The Gospels say many people saw Jesus die on the Cross and then saw him alive later, and that natural explanations (Jesus survived the crucifixion, everyone was hallucinating, it was Jesus’ twin brother—yes, they actually addressed that) are all unconvincing; therefore Jesus really was resurrected. According to the Gospels, this was seen by many witnesses, including luminaries like St. Peter, and none of them later came forward to say “No, we didn’t see this at all, shut up”. Further, many of them later died an extremely predictable martyr’s death, proving that they believed in Christ’s resurrection enough to sacrifice their lives for him, something they wouldn’t have done if it were all made up (they point out that although some people, like kamikaze pilots, have sacrificed their lives to false philosophies, it is far more unlikely that the Apostles would sacrifice their lives to a false empirical fact, namely that they had seen Jesus rise from the dead).
This argument doesn’t quite take the truth of the Gospels as a premise, but it comes close. Although there are some atheist accounts that allow for the truth of the Gospels as written while still casting doubt on Christ’s divinity, that’s not where the smart money lies—most atheists would deny to one degree or another the validity of the Gospels themselves. Either the entire thing was made up (a theory which the McGrews reject, and I think rightly) or a historical Jesus had various miracles falsely attributed to him by overzealous believers. This leaves the McGrews’ objection that the existence of a wider Christian community, many of whom had been personally involved in the events described, would have limited the Gospel writers’ ability to make things up even if they had been so inclined.
So instead of basing his argument on the likelihood of people hallucinating resurrected Jesus, the McGrews should have investigated the probability that the Gospel writers would make up miracles and the probability that they would be caught; something like
P(resurrection) ~= P(gospels true) ~= 1 - [P(people make stuff up about Jesus) * P(they don’t get called on it)]
So what is the probability that, given some historical tradition of Jesus, it will get embellished with made-up miracles and people will write gospels about it? Approximately 1: both Christians and atheists agree that the vast majority of the few dozen extant Gospels are false, including the infancy gospels, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Peter, et cetera. All of these tend to take the earlier Gospels and stories and then add a bunch of implausible miracles to them. So we know that the temptation to write false Gospels laden with miracles was there. Apologists say that the four canonical Gospels are earlier and more official than the apocryphal Gospels, and I agree, but given the existence of a known tendency for people to make up books, and a set of books that sound made-up, the difference seems more one of degree than of kind.
That leaves the question of whether anyone would notice. The dates of all the Gospels are uncertain, but around 70 − 80 AD for the synoptics seems like a fair guess. The average life expectancy in classical Judaea for those who survived childhood was 40 to 50. That means Jesus’ generation would be long gone by the time the first Gospel came out, and even people who were teenagers at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion would be dying off. Christian tradition lists all the Apostles except John as dead by 75 AD.
There’s also the more general question of argument from silence. Let’s say someone did have evidence against something in the Gospels. Most Judeans at the time wouldn’t have been literate, especially not in the Greek in which the Gospels were written. Many who were, might not have had the time or interest to pen responses to what seemed a minor cult at the time. If any did, those responses might not have spread in an age when every work had to be laboriously copied by hand. And if by some miracle a refutation did become popular, there’s no reason to think we would know about it since many of the popular works of the age have been lost completely.
Matthew mentions that on the day of Jesus’ crucifixion, graves opened and the dead walked the earth throughout the city of Jerusalem for several hours. No one else (including the other evangelists!) mentioned the dead walking the earth, either to confirm or refute it, so clearly the 1st century AD Judean skeptical community wasn’t exactly on top of its game. That alone casts suspicion on the whole “if this was false, someone would’ve said so” argument.
All of this makes the Gospel argument relatively uninteresting to me. But it hints at a different problem which is interesting. Twenty years after the death of Christ, we have Paul writing letters to flourishing churches all across the eastern Mediterranean, all of whom seem to have at least a vague tradition of Christ being resurrected and appearing to people. That means Christianity spread really, really fast, presumably by people who were pretty sure they had met the resurrected Christ. At my current, limited level of Biblical scholarship I consider myself still confused on this point and yet to see a satisfactory explanation (people rising from the dead doesn’t count as ‘satisfactory’).
