Heads up to all my patrons! Tonight I’ll be discussing The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus, which is now shipping in the US (and it should soon beyond, although our dumb trade war might be slowing that), on the Godless Granny show early this evening (Saturday, November 22, 4:30pm Eastern) and then Tuesday on the Godless Engineer show (November 25, 8pm Eastern) at in case you had more questions after seeing the discussion with Godless Granny! Both hosts will also be interested in different things, so I expect you’ll also get different things out of each show.
Enjoy!
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I’m in London. My Amazon pre-order was supposed to be delivered today. “Your order has been delayed.” =grrr= As Paul Krugman says, the metaphor of trade war was invented so that military historians could get talking-head gigs pontificating about the economy.
Thank you for keeping us updated here. I wouldn’t know about this otherwise!
Alas, I don’t know why though. It’s frustrating. I can indeed only assume it’s trade war related.
To be fair to the military historians, the breakdown of America’s soft power as a result of every aspect of Trumpism is making the world less safe (and I say that not at all as a fan of American hegemony). So now the “metaphor” is becoming increasingly not all that metaphorical.
I’m in Australia (from Canada) until mid-January. Amazon Canada wouldn’t deliver to an Australian address, so my copy will be (presumably) waiting for me when I get home. Amazon Australia shows the book as “Temporarily out of stock”.
Amazon.de planned to deliver me the book on Nov 20 (to Czechia) but then switched to just saying”We will email you when we have an estimated delivery date.”
I’m about halfway through OPHJ and am enjoying it so far. You explain the math a lot better here. I think in OHJ you underestimated just how intimidated by math even highly educated scholars can be.
My one complaint with calculating the odds of a Rank-Ragland member being historical is that the margins of error are a bit too fuzzy. Instead of providing upper bounds and lower bounds, you should instead confidence intervals. Calculating confidence intervals for an estimate of a binomial proportion isn’t an exact science, but using the Wilson method (which is preferred) the 99% confidence interval is from 0.046 (about 1/21) to 0.489 (about 1/2).
It seems your margin of error isn’t measuring the statistical margin of error, but instead an error in identifying the true members of the set that we actually have. In OHJ you got to 4/14 by being overly generous and not just counting Moses and Joseph as historical, but also two pagans in the set as well. In OPHJ you’re a little less generous by just counting Moses and Joseph as historical on top of the 3 new members to get to 5/17. But if we’re going to be as generous as possible we should keep the original 4, so it’d be 7/17. With this generous estimate we now get a 99% confidence interval estimate of 0.175 to 0.699.
So if you’re trying to be as generous as possible to the historicity side, you could say our error margins include assume 4 of those mythical people are actually historical and we got really unlucky in the rate of Rank-Ragland historical people got left down to us so that maximum upper bound is 7/3 in favor of historicity, with the opposite extreme being 476/23 in favor of mythicism.
I know this type of analysis is way beyond what your critics are able to handle when they struggle with just understanding the logic of prior probabilities, but I’d be interested to hear your justification for not including the statistical margin of error.
Oh that’s interesting. I did not know there was an online calculator for CL/CI with small sample sizes. Thank you for linking that in here.
Doing that math manually would have been far scarier than the original study (as you note). So I make the point about confidence level and its relationship to interval, but simply show I am being very generous, which is enough to suit purpose.
Indeed 99% confidence is quite generous (that’s an implausible scale of certitude for a vague case like this). I’m operating nearer 90% confidence.
Part of the problem here is that the average person doesn’t understand what this is doing. They may be inclined to think they can get Jesus to exist by “raising” the confidence level (as that is what happens to the interval’s upper margin), but that would be exactly the opposite of what’s happening. If I say I am “99.9%” sure P(Jesus) is “below” 58% that is because I have jacked up my confidence, which necessarily fuzzes the margins we can be that confident in.
So a naive operator might think we can get the prior probability Jesus existed to “be” 63% if we just jack the confidence we need up to 99.99%, or get P(Jesus) to “be” 99% if we add more 9s to that confidence level. A smart operator should be suspicious of this. But a naive operator won’t realize the problem, which is that this is not the prior probability of Jesus: it’s the highest it could be if we want to be “that” certain. It has as much chance as being at the bottom margin as the top, or anywhere in between. But when people see a top margin they just say “oh, that’s the probability!” And I have to forestall that mistake.
