I see. Thanks for the reply. Yes, that makes sense and captures what I was sort of clumsily intuiting. I appreciate the elaboration.

On your second question, your intuition is correct. And I point this out in that response video on tha Godless Engineer show and discuss why his argument is illogical.

In short, we have ample evidence of authors making things up, and even Ehrman must admit someone made up most of it (e.g. Matthew’s Nativity narrative; even if he didn’t make that up, and he almost certainly did, someone made it up, so “making stuff up” is a proven cause of Gospel content, indeed of most Gospel content).

So we have two known causes of Gospel content, not one. All else being equal, that leaves us at 50/50 which it is. So you can’t claim to “know” it’s always one and not the other. That is Ehrman’s mistake: he leaps from “either A or B” directly to “therefore B” without any justification. It’s like saying “either I misplaced my wallet or someone stole it; I have examples of people stealing wallets; therefore someone stole my wallet.” This is not logical.

I address similarly fallacious reasoning on the Canadian Catholic’s show, and in my analysis of that I wrote the following (there is more in there you might find useful to read too):

[That I point out everything unsourced could be fiction for all we know] does not mean I have concluded everything in the Gospels “is” fiction. And Canadian Catholic made the mistake of thinking that’s what this means. This is a common confusion I notice, particularly among people trying to use or criticize Bayesian reasoning without understanding it: proving that we don’t know something is true is not the same thing as proving it’s false. Yet Christian apologists especially have a hard time understanding the difference. When I conclude it’s 50/50 whether the Gospels contain authentic data about Jesus, I am not thereby claiming “the Gospels do not contain authentic data about Jesus.” To the contrary, I am claiming we do not know if they do. And consequently, we can’t use any assumption that they do as a premise. What this translates to in the Bayesian framework is simply a 50/50 Likelihood Ratio: the contents of the Gospels are just as likely either way. Therefore, we cannot use the Gospels as evidence either way. Note that that includes mythicism: the fact that we cannot prove the Gospels do or don’t contain data about Jesus means the Gospels also don’t argue for mythicism either. There is one other sense in which they do (how they establish Jesus in a familiar and countable reference class), but we’ll get to that later. Apart from that, our being unable to prove anything probably is true about Jesus in the Gospels, leaves us simply not knowing—from only the Gospels—whether Jesus existed or not.

Ehrman is thus claiming to know things he doesn’t know, by ignoring the fact that there is as much evidence of authors inventing things, as of using sources for things (actually, more). Like the guy ignoring all the examples of people misplacing their wallets.

On your first question, no, I haven’t seen much need of a blog post. There is one video now, and another will be produced (when we go over the Q&A sequel show). That’ll suffice. Each individual subject is already adequately covered in my book or an article here on this blog, so no duplication of effort is needed. Like William Lane Craig, Bart Ehrman never has anything new to say on this subject, so it’s all been debunked already.

You must not have actually read my work. I have an entire section on this (OHJ, Element 15, Chapter 4).

One thing he said that I thought was interesting concerned his reasoning around the hypothetical M source behind Matthew. He reasoned that we can assume that Matthew had a source for all the material not from Mark. He said that since we know Matthew used Mark, then we can assume his other material came from sources and was not the author’s own creation. In other words, it is more probable that Matthew gets all of his information from other sources since we can confirm he did this with Mark. Ehrman’s reasoning seems flawed to me, but I struggle to articulate the problem. I suspect the answer has something to do with him ignoring the reference class of ancient authors who often make things up and editorialize their own agenda through fabrications, even when pulling some information from other sources. I am curious what your thoughts are on Ehrman’s reasoning here. Cheers.

All of that is possible; none of it is likely. And that’s the rub.

The base rate of interpolation in the NT is no better than 1 in 200 (it lies between that rate and 1 in 1000), and even combined these arguments produce no likelihood ratio capable of even approaching much less reversing that. So it isn’t of any use to entertain.

Contrast with the case for 1 Thess. 2. Indeed, contrast with the case for 1 Cor. 15:6, which is substantially stronger than the case you just made, yet still not strong enough to affirm as a premise, as can be done in the former case.

