“Very surprised”, indeed. The thousands of first-century Christian martyrs would be very surprised, too at this unfortunate news from our PhilosophyTutor.
FeatherlessBiped update: I withdraw the argument. As David_Gerard notes, it is not a real argument.
However, people do memetically-wise genetically-foolish things (i.e. die for their beliefs) all the time and for lots of reasons. So the Christian martyrs are not strong evidence that biblical Jesus is true (whatever one means by “biblical Jesus is true”).
My experience with Homo Sapiens (from reading about repressive regimes) is that they will say anything to keep from being killed.
If somebody holds a gun to your head and says, “all you have to say is ‘I just made up this little story about my invisible friend, Joe Bob’, and I will set you free”, what are you gonna say? If you’d made it up, why not admit it, and go free?
This was the situation the apostles and other 1st century martyrs faced during the persecutions. Yet they all went to their deaths. That doesn’t impress you?
The apostles choosing death over renouncing Jesus is a popular meme, but we don’t actually have a historical basis for supposing that it happened.
As Richard Carrier notes, of the little evidence we have for early Christian martyrdom, none of it was as a choice between recanting a belief in Jesus and dying. They were simply killed on trumped up legal charges from which recanting would not have saved them.
Certainly there have been people who have chosen to die rather than recant their beliefs, in plenty of different religions. It wouldn’t even be particularly strange if early Christians did so, and it’s certainly possible that it happened, although it would not be significant as evidence for Christianity, for reasons that others have already addressed. But it appears that all our stories of this actually happening to any of the apostles were simply made up somewhere along the line by people who were in no position to know.
That may be what the majority does, but history is filled with people willing to die for their beliefs. From the Maccabees against Assyrian Greeks to Falun Gong against modern China, martyrdom is not all that historically unusual. And the beliefs supporting martyrdom are so blatantly contradictory that they can’t all be right.
Moreover, martyrdom is not particularly Christian. For example, Rabbi Akiva was a great Jewish martyr.
This argument is fallacious and does not address historicity in any way. People throughout history have, in fact, died for beliefs which turned out to be false, deceptive, or poorly understood; such as suicide bombers being rewarded with virgins. Just because these men so firmly believed that their beliefs were true that they were willing to die for them does not give their beliefs any credibility. Here is an extensive list of refutations to this terrible argument.
Even this is making the generous assumption that the martyrs in question even existed. Some martyr-stories are known to be completely fabricated; the hagiography of St. Catherine of Alexandria, for example, is a partial rip-off of the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, the pagan philosopher who was skinned to death with tiles (by Christians!).
I think you’re overestimating the degree to which 1st century martyrs were killed for religious reasons and not more generic treasonous revolutionary talk or anti-statism.
Please don’t do this. The sarcasm and weak argumentation. This is beneath the standards of LessWrong. Millions of first-century people would be very surprised at lots of things that are nonetheless true.
Please forgive my inappropriate style. I am new, here.
For what it’s worth, I agree with your comment at 4:26 am, above, calling for a <5 % chance that Jesus was completely fictitious. Although I am Catholic, I acknowledge that by certain standards of proof, the existence of the Jesus as described in the Gospels is uncertain.
Personal biographical note: 30+ years ago, I called myself an atheist.
But seriously, by my accounting, every standard of evidence I know includes an element of faith. The only differences between them are (a) what is taken on faith and (b) how credulous that faith is.
Namely, I find faith elements in believing:
first/second/third-hand reports, even by trained, neutral observers
expert consensus
single expert opinion
by contradiction
the evidence standards of American civil and criminal trials (note the plural, “standardS”. The standards are different between them.)
induction, including (perhaps) mathematical induction
“engineering quality” proof
“mathematician quality” proof
My professional practice as an aircraft mishap investigator is to identify and apply the highest feasible standard from the above list, based on what information is available. “Best practice” in this industry dictates that selection and application of a standard of evidence is a matter of prudential judgement, based on the consequences and probabilities of being wrong, the resources available (evidence, time and $), while being scrupulously open about ones methods.
On historical questions about events of 20 centuries ago, the quality of evidence is not very good. About pretty much everything. What we are left with is Bayesian stuff. Anybody who goes to 0% or 100% draws the raised eyebrow from me. :-)
This is, in practice, a form of equivocation between epsilon uncertainty and sufficient uncertainty to take seriously as an argument.
There is technically no such thing as certainty.
Therefore, the uncertainty in [argument I don’t like] is non-negligible.
Step 2 is the tricky one. I suggest reviewing But There’s Still A Chance, Right? Humans are, in general, really bad at feeling the difference between epsilon uncertainty and sufficient uncertainty to be worth taking notice of.
I reviewed your link—thanks, that was interesting.
Maybe we’re in agreement. Let me try a more audacious assertion...
All I was saying was that practical demonstration or persuasion takes place within an unquestioned frame of reference. For purposes of the topic at hand, I would say, for example, that using the available evidence, I could convince 9 of 12 jurors under American rules of evidence and jury instructions applicable to civil trials, that Jesus of Nazareth was a flesh and blood historical figure. I think I could do this every week for a year and win 90% of the time. If we change the rules to “establish it beyond a reasonable doubt to 12 of 12 jurors”, then my success rate goes way down, obviously.
(Of course, I am assuming that I make no intentional misrepresentations and call only expert witnesses with recognized technical qualifications and unimpeachable character. I.e., no “funny stuff”.)
In other words, I am claiming to not be anywhere in the neighborhood of epsilon.
I’m almost entirely unconvinced (somewhat greater than epsilon) that’s a useful measure—humans can be convinced of just about anything. But, an upvote for suggesting a measure. Still thinking of what I’d accept as a measure.
Citation needed, or clarification what you mean by “anyone substantially like him”. Because I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t a real person named Jesus who was really crucified at the roots of the proto-Christian movement—I’d probably assign less that 5% chance that Jesus was completely fictional. (though of course many other elements, like the birth at Bethlehem are almost certainly fictitious)
There is absolutely no direct evidence that dates from the time Jesus supposedly lived that any such religious leader was born, lived or died except for one contemporary reference to a rabbi called Jesus with a brother called James. Given that Jesus was not supposed to be a rabbi, and that both Jesus and James were common names from the time, and that Jesus had several other brothers and sisters who were also named in the Bible multiplying the possibilities for a false positive substantially, this is very weak evidence.
Given that Jesus was supposedly a very noteworthy figure who died in a noteworthy way founding a major religion, the total absence of any historical record of him or anyone substantially resembling him would be very surprising if he was real.
Given that lack of evidence the most parsimonious explanation is just that Jesus is fictional. An alternative, unfalsifiable hypothesis is that someone existed who played a causal role in the founding of Christianity but that they were so boring they left no trace in history and hence bore very little resemblance to the figure described in the Bible.
“Very surprised”, indeed. The thousands of first-century Christian martyrs would be very surprised, too at this unfortunate news from our PhilosophyTutor.
Not just the first century ones, I would say, but this is not evidence.
There is absolutely no direct evidence that dates from the time Jesus supposedly lived that any such religious leader was born,
There exist only two non-biblical pieces of evidence for the existence of Pontius Pilate—and he was the damn Prefect of Judaea for Cthulhu’s sake. How much “direct evidence” do you expect for a rather Jewish-cult-leader, one of possibly dozen such groups the time?
Given that Jesus was supposedly a very noteworthy figure who died in a noteworthy way founding a major religion,
So is it just his noteworthiness that you doubt, not his existence?
Given that lack of evidence the most parsimonious explanation is just that Jesus is fictional.
No, that’s a completely unbelievable explanation. If he was fictional he’d not have been of Nazareth with a circuitous reasoning about why he was also of Bethlehem—he’d have been directly of Bethlehem. His name wouldn’t have been Jesus with a completely circuitous explanation about why “Emmanuel” also counts as his name, his name would have been directly Emmanuel.
Nor do I know of any fictional characters that are so deliberately placed recent history and yet their existence is believed by their contemporaries as real. If the Christian movement had began in the 1st century, and yet its founder placed as having lived in 3rd century BC, that explanation might make sense. But he was placed as a contemporary, and expected to be believed to be real. You don’t do that with fictional founders of your order.
Jesus was a real historical figure. His being fictional just doesn’t make sense—same way that Mohammed being fictional doesn’t make sense—or do you also believe Mohammed fictional?
Jesus was a real historical figure. His being fictional just doesn’t make sense—same way that Mohammed being fictional doesn’t make sense—or do you also believe Mohammed fictional?
And there is serious historical thought that Mohammed, too, was fictional. The Wikipedia article maps out the scanty evidence.
The real problem with either question is the excessive interest in getting the “right” answer. If e.g. Socrates turned out to be a fictional character invented by Plato, philosophy wouldn’t care. If Gautama Buddha turned out to be fictional, Buddhism wouldn’t care. But Jesus or Mohammed existing or not is a REALLY BIG DEAL, and we really don’t have a great deal of evidence in either case. Considerably less for Jesus, and a lack of evidence where it would have been expected had he existed.
And there is serious historical thought that Mohammed, too, was fictional
Yeah, that’s a ludicrous idea too. Some people seem to think that “fictional” is the null-hypothesis, to be believed by default unless there’s an extraordinary amount of evidence to the contrary. This is nonsense: Fictional characters of historical influence aren’t more common than real people of historical influence.
This is bias at its most obvious.