It’s like saying “I am 99.99% certain my income will be less than a million dollars next year” when I know full well it almost certainly won’t even break six figures. Yes, $100,000 is “less” than $1,000,000, so I wasn’t wrong. But I’d be wrong if I mistook that for meaning I realistically will make hundreds of thousands of dollars next year. Ditto Jesus. We can’t actually have confidence in something so fuzzy (compared to many other statements about ancient history, as I show in chapter six), and jacking up the margins doesn’t get us to greater but less certainty as to the probability Jesus existed.
This is counter-intuitive to anyone who doesn’t understand what a confidence level and interval actually are. Most people will naively think a higher confidence level means a higher confidence in the top margin, when in fact it means less confidence in the top margin.
So I stick nearer a 90% confidence level. That way we know there is maybe a 10% chance it’s above or below the margins but a 90% chance it’s within the margins, which is more what we want to know. Then we have a meaningful error margin, and not a false confidence in a high margin.
In other words, it’s more useful to know there is a 10% chance it’s above 1/3 (what a ~90% confidence gives us) than that there is a 1% chance it’s above 2/3 (what a 99.99% confidence gives us). The former makes clear how unlikely it is to be above 1/3, whereas the latter hides that fact.
(To be clear, it’s a 10% chance it’s above 1/3 or below the bottom margin, which one might say is a 5% chance it’s above 1/3, but the math doesn’t work out quite so cleanly; easier to just say “less than” a 10% chance it’s “above” 1/3. But the communicated lesson is the same.)
Actually it’s the same. I predicted there would be four. Someone found three. So either I was right and there are four, or they are right and there are three. The rest follows.
But at the medium confidence level I run at, I also ran the math for adding a bunch more in, and it still gets us the same margin the original study predicted, so the results remain within the original study’s tolerances no matter how much one stretches.
The question before us is how often people in the Greco-Roman world invented stories like those of Jesus, and how frequently stories like Jesus were based, at least nominally, on a historical character. What makes a story become a “story like Jesus”? You use the Rank-Raglan list, which is probably the best we have.
Had history been different, all this would have changed. One can easily imagine that the ancient world could have unfolded with nobody on the Rank-Raglan list. And then there most likely would never have been a gospel story (unless, of course, it was actually based on history).
If we are living in a world where 3/4 of Rank-Raglan heroes are fictional, then, when we hear of a new story in that category, we should assume 75% prior probability that this is fiction also unless the specific evidence indicates otherwise.
Imagine a world in which stories like Mark’s never existed. We might find everyone worshipping a totally different God, or even find that most people are adopting a rational, scientific viewpoint in that world.
Note the RR class is just a proxy for heavily mythologized heroes. If the RR class didn’t exist, we’d have a harder but still doable task of cataloguing all the criteria that distinguish heavily from merely mythologized heroes, and distinguishing heroes and characters from myth and fiction from mundane persons in nonmythical and nonfictional records. We’d then build those sets and check their comparative frequencies. As I pointed out in my original study, I expect any such programme would get no different a result than we get for the RR class.
It’s just obvious that in any set of heavily mythologized heroes, most won’t exist; while in any set of non-mythologized, non-heavily mythologized, and nonfictional people, most will. The only question is what does “most” correspond to (how much). And that’s all that the counting of actual frequencies does for us. The RR class is convenient because it is easy to quantify and count, and as such operates as an example set of any heavily mythologized set. It can be expected to have the same frequencies as those (there is no reason we know of that the RR set would somehow be more populated with nonexistent people than other myth-heavy sets).
This was all explained in chapter six of OHJ and is explained more now in chapter six of OPH.
Also, note, the math has to allow margins of error. So it’s not “in a world where 3/4 of Rank-Raglan heroes are fictional, then, when we hear of a new story in that category, we should assume 75% prior probability that this is fiction” but “in a world where 3/4 of Rank-Raglan heroes are fictional, then, when we hear of a new story in that category, we should assume EL–EH% prior probability that this is fiction,” where EL and EH marks the confidence interval for the confidence level chosen (as explained in OHJ and again in OPH). Because we have to account for uncertainties.
But, of course, what this really means is, “in a world where 3/4 of as-heavily-mythologized-as-that heroes are fictional, then…” and not really about RR membership specifically. RR membership just makes the relationship more visible. It isn’t the thing itself we are measuring.