… the earlier commentator who says that the probability is “approximately 1” that there would be made-up resurrection stories (and apparently thinks that this applies to the gospels) ignores various obvious distinctions. For example, the distinction between stories by people who had nothing to gain and everything to lose for making up such stories and people who had nothing to lose and something to gain by doing so. Also, the distinction between people’s elaborating stories when they themselves were in a position to know what really happened and people who were not in a position to know what really happened.
We are talking in the paper about what the disciples themselves claimed. They were in a position to know whether what they were claiming was true or false, and they had a great deal to lose and nothing to gain by simply making up such tales. - link
Would you be willing to elaborate on that? I have a strong personal interest in your thoughts on the matter, having previously spent some time on the bizarre world of Christian apologetics, myself.
Obviously, outputting numbers like 10^39 is a sign that your argument is flawed. Nonetheless, I have sympathy for McGrew because so many are misunderstanding her argument.
Christian: If they were independent, the chances of the disciples coming up with the same story are tiny. So it is most likely they are all reporting reality.
Non-Christian: I agree that would be the case if they were independent, but it is more likely that they were in communication and conspired than that there is a supernatural/Jesus rose from the dead/etc.
C: If they were in communication, each martyr had the opportunity to sell out the conspiracy when threatened with death. As unlikely as all the disciples independently hallucinating and dying for a lie is, it is even less likely that each martyr independently chose to die for a conspiracy when each martyr knew any of the other disciples could render their martyrdom pointless by selling out the conspiracy (i.e. defecting in the prisoner’s dilemma).
It is even less likely that all of them would cooperate in a many-way prisoner’s dilemma when each knew the others knew how unlikely it would be for each to cooperate in a many way prisoner’s dilemma when each knew...etc.
Therefore, the conservative assumption is that each was independent, which yields 10^39 to one that Jesus rose from the dead at the least (though it is really more likely than that because I am assuming independence, for which my argument is weaker than had they conspired). Consider: each would be consciously dying for a lie (nothing to gain, everything to lose), unlike people who later made up stories to be famous or for whatever reason (everything to gain, nothing to lose) when they were not in position to now what had happened.
So I am using 1 - [P(people make stuff up about Jesus) P(they don’t get called on it)], P(they don’t get called on it) is tiny for cases in which each disciple is claiming that the other disciples were eyewitnesses, particularly* when they are not independent.
N-C: Aha! So you admit that you got 10^39 from an assumption of independence!
We know that many zealous followers are willing to die for the honor of their leaders. It would not be very surprising to see that happen in early Christianity.
There isn’t even a requirement that they all do so—or even most! Those who recanted would be forgotten, their recanting being attributed to pressure rather than belief.
You said pretty much exacty everything I would have said and more.
One question—I only read the first third of so and skimmed the rest. The bits I read seemed to give a false dichotomy for dates of the composition of the gospels. The authors discussed atheistic schools that believed the gospels were all composed post 100 and contrasted these with the pre70 dates of Christian belief. Do they ever discuss the modern scholarly mostly-consensus of 70-90?
Relatedly, do you know of any good arguments for post 70 composition dates, especially for Matthew and Luke, other than fulfilled prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem? I’ve always found the arguments that these books were written before 70 because they could not have predicted the destruction of Jerusalem suspiciously question-begging about the possibility of miracles.
“P(resurrection) ~= P(gospels true) ~= 1 - [P(people make stuff up about Jesus) * P(they don’t get called on it)]
So what is the probability that, given some historical tradition of Jesus, it will get embellished with made-up miracles and people will write gospels about it? Approximately 1: both Christians and atheists agree that the vast majority of the few dozen extant Gospels are false, including the infancy gospels, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Peter, et cetera. All of these tend to take the earlier Gospels and stories and then add a bunch of implausible miracles to them. So we know that the temptation to write false Gospels laden with miracles was there.”
But don’t the gnostic gospels serve as a sort of control case for the true gospels? That is, becuase everyone, starting with the early church, agrees that, say, Gospel of Thomas was just made up by the Gnostics, then wouldn’t that imply that P(gets called on it I made up a random gospel) ≈ 1, or at least is very high, which would imply that P(makes up gospel, doesn’t get called on it) is low?