If you believe that someone made a fictional character up, and then he made thousands of near-contemporaries believe in his existence, that’s a rather extraordinary hypothesis, which has a very low prior given that nobody else seems to have ever managed this feat ever.
Muhammed existed. Jesus of Nazareth existed. The evidence are overwhelmingly in their favour—including the various bits of inelegancies and clumsinesses in their life-stories that only real-life people display, not fictional characters constructed at their time-period. And there’s not a single piece of evidence that someone authored them as fictional characters.
The real problem with either question is the excessive interest in getting the “right” answer.
Right in quotes? Are we now pretending that truth has a subjective value now? This is about being less wrong, and people that assume “fiction” to be the default hypothesis, and that discount religious texts as evidence just because they are religious texts, they are more wrong than other people.
If e.g. Socrates turned out to be a fictional character invented by Plato, philosophy wouldn’t care.
No, that’s a completely unbelievable explanation. If he was fictional he’d not have been of Nazareth with a circuitous reasoning about why he was also of Bethlehem—he’d have been directly of Bethlehem. His name wouldn’t have been Jesus with a completely circuitous explanation about why “Emmanuel” also counts as his name, his name would have been directly Emmanuel.
These all seem to me to be false dichotomies, which assume that it’s impossible either for a single creator to have embroidered their story as they went along, or for multiple creators or editors to have changed the story at different points in time.
Nor do I know of any fictional characters that are so deliberately placed recent history and yet their existence is believed by their contemporaries as real. If the Christian movement had began in the 1st century, and yet its founder placed as having lived in 3rd century BC, that explanation might make sense. But he was placed as a contemporary, and expected to be believed to be real. You don’t do that with fictional founders of your order.
As long as it’s far enough away in time and space that your claims can’t be checked, what difference does it make? This seems to me like a post hoc justification for believing the Bible story, not an argument that anyone would have come up with if they didn’t have a pet hypothesis to defend.
Also we don’t have any evidence that Jesus’ contemporaries believed he was real. The reports of people believing Jesus was real come from long after Jesus supposedly died.
Nor do I know of any fictional characters that are so deliberately placed recent history and yet their existence is believed by their contemporaries as real.
“Throughout most of Chinese history, the Yellow Emperor and the other ancient sages were considered to be real historical figures. Their historicity started to be questioned in the 1920s by historians like Gu Jiegang, one of the founders of the Doubting Antiquity School in China. In their attempts to prove that the earliest figures of Chinese history were mythological, Gu and his followers argued that these ancient sages were originally gods who were later depicted as humans by the rationalist intellectuals of the Warring States period. Yang Kuan (楊寬), a member of the same historiographical current, noted that only in the late Warring States had the Yellow Emperor started to be described as the first ruler of China. Yang thus argued that Huangdi was a late transformation of Shangdi, the supreme god of the Shang pantheon.
[snip]
Most scholars now agree that the Yellow Emperor was originally a deity who was later transformed into a human figure.”
I said placed in recent history, and contemporaries. The Yellow Emperor seems to have been placed millenia in the past, compared to when belief in him existed.
The proper comparison of the Yellow Emperor would be someone like Noah or Enoch—someone placed many centuries or even millenia in the past of when he was known to be believed in—and I certainly would consider Noah and Enoch to be most likely fictions, never to have been based on real people at all.
Hm. Good point. I’m unwilling to give up the search quite yet, however, because I feel the boundary between myth and reality is so fragile in the past that an example like what you’re looking for must surely exist.
One gets a bit closer with Cú Chulainn and some other figures from the Ulster Cycle; the gap there is merely seven or eight centuries instead of two millennia.
Seven or eight centuries is an awfully long time in a culture that doesn’t keep good records.
I remember reading with some surprise a transcription of some tribal history of a group of Plains Indians, which ended with the assertion that their forefathers had been so living there for “at least seven generations, perhaps more.” In reality, it had been much, much longer, they simply hadn’t been keeping track.
These all seem to me to be false dichotomies, which assume that it’s impossible either for a single creator to have embroidered their story as they went along, or for multiple creators or editors to have changed the story at different points in time.
According to the messianic prophesies (of which Jesus fulfilled practically none even according to generous interpretations) the messiah was supposed to be born in the land of David, which was Bethlehem. Being from somewhere else was inconvenient for a prospective messiah, so his followers had an incentive to claim that he was from there even if he really wasn’t. The hypothesis of a real cult leader whose followers wanted to believe he was the messiah predicts the nonsensical census story better than the hypothesis of an imaginary figure who was invented to be a messiah; much simpler and more convenient to simply say that his family was from Bethlehem.
These all seem to me to be false dichotomies, which assume that it’s impossible either for a single creator to have embroidered their story as they went along, or for multiple creators or editors to have changed the story at different points in time.
You know there’s no impossibility—that’s why I said “I assign less than 5% probability”, I didn’t say “I assign 0% probability”. I’m talking about the probabilities of each scenario. Conditional and prior.
If you considered that, and you didn’t treat “completely fictional” as the default, needing extraordinary evidence to decide against it, but having hardly any evidence in its favour, I think you’d reach the same conclusion as I
You know there’s no impossibility—that’s why I said “I assign less than 5% probability”, I didn’t say “I assign 0% probability”. I’m talking about the probabilities of each scenario. Conditional and prior.
In that case substitute “highly improbable” for “impossible” in the grandparent and exactly the same argument still goes through. Why is it improbable for a cult leader to make up a story, and then later decide that they need to embroider the story further to reconcile it with some existing myths? It seems to me your argument-form also fits the following argument: “If Jesus was fictional then the Bible would say he was born at Christmas, but since it doesn’t say Jesus was born at Christmas this is evidence he was real”.
I just don’t see why it’s in any way improbable that one bunch of people made up the Jesus myth, then another bunch of people made an editorial decision of convenience that Jesus was “the reason for the season”. In the same way I see absolutely nothing improbable about one person making up Jesus the Nazarene preacher, and then the same person or someone else later saying “Oh and by the way, he also fulfilled all these different prophecies in convoluted ways”.
If you considered that, and you didn’t treat “completely fictional” as the default, needing extraordinary evidence to decide against it, but having hardly any evidence in its favour, I think you’d reach the same conclusion as I.
The idea that “completely fictional” is the default position is a straw man argument. I lean towards the completely fictional interpretation because of the total lack of supporting documentary evidence, which I would find very surprising if he had existed given the enormous effort that has been dedicated to finding such evidence.
As others have pointed out, Jesus wasn’t even an uncommon name and itinerant preachers weren’t even an uncommon phenomenon. Yet we don’t even have a decent bit of documentary evidence that could be a false positive. The prior probability that Jesus had some kind of factual basis is not incredibly low, but it’s very low after we’ve conducted a major search for such evidence and come up empty.
Similarly the reason we are very sure that vaccines don’t cause autism is that the hypothesis has been studied exhaustively and absolutely no sign of causation has been found. It’s not that “vaccines are harmless” is the default position, it’s that evidence for the non-default position has been searched for at great length and no such evidence has been found.
As others have pointed out, Jesus wasn’t even an uncommon name
For real or for fictional people?
and itinerant preachers weren’t even an uncommon phenomenon.
Doesn’t that mean you should increase the estimation of the prior you have for him being real? You seem to be using it in the opposite direction.
What’s the average amount of documentary evidence that an average real such itinerant preacher leave behind, so that we compare it with the amount of documentary evidence that Jesus left behind?
Unless Jesus left behind less “documentary evidence” than the average iterenant preacher, that’s not argument against his existence.
Why is it improbable for a cult leader to make up a story, and then later decide that they need to embroider the story further to reconcile it with some existing myths?
What is unbelievable is that he wouldn’t have made a better messianic story in the first place.
I see what kind of stories cult leaders make, and the Jesus story doesn’t fit in with them, not at all. Cult leaders seem to make stories of visions they had, like Paul did, or they make stories of people hundreds and thousands of years in the past, like Ron Hubbard did. Or both of the above, like Joseph Smith did.
But mostly those stories fit in with a specific message they want to impart.
The Jesus story makes sense only as the embroidered/enhanced story of an actual person; which has a basic outline (basically the fact of his crucifixion) that’s unchangeable because it’s known among the core believers; but no coherent singular message. So sometimes it’s about forgiveness and sometimes it’s about faith, and sometimes it’s about patience until God’s wrath smites the wicked. So they widely differ on interpretation but not on core events—everyone agrees that he was called “Jesus of Nazareth”, everyone agrees he got crucified during the rule of Pontius Pilate. Everyone agrees he had disciples and a living mother when he died. But nobody’s quite sure what it all meant, and everyone’s a bit uncomfortable with all the ways some parts of his story don’t make sense, and then some completely fictional elements are added.
The idea that “completely fictional” is the default position is a straw man argument. I lean towards the completely fictional interpretation because of the total lack of supporting documentary evidence
That’s what making it the default position means, no? Because lack of enough evidence (according to you) that he was real, you treat his fictionality as a default position, even though you don’t have any evidence in favour of it—no evidence in favour of the existence of that supposed “cult leader” who authored him; and yet somehow was completely unknown to history.
Who authored Jesus? With what purpose? Why didn’t Jesus life have a more coherent message than it did, if he so authored it?
That’s what making it the default position means, no? Because lack of enough evidence (according to you) that he was real, you treat his fictionality as a default position, even though you don’t have any evidence in favour of it—no evidence in favour of the existence of that supposed “cult leader” who authored him; and yet somehow was completely unknown to history.