As for where we’d be without the Gospels: the law of displacement effects nixes most contrafactuals like that. Remove one religion and another moves in to fill the void. So there is no guarantee we’d be rational and scientific top to bottom. Indeed, more decisively was Constantine’s choice to imperialize Christianity. Had he chosen another religion (say, Mithraism or Neoplatonism or, as previous emperors tried but unlike him were assassinated before they could effect it, Baal cult or Sol Invictus cult), we could as well just be in the same place—albeit maybe more polytheistic, but still just a bunch of superstitious nutters, only a fringe few among escape to rationalism and science.
I would say the odds would be better, but not by much. As I prove in Scientist, paganism came with rationality and scientific values that Christianity opposed when Constantine adopted it. But the same forces that drove him to eschew that culture for an irrationalist and antiscientific one could as well have driven him to some wing of paganism that was also irrationalist and antiscientific. There is no guarantee he’d have selected the dominant elite pagan worldview—after all, he didn’t. So odds are, he wouldn’t.
As I think of it, the Roman world could have developed such that stories like the gospel account were not common. If the world had been that way, we wouldn’t even be discussing the gospel story, since it would not exist ( unless, of course, it is based on history.)
Contrafactual history is interesting but complicated by displacement effects (i.e. remove one thing and something often moves in to replace it, or it otherwise changes the system, ruining ceteris paribus reasoning).
That’s essentially changing the question to P(h|e.~b) where ~b means “current background knowledge is in some way false,” e.g. what if aliens invaded Earth in 232 BC, what if writing wasn’t invented in the West yet, what if Persia defeated the Greeks and Romans, and so on.
That aside, the more important and maneageable question is ~e rather than ~b, since P(e|h.b) equals 1 minus P(~e|h.b), so ~e and e are reciprocals and therefore any statement about P(~e|h.b) entails a statement about P(e|h.b). This can even be methodologically useful to explore (I discuss the approach in Proving History).
All b was a de facto e, so one can get at ~b that way, but it’s a very convoluted approach that runs into the problems noted above, whereas tracking ~e doesn’t because it isn’t a vast body of information but a singular prediction of h and/or ~h.
So, for example, if instead of having the Gospels we had a memoir of Peter similar to the Life of Josephus (in content, genre, quality, etc.) and a memoir of Caiaphas similar to the Alexander the False Prophet of Lucian (in content, genre, quality, etc.). Or if we had both (e.g. the Gospels being later myths spun out of the same story). That would be an example of a “not e” (~e).
Then Jesus would be in a similar position to Haile Selassie, an example I give and discuss in On the Historicity of Jesus. This would establish historicity.
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Mathematically, this gets P(~e|h) > P(e|h), i.e. if Jesus existed, however improbable it is to have this ~e (e.g. if Jesus was a nobody, source survival is low, etc.), it is still more probable to have ~e than if Jesus didn’t exist, which entails the converse, P(e|h), meaning the probability of the evidence we do actually have, must be lower on historicity than on mythicism (even if by only a fraction of a percent).
Moreover, the probability of historicity must be reduced on e by as much as having ~e would have increased it (this is a logically necessary fact of probability). So if having ~e would increase that probability a thousandfold, not having ~e (the situation we are actually in) has already reduced that probability a thousandfold. In other words, if Jesus would be a thousand times more likely to exist if we had those two memoirs, Jesus must be a thousand times less likely to exist when we don’t have them.
The only mediating factor is b giving us the improbability on both theories that we’d have such memoirs, which is a function of external factors like Jesus’s actual social irrelevance, the widespread accidental loss of sources from antiquity, and so on, but that cancels out (because it’s the same on both sides of the ratio—this is called a coefficient of contingency, discussed in Proving History).
So the probability of historicity is simply the probability on what we have, the Gospels, which is (all considered) 1/2 as prior odds, but with ~e it would be updated, say, 1000/2 = 500/1 or five hundred to one in favor of historicity (even after considering the hit taken by the mythologization of the Gospels).
So the actual probability of Jesus existing has indeed been reduced a thousand times from what it would have been, had we had the kind of evidence that would secure our confidence in his existence. Which does not mean we should have had this evidence specifically; there are dozens of different kinds of things that could have survived (even different wording in the extant Epistles of Paul) that would do it.
See my nee article on the Historicity of Aristotle.
