Responses and rejoinders

A Christian who read my essay on Jesus' historicity raised several objections, which I present here in paraphrased form with my replies.

1. The biggest problem with your so-called conventional theory is its implication that Jesus was a raving lunatic. Either that, or else the movement he inspired somehow managed to completely redefine his teachings.

Well, we are agreed that what I am calling the conventional theory is improbable, although we differ as to why we find it so. That the followers of a "raving lunatic" might have started a major religion does not strike me as prima facie implausible. I do not think that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints qualifies as a major religion yet, but I think it suffices as a counterexample (except to Mormons, of course) to any claim that a lunatic could not get a major religion started.

As for Jesus' teachings being "completely redefined" within less than four decades, I am at a loss to imagine why that should be considered so unlikely, considering there was no written record of anything he taught. Anyhow, not all versions of the conventional theory suppose, as Crossan for one example does, that his message was totally replaced by something bearing essentially no resemblance to it. As many others have noted on many occasions, every scholar who attempts to reconstruct the man's actual thinking without assuming the inerrancy of the gospels, or something close to inerrancy, inevitably concludes that Jesus' thinking was rather like his or her own.

Given an assumption that there was a man behind the gospel stories but rejecting an assumption that the stories are inerrant, any reconstruction of the historical Jesus is bound to be little more than pure speculation. The difference between his actual words and the recorded words could be slight or total or anything in between. We have no reliable account of what he really said. All we know, if there was such a man, is what some people were saying he said at least 30 years, and perhaps a lot longer, after he died.

2. Isn't there some principle that you can never prove a negative? Or that absence of evidence is never evidence of absence?

There is no logical principle against proving a negative. Mathematics, which essentially is nothing but logic, has been proving negatives since at least Pythagoras's time.

Science, strictly speaking, never proves anything, positive or negative. It does assume that what is logically impossible is also empirically impossible, but that implies only that reality will not contradict itself. Given an apparent logical contradiction between observations A and B, at least one observation must be wrong, but science can say no more than that A or B is the one that is more likely to be wrong.

Furthermore, I did state that we are not talking about conclusive proof. The scientific method uses logic to establish probable truths, not certain truths. Let me expand my explanation a bit.

In any historical science, from crime detection to paleontology, the implication is never certain. Given a fact F offered as evidence for a proposition P, we are claiming that it is to some degree unlikely that we would observe F if P were not true. Of course one can always speculate as to how F could be true while P was false, but speculation is not itself evidence one way or the other. If we observe F, we might not know for certain that P is true, but we may well have good reason to believe P, depending on how cogent is the argument supporting the implication.

Furthermore, some implications are more likely than others. The existence of fossils millions of years old and the nonexistence of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago is extremely unlikely. The probability is not zero, but it is close enough for the time being. We are justifiably very confident in our inference from the fossil evidence that life has existed on this world for a lot longer than is implied by the fundamentalists' literal interpretation of the Bible.

In this context, then, when I say F => P, I do not mean that (F & ~P) is a logical impossibility. In deductive logic, that is what it means, but we're talking inductive logic here. An inductive argument will seek to establish that (F & ~P) is improbable. If it succeeds, then it is a cogent argument. If it fails, then it is a weak argument. And if it uses fallacious logic, then it is no argument at all.

Now, for some events, a cogent argument can be made that if they had occurred, they would have left evidence. For the argument to work, there has to be some specification of that evidence. "There would be evidence of some kind" will not do. If P = "X happened," then some particular fact F must be proposed and an argument offered to the effect of P => F. If there is such an argument, and if it is a cogent argument, then we may logically infer ~F => ~P. If F is absent, we do not know that P is not true, but, depending on how cogent the argument is, we may reasonably doubt that P is true until such time as F is discovered.

Of course any probabilistic argument will depend for its persuasiveness on, among other things, the hearer's life experiences. Reasonable people can disagree to some extent about what is likely or not to have happened under such-and-such circumstances, and it can be very hard to objectively demonstrate which one's assessment is more likely to be accurate. So be it. The honest intellectual will try as best he can to sort fact from supposition. None of us perfect. We all believe some things that are not so, but we need not cease the effort to figure out which things those are.

3. Doherty's comment on Ignatius that you quoted misses the point. His writings show that the gospels must have been written within his lifetime, which ended in 115 CE. Furthermore, his beliefs were probably consistent throughout his adult life, thus precluding any major change in Christian thinking during the latter first century.