Perhaps you can explain where your reasoning differs from mine using the vaccination/autism example? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but absence of evidence after a search that should have found evidence if there was any evidence to be found is evidence of absence.
I don’t have a default position that there is nobody on the footpath outside my house. However if I look outside at the footpath and I can see that there is nobody there, then that is strong evidence in favour of the hypothesis that there is nobody there.
Regarding your other arguments, I do not find the argument that the Jesus story is exceptional because it has elements X, Y, Z etc. not found in other messianic stories persuasive because it is a highly general argument. You can always find something in your favourite story which is not in other commonly-known stories and claim that this is evidence your story is exceptional.
The fact that some elements of the story are relatively constant is not persuasive evidence of a unitary historical founder either, any more than the fact that the basic story of King Arthur or Batman stays the same despite many reinterpretations is evidence that there must have been a real person behind those myths.
Perhaps you can explain where your reasoning differs from mine using the vaccination/autism example?
I don’t have sufficient knowledge of medicine to have a discussion about vaccination and autism. Either way, it’s also an irrelevant discussion.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
Of course it is. But it has be weighed accordingly.
but absence of evidence after a search that should have found evidence if there was any evidence to be found is evidence of absence.
You’ve not given me any reason that it “should have found evidence”. I’ve asked you how much documentary evidence the average itinerant preacher left behind. Even ones that were relatively well-known at their time. How can you say that Jesus should have left documentary evidence, when you don’t know if other itinerant preachers left “documentary evidence”?
I don’t have a default position that there is nobody on the footpath outside my house.
I have. It’s the default position because most moments there’s nobody on the footpath outside my house. The prior for it is higher therefore.
What was the more common occurrence though in the 1st century AD: real itinerant preachers, or stories about fictional itinerant preachers who were nonetheless believed to be real? Where are the evidence that such fictional stories existed?
Answer: the former. Thus the default hypothesis should be that Jesus was a real itinerant preacher—because the prior for that is significantly higher.
Regarding your other arguments, I do not find the argument that the Jesus story is exceptional because it has elements X, Y, Z etc. not found in other messianic stories persuasive because it is a highly general argument. You can always find something in your favourite story which is not in other commonly-known stories and claim that this is evidence your story is exceptional.
You’re disregarding everything I say. I’m not saying anything is exceptional in the Jesus story. It’s not any more exceptional than the Mohammed story, or the Joseph Smith story. It seems to me a very ordinary story if it’s based on an actual human being, an actual preacher/faith healer/etc.
It’d be an extraordinary story if it was completely fictional, because other than some specific fictional elements ( the humble, danger-filled but also miracle-filled birth—following the mold of Moses/Perseus, etc—the deification/glorification after death ) it doesn’t follow the mold of such stories at all.
The fact that some elements of the story are relatively constant is not persuasive evidence of a unitary historical founder either, any more than the fact that the basic story of King Arthur or Batman stays the same despite many reinterpretations is evidence that there must have been a real person behind those myths.
Actually the story of Arthur has significantly changed, between the original welsh tradition and the time he was enhanced to King of the Bretons by Geoffrey of Monmouth.
But more importantly, in those stories the most crucial elements remain the same. Batman fights against criminals dressed as a giant bat, motivated by the death of his parents. Robin Hood leads a band of merry men, steals from the rich, and sometimes gives to the poor. Hercules was a monster-slaying son of Zeus with enormous strength. The core of the story is summarized in the relevant elements.
Also the prior of successful costumed superheroes being fictional is much higher than them being real.
In the Jesus story the most non-meaningful elements remain the same, but the ones that would be most widely known: e.g. he was of Nazareth. The public crucifixion. There’s no inherent meaning or moral in that—not nearly as obvious a meaning as “The Heavens themselves proclaimed the significance of his birth by having a new star appear in the heavens above him”—whose analogies we see in the semi-deification of the Kims in North Korea. But because the crucifixion was a public event, it had to be present in every story and be given meaning it did not inherently possess.
You’ve not given me any reason that it “should have found evidence”. I’ve asked you how much documentary evidence the average itinerant preacher left behind. Even ones that were relatively well-known at their time. How can you say that Jesus should have left documentary evidence, when you don’t know if other itinerant preachers left “documentary evidence”?
If the historical Jesus was an “average itinerant preacher” then he isn’t the Biblical Jesus in any meaningful sense. The widely-believed story is that Jesus was notable and politically significant in his own lifetime, founded Christianity in his own lifetime in the form of a number of followers who knew him personally and knew he was real, and that modern Christianity is a linear descendant of that original group.
There’s simply no evidence of any such person or any such group of personal followers. That seems to me far more consistent with Jesus being made up out of whole cloth after his purported life and death.
You’re disregarding everything I say. I’m not saying anything is exceptional in the Jesus story.
In my terms you are saying that. You have said twice now that you find the Jesus story plausible because it has elements that you think would make it exceptional amongst made-up stories of miracle-working messiahs. My point is that you could use the exact same argument for any such story just by picking out the story elements which are unique to whichever story you wish to privilege.
As for the comparison with Batman, Robin Hood and so forth it seems to me that your division of story elements into “meaningful”/”core”/”crucial” and not-meaningful/core/crucial is post hoc. To the Christians of, say, 80AD it might well have been that Jesus being crucified and being from Nazareth were just as much a part of his story as murdered parents and a bat suit are to Batman. My recollection was that crucifixion imagery was a regular motif in Christian thought by the second century at the latest, so it became an important part of the story very quickly.
I think a lot of Christians uncritically buy an implicit argument that goes like this: The Christ story got increasingly ridiculous over time, as demonstrated by the increasingly silly things in the later Gospels. Therefore if you draw a line back through the graph of ridiculousness over time you’ll eventually get to the origin point which will be a real story with zero ridiculousness. The problem is that the origin point could equally well have been a fictional story with a low level of ridiculousness, and given the total lack of evidence from Jesus’ time that he or his followers existed that seems more likely to me.
If the historical Jesus was an “average itinerant preacher” then he isn’t the Biblical Jesus in any meaningful sense.
If there was a real guy called Jesus of Nazareth around the early 1st century, who was crucified during Pontius Pilate, and his disciples and followers that formed the core of the religious movement later called Christianity, to argue that Jesus was nonetheless “completely fictional” becomes a mere twisting of words that miscommunicates its intent.
At this point no matter how much evidence appear for a historical Jesus, you can argue that he’s fictional because he doesn’t match well enough the story of the Bible. Well, yeah, ofcourse he won’t match up well enough the story of the Bible, because the story of the bible is filled with lies and embellishments. But at the bottomline either one or more people sat down and thought “We’ll make up a character called Jesus of Nazareth, and have him preach to people and get executed by crucifixion by the Romans”, or there was a real Jesus of Nazareth who preached to people and got executed by crucifixion by the Romans.
As for the comparison with Batman, Robin Hood and so forth it seems to me that your division of story elements into “meaningful”/”core”/”crucial” and not-meaningful/core/crucial is post hoc.
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Well they’re not.
To the Christians of, say, 80AD it might well have been that Jesus being crucified and being from Nazareth were just as much a part of his story as murdered parents and a bat suit are to Batman.
I’m getting tired, and this is becoming ludicrous. You’re not telling me why these things were important, if they weren’t real. Why would someone create such horrible ill-fitting to prophecy elements as the name “Jesus” and the location “Nazareth”, when it was the name “Emmanuel” and the location “Bethlehem” that were the significant ones? What is the meaning of the crucifixion? Christian still don’t agree on this, only saying that it is for some reason part of the divine plan, but they don’t have a reason on why.
Why? Why? Why? If you can’t answer that, then the simplest explanation is that the name “Jesus of Nazareth” and the crucifixion were not elements that were authored, they were elements they were stuck with, because they were real
I think a lot of Christians uncritically
I’m not a Christian, I’m an atheist. That doesn’t mean I have to ignore what the evidence tells me.
And Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure. So was Mohammed. And Socrates too. That’s what the evidence tell us.
Why would someone create such horrible ill-fitting to prophecy elements as the name “Jesus” and the location “Nazareth”, when it was the name “Emmanuel” and the location “Bethlehem” that were the significant ones?
Maybe it’s down to all the fantasy stories I’ve read, where prophesies are almost always fulfilled in an unintuitive way (although the Greek oracles were like this too,) but I’ve always found the theological explanation for Jesus’s name entirely satisfying. Emmanuel means “God With Us,” and if Jesus was really God incarnate, it would be an entirely appropriate descriptor; his “true name” as it were. And in any case, I’d have a hard time taking seriously the straightforward fulfillment of a prophesy which could so easily be fulfilled by any pair of parents with particularly high hopes for their kid, or by any preacher who decided to pop up in an unfamiliar location and start going by a different name.
In any case, there are already more than enough messianic prophesies to deal with that Jesus never came close to fulfilling in any sense. The entire doctrine of the Second Coming was born mainly as an effort to reconcile all the large scale, unmistakeable achievements that were prophesied of the Messiah with all the things Jesus never did, and the whole census story has about the same degree of plausibility as “some anonymous black man did it while I was in the bathroom”.
If there was a real guy called Jesus of Nazareth around the early 1st century, who was crucified during Pontius Pilate, and his disciples and followers that formed the core of the religious movement later called Christianity, to argue that Jesus was nonetheless “completely fictional” becomes a mere twisting of words that miscommunicates its intent.
