You left out the ‘magical’ part of my question. If magical beings exist(ed), then everything becomes more mysterious. That’s partly why we don’t pester JK Rowling about what extra-special boy Harry Potter was based on. We don’t even suspect comic superheros like Batman, who has no magic, to have been based on a real-life billionaire. We certainly don’t have scholars wasting time looking for evidence of ‘the real Batman.’ Modern stories of unlikely events are easily taken as imaginings, yet when people bucket a story as ‘old/traditonal’, for some people, that bucket includes ‘characters must’ve been real persons’, as if humans must’ve been too stupid to have imagination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakelore
the closer the real Paul Bunyan hews to the Bunyan of the stories, the smaller the mystery
Of course magic makes everything else more mysterious i.e. P(magical Jesus) is infinitesimal. But P(non magical Jesus) is not low. We do ask JK Rowling what non magical boy inspired Harry Potter.
We do ask J K Rowling what non-magical boy inspired Harry Potter.
I guess you mean that we could and it wouldn’t be obviously silly, with which I agree. But, for what it’s worth, it never crossed my mind to assume that Harry Potter was based on any specific non-magical boy. The characteristics he has that aren’t essentially dependent on story-specific things (magic, being the prime target of a supervillain, etc.) seem pretty ordinary and not in any particular need of explanation.
I wouldn’t be astonished if it turned out that there was some kid Rowling knew once whom she used as a sort of basis for the character of Harry Potter, but I’d be a bit surprised. And if it did, I wouldn’t expect particular incidents in the books to be derived from particular things that happened to that child.
In particular, I wouldn’t say that the simplest (still less the most likely) explanation for the Harry Potter stories involves there being some non-magical child on whom they are based.
I don’t think any of this has much bearing on whether the simplest explanation for stories about Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Zeus, etc., involves actual historical characters on which they’re based. The answer to that surely varies a lot from case to case. (FWIW I’d say: historical Jesus of some sort likely but not certain; historical Muhammad almost certain; historical Buddha likely but not certain; historical Zeus-predecessor very unlikely. But I am not expert enough for my guesses to be worth anything.)
Historical Muhammad not certain: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122669909279629451 . Of course, people have set about trying to protect minds from a ‘fringe’ Bayesian view: “Prof. Kalisch was told he could keep his professorship but must stop teaching Islam to future school teachers.” In case anyone missed it, Richard Carrier explicitly used Bayes on question of historical Jesus. I don’t know if Kalisch used Bayes, but his language conveys intuitive Bayesian update.
The bearing of fictional stories is simple: calculate probabilities of historical X based on practically 100% probability that human imagination was a factor (given that the stories contain highly unlikely magic like in known-to-be fiction stories, plus were written long after X supposedly lived). Note that that still leaves out probabilities of motivations for passing fiction as nonfiction like Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard did. Once you figure probabilities including motivations and iterations of previous religious memes, it becomes increasingly unlikely that X existed. Paul Bunyan, AFAIK, wasn’t based on previous memes for controlling people, nor were the stories used to control people, so I wouldn’t be suspicious if someone believed the stories started based on someone real. When people insist religious characters were real, OTOH, I become suspicious of their motivations, given unlikelihood that they examined evidence and updated Bayesian-like.
@Salemicus: Citation for “We do ask JK Rowling what non magical boy inspired Harry Potter”?
What’s your comparison baseline? Compared to the screen in front of your face, he’s not certain. Compared to pretty much anyone born in the VI century, he is quite certain.
You don’t count the Koran as “intact own writings”? :-) Yes, I am well aware that it was compiled quite some time after his death from a collection of records and that, by tradition, Muhammad was illiterate.
The Arab society around VII century wasn’t big on writing—the cultural transmission was mostly oral. However external sources mention Muhammad already in 636 AD.
You’re referring to the phrase “many villages were ravaged by the killing of the Arabs of Muhammad”, written after Muhammad’s supposed death, “Arabs of Muhammad” meaning ‘Muslims’ the way “people of Christ” means ‘Christians’. That Muslims and Christians existed doesn’t mean the characters they invoked to justify violence, supremacism, etc. existed as actual humans.
Criteria for considering Muhammad and Jesus near certain are so lax, we’d have to consider some Greek/Roman gods near certain.