Why would the apostles all die martyrs deaths for someone who didn’t live up to his promises? Especially since the gospels show they weren’t of the most courageous character either. That is pretty convincing to me, I don’t know of a good counter.
Also, if there were so many Christian communities so soon after Jesus’ death, then there would be a good community of knowledge to filter false and true accounts of Jesus life.
Finally, why didn’t any of the other unorthodox accounts start similar communities? Why are the communities so similar in their beliefs about Jesus, if it is quite likely to have been made up, as you suggest?
Finally, why didn’t any of the other unorthodox accounts start similar communities? Why are the communities so similar in their beliefs about Jesus, if it is quite likely to have been made up, as you suggest?
They did. There were plenty of wildly disparate sects of Christianity early on, out of whose beliefs the gospels that were declared noncanonical rose up in the first place. Most of these communities died out over time, although some lasted for centuries, and Gnostics, who existed in several branches and were the most significant competitors for what became “mainstream” Christianity, still exist today. I suggest reading up a bit on Gnostic mythology to see just how disimilar it is to all mainstream branches of Christianity.
As for why the apostles would die martyrs’ deaths for someone who didn’t live up to his promises, we have no reason to think they did. That is, they weren’t killed for their beliefs after being given the option of recanting to have their lives spared. This is a popular meme, but there’s no historical basis for ever suspecting it happened in the first place. jhwendy’s link at the bottom of the page provides more information on this.
As for the Christian communities being able to filter true and false accounts of his life, we already know that they didn’t; witness the proliferation of sects and gospels declared noncanonical. Most of them had probably never known him during his life.
Even if we take as given that the apostles died bravely defending the resurrection, you can’t take people dying martyr’s death as evidence for their beliefs, only for their level of belief. People have martyred themselves for many CONFLICTING ideologies. Islam and Christianity to pick 2 of the most obvious examples, can’t both be correct.
Finally, why didn’t any of the other unorthodox accounts start similar communities? Why are the communities so similar in their beliefs about Jesus, if it is quite likely to have been made up, as you suggest?
Paul’s letters explain this. The communities were so similar because they were all so strongly influenced by Paul.
I read...a surprisingly large amount of that.
If I understand it right, they are saying that modern scholarship confirms that the Gospels avoid certain obvious failure modes—eg being written hundreds of years after the fact, wildly contradicting each other on important points, and erring on simple points of geography and history—and that someone would’ve called them on it if they just blatantly made things up—therefore the Gospels can be assumed mostly true. The Gospels say many people saw Jesus die on the Cross and then saw him alive later, and that natural explanations (Jesus survived the crucifixion, everyone was hallucinating, it was Jesus’ twin brother—yes, they actually addressed that) are all unconvincing; therefore Jesus really was resurrected. According to the Gospels, this was seen by many witnesses, including luminaries like St. Peter, and none of them later came forward to say “No, we didn’t see this at all, shut up”. Further, many of them later died an extremely predictable martyr’s death, proving that they believed in Christ’s resurrection enough to sacrifice their lives for him, something they wouldn’t have done if it were all made up (they point out that although some people, like kamikaze pilots, have sacrificed their lives to false philosophies, it is far more unlikely that the Apostles would sacrifice their lives to a false empirical fact, namely that they had seen Jesus rise from the dead).
Multiplying the low probabilities of everyone involved simultaneously having some kind of fit of insanity leading them to sincerely believe Jesus had risen from the dead gives 1 : 10^39 against, and since this is a very small number obviously the argument must be correct.
This argument doesn’t quite take the truth of the Gospels as a premise, but it comes close. Although there are some atheist accounts that allow for the truth of the Gospels as written while still casting doubt on Christ’s divinity, that’s not where the smart money lies—most atheists would deny to one degree or another the validity of the Gospels themselves. Either the entire thing was made up (a theory which the McGrews reject, and I think rightly) or a historical Jesus had various miracles falsely attributed to him by overzealous believers. This leaves the McGrews’ objection that the existence of a wider Christian community, many of whom had been personally involved in the events described, would have limited the Gospel writers’ ability to make things up even if they had been so inclined.