Isn’t that just what I said? I contrasted such a Jesus-figure with one who did not do those things, and said that the Jesus-figure you describe would count as a historical Jesus and one that did not do those things would not.
At this point no matter how much evidence appear for a historical Jesus, you can argue that he’s fictional because he doesn’t match well enough the story of the Bible.
When I start doing that then you can legitimately criticise me for it. Until then you are blaming me for something I haven’t done yet.
I’m getting tired, and this is becoming ludicrous. You’re not telling me why these things were important, if they weren’t real.
There could be many reasons, but the most obvious possibility is that Paul (or whoever) made up a story with those elements, and those who came afterwards had to work within that framework to maintain suspension of disbelief. If you’ve been proclaiming on street corners for years that you are followers of “Jesus of Nazareth” it could well be hard to suddenly rebrand yourself as followers of “Jesus of Bethlehem” when you figured out you’d have broader appeal if you claimed your messiah was the foretold Jewish messiah. They might wish with hindsight that they’d said he’d been born somewhere else to different parents with a different name, but you can’t change your whole brand identity overnight. That doesn’t mean the story is true, it just means that the person who made it up didn’t perfectly foresee the later opportunities to piggyback on other myths.
If you think about it, the argument that they must have had to keep those elements because they were real doesn’t actually make any sense. From the late first century onwards neither the people making up the Christian mythology nor their audience would have had any means to check whether those elements were factual or not. There would have been constraints on their ability to change their story, but historicity would not have been one of those constraints.
I’m not a Christian, I’m an atheist. That doesn’t mean I have to ignore what the evidence tells me.
I’m still not clear why you assume the zero point of the graph is a real story, as opposed to a made-up story. The fact that they changed it later isn’t evidence it’s real, just evidence that you can’t turn a cult on a dime.
Isn’t that just what I said? I contrasted such a Jesus-figure with one who did not do those things, and said that the Jesus-figure you describe would count as a historical Jesus and one that did not do those things would not.
I don’t understand. My version just has four elements: being an itinerant preacher, being called “Jesus of Nazareth”, being crucified by the Romans, and having his followers begin the Christian movement.
You already conceded there were many itinerant preacher, so that’s nothing special that we’d expect documentary evidence about for any specific one of them.
You already conceded that the name “Jesus” was commonplace, so there’s nothing special about that either.
We know as a matter of historical fact that the the Christian movement thought themselves as followers of Jesus of Nazareth. That’ s indisputable.
So the only thing that’s so extraordinary that you expect “documentary evidence” for you to you believe it happened, was that there was a crucifixion of this person? You don’t believe crucifixions happened in Judaea, is that it?
What exactly is this extraordinary hypothesis that you disbelieve in without the presence of documentary evidence?
There could be many reasons, but the most obvious possibility is that Paul (or whoever) made up a story with those elements,
And again you can’t explain why those elements were inserted. You just don’t have an explanation for them if they were fictional, you just call it a mistake on part of the unknown authors and move on.
Cult leaders don’t make up stories about fictional people with their own divine missions, they make up stories about their own visions, their own supposed divine missions. Show me a cult leader that ever invented other fictional people to be the messiahs, instead of themselves.
You aren’t addressing any of my points, you have just written your bottomline.
I’m still not clear why you assume the zero point of the graph is a real story, as opposed to a made-up story.
That’s very simple.
Besides all the arguments I’ve already given you about none of the story make at all sense as fictional, and goes against everything we know about how religious groups write their stories, there’s the plain fact that when asking if a person that’s supposed to have lived in existed for real or not. I give significant weight to the beliefs on the subject of the people that lived in his/her time, or as near it as we can get.
I haven’t seen “documentary evidence” that Socrates existed. It’s just that his contemporaries believed him to exist, and his life story doesn’t make sense as a fictional story. Same with Jesus and his own near-contemporaries.
Also we don’t have any evidence that Jesus’ contemporaries believed he was real. The reports of people believing Jesus was real come from long after Jesus supposedly died.
And considerable evidence of belief in the first century that Jesus was not corporeal, but an ideal (docetism). This was a major point of theological contention. The notion of a human Jesus did not achieve popularity until well into the second century.
An alternative, unfalsifiable hypothesis is that someone existed who played a causal role in the founding of Christianity but that they were so boring they left no trace in history and hence bore very little resemblance to the figure described in the Bible.
Someone—many people—played a causal role in the founding of Christianity, since Christianity was, in fact, founded [1]. Does modern scholarship have anything to say about what did happen to start Christianity?
[1] I have just thought up an imaginary Christian heresy that claims that Christianity was in fact never founded at all. God planted it as an already well-developed sapling some time in the late 1st or early 2nd century “AD”, giving everyone involved false memories of how it had started. That’s why there’s no historical evidence from Jesus’ lifetime.
Paul of Tarsus is assumed to have existed. The only evidence for him is his works in the Bible—seven written by the same author, a few more by this author with others’ text mixed in, a few clearly not written by this author—but this is evidence that one person, who called himself Paul, wrote these things. I suppose it’s possible he was an entirely fictional construct, but scholars tend to go with “dude wrote this stuff.” Much like Socrates (and unlike Jesus), his existence is secondary to his body of work.
“Given that Jesus was supposedly a very noteworthy figure who died in a noteworthy way founding a major religion, the total absence of any historical record of him or anyone substantially resembling him would be very surprising if he was real.”
Documentary evidence that dates from the time of Jesus’ supposed life and death, which describes a religious leader called Jesus who started a splinter sect of Judaism would do it.
I wouldn’t be in any way upset if such evidence emerged tomorrow, but I think it’s very unlikely. Pious researchers have been looking very hard for a very long time for even a shred of contemporary evidence for a historical Jesus that isn’t forged, and they’ve come up with nothing so far. When people have looked long and hard for evidence and found none the probability that there is no evidence to find gets very high.
There were quite a few troublemaking preachers who fell afoul of the law in Judaea at the time, many of whom were called Jesus—it was a very common name at the time.
However, one of the big problems with assuming one of these fellows (or another we have no documentation of) was the human seed for Christianity is the early Christian tradition of docetism—that Christ had no corporeal existence at all, and was just an idea. Paul of Tarsus certainly seems to think along these lines, despite the later caution against said notion in John.
This also helps explain the curious lack of non-Biblical evidence for such a person, in histories where one would expect it.
It is often noted by apologists that scholars think there’s enough evidence to say there was a human seed for Christianity. However, “scholar” in this context is a weasel word—most are Christians and theologians, who would have tremendous trouble (personal and professional) coming to the opposite conclusion at all. The epistemological standards accepted in Biblical history in particular are generally bloody awful and an embarrassment to other ancient historians.
For a pile of stuff on this issue I recommend the RationalWiki article, which I have worked extensively on. (One of the other main contributors just so happens to be an atheist who was a student of Biblical history.)
(I find this stuff fascinating, if only for the psychopathology. And, as such strident atheists as Mencken, Dawkins and Hitchens have noted, you can’t be highly literate in English without knowing the KJV, much as you need to know Shakespeare and Greek mythology. The trouble is that … well, it’s like you wanted to study the Odyssey or the Iliad but the only people to learn from were people who (a) actually believed in all the gods named therein (b) really wanted you to as well.)
We have pretty good records of letters from Paul from the second half of the first century (as well as a bunch of frauds, but AFAIK there are several that stand up under analysis as being written by the same person at a very early date), who (in several of those letters) was adamant that his sect believed in an individual Christ in the flesh. So if the legend of the historical Jesus sprang from whole cloth, it did so pretty quickly- not to mention the synoptic gospels, which the most skeptical of scholars still date to around 100 AD.
More generally, I’d caution fellow atheists against getting drawn into the existence-of-Jesus debate in meatspace: unless you’ve done a lot of relevant study (and why on earth would you?) you won’t be able to point to basic evidence that your interlocutor has heard of, only to the statements of experts that they won’t trust. Better to say “Well, I’m not sure there’s enough evidence even to conclude that there was a historical Jesus- but even granting that there was, and that there came to be a group of followers convinced of his divinity, that’s still nowhere near the kind of evidence to make Christianity a viable hypothesis, compared to the hypothesis that it was just a rabidly successful example of what happens within cults.” That’s a much better place to draw up battle lines, IMO.
The overarching problem you outline in your second paragraph—the more general problem, faced in many fields, of having to compress a degree into a few sentences to properly answer an objection—is sadly well known. This is why the RationalWiki article (which is still patchy as heck) is a sea of nuance and caveats—it attempts to get it right in less than a book for an audience who are frequently just realising that there’s actually historical thought on this matter (and look how that line of inquiry worked out for Lukeprog!). I’m very much looking forward to Richard Carrier’s book on the historicity of Jesus later this year. (And not just so I can crib furiously from it.)
That stuff is very interesting. Your point about motivate teachers is fruitful. I’m adjusting my belief that there was a Jesus. That said, I learned of the historical Jesus thesis from my Rabbi, who I don’t think had a motivation to be pro-Jesus. And he didn’t sugarcoat religion with me (he introduced me to such anti-religious ideas like the problem of evil and the problem of miracles).
That said, I can’t give very much weight to docetism, (or Gnosticism generally) because they lost the ideological/theological battle. (Wikipedia is quite coy, saying that “some Christians” think it’s heretical. The Nicene Creed is a flat-out rejection of docetism, so I think it’s safe to say most Christians reject it).