-:-
Any statement about “alternative background knowledge,” like “what if mythography didn’t exist then as a genre,” would fall out the same way mathematically, it would just be far harder to run the math because of displacement effects in contrafactual history that broad.
I’m looking forward to your new book. I’m tired of dubious methodologies of biblical studies. Lately I was reading some gerd ludemann (supposed to be a radical skeptic from a pious perspective) books and I was shocked by how conservative some of his takes are. The worst one was granting authenticity to Jesus calling peter Satan because of the criterion of embarrassment. Who would invent that? Mark would! He had no problem lambasting the disciples in his gospels, as they are portrayed as simple minded. He wants to convince us that God wants a peaceful messiah like Jesus while the masses want a liberator like Barabbas (both are sons of the father). While I’m a minimalist historicist, I respect some types of mythcism like yours and learned a lot from your books.
That’s a nice example proving the point. I use the castration of Attis in OHJ. The assumption that religious people won’t invent embarrassing things is simply false. They do that routinely. This is why one can’t just apply one’s own anachronistic assumptions about what “we” would do today, we have to actually compare competing theories for why someone then would do what we observe. This is a point I make a few times, with examples, in OPH.
But calling Peter the voice of Satan would have served as another example: one has to ask why Mark is writing that. It can’t likely be “because it happened and was embarrassing” as then Mark would simply have left it out. One might then try to advance armchair excuses (“maybe he had to include it for some reason we can’t discern?”) but that’s fallacious. When we look at literary reason instead, they have more evidence to back them, they rest on far more established precedent (as to what Mark, for example, is constantly doing), and they better explain the exact position and content of the passage.
Ignoring literary hypotheses is a common failure mode in this field. Some scholars have tried recently to turn that around. But I don’t know if they’ll succeed. The field seems hell bent on avoiding that.
This from memory. Enoch Powell in his “Evolution of the Gospel” (1994) argued on internal textual evidence alone that Matthew was the first gospel and that Mark and Luke are attempts at editing it into a coherent narrative. But Matthew itself is a jumble of two different strands — a gospel according to Peter (who is presented as the authority figure in early Xtianity) but also material interpolated by a different hand at a later stage with the aim of undermining Peter. The Satan comment, Powell suggested, is part of the later additions. Presumably at a point when Peter was not around to dispute how he was characterised.
There are many Matthaean priority theories. I would love them to be right (that the first Gospel should be the most Jewish and fabulous and obviously fake would be telling). But all the evidence is against it.
For example, Mark composed stories using the LXX and Homer and the Epistles of Paul, explaining elements that get scrambled in Matthew by not faithfully preserving the elements that justified their construction in the first place. This means Matthew cannot have constructed those stories. He is diluting them in transmission. Mark must have composed them. There are other examples of this effect (Matthew always degrades information Mark clearly originated), e.g. the empty tomb story is evidently a reaction to Mark’s (who had not yet heard of any theft accusation because the tomb claim hadn’t been invented yet), the authorial fatigue (a la Goodacre) consistently shows Matthew copying Mark and not the other way around. Mark has no knowledge of the Five Great Discourses (the bulk of what Matthew adds) yet Matthew has knowledge of the structure and stories of Mark (even when he changes it). And so on.
So we have to explain the story as an invention of the Pauline author Mark, which is easy to do (that simply reifies points made in Galatians 2). Matthew is trying to sell itself as the original version Mark corrupted (when in fact it was the other way around, just like 2 Thess did to 1 Thess) and so has to keep key material and then spin it (with the rock and keys discourse, establishing that Jesus merely means Peter will falter but maintain primary authority upon his repentance), rather than hide material that could be used against Matthew’s line without that preemptive spin.
So there is no difficulty explaining the material and its development in the standard Synoptic chronology.
Would the priests of the Attis cult castrate themselves for a lie?
Exactly. Or would Romans worship a fratricide (Romulus) despite believing that earned the deepest level of hell. Or join Osiris cult whose god was foreign and incestuous. Or admire Hercules who was humiliated with shoveling flop. And so on.
How much of that do you think is humanity’s need to tell effective stories that humanize their protagonists and make them multi-layered and sympathetic?