So instead of basing his argument on the likelihood of people hallucinating resurrected Jesus, the McGrews should have investigated the probability that the Gospel writers would make up miracles and the probability that they would be caught; something like
P(resurrection) ~= P(gospels true) ~= 1 - [P(people make stuff up about Jesus) * P(they don’t get called on it)]
So what is the probability that, given some historical tradition of Jesus, it will get embellished with made-up miracles and people will write gospels about it? Approximately 1: both Christians and atheists agree that the vast majority of the few dozen extant Gospels are false, including the infancy gospels, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Peter, et cetera. All of these tend to take the earlier Gospels and stories and then add a bunch of implausible miracles to them. So we know that the temptation to write false Gospels laden with miracles was there. Apologists say that the four canonical Gospels are earlier and more official than the apocryphal Gospels, and I agree, but given the existence of a known tendency for people to make up books, and a set of books that sound made-up, the difference seems more one of degree than of kind.
That leaves the question of whether anyone would notice. The dates of all the Gospels are uncertain, but around 70 − 80 AD for the synoptics seems like a fair guess. The average life expectancy in classical Judaea for those who survived childhood was 40 to 50. That means Jesus’ generation would be long gone by the time the first Gospel came out, and even people who were teenagers at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion would be dying off. Christian tradition lists all the Apostles except John as dead by 75 AD.
There’s also the more general question of argument from silence. Let’s say someone did have evidence against something in the Gospels. Most Judeans at the time wouldn’t have been literate, especially not in the Greek in which the Gospels were written. Many who were, might not have had the time or interest to pen responses to what seemed a minor cult at the time. If any did, those responses might not have spread in an age when every work had to be laboriously copied by hand. And if by some miracle a refutation did become popular, there’s no reason to think we would know about it since many of the popular works of the age have been lost completely.
Matthew mentions that on the day of Jesus’ crucifixion, graves opened and the dead walked the earth throughout the city of Jerusalem for several hours. No one else (including the other evangelists!) mentioned the dead walking the earth, either to confirm or refute it, so clearly the 1st century AD Judean skeptical community wasn’t exactly on top of its game. That alone casts suspicion on the whole “if this was false, someone would’ve said so” argument.
All of this makes the Gospel argument relatively uninteresting to me. But it hints at a different problem which is interesting. Twenty years after the death of Christ, we have Paul writing letters to flourishing churches all across the eastern Mediterranean, all of whom seem to have at least a vague tradition of Christ being resurrected and appearing to people. That means Christianity spread really, really fast, presumably by people who were pretty sure they had met the resurrected Christ. At my current, limited level of Biblical scholarship I consider myself still confused on this point and yet to see a satisfactory explanation (people rising from the dead doesn’t count as ‘satisfactory’).
Lydia McGrew responded to you saying:
Thanks for pointing that out. Needless to say I don’t agree, but I respect her decision not to get in an endless internet argument about it.
Would you be willing to elaborate on that? I have a strong personal interest in your thoughts on the matter, having previously spent some time on the bizarre world of Christian apologetics, myself.
I would like to hear your disagreements too, even if Lydia McGrew is not interested.
Obviously, outputting numbers like 10^39 is a sign that your argument is flawed. Nonetheless, I have sympathy for McGrew because so many are misunderstanding her argument.
Christian: If they were independent, the chances of the disciples coming up with the same story are tiny. So it is most likely they are all reporting reality.
Non-Christian: I agree that would be the case if they were independent, but it is more likely that they were in communication and conspired than that there is a supernatural/Jesus rose from the dead/etc.
C: If they were in communication, each martyr had the opportunity to sell out the conspiracy when threatened with death. As unlikely as all the disciples independently hallucinating and dying for a lie is, it is even less likely that each martyr independently chose to die for a conspiracy when each martyr knew any of the other disciples could render their martyrdom pointless by selling out the conspiracy (i.e. defecting in the prisoner’s dilemma).
It is even less likely that all of them would cooperate in a many-way prisoner’s dilemma when each knew the others knew how unlikely it would be for each to cooperate in a many way prisoner’s dilemma when each knew...etc.