So you’re arguing that by 632 the violent and supremacist Arab hordes were justifying their violence and supremacism by inventing an imaginary prophet who lived merely a few decades before (so some of “his” contemporaries were still alive). Because they were so tricksy they made him not a terribly appealing character—an illiterate merchant’s apprentice who married a cougar and then went a bit crazy—and attributed to him a whole book of poetry clearly written while on acid. And hey—it worked! Their creation (I guess it was a joint effort—takes a village and all that..?) was so successful that it caused the fastest massive conquest in human history.
The criteria for the historicity of Greek/Roman Gods and Muhammad/Jesus are not the same.
The Roman Gods are for the most part just Romanized versions of Greek Gods. If you examine the different characteristics closely, then the Greek Gods have much in common with Gods in the pantheons of other Indo-European peoples. For example Zeus is the God of Thunder, Thor is the God of Thunder in Germanic mythologies, and Perun serves the same purpose in Slavic mythologies.
Based on these similarities you can trace these stories to the stories of some common ancestral Gods of the old Indo-European nomads on the steppes of Russia and the Ukraine… So these stories are so ancient that any link to anyone living whether man or whatever is highly unlikely.
However stories of Jesus and Muhammad are much more likely considering since they occured at times when writing was already invented and shortly after their death, we can see stirrings of historical events linked to them. With Jesus, we have historical writing of him maybe 50 years after his death, including by his enemies. So a historical figure of Jesus is highly likely, although the miracles and stuff attributed to him are made up.
With Muhammad the probabilities are even higher. Shortly after his death, there were conquests of neighboring lands done by people who were saying they were his friends (meaning they saw him live). While most of the stories about him are probably highly exaggerated, there most likely was a historical Muhammad.
I did say almost certain. My impression—which, as I said above, is no more than that and could easily be very wrong—is that the Jesus-myth theories require less “conspiracy” than the Muhammad-myth ones.
Interestingly, after looking over Wikipedia a bit, apparently there may have been a Paul Bon Jean on whom the earliest Paul Bunyan tales could have been based… a big lumberjack, but with “big” being more like six to seven foot and less like sixty to seventy foot.
You left out the ‘magical’ part of my question. If magical beings exist(ed), then everything becomes more mysterious. That’s partly why we don’t pester JK Rowling about what extra-special boy Harry Potter was based on. We don’t even suspect comic superheros like Batman, who has no magic, to have been based on a real-life billionaire. We certainly don’t have scholars wasting time looking for evidence of ‘the real Batman.’ Modern stories of unlikely events are easily taken as imaginings, yet when people bucket a story as ‘old/traditonal’, for some people, that bucket includes ‘characters must’ve been real persons’, as if humans must’ve been too stupid to have imagination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakelore
No, I didn’t leave that part out.
Of course magic makes everything else more mysterious i.e. P(magical Jesus) is infinitesimal. But P(non magical Jesus) is not low. We do ask JK Rowling what non magical boy inspired Harry Potter.
I guess you mean that we could and it wouldn’t be obviously silly, with which I agree. But, for what it’s worth, it never crossed my mind to assume that Harry Potter was based on any specific non-magical boy. The characteristics he has that aren’t essentially dependent on story-specific things (magic, being the prime target of a supervillain, etc.) seem pretty ordinary and not in any particular need of explanation.
I wouldn’t be astonished if it turned out that there was some kid Rowling knew once whom she used as a sort of basis for the character of Harry Potter, but I’d be a bit surprised. And if it did, I wouldn’t expect particular incidents in the books to be derived from particular things that happened to that child.
In particular, I wouldn’t say that the simplest (still less the most likely) explanation for the Harry Potter stories involves there being some non-magical child on whom they are based.
I don’t think any of this has much bearing on whether the simplest explanation for stories about Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Zeus, etc., involves actual historical characters on which they’re based. The answer to that surely varies a lot from case to case. (FWIW I’d say: historical Jesus of some sort likely but not certain; historical Muhammad almost certain; historical Buddha likely but not certain; historical Zeus-predecessor very unlikely. But I am not expert enough for my guesses to be worth anything.)
Historical Muhammad not certain: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122669909279629451 . Of course, people have set about trying to protect minds from a ‘fringe’ Bayesian view: “Prof. Kalisch was told he could keep his professorship but must stop teaching Islam to future school teachers.” In case anyone missed it, Richard Carrier explicitly used Bayes on question of historical Jesus. I don’t know if Kalisch used Bayes, but his language conveys intuitive Bayesian update.