And generally, I don’t expect much historical evidence of Jesus, because he wasn’t that important in his lifetime. As ArisKatsaris says
There exist only two non-biblical pieces of evidence for the existence of Pontius Pilate—and he was the damn Prefect of Judaea for Cthulhu’s sake. How much “direct evidence” do you expect for a rather Jewish-cult-leader, one of possibly dozen such groups the time?
In other words, the assertion in Mark that Jesus was followed around by scribes is a pious lie that can easily be explained without asserting that Jesus never existed.
That docetism lost out isn’t really the key point.
Consider the general case: there’s some property P that is observable (for example, having a physical body). At time T, there’s no agreement that I have P. At time T+ 200 years, there’s agreement that I had P at T.
It seems to me that the lack of agreement about P at T is important evidence here, regardless of what agreement other people come to about P at (T+200).
The people arguing not-P are theological mystics, who have substantial reason to assert not-P despite any observation, That is, a substantial amount of the motivation for asserting not-P can be explained without reference to observation.
I’m on shakier ground on the specific contents of the theological position, but Wikipedia leaves the impression was that the dispute was not about what was observed, but what was actually there. It seems consistent with docetism that Pilate believed there was a seditious preacher named Jesus, who he ordered crucified. Docetism just says that the image Pilate saw was an illusion, not a man (or even matter).
Ah! I hadn’t realized that. Yeah, if the docetics were making the same claims about the observable world, then my argument above is irrelevant.
Not quite. It’s not irrelevant, it just becomes an argument in favor of historical Jesus, rather than against it.
If a lack of agreement among early Christian about the observable world was relevant as evidence AGAINST the existence of a historical Jesus, then by Law of Probability, agreement about it must constitute evidence in its favour.
Sure. Needn’t be anywhere near that complicated, though.… the existence of people who believe in the existence of a historical Jesus is evidence of a historical Jesus, albeit not particularly strong evidence. If it weren’t for those people, we wouldn’t even be talking about it, any more than we’re talking about a historical Clark Kent.
(Restricting myself to two quibbles, for the sake of time):
I believe your description of Docetism gives the wrong idea; Docetism (as I learned it) did not say that Jesus was not there at all, but rather merely asserted that his corporeality was an illusion. The Docetists did not think of Jesus as “only an idea”, but as somebody who staged a form of divine theater, as it were. (Research “Christological Heresies” for more on Docetism and its cousins.)
Quibble #2: not all biblical scholarship is as bad as you say—much of it is quite rigorous and would be right at home in a secular university anthropology department.
Documentary evidence that dates from the time of Jesus’ supposed life and death, which describes a religious leader called Jesus who started a splinter sect of Judaism would do it.
What documentary evidence for any other religious leaders that started other splinter sects of Judaism at the time do you have?
If you don’t have any direct evidence for any specific one of those leaders, does that mean there didn’t exist any such splinter sects at the time?
Thank you. This is a concise representation of the general objection I was going to make.
Finding evidence of ANYTHING in that era that meets modern standards is often very difficult, if not impossible. Nearly all history from that era can be, and is, challenged.
I have yet to see a statement from PhilosophyTutor justifying his choice for a standard of evidence on this question.
“Very surprised”, indeed. The thousands of first-century Christian martyrs would be very surprised, too at this unfortunate news from our PhilosophyTutor.
FeatherlessBiped update: I withdraw the argument. As David_Gerard notes, it is not a real argument.
However, people do memetically-wise genetically-foolish things (i.e. die for their beliefs) all the time and for lots of reasons. So the Christian martyrs are not strong evidence that biblical Jesus is true (whatever one means by “biblical Jesus is true”).
Wikipedia has decent material answering your implied question in parentheses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_myth_theory
See also the related articles. Cheers!
My experience with Homo Sapiens (from reading about repressive regimes) is that they will say anything to keep from being killed.
If somebody holds a gun to your head and says, “all you have to say is ‘I just made up this little story about my invisible friend, Joe Bob’, and I will set you free”, what are you gonna say? If you’d made it up, why not admit it, and go free?
This was the situation the apostles and other 1st century martyrs faced during the persecutions. Yet they all went to their deaths. That doesn’t impress you?
The apostles choosing death over renouncing Jesus is a popular meme, but we don’t actually have a historical basis for supposing that it happened.
As Richard Carrier notes, of the little evidence we have for early Christian martyrdom, none of it was as a choice between recanting a belief in Jesus and dying. They were simply killed on trumped up legal charges from which recanting would not have saved them.
Certainly there have been people who have chosen to die rather than recant their beliefs, in plenty of different religions. It wouldn’t even be particularly strange if early Christians did so, and it’s certainly possible that it happened, although it would not be significant as evidence for Christianity, for reasons that others have already addressed. But it appears that all our stories of this actually happening to any of the apostles were simply made up somewhere along the line by people who were in no position to know.
That may be what the majority does, but history is filled with people willing to die for their beliefs. From the Maccabees against Assyrian Greeks to Falun Gong against modern China, martyrdom is not all that historically unusual. And the beliefs supporting martyrdom are so blatantly contradictory that they can’t all be right.
Moreover, martyrdom is not particularly Christian. For example, Rabbi Akiva was a great Jewish martyr.
This argument is fallacious and does not address historicity in any way. People throughout history have, in fact, died for beliefs which turned out to be false, deceptive, or poorly understood; such as suicide bombers being rewarded with virgins. Just because these men so firmly believed that their beliefs were true that they were willing to die for them does not give their beliefs any credibility. Here is an extensive list of refutations to this terrible argument.
Even this is making the generous assumption that the martyrs in question even existed. Some martyr-stories are known to be completely fabricated; the hagiography of St. Catherine of Alexandria, for example, is a partial rip-off of the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, the pagan philosopher who was skinned to death with tiles (by Christians!).
I think you’re overestimating the degree to which 1st century martyrs were killed for religious reasons and not more generic treasonous revolutionary talk or anti-statism.
Not particularly.
Please don’t do this. The sarcasm and weak argumentation. This is beneath the standards of LessWrong. Millions of first-century people would be very surprised at lots of things that are nonetheless true.
Please forgive my inappropriate style. I am new, here.
For what it’s worth, I agree with your comment at 4:26 am, above, calling for a <5 % chance that Jesus was completely fictitious. Although I am Catholic, I acknowledge that by certain standards of proof, the existence of the Jesus as described in the Gospels is uncertain.
Personal biographical note: 30+ years ago, I called myself an atheist.
Those pesky standards that don’t consist of “faith”. ;)
Winky-face noted and appreciated!
But seriously, by my accounting, every standard of evidence I know includes an element of faith. The only differences between them are (a) what is taken on faith and (b) how credulous that faith is.
Namely, I find faith elements in believing:
first/second/third-hand reports, even by trained, neutral observers
expert consensus
single expert opinion
by contradiction
the evidence standards of American civil and criminal trials (note the plural, “standardS”. The standards are different between them.)
induction, including (perhaps) mathematical induction
“engineering quality” proof
“mathematician quality” proof
My professional practice as an aircraft mishap investigator is to identify and apply the highest feasible standard from the above list, based on what information is available. “Best practice” in this industry dictates that selection and application of a standard of evidence is a matter of prudential judgement, based on the consequences and probabilities of being wrong, the resources available (evidence, time and $), while being scrupulously open about ones methods.
On historical questions about events of 20 centuries ago, the quality of evidence is not very good. About pretty much everything. What we are left with is Bayesian stuff. Anybody who goes to 0% or 100% draws the raised eyebrow from me. :-)
This is, in practice, a form of equivocation between epsilon uncertainty and sufficient uncertainty to take seriously as an argument.
There is technically no such thing as certainty.
Therefore, the uncertainty in [argument I don’t like] is non-negligible.
Step 2 is the tricky one. I suggest reviewing But There’s Still A Chance, Right? Humans are, in general, really bad at feeling the difference between epsilon uncertainty and sufficient uncertainty to be worth taking notice of.
I reviewed your link—thanks, that was interesting.
Maybe we’re in agreement. Let me try a more audacious assertion...
All I was saying was that practical demonstration or persuasion takes place within an unquestioned frame of reference. For purposes of the topic at hand, I would say, for example, that using the available evidence, I could convince 9 of 12 jurors under American rules of evidence and jury instructions applicable to civil trials, that Jesus of Nazareth was a flesh and blood historical figure. I think I could do this every week for a year and win 90% of the time. If we change the rules to “establish it beyond a reasonable doubt to 12 of 12 jurors”, then my success rate goes way down, obviously.
(Of course, I am assuming that I make no intentional misrepresentations and call only expert witnesses with recognized technical qualifications and unimpeachable character. I.e., no “funny stuff”.)
In other words, I am claiming to not be anywhere in the neighborhood of epsilon.
I’m almost entirely unconvinced (somewhat greater than epsilon) that’s a useful measure—humans can be convinced of just about anything. But, an upvote for suggesting a measure. Still thinking of what I’d accept as a measure.
Indeed. They pretty much fail at thinking.
There is absolutely no direct evidence that dates from the time Jesus supposedly lived that any such religious leader was born, lived or died except for one contemporary reference to a rabbi called Jesus with a brother called James. Given that Jesus was not supposed to be a rabbi, and that both Jesus and James were common names from the time, and that Jesus had several other brothers and sisters who were also named in the Bible multiplying the possibilities for a false positive substantially, this is very weak evidence.