Therefore, the conservative assumption is that each was independent, which yields 10^39 to one that Jesus rose from the dead at the least (though it is really more likely than that because I am assuming independence, for which my argument is weaker than had they conspired). Consider: each would be consciously dying for a lie (nothing to gain, everything to lose), unlike people who later made up stories to be famous or for whatever reason (everything to gain, nothing to lose) when they were not in position to now what had happened.
So I am using 1 - [P(people make stuff up about Jesus) P(they don’t get called on it)], P(they don’t get called on it) is tiny for cases in which each disciple is claiming that the other disciples were eyewitnesses, particularly* when they are not independent.
N-C: Aha! So you admit that you got 10^39 from an assumption of independence!
C:...(sigh)...
We know that many zealous followers are willing to die for the honor of their leaders. It would not be very surprising to see that happen in early Christianity.
There isn’t even a requirement that they all do so—or even most! Those who recanted would be forgotten, their recanting being attributed to pressure rather than belief.
You said pretty much exacty everything I would have said and more.
One question—I only read the first third of so and skimmed the rest. The bits I read seemed to give a false dichotomy for dates of the composition of the gospels. The authors discussed atheistic schools that believed the gospels were all composed post 100 and contrasted these with the pre70 dates of Christian belief. Do they ever discuss the modern scholarly mostly-consensus of 70-90?
Relatedly, do you know of any good arguments for post 70 composition dates, especially for Matthew and Luke, other than fulfilled prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem? I’ve always found the arguments that these books were written before 70 because they could not have predicted the destruction of Jerusalem suspiciously question-begging about the possibility of miracles.
I’m afraid I really know very little about dating the Gospels; I just trusted what I saw on Wikipedia.
1
“P(resurrection) ~= P(gospels true) ~= 1 - [P(people make stuff up about Jesus) * P(they don’t get called on it)]
So what is the probability that, given some historical tradition of Jesus, it will get embellished with made-up miracles and people will write gospels about it? Approximately 1: both Christians and atheists agree that the vast majority of the few dozen extant Gospels are false, including the infancy gospels, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Peter, et cetera. All of these tend to take the earlier Gospels and stories and then add a bunch of implausible miracles to them. So we know that the temptation to write false Gospels laden with miracles was there.”
But don’t the gnostic gospels serve as a sort of control case for the true gospels? That is, becuase everyone, starting with the early church, agrees that, say, Gospel of Thomas was just made up by the Gnostics, then wouldn’t that imply that P(gets called on it I made up a random gospel) ≈ 1, or at least is very high, which would imply that P(makes up gospel, doesn’t get called on it) is low?
Why would the apostles all die martyrs deaths for someone who didn’t live up to his promises? Especially since the gospels show they weren’t of the most courageous character either. That is pretty convincing to me, I don’t know of a good counter.
Also, if there were so many Christian communities so soon after Jesus’ death, then there would be a good community of knowledge to filter false and true accounts of Jesus life.
Finally, why didn’t any of the other unorthodox accounts start similar communities? Why are the communities so similar in their beliefs about Jesus, if it is quite likely to have been made up, as you suggest?
They did. There were plenty of wildly disparate sects of Christianity early on, out of whose beliefs the gospels that were declared noncanonical rose up in the first place. Most of these communities died out over time, although some lasted for centuries, and Gnostics, who existed in several branches and were the most significant competitors for what became “mainstream” Christianity, still exist today. I suggest reading up a bit on Gnostic mythology to see just how disimilar it is to all mainstream branches of Christianity.
As for why the apostles would die martyrs’ deaths for someone who didn’t live up to his promises, we have no reason to think they did. That is, they weren’t killed for their beliefs after being given the option of recanting to have their lives spared. This is a popular meme, but there’s no historical basis for ever suspecting it happened in the first place. jhwendy’s link at the bottom of the page provides more information on this.
As for the Christian communities being able to filter true and false accounts of his life, we already know that they didn’t; witness the proliferation of sects and gospels declared noncanonical. Most of them had probably never known him during his life.
Even if we take as given that the apostles died bravely defending the resurrection, you can’t take people dying martyr’s death as evidence for their beliefs, only for their level of belief. People have martyred themselves for many CONFLICTING ideologies. Islam and Christianity to pick 2 of the most obvious examples, can’t both be correct.
Paul’s letters explain this. The communities were so similar because they were all so strongly influenced by Paul.