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.
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.