Given that Jesus was supposedly a very noteworthy figure who died in a noteworthy way founding a major religion, the total absence of any historical record of him or anyone substantially resembling him would be very surprising if he was real.
Given that lack of evidence the most parsimonious explanation is just that Jesus is fictional. An alternative, unfalsifiable hypothesis is that someone existed who played a causal role in the founding of Christianity but that they were so boring they left no trace in history and hence bore very little resemblance to the figure described in the Bible.
Not just the first century ones, I would say, but this is not evidence.
There exist only two non-biblical pieces of evidence for the existence of Pontius Pilate—and he was the damn Prefect of Judaea for Cthulhu’s sake. How much “direct evidence” do you expect for a rather Jewish-cult-leader, one of possibly dozen such groups the time?
So is it just his noteworthiness that you doubt, not his existence?
No, that’s a completely unbelievable explanation. If he was fictional he’d not have been of Nazareth with a circuitous reasoning about why he was also of Bethlehem—he’d have been directly of Bethlehem. His name wouldn’t have been Jesus with a completely circuitous explanation about why “Emmanuel” also counts as his name, his name would have been directly Emmanuel.
Nor do I know of any fictional characters that are so deliberately placed recent history and yet their existence is believed by their contemporaries as real. If the Christian movement had began in the 1st century, and yet its founder placed as having lived in 3rd century BC, that explanation might make sense. But he was placed as a contemporary, and expected to be believed to be real. You don’t do that with fictional founders of your order.
Jesus was a real historical figure. His being fictional just doesn’t make sense—same way that Mohammed being fictional doesn’t make sense—or do you also believe Mohammed fictional?
“There is more evidence for Jesus than X” turns out not to be such a good argument either.
And there is serious historical thought that Mohammed, too, was fictional. The Wikipedia article maps out the scanty evidence.
The real problem with either question is the excessive interest in getting the “right” answer. If e.g. Socrates turned out to be a fictional character invented by Plato, philosophy wouldn’t care. If Gautama Buddha turned out to be fictional, Buddhism wouldn’t care. But Jesus or Mohammed existing or not is a REALLY BIG DEAL, and we really don’t have a great deal of evidence in either case. Considerably less for Jesus, and a lack of evidence where it would have been expected had he existed.
Yeah, that’s a ludicrous idea too. Some people seem to think that “fictional” is the null-hypothesis, to be believed by default unless there’s an extraordinary amount of evidence to the contrary. This is nonsense: Fictional characters of historical influence aren’t more common than real people of historical influence.
This is bias at its most obvious.
If you believe that someone made a fictional character up, and then he made thousands of near-contemporaries believe in his existence, that’s a rather extraordinary hypothesis, which has a very low prior given that nobody else seems to have ever managed this feat ever.
Muhammed existed. Jesus of Nazareth existed. The evidence are overwhelmingly in their favour—including the various bits of inelegancies and clumsinesses in their life-stories that only real-life people display, not fictional characters constructed at their time-period. And there’s not a single piece of evidence that someone authored them as fictional characters.
Right in quotes? Are we now pretending that truth has a subjective value now? This is about being less wrong, and people that assume “fiction” to be the default hypothesis, and that discount religious texts as evidence just because they are religious texts, they are more wrong than other people.
Socrates existed too.
These all seem to me to be false dichotomies, which assume that it’s impossible either for a single creator to have embroidered their story as they went along, or for multiple creators or editors to have changed the story at different points in time.
As long as it’s far enough away in time and space that your claims can’t be checked, what difference does it make? This seems to me like a post hoc justification for believing the Bible story, not an argument that anyone would have come up with if they didn’t have a pet hypothesis to defend.
Also we don’t have any evidence that Jesus’ contemporaries believed he was real. The reports of people believing Jesus was real come from long after Jesus supposedly died.
How about Huangdi?
I said placed in recent history, and contemporaries. The Yellow Emperor seems to have been placed millenia in the past, compared to when belief in him existed.
The proper comparison of the Yellow Emperor would be someone like Noah or Enoch—someone placed many centuries or even millenia in the past of when he was known to be believed in—and I certainly would consider Noah and Enoch to be most likely fictions, never to have been based on real people at all.
Jesus is a different sort of fish altogether.
So, Jesus is the kind of fish that exists only as a symbol of Christian group identity? ;)
Philip K. Dick would have a lot to say on this.
About the casual use of double entendre? I bet he does.
Hm. Good point. I’m unwilling to give up the search quite yet, however, because I feel the boundary between myth and reality is so fragile in the past that an example like what you’re looking for must surely exist.
One gets a bit closer with Cú Chulainn and some other figures from the Ulster Cycle; the gap there is merely seven or eight centuries instead of two millennia.
Seven or eight centuries is an awfully long time in a culture that doesn’t keep good records.
I remember reading with some surprise a transcription of some tribal history of a group of Plains Indians, which ended with the assertion that their forefathers had been so living there for “at least seven generations, perhaps more.” In reality, it had been much, much longer, they simply hadn’t been keeping track.
If that’s an accurate quote from the Plains Indians, it’s much to their credit—they weren’t making claims wildly beyond their knowledge.
According to the messianic prophesies (of which Jesus fulfilled practically none even according to generous interpretations) the messiah was supposed to be born in the land of David, which was Bethlehem. Being from somewhere else was inconvenient for a prospective messiah, so his followers had an incentive to claim that he was from there even if he really wasn’t. The hypothesis of a real cult leader whose followers wanted to believe he was the messiah predicts the nonsensical census story better than the hypothesis of an imaginary figure who was invented to be a messiah; much simpler and more convenient to simply say that his family was from Bethlehem.
You know there’s no impossibility—that’s why I said “I assign less than 5% probability”, I didn’t say “I assign 0% probability”. I’m talking about the probabilities of each scenario. Conditional and prior.
If you considered that, and you didn’t treat “completely fictional” as the default, needing extraordinary evidence to decide against it, but having hardly any evidence in its favour, I think you’d reach the same conclusion as I
In that case substitute “highly improbable” for “impossible” in the grandparent and exactly the same argument still goes through. Why is it improbable for a cult leader to make up a story, and then later decide that they need to embroider the story further to reconcile it with some existing myths? It seems to me your argument-form also fits the following argument: “If Jesus was fictional then the Bible would say he was born at Christmas, but since it doesn’t say Jesus was born at Christmas this is evidence he was real”.
I just don’t see why it’s in any way improbable that one bunch of people made up the Jesus myth, then another bunch of people made an editorial decision of convenience that Jesus was “the reason for the season”. In the same way I see absolutely nothing improbable about one person making up Jesus the Nazarene preacher, and then the same person or someone else later saying “Oh and by the way, he also fulfilled all these different prophecies in convoluted ways”.
The idea that “completely fictional” is the default position is a straw man argument. I lean towards the completely fictional interpretation because of the total lack of supporting documentary evidence, which I would find very surprising if he had existed given the enormous effort that has been dedicated to finding such evidence.
As others have pointed out, Jesus wasn’t even an uncommon name and itinerant preachers weren’t even an uncommon phenomenon. Yet we don’t even have a decent bit of documentary evidence that could be a false positive. The prior probability that Jesus had some kind of factual basis is not incredibly low, but it’s very low after we’ve conducted a major search for such evidence and come up empty.
Similarly the reason we are very sure that vaccines don’t cause autism is that the hypothesis has been studied exhaustively and absolutely no sign of causation has been found. It’s not that “vaccines are harmless” is the default position, it’s that evidence for the non-default position has been searched for at great length and no such evidence has been found.
For real or for fictional people?
Doesn’t that mean you should increase the estimation of the prior you have for him being real? You seem to be using it in the opposite direction.
What’s the average amount of documentary evidence that an average real such itinerant preacher leave behind, so that we compare it with the amount of documentary evidence that Jesus left behind?
Unless Jesus left behind less “documentary evidence” than the average iterenant preacher, that’s not argument against his existence.
What is unbelievable is that he wouldn’t have made a better messianic story in the first place.
I see what kind of stories cult leaders make, and the Jesus story doesn’t fit in with them, not at all. Cult leaders seem to make stories of visions they had, like Paul did, or they make stories of people hundreds and thousands of years in the past, like Ron Hubbard did. Or both of the above, like Joseph Smith did.
But mostly those stories fit in with a specific message they want to impart.
The Jesus story makes sense only as the embroidered/enhanced story of an actual person; which has a basic outline (basically the fact of his crucifixion) that’s unchangeable because it’s known among the core believers; but no coherent singular message. So sometimes it’s about forgiveness and sometimes it’s about faith, and sometimes it’s about patience until God’s wrath smites the wicked. So they widely differ on interpretation but not on core events—everyone agrees that he was called “Jesus of Nazareth”, everyone agrees he got crucified during the rule of Pontius Pilate. Everyone agrees he had disciples and a living mother when he died. But nobody’s quite sure what it all meant, and everyone’s a bit uncomfortable with all the ways some parts of his story don’t make sense, and then some completely fictional elements are added.
That’s what making it the default position means, no? Because lack of enough evidence (according to you) that he was real, you treat his fictionality as a default position, even though you don’t have any evidence in favour of it—no evidence in favour of the existence of that supposed “cult leader” who authored him; and yet somehow was completely unknown to history.