There are 4 reasons to consider the phrase as an interpolation:

first reason: the Lamb elsewhere is said to be immolated, and an immolation is not coincidentially the form of death apt in the context since the effusion of a lot of blood is secured (to wash away sins), whereas a crucifixion (beyond if celestial or earthly) makes blood to exit only from the hands and the feet.

second reason: the two witnesses are exposed post-mortem in the square of the great city, and this is a crucifixion post-mortem, à la Jewish way, hence insofar their fate mirrors the fate of the Lamb (of which they are adorers), then the Lamb himself, if crucified, was crucified post-mortem and therefore it was not a Roman crucifixion.

third reason: the central event of the Christian belief, the crucifixion, couldn’t be mentioned so en passant, as a marginal note, hence his nature of scribal glossa is easily signaled. Basically, the same reason because you assume that ‘called Christ’ is an interpolation in Ant. 20:200.

fourth reason: in our manuscripts there is a lacuna after ‘bodies’ in Rev. 11, hence the concrete possibility exists that a Christian interpolator found the Jewish original text saying:

Their bodies were hanged/crucified in the public square of the great city—which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt—

…and since he knew about only one crucified (= the Lord Jesus Christ), he removed “were hanged/crucified” from the original text and then he added the interpolation, meant to explain who was “really” the only crucified victim:

Their bodies … in the public square of the great city—which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt—where also their Lord was crucified

But naturally he has left the traces of the his corruption + interpolation of the text (a lacuna appears in our texts after ‘bodies’).

This post is meant to be a plea for interpreting Revelation under the mythicist paradigm as a text not affected still by the historicist reading Gospels-based.
Note that Volkmar, the great critic who advanced first the idea that Mark is a 100% pauline midrash, argued that Mark was written as reaction against the Book of Revelation. Note for example the negative portrayal of the two boanerges (“Sons of Thunder”), called so because in Revelation the two witnesses have the power of throwing fire from their mouth.
Or note the negative portrayal of Mary in Mark, a caustic parody of the Woman of Revelation, allegory of the Jewish-Christian anti-Pauline sect.

Thanks in advance for any answer.
Giuseppe

I would love to see this argument in its original context, because… the fact that Revelation is able to so perfectly purloin a biography about a supposedly real guy and use it for political calculations is expressly predicted under mythicism. That was the entire point: Under mythicism, both Jesus as archangel and Jesus as rabbi are mouthpieces for ideology.

In any case, in the context of a cult, one couldn’t take anything from Revelations very seriously. Even if we ignore that there’s a strong argument to view Revelations as being as much political cartoon as prophecy, it’s so nutter butters that the person writing it was clearly willing to say anything (whether they were just entirely delusional or writing fairly crass political commentary). It’s either delusion or propaganda or both, and so there’s no reason to expect the author to have cared about any historical Jesus tradition or any previous people in the cult even if he could have.

Well, I do think the RR point is a little more than a proxy, because the fact that he does score so highly even with the stretches that some scores have to be metaphorical is fairly clearly not coincidence: the Gospel writers knew what they were doing. Both historicists and mythicists have to deal with the fact that the only stories we have of a supposedly human Jesus are ones that ram together Moses, Odysseus, Aesop and RR tropes.

I only wonder if there may be a better reference class even with only sticking to the context of antiquity because Jesus is definitely in this liminal status in terms of literature (he’s this last gasp of an ancient mythical type). I can’t think of one and historicity defenders haven’t even tried, but there is a lot of fiction and historical texts even from antiquity. Again, I know the Buddhist context somewhat better, where one can definitely see mythical inspiration but that mythical inspiration could easily have been either something the guy himself believed or used as a way to teach ideas etc., because that is how the Buddhist teaching method worked. But your point that he still belongs to the RR class, and that’s weird, would still be relevant, and that even a hypothetical class that somehow contained 40 people drawn from a full cross-section of the Axial Age literature in the Greco-Roman context would either have him be a very odd exception (and thus only marginally fit in) or would include a lot of people whose historicity is either known to be non-existent or is in doubt. Like, it does remain weird to have a historical founder be that mythologized, not in the sense of being described as having superpowers but in the sense of all of his biographies being literary masterpieces that are actually horrible biographies. To me, that’s what I find interesting about your use of the RR scale: The RR scale isn’t just a statement of supernaturalism, it is a scale of specific literary tropes that overwhelmingly do not cohere in real people. And while a real person could have RR-ified pseudo-biographies written about them, to have only such biographies exist so shortly after their death is very odd.