The bearing of fictional stories is simple: calculate probabilities of historical X based on practically 100% probability that human imagination was a factor (given that the stories contain highly unlikely magic like in known-to-be fiction stories, plus were written long after X supposedly lived). Note that that still leaves out probabilities of motivations for passing fiction as nonfiction like Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard did. Once you figure probabilities including motivations and iterations of previous religious memes, it becomes increasingly unlikely that X existed. Paul Bunyan, AFAIK, wasn’t based on previous memes for controlling people, nor were the stories used to control people, so I wouldn’t be suspicious if someone believed the stories started based on someone real. When people insist religious characters were real, OTOH, I become suspicious of their motivations, given unlikelihood that they examined evidence and updated Bayesian-like.
@Salemicus: Citation for “We do ask JK Rowling what non magical boy inspired Harry Potter”?
What’s your comparison baseline? Compared to the screen in front of your face, he’s not certain. Compared to pretty much anyone born in the VI century, he is quite certain.
Then why don’t you just point to evidence of his existence being more likely than others’? We have bodily remains, intact own writings, or historical records made during the lives of many born in 6th century, e.g. Columbanus, Pope Gregory I, founding emperor of Tang Dynasty, Radegund, Venantius Fortunatus, Theodora). So why don’t we have any one of those types of evidence about Muhammad?
You don’t count the Koran as “intact own writings”? :-) Yes, I am well aware that it was compiled quite some time after his death from a collection of records and that, by tradition, Muhammad was illiterate.
The Arab society around VII century wasn’t big on writing—the cultural transmission was mostly oral. However external sources mention Muhammad already in 636 AD.
You’re referring to the phrase “many villages were ravaged by the killing of the Arabs of Muhammad”, written after Muhammad’s supposed death, “Arabs of Muhammad” meaning ‘Muslims’ the way “people of Christ” means ‘Christians’. That Muslims and Christians existed doesn’t mean the characters they invoked to justify violence, supremacism, etc. existed as actual humans.
Criteria for considering Muhammad and Jesus near certain are so lax, we’d have to consider some Greek/Roman gods near certain.
So you’re arguing that by 632 the violent and supremacist Arab hordes were justifying their violence and supremacism by inventing an imaginary prophet who lived merely a few decades before (so some of “his” contemporaries were still alive). Because they were so tricksy they made him not a terribly appealing character—an illiterate merchant’s apprentice who married a cougar and then went a bit crazy—and attributed to him a whole book of poetry clearly written while on acid. And hey—it worked! Their creation (I guess it was a joint effort—takes a village and all that..?) was so successful that it caused the fastest massive conquest in human history.
An interesting theory.
The criteria for the historicity of Greek/Roman Gods and Muhammad/Jesus are not the same.
The Roman Gods are for the most part just Romanized versions of Greek Gods. If you examine the different characteristics closely, then the Greek Gods have much in common with Gods in the pantheons of other Indo-European peoples. For example Zeus is the God of Thunder, Thor is the God of Thunder in Germanic mythologies, and Perun serves the same purpose in Slavic mythologies.
Based on these similarities you can trace these stories to the stories of some common ancestral Gods of the old Indo-European nomads on the steppes of Russia and the Ukraine… So these stories are so ancient that any link to anyone living whether man or whatever is highly unlikely.
However stories of Jesus and Muhammad are much more likely considering since they occured at times when writing was already invented and shortly after their death, we can see stirrings of historical events linked to them. With Jesus, we have historical writing of him maybe 50 years after his death, including by his enemies. So a historical figure of Jesus is highly likely, although the miracles and stuff attributed to him are made up.
With Muhammad the probabilities are even higher. Shortly after his death, there were conquests of neighboring lands done by people who were saying they were his friends (meaning they saw him live). While most of the stories about him are probably highly exaggerated, there most likely was a historical Muhammad.
I did say almost certain. My impression—which, as I said above, is no more than that and could easily be very wrong—is that the Jesus-myth theories require less “conspiracy” than the Muhammad-myth ones.
Interestingly, after looking over Wikipedia a bit, apparently there may have been a Paul Bon Jean on whom the earliest Paul Bunyan tales could have been based… a big lumberjack, but with “big” being more like six to seven foot and less like sixty to seventy foot.