To be fair, Chomsky can actually be quite affable and likeable in “intellectual Grandpa” way, and I think his discussion with Foucault and his interviews with Barsamian give him a subdued charisma. Yes, Noam is clearly mostly appealing to people by virtue of the strength of his argument and his clear moral conviction, but a lot of people like him… just not in ways that are the same way that one likes, say, Obama or Sanders.

There are two levels of the problem.

The first is that history as a field lacks any clear method. Historians don’t do “logics,” they just do gut feelings and intuitions. That’s okay when lots of data exist (like in modern history), because then the weight of data compensates for the weakness of methods. But when data is poor this doesn’t work so well. And even when it’s strong it can fail. This is a major problem extensively documented by David Hackett Fischer in Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought.

The second is that biblical history has been captured by confessionalists and dogmatists (Christian apologists and their peer review, peer training, and peer pressure networks that extend to influence and “panopticon” even secular scholars). When you combine the first point with this point, it’s a recipe for pervasive and disastrous error. The methods the militarists are using are not “crank” in the sense that they are new or radical; they are the same “mainstream” methods used by all biblical historians. They were just built by Christian apologists trying to defend a belief rather than find the truth.

All the militarists are doing is turning their own weapons against them. But those weapons are still apologetical. Thus their results are just as bogus no matter what pet theory they are deployed to defend.

And because the field is awash in Prestige Politics, anyone who points this out or tries to change it gets dismissed as a crank or fringe or ignored altogether (hence every single study ever conducted on the validity of these methods has found them to be bogus; no one cares—I cite all of those studies in Proving History and explain logically why these methods are bogus; no one cares).

All good questions.

Your second two are most apt.

The trajectory is wrong: that stuff should be getting more and more abandoned/concealed, not more and more included. This is my point about how their theory does not explain why, e.g., Luke, would add things against his interest. It can’t be because he had to; because Mark didn’t. So why would Luke?

That is not impossible, but it is improbable, and that is the material point. Whereas it is far more probable if Luke is not doing what they aver but something else. And there is abundant independent evidence Luke is doing the something else. Which means in fact their theory is stymying progress in discovering Luke’s actual intentions (the Two Swords case is a sterling example, but not the only one).

Likewise Paul. If Jesus was newly being sold as a pacifist despite being an outspoken rebel, this would entail enormous policing and pushback, that Paul would then have to deal with: he’d be facing and thus rebutting arguments about it; he’d be consoling and reassuring his congregations over it; his constant enemies would not be the circumcisionists but the rebels upset at Jesus being whitewashed (and trying to snake his congregations) and the elite being concerned that he was still being popularized (and thus needing to be reassured they weren’t a rebel movement going underground). We’d see this all over Acts, too (unless it is 100% fiction and not just revisionist history). But we’d especially see it all over Paul, and indeed in many specific places where we have him arguing.

Again, it’s not “impossible” all this would somehow be missing; it’s just not probable. And that’s what matters.

Your first point, though, I think they would argue the contrary to: their imagined trajectory could be that Jesus was “angelified” (not exactly “deified”; Jesus wouldn’t be thought a “god” until well after the NT was finished, but “angelified” works as well for the point) only by the pacifist whitewashers, that that was part of their program. Or if he was angelified by both groups, and somehow Paul is the whitewasher and the Pillars still rebels, Paul is still only tweaking the angelified Jesus story; that’s not a radical break with the angelification, just a break with the messaging around it. The first Gospel (Mark) then reifies Paul’s tweak. They are in complete agreement then. Matthew wants to re-Judaize Jesus by rewriting Mark but keeps the pacifist version and thus is not influenced by the militants at all. And so on.

So their model is not as convoluted as you imagine. It just would have left different evidence than we have, as you point out.

And I couldn’t help wondering why, if the objective of the gospels was to cover up Jesus’ persona as a political rebel, so many of their “rebel Jesus” quotes only occur in the later gospels. Where did Luke, e.g., get this information, and why is he at pains to include it in his gospel? Why even bring it up?

And if Jesus was indeed a radical revolutionary, what on earth was Paul babbling about? He knew many of the people who would have known Jesus intimately. Why do his letters not contain even a hint of that?

I think your penultimate intuition is more apt here: exemplars of the set you’ve defined don’t do public speaking, so we won’t observe them so as to be able to list them.

If the question is, “Is that a thing that happens?” I don’t think anyone doubts it. We’ve all met smart people who are terrible public speakers. The joke is that those who can’t do, teach; but as teachers know (as do the people who have to hire them), most of those who do, can’t teach.

Moreover, Paul is exaggerating for effect, so the difference might not be as stark as you are imagining.

Compare, for example, Christopher Hitchens with Daniel Dennett. Dennett wasn’t awful. But he was nowhere near Hitchens class. A speech by Dennett might be smarter and have more information, but a speech by Hitchens will be more powerful and persuasive. This is the kind of comparison Paul is making. He’s just “not as good” as Hitchens but “still has important things to say” so “please bear with me” and “don’t mistake their wit and polish for being right and my comparative poverty of style for being wrong.”

Hence in respect to Paul’s veracity: I did note I think he is humblebragging. He actually is better at this than he pretends; the pose is rhetorical: it’s a backhanded way of blaming their success on polish rather than merit of argument, so he can position himself as winning on the merit of argument rather than polish.

Nevertheless, Paul did make a thing of this, a lot. So much so that the Corinthians already knew what his “thorn” was, so well he didn’t have to explain it. Was it a fatigue disorder? A weak voice? A social disorder? A speech disorder? We don’t know. But it must be something in that overall set, because it was something visible enough everyone knew about it and it vexed him and hindered him in some way in respect to his competing as an orator.

It wasn’t mere “lack of training.” Since he specifically says it was a disorder he begged Jesus to heal and was refused.

Paul claims a lack of training, but that must mean, in oratory specifically not rhetoric, i.e. he is a very well educated rhetor, but oratory involved movement coaching, body language training, vocal training, performance art; the list can be found in Quintilian, and I cover that briefly in Science Education. He could also be lying (pretending to be untrained in performance) but he could also be telling the truth, since performance training could be accomplished by a different teacher or at a different phrase of a training program, and he might have dropped out or not funded that “semester” so to speak. Indeed, he could have been refused as a student in that art because of his disorder (whatever that was).

“I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling,” and hence “my message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power”

Notwithstanding Paul’s disingenuousness here – clearly his way with the written word is crucial to his success – I’m trying to think of a modern example of somebody who is (for example) a terrible (or at least underwhelming) public speaker, but an admired and influential thinker.

Google throws up plenty of people who overcame stutters, and there are plenty of celebrities with speech impediments or heavy accents. But it’s harder to find examples of public intellectuals who didn’t overcome an impediment or lack of charisma, but had profound influence despite clearly not overcoming it.

Stephen Hawking? Noam Chomsky?

I guess there are plenty of writers who we simply never see speaking in public.

But I’d be interested to know, who’s the worst public speaker you’ve seen with the best message?