Who authored Jesus? With what purpose? Why didn’t Jesus life have a more coherent message than it did, if he so authored it?
Perhaps you can explain where your reasoning differs from mine using the vaccination/autism example? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but absence of evidence after a search that should have found evidence if there was any evidence to be found is evidence of absence.
I don’t have a default position that there is nobody on the footpath outside my house. However if I look outside at the footpath and I can see that there is nobody there, then that is strong evidence in favour of the hypothesis that there is nobody there.
Regarding your other arguments, I do not find the argument that the Jesus story is exceptional because it has elements X, Y, Z etc. not found in other messianic stories persuasive because it is a highly general argument. You can always find something in your favourite story which is not in other commonly-known stories and claim that this is evidence your story is exceptional.
The fact that some elements of the story are relatively constant is not persuasive evidence of a unitary historical founder either, any more than the fact that the basic story of King Arthur or Batman stays the same despite many reinterpretations is evidence that there must have been a real person behind those myths.
I don’t have sufficient knowledge of medicine to have a discussion about vaccination and autism. Either way, it’s also an irrelevant discussion.
Of course it is. But it has be weighed accordingly.
You’ve not given me any reason that it “should have found evidence”. I’ve asked you how much documentary evidence the average itinerant preacher left behind. Even ones that were relatively well-known at their time. How can you say that Jesus should have left documentary evidence, when you don’t know if other itinerant preachers left “documentary evidence”?
I have. It’s the default position because most moments there’s nobody on the footpath outside my house. The prior for it is higher therefore.
What was the more common occurrence though in the 1st century AD: real itinerant preachers, or stories about fictional itinerant preachers who were nonetheless believed to be real? Where are the evidence that such fictional stories existed?
Answer: the former. Thus the default hypothesis should be that Jesus was a real itinerant preacher—because the prior for that is significantly higher.
You’re disregarding everything I say. I’m not saying anything is exceptional in the Jesus story. It’s not any more exceptional than the Mohammed story, or the Joseph Smith story. It seems to me a very ordinary story if it’s based on an actual human being, an actual preacher/faith healer/etc.
It’d be an extraordinary story if it was completely fictional, because other than some specific fictional elements ( the humble, danger-filled but also miracle-filled birth—following the mold of Moses/Perseus, etc—the deification/glorification after death ) it doesn’t follow the mold of such stories at all.
Actually the story of Arthur has significantly changed, between the original welsh tradition and the time he was enhanced to King of the Bretons by Geoffrey of Monmouth.
But more importantly, in those stories the most crucial elements remain the same. Batman fights against criminals dressed as a giant bat, motivated by the death of his parents. Robin Hood leads a band of merry men, steals from the rich, and sometimes gives to the poor. Hercules was a monster-slaying son of Zeus with enormous strength. The core of the story is summarized in the relevant elements.
Also the prior of successful costumed superheroes being fictional is much higher than them being real.
In the Jesus story the most non-meaningful elements remain the same, but the ones that would be most widely known: e.g. he was of Nazareth. The public crucifixion. There’s no inherent meaning or moral in that—not nearly as obvious a meaning as “The Heavens themselves proclaimed the significance of his birth by having a new star appear in the heavens above him”—whose analogies we see in the semi-deification of the Kims in North Korea. But because the crucifixion was a public event, it had to be present in every story and be given meaning it did not inherently possess.
If the historical Jesus was an “average itinerant preacher” then he isn’t the Biblical Jesus in any meaningful sense. The widely-believed story is that Jesus was notable and politically significant in his own lifetime, founded Christianity in his own lifetime in the form of a number of followers who knew him personally and knew he was real, and that modern Christianity is a linear descendant of that original group.
There’s simply no evidence of any such person or any such group of personal followers. That seems to me far more consistent with Jesus being made up out of whole cloth after his purported life and death.
In my terms you are saying that. You have said twice now that you find the Jesus story plausible because it has elements that you think would make it exceptional amongst made-up stories of miracle-working messiahs. My point is that you could use the exact same argument for any such story just by picking out the story elements which are unique to whichever story you wish to privilege.
As for the comparison with Batman, Robin Hood and so forth it seems to me that your division of story elements into “meaningful”/”core”/”crucial” and not-meaningful/core/crucial is post hoc. To the Christians of, say, 80AD it might well have been that Jesus being crucified and being from Nazareth were just as much a part of his story as murdered parents and a bat suit are to Batman. My recollection was that crucifixion imagery was a regular motif in Christian thought by the second century at the latest, so it became an important part of the story very quickly.
I think a lot of Christians uncritically buy an implicit argument that goes like this: The Christ story got increasingly ridiculous over time, as demonstrated by the increasingly silly things in the later Gospels. Therefore if you draw a line back through the graph of ridiculousness over time you’ll eventually get to the origin point which will be a real story with zero ridiculousness. The problem is that the origin point could equally well have been a fictional story with a low level of ridiculousness, and given the total lack of evidence from Jesus’ time that he or his followers existed that seems more likely to me.
If there was a real guy called Jesus of Nazareth around the early 1st century, who was crucified during Pontius Pilate, and his disciples and followers that formed the core of the religious movement later called Christianity, to argue that Jesus was nonetheless “completely fictional” becomes a mere twisting of words that miscommunicates its intent.
At this point no matter how much evidence appear for a historical Jesus, you can argue that he’s fictional because he doesn’t match well enough the story of the Bible. Well, yeah, ofcourse he won’t match up well enough the story of the Bible, because the story of the bible is filled with lies and embellishments. But at the bottomline either one or more people sat down and thought “We’ll make up a character called Jesus of Nazareth, and have him preach to people and get executed by crucifixion by the Romans”, or there was a real Jesus of Nazareth who preached to people and got executed by crucifixion by the Romans.
I’m getting tired, and this is becoming ludicrous. You’re not telling me why these things were important, if they weren’t real. Why would someone create such horrible ill-fitting to prophecy elements as the name “Jesus” and the location “Nazareth”, when it was the name “Emmanuel” and the location “Bethlehem” that were the significant ones? What is the meaning of the crucifixion? Christian still don’t agree on this, only saying that it is for some reason part of the divine plan, but they don’t have a reason on why.
Why? Why? Why? If you can’t answer that, then the simplest explanation is that the name “Jesus of Nazareth” and the crucifixion were not elements that were authored, they were elements they were stuck with, because they were real
I’m not a Christian, I’m an atheist. That doesn’t mean I have to ignore what the evidence tells me.
And Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure. So was Mohammed. And Socrates too. That’s what the evidence tell us.
Maybe it’s down to all the fantasy stories I’ve read, where prophesies are almost always fulfilled in an unintuitive way (although the Greek oracles were like this too,) but I’ve always found the theological explanation for Jesus’s name entirely satisfying. Emmanuel means “God With Us,” and if Jesus was really God incarnate, it would be an entirely appropriate descriptor; his “true name” as it were. And in any case, I’d have a hard time taking seriously the straightforward fulfillment of a prophesy which could so easily be fulfilled by any pair of parents with particularly high hopes for their kid, or by any preacher who decided to pop up in an unfamiliar location and start going by a different name.
In any case, there are already more than enough messianic prophesies to deal with that Jesus never came close to fulfilling in any sense. The entire doctrine of the Second Coming was born mainly as an effort to reconcile all the large scale, unmistakeable achievements that were prophesied of the Messiah with all the things Jesus never did, and the whole census story has about the same degree of plausibility as “some anonymous black man did it while I was in the bathroom”.
Isn’t that just what I said? I contrasted such a Jesus-figure with one who did not do those things, and said that the Jesus-figure you describe would count as a historical Jesus and one that did not do those things would not.
When I start doing that then you can legitimately criticise me for it. Until then you are blaming me for something I haven’t done yet.
There could be many reasons, but the most obvious possibility is that Paul (or whoever) made up a story with those elements, and those who came afterwards had to work within that framework to maintain suspension of disbelief. If you’ve been proclaiming on street corners for years that you are followers of “Jesus of Nazareth” it could well be hard to suddenly rebrand yourself as followers of “Jesus of Bethlehem” when you figured out you’d have broader appeal if you claimed your messiah was the foretold Jewish messiah. They might wish with hindsight that they’d said he’d been born somewhere else to different parents with a different name, but you can’t change your whole brand identity overnight. That doesn’t mean the story is true, it just means that the person who made it up didn’t perfectly foresee the later opportunities to piggyback on other myths.
If you think about it, the argument that they must have had to keep those elements because they were real doesn’t actually make any sense. From the late first century onwards neither the people making up the Christian mythology nor their audience would have had any means to check whether those elements were factual or not. There would have been constraints on their ability to change their story, but historicity would not have been one of those constraints.
I’m still not clear why you assume the zero point of the graph is a real story, as opposed to a made-up story. The fact that they changed it later isn’t evidence it’s real, just evidence that you can’t turn a cult on a dime.
I don’t understand. My version just has four elements: being an itinerant preacher, being called “Jesus of Nazareth”, being crucified by the Romans, and having his followers begin the Christian movement.
You already conceded there were many itinerant preacher, so that’s nothing special that we’d expect documentary evidence about for any specific one of them. You already conceded that the name “Jesus” was commonplace, so there’s nothing special about that either. We know as a matter of historical fact that the the Christian movement thought themselves as followers of Jesus of Nazareth. That’ s indisputable. So the only thing that’s so extraordinary that you expect “documentary evidence” for you to you believe it happened, was that there was a crucifixion of this person? You don’t believe crucifixions happened in Judaea, is that it?