For purposes of dating the gospels, the only issue regarding Ignatius is how plausible it is that he could have written what he wrote if he had never read one of them. It seems to me that any argument for its implausibility has to assume the conclusion that they must have existed during his lifetime. Obviously he believed what he wrote, and obviously he was not the only Christian at that time who believed it. More than that, though, his words do not imply anything with any great probability.

As for the tenure of his beliefs, I do not think we know enough to say what is probable. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica,

There is no record of his life prior to his arrest, but his letters reveal his personality and his impact on the Christianity of his time.

"Saint Ignatius of Antioch," Encyclopędia Britannica
from Encyclopędia Britannica Premium Service.http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=43009
[Accessed 2/1/2004.]

4. Your claim that Jews would not have deified a human messiah is simply wrong. From several passages in the gospels as well as the epistles, we know that messianic Jews were expecting God to come to earth as a divine messiah. The Jewish faith readily accepts direct communication from God, through angels and even physical revelation. Furthermore, Old Testament messianic prophecies such as Isaiah ("The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel [God with us].") demonstrate that at least some Jews knew the messiah would be God incarnate.

Your argument from the gospels to the beliefs of early Jewish Christians assumes your conclusion that the gospels accurately report those beliefs. I am not disputing that the gospels say certain things about the first Christians and their Jewish contemporaries. I am disputing whether we should believe what the gospels say about them. I believe that when all the factual evidence is considered, we have good reason to think it very unlikely. There is no documentation I am aware of, outside of Christian writings, that any first-century Jews expected the Messiah to be God incarnate.

And for that matter, I do not see it even in Christian writings, including the gospels. I am conceding the possibility that some passages can be so interpreted, but the point remains that even if an early Christian had said it unambiguously, his mere assertion that it was so would not make it so.

Until somebody produces a document to the contrary written by a non-Christian Jew, there is no reason to think that first-century Jews were going to believe that a man was God, even if they were convinced that that man was the Messiah.

Unless, of course, the man really was God and proved it by rising from the dead. But that is for another discussion.

Christian interpretations of allegedly messianic prophecies could prove that in the Christian writers' opinion, the Jews ought to have been expecting the Messiah to be God incarnate. They would not prove that the Jews actually did have, or even should have had, such an expectation.

5. Theories of popular movements do not allow for cults to form without identifiable leaders. It could not have been Paul, since the Jesus movement had to have existed before his conversion. Neither Peter nor James is ever presented as having been the first to receive the message, and John's writings are too late to qualify him as a founder.

I am not aware of any "theories of popular movements." I would not be at all surprised to learn that somebody, somewhere, at some time has proposed such a theory, but I have never seen one myself.

The mere fact—assuming it for the sake of discussion to be a fact—that there is such a theory tells us nothing about its scientific merits. Maybe it has none. It would be wrong to call it a theory in that case, but since I have not examined the theory and the evidence claimed for it, I do not know one way or the other.

In any case, no theory dictates what the facts will be. A properly formulated theory will explain facts already observed, and it will inform us about new facts that we can expect to observe. If we do observe them, then the theory gains some confirmation. A theory will also inform us, though, that we will not observe certain facts if the theory is true. If such a fact is nevertheless observed, then the theory must be presumed wrong. The appropriate response when that happens is to either (1) modify the theory to accommodate the fact or else (2) scrap the theory and propose a new one.

You seem to be claiming that the facts known to us regarding the origin of cults since the dawn of recorded history lead us reasonably to infer that any cult will have an identifiable creator. That is fine. Identifiable by whom, though? By any historian living in the 21st century? Do we actually know with reasonable confidence exactly who created every cult, past or present, whose existence we know about? I really do not think so, and if any theory claims we know, then it is wrong.

Now, let us stipulate just for a moment that, given any particular cult, somebody had to start it. Whatever the practice or teaching, somebody had to be the first one to do it or believe it. I have no problem with that. I do have a problem with the notion that we can always figure out who that person was.

Obviously Paul was not the inventor of Christianity. No matter what Christianity actually was when he lived, it had been around for a while before he embraced it. Or at least, something like it had been around. A cult is just a set of ideas. The ideas are expressed in certain behaviors, but the behaviors reflect the ideas, not vice versa. Otherwise there could be no such thing as a hypocrite. People are not Christians because they go to church. They go to church because they hold certain beliefs that are characteristically Christian.