That was more of a concern of post-Enlightenment fiction (the rise of literary realism). It’s why novels in the 19th century look so different from the 2nd century, and novels of the 21st century so different from the 19th. The techniques of making someone admirable and a model or conveying a message about people and society changed, becoming more realist over time. Thus we now appreciate complex characters over monotonous good vs. evil characters in a way that wasn’t so much a thing before. It only started becoming a thing in the 19th century.
We can see what ancient analysts thought because several examples survive, e.g. Plato’s Republic and Plutarch’s How to Read Poetry overtly discuss how literary characters should be written, and the gist we get is that it’s more black and white modeling rather than complexity; complexity itself was a flaw. It’s just that what purpose stories about heroes served didn’t always match the sole purpose of making them moral ideas, and what moral ideals were was way different then than now (in many ways that is what Plutarch is reacting to: moral values changed between Homer and Plato, and that made promoting Homer an apologetical problem it hadn’t been before).
So, for example, we can’t assume that when Jesus is portrayed as an asshole (which is a lot), that’s just realist complexity; it’s literally advocating that as a moral ideal (that it is a shitty ideal is only a modern hindsight). Jesus can be racist, because racism was morally good. Jesus can advocate genital mutilation to avoid sex, because that was totally admirable then. And so on.
We see this in the Infancy Gospel, where toddler Jesus is a Lovecraftian monster, which we think really weird now, but back then it made sense: of course we should prove God’s absolute sovereignty by having Jesus display it. Nothing Jesus does in that story is morally bad. It’s all the fully appropriate behavior of a sovereign Lord. It’s not meant to be emulated (as humans are not divine beings). It’s meant to be respected. Whereas now, we are horrified. We see the old way in how hurricanes get blamed on gay sex: to any modern mindset that’s horrifying, but to the simplistic ye-olde-tyme mindset, it’s totally righteous.
Conversely, Peter is depicted as flawed not to make him more sympathetic, but to make him less sympathetic. In a sense it’s a sympathetic pose insofar as the reader is meant to see themselves in Peter (as a failed sinner, even the mighty fall, and so on), but not as an ideal to be okay with or emulate, but as a lesson in how not to be. When Jesus rebukes Peter as putting human interests above God’s, the intention is for the reader to feel shame for Peter as a failure, a thing not to emulate; and to learn that even the haughty elite can sin.
The overlap between then and now is the rhetorical utility: modern preachers tell tales about being hardened atheists mired in debauchery so as to promote the power of Christ in reforming them, but not to promote hardened atheists mired in debauchery as “being sympathetically complex” but as absolutely wrong, and the transformation as proof.
This is black and white thinking. Not sympathetic reasoning. Peter plays the same role for Mark and Matthew: he’s just another sin-prone leader who fell to the depths and had to dig his way back up. The message being that you too can stop being bad and through the Holy Spirit find redemption, even to the highest rank. More black and white thinking. Not sympathetic reasoning.
Caught the end of the stream! I’ve really warmed up to your chats with Granny, they’re often really useful because she asks excellent entry-level questions (whereas your great interactions with GE or MythVision can be a little higher-level).
I am up to page 133 in this new book. Very good so far. A comment and a question. I was more than a little surprised that the bibliography listed NO books by Robert Price ! I would have thought that 2 or 3 of his earlier works would be listed as foundational. I understand his egregious political fostering in recent years, but still. Also, there were at least 3 books or publications listed by you as “forthcoming”. Are these articles to appear somewhere or actual short books?
I don’t cite books that are not peer reviewed unless they are necessary to cite. Price’s books almost never meet both criteria (but sometimes do: I cite them half a dozen times in Proving History and almost a dozen times in Historicity; OPH is mostly limiting to discussing the last ten years, and Price doesn’t have anything that scores in that window).
I also find his books problematic for a number of reasons: his tendency to argue multiple contradictory theories without explaining what he’s doing or their hierarchy of probability, but giving the impression of being totally convinced by each one instead (which requires too much word count to warn readers about); and his tendency to mix in too many unsourced assertions, leading to another general rule: if I have to do all the work of fact-checking something you said, you don’t get the credit. It’s only the worse that he overstates facts a lot, often conflates speculations with facts, and over-relies on obsolete scholarship of the 19th and early 20th century.
So, there’s good stuff in there. But it’s too problematic and unnecessary to cite. For the same reason, I rarely cite Doherty either, despite his work being much better by all metrics, and seminal to the only mythicist thesis to survive peer review (twice now, when we count Lataster). But he’s worth getting the hat-tip: hence the dedication in OPH.