What exactly is this extraordinary hypothesis that you disbelieve in without the presence of documentary evidence?
And again you can’t explain why those elements were inserted. You just don’t have an explanation for them if they were fictional, you just call it a mistake on part of the unknown authors and move on.
Cult leaders don’t make up stories about fictional people with their own divine missions, they make up stories about their own visions, their own supposed divine missions. Show me a cult leader that ever invented other fictional people to be the messiahs, instead of themselves.
You aren’t addressing any of my points, you have just written your bottomline.
That’s very simple.
Besides all the arguments I’ve already given you about none of the story make at all sense as fictional, and goes against everything we know about how religious groups write their stories, there’s the plain fact that when asking if a person that’s supposed to have lived in existed for real or not. I give significant weight to the beliefs on the subject of the people that lived in his/her time, or as near it as we can get.
I haven’t seen “documentary evidence” that Socrates existed. It’s just that his contemporaries believed him to exist, and his life story doesn’t make sense as a fictional story. Same with Jesus and his own near-contemporaries.
And considerable evidence of belief in the first century that Jesus was not corporeal, but an ideal (docetism). This was a major point of theological contention. The notion of a human Jesus did not achieve popularity until well into the second century.
Even “docetics” seem to have believed he was really seen by people and really seen to be crucified. They didn’t argue he was fictional.
Someone—many people—played a causal role in the founding of Christianity, since Christianity was, in fact, founded [1]. Does modern scholarship have anything to say about what did happen to start Christianity?
[1] I have just thought up an imaginary Christian heresy that claims that Christianity was in fact never founded at all. God planted it as an already well-developed sapling some time in the late 1st or early 2nd century “AD”, giving everyone involved false memories of how it had started. That’s why there’s no historical evidence from Jesus’ lifetime.
Paul of Tarsus is assumed to have existed. The only evidence for him is his works in the Bible—seven written by the same author, a few more by this author with others’ text mixed in, a few clearly not written by this author—but this is evidence that one person, who called himself Paul, wrote these things. I suppose it’s possible he was an entirely fictional construct, but scholars tend to go with “dude wrote this stuff.” Much like Socrates (and unlike Jesus), his existence is secondary to his body of work.
“Given that Jesus was supposedly a very noteworthy figure who died in a noteworthy way founding a major religion, the total absence of any historical record of him or anyone substantially resembling him would be very surprising if he was real.”
What would you accept as evidence? Seriously.
Documentary evidence that dates from the time of Jesus’ supposed life and death, which describes a religious leader called Jesus who started a splinter sect of Judaism would do it.
I wouldn’t be in any way upset if such evidence emerged tomorrow, but I think it’s very unlikely. Pious researchers have been looking very hard for a very long time for even a shred of contemporary evidence for a historical Jesus that isn’t forged, and they’ve come up with nothing so far. When people have looked long and hard for evidence and found none the probability that there is no evidence to find gets very high.
There were quite a few troublemaking preachers who fell afoul of the law in Judaea at the time, many of whom were called Jesus—it was a very common name at the time.
However, one of the big problems with assuming one of these fellows (or another we have no documentation of) was the human seed for Christianity is the early Christian tradition of docetism—that Christ had no corporeal existence at all, and was just an idea. Paul of Tarsus certainly seems to think along these lines, despite the later caution against said notion in John.
This also helps explain the curious lack of non-Biblical evidence for such a person, in histories where one would expect it.
It is often noted by apologists that scholars think there’s enough evidence to say there was a human seed for Christianity. However, “scholar” in this context is a weasel word—most are Christians and theologians, who would have tremendous trouble (personal and professional) coming to the opposite conclusion at all. The epistemological standards accepted in Biblical history in particular are generally bloody awful and an embarrassment to other ancient historians.
For a pile of stuff on this issue I recommend the RationalWiki article, which I have worked extensively on. (One of the other main contributors just so happens to be an atheist who was a student of Biblical history.)
(I find this stuff fascinating, if only for the psychopathology. And, as such strident atheists as Mencken, Dawkins and Hitchens have noted, you can’t be highly literate in English without knowing the KJV, much as you need to know Shakespeare and Greek mythology. The trouble is that … well, it’s like you wanted to study the Odyssey or the Iliad but the only people to learn from were people who (a) actually believed in all the gods named therein (b) really wanted you to as well.)
We have pretty good records of letters from Paul from the second half of the first century (as well as a bunch of frauds, but AFAIK there are several that stand up under analysis as being written by the same person at a very early date), who (in several of those letters) was adamant that his sect believed in an individual Christ in the flesh. So if the legend of the historical Jesus sprang from whole cloth, it did so pretty quickly- not to mention the synoptic gospels, which the most skeptical of scholars still date to around 100 AD.
More generally, I’d caution fellow atheists against getting drawn into the existence-of-Jesus debate in meatspace: unless you’ve done a lot of relevant study (and why on earth would you?) you won’t be able to point to basic evidence that your interlocutor has heard of, only to the statements of experts that they won’t trust. Better to say “Well, I’m not sure there’s enough evidence even to conclude that there was a historical Jesus- but even granting that there was, and that there came to be a group of followers convinced of his divinity, that’s still nowhere near the kind of evidence to make Christianity a viable hypothesis, compared to the hypothesis that it was just a rabidly successful example of what happens within cults.” That’s a much better place to draw up battle lines, IMO.
The overarching problem you outline in your second paragraph—the more general problem, faced in many fields, of having to compress a degree into a few sentences to properly answer an objection—is sadly well known. This is why the RationalWiki article (which is still patchy as heck) is a sea of nuance and caveats—it attempts to get it right in less than a book for an audience who are frequently just realising that there’s actually historical thought on this matter (and look how that line of inquiry worked out for Lukeprog!). I’m very much looking forward to Richard Carrier’s book on the historicity of Jesus later this year. (And not just so I can crib furiously from it.)
That stuff is very interesting. Your point about motivate teachers is fruitful. I’m adjusting my belief that there was a Jesus. That said, I learned of the historical Jesus thesis from my Rabbi, who I don’t think had a motivation to be pro-Jesus. And he didn’t sugarcoat religion with me (he introduced me to such anti-religious ideas like the problem of evil and the problem of miracles).
That said, I can’t give very much weight to docetism, (or Gnosticism generally) because they lost the ideological/theological battle. (Wikipedia is quite coy, saying that “some Christians” think it’s heretical. The Nicene Creed is a flat-out rejection of docetism, so I think it’s safe to say most Christians reject it).
And generally, I don’t expect much historical evidence of Jesus, because he wasn’t that important in his lifetime. As ArisKatsaris says
In other words, the assertion in Mark that Jesus was followed around by scribes is a pious lie that can easily be explained without asserting that Jesus never existed.
That docetism lost out isn’t really the key point.
Consider the general case: there’s some property P that is observable (for example, having a physical body). At time T, there’s no agreement that I have P. At time T+ 200 years, there’s agreement that I had P at T.
It seems to me that the lack of agreement about P at T is important evidence here, regardless of what agreement other people come to about P at (T+200).
The people arguing not-P are theological mystics, who have substantial reason to assert not-P despite any observation, That is, a substantial amount of the motivation for asserting not-P can be explained without reference to observation.
I’m on shakier ground on the specific contents of the theological position, but Wikipedia leaves the impression was that the dispute was not about what was observed, but what was actually there. It seems consistent with docetism that Pilate believed there was a seditious preacher named Jesus, who he ordered crucified. Docetism just says that the image Pilate saw was an illusion, not a man (or even matter).
Ah! I hadn’t realized that. Yeah, if the docetics were making the same claims about the observable world, then my argument above is irrelevant.
Not quite. It’s not irrelevant, it just becomes an argument in favor of historical Jesus, rather than against it.
If a lack of agreement among early Christian about the observable world was relevant as evidence AGAINST the existence of a historical Jesus, then by Law of Probability, agreement about it must constitute evidence in its favour.
Sure. Needn’t be anywhere near that complicated, though.… the existence of people who believe in the existence of a historical Jesus is evidence of a historical Jesus, albeit not particularly strong evidence. If it weren’t for those people, we wouldn’t even be talking about it, any more than we’re talking about a historical Clark Kent.
alternatively...:-)
(Restricting myself to two quibbles, for the sake of time):
I believe your description of Docetism gives the wrong idea; Docetism (as I learned it) did not say that Jesus was not there at all, but rather merely asserted that his corporeality was an illusion. The Docetists did not think of Jesus as “only an idea”, but as somebody who staged a form of divine theater, as it were. (Research “Christological Heresies” for more on Docetism and its cousins.)
Quibble #2: not all biblical scholarship is as bad as you say—much of it is quite rigorous and would be right at home in a secular university anthropology department.
What documentary evidence for any other religious leaders that started other splinter sects of Judaism at the time do you have?
If you don’t have any direct evidence for any specific one of those leaders, does that mean there didn’t exist any such splinter sects at the time?
Thank you. This is a concise representation of the general objection I was going to make. Finding evidence of ANYTHING in that era that meets modern standards is often very difficult, if not impossible. Nearly all history from that era can be, and is, challenged.
I have yet to see a statement from PhilosophyTutor justifying his choice for a standard of evidence on this question.
Argumentum ad martyrdom is utterly fallacious.