For a cult to grow, or just to survive, its ideas must be transmitted over time, and they are subject to modification in the process. Modification does not always happen, but it is a fact that it often happens. We have no reason merely to assume that all people calling themselves Christians in 150 CE believed substantially the same things as all people who called themselves Christians in 50 CE. Neither have we any reason merely to assume that all Christians at either time agreed substantially with one another. The documentary evidence is too meager to support either assumption. The evidence that we have is what happened to have been preserved, and it is not unreasonable to suspect that the preservation could have been subject to some ideological filtration.

I agree that Paul seems to have been in substantial accord with Peter et al. of the Jerusalem church, with the possible exception of the status of gentile converts with regard to Jewish law. But then, the only mid-first-century Christian communities we know about from the historical paper trail are the ones Paul mentioned in his letters. There could have been dozens of others scattered throughout the region, and at least some of them could have existed for decades before Paul's time. The first Christians whom we know about were Jews in Jerusalem. That does not imply that those Jews in Jerusalem were the first Christians.

6. Christian orthodoxy is the probable theory if there are miracles, and you are just assuming that there are none. A lot of people a lot better credentialed than you are believe otherwise. You really ought to explore the possibility that your assumption is unjustified.

I don't agree that even a stipulation of "miracles do happen" establishes a high probability that Christianity is true. If miracles happen, then the orthodox theory could be correct, but that does not necessarily mean it is likely to be correct.

If there is a god, and if his nature is such, as the church historically has claimed, that it pleases him on occasion to affect the natural course of events in this world, then of course the gospels could be an account of such an intervention. However, evidence for the possibility of X is not evidence for the likelihood of X. It is possible that I was an adopted child. I think I can prove that it was not impossible for my birth certificate to have been forged. That would not justify my believing that the man and woman who raised me and whose names are on that birth certificate were not my natural parents.

For the sake of argument, let us say that there is a god and, furthermore, that he not only can raise people from the dead (what good is a god who can't, anyway?) but has in fact done so. Next question: Did he do it on this particular occasion? If we stipulate that some people have been raised from the dead, should we believe that Jesus of Nazareth was one of them? Well, why should we? Because one of the world's major religions has been saying so for almost 2,000 years? Depending on how you define major, there are at least four major religions in this world today, and three of them say the resurrection didn't happen.

Of course a vote isn't going to settle the question, so where does that leave us? It leaves us looking at the evidence again. We're back to examining the facts—all of the facts that we know about—and seeing how they can be accounted for while making the fewest assumptions about how those facts came into being, assumptions such as who wrote what or when it was written.

As for exploring the miraculous to the end of justifying that stipulation, that exploration has been done already. Skepticism was not invented in the 20th century by a bunch of pigheaded anti-Christian fanatics. Centuries of scientific study have given us good reason to believe that certain things just do not happen, and our inability to prove that they never could have happened is simply beside the point. The issue is what we may reasonably believe, not what we can know with perfect certainty.

The sincere belief of some people that some dead people have returned to life is not sufficient warrant for supposing that any dead person ever did come back to life. The strength of a conviction is not evidence that the conviction must be true. There just is no contradiction implied by the certainty of a belief conjoined with its falsity. People can and do believe falsehoods with passionate certainty.

Evidence for a miracle, as for any other claimed event, would consist of a fact or set of facts inconsistent with the event's nonoccurrence. As discussed earlier, though, we cannot expect any evidence to be perfectly conclusive. At some point we must form a judgment of likelihood. If a man says he saw a dead person come back to life, how probable is it that he was mistaken about what he saw, compared with the probability that an apparent violation of natural law occurred? I may easily accept that he saw the person alive after an apparent death, but I will be hard to convince that the person actually was dead. Firsthand testimony by trained medical professionals who were present at the time of the alleged death would be very helpful in overcoming my doubt. Not much else would.

7. A good place to start re-examining your assumptions would be the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints. If you're serious about wanting some real answers, you'll find them there.

I am aware that the Roman Catholic Church does not uncritically accept or endorse every miracle report it gets, and there are few opportunities I would welcome more than to examine the Vatican archives of its investigations. Until that opportunity comes along, though, all I know is that the church claims to have good evidence that miracles have happened. I do not doubt that whichever church officials have seen the evidence for themselves sincerely believe that it is in fact good evidence. I need not assume that I would agree with them if I saw it for myself.

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