Exceptions also don’t show up for being off subject, e.g. I often cite Price’s chapter on rationalist arguments against the resurrection, being hands down the best summary of that point ever in print and required reading for it, but that has no relevance to my discussions of historicity (where I am comparing two sides who already agree Jesus didn’t rise from the dead).
I’ve had my copy of your latest book for about ten days (Amazon shipment, USA). I had placed a pre-order shortly after you announced, so maybe I received it sooner. Really enjoying it. I’m reading it slow.
Looking forward to the rest of book, but the first hundred pages is familiar since I’ve purchased / read everything else you’ve written over the years. I do like how you summarized how Christianity likely came about.
I REALLY wish this type of scholarly research and explanations were widely taught in America, we desperately need this type of information to repel the christian fascism being embraced here. I believe if we did, we would have a different country then what we have today.
I have recommended your books and research for many years now. Your research has helped me and undoubtedly many others escape the incessant lies being taught.
Thank you. That’s helpful to know.
Posted my review: EVALUATION: Richard Carrier’s new book “The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus (2025)”
I gave it a 9/10 and encouraged a wide readership:
https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/2025/11/evaluation-richard-carriers-new-book-the-obsolete-paradigm-of-a-historical-jesus-2025/
Thank you. I’ll put it on my agenda to look over next month.
I bought the new book; it’s great. But with all due respect, you need a good editor. The following is feedback, offered in good faith to help elevate your future works.
There are areas that are vague and require diving into non-footnote texts to understand your meaning. You also frequently mention other books or scriptures but rarely quote them directly, forcing readers to switch between books (at least you do provide footnotes). Additionally, you tend to reuse certain words within specific subsections, creating unintentional repetition. You also love to use combinations of punctuation like em dashes and semicolons to compound sentences, but then avoid them altogether in other places, resulting in awkward sentence fragments. None of these are issues with the contents or research, merely critiques of the reading experience.
Thanks for writing the book.
Happy thanksgiving.
Thanks, but:
I use sentence fragments to emulate spoken English. It’s an easier read for most people, because it’s how people talk. I think it’s high time grammars acknowledge this.
I use the general-to-particular ramping to footnotes for the same reason: most people don’t want the digression into nitpicking and just want the summary; people who do want to “click through the hyperlink” to dive into the digression can then use the footnotes. And people in between know they can go back and do that later. This thus creates wider utility for the text (it hits more reader markets rather than assuming only one).
And this book is a sequel to, not a revision or replacement of, the original study. Though one doesn’t really need to read the original study to get everything said (only to vet or challenge it), if someone does need to “go back to the original hypertext” for any reason, the breadcrumb is provided.
This is essential for efficiency. Replicating the original study would double the page count and thus the tedium and cost of the book, while replicating anything at all is redundant and thus wasteful. I write books and articles so I won’t have to repeat myself (I can just refer to where I already covered it). Having to repeat myself in every book would defeat the purpose of writing books at all.
Looking at your calculation summary on page 380, we find the a fortiori consequent odds of Jesus existing are 373248 / 390625, which is, for all practical purposes, 1. So, after all the excellent analysis of the gospels, the epistles, and other early sources, we find that the total of all this is that this evidence is just as likely to be this way whether Jesus existed or didn’t (when arguing a fortiori).
We are then left with finding the prior odds, and whatever comes out of that is basically the a fortiori odds of Jesus existing.
The prior odds are based on a limited set of people on the Rank-Raglan list. Had history been different, it is easy to see that this list could be 5% real people or 75% real people. It comes out to be about 26%, and that becomes the ballpark estimate for the existence of Jesus. Had history been a little different, this number could be very different.
After reading much of what you have written about the consequent odds, summing it up at 1/1 seems like a stretch for the a fortiori case. By contrast, your 3/2500 a judicantiori odds seem much closer to reality.
An interesting exercise, after reading your former books, is to read the New Testament in the order the books are thought to have been written and ask, “What was this author thinking?” When I did that, it was pretty apparent to me that the earliest writers were not thinking of a historical Jesus.
Consequent odds aren’t the posterior odds. But yes, if I exaggerate the evidence for Jesus 8/1 the upper margin is dragged to a wash by the remaining evidence and the prior dictates the posterior. But the lower margin remains far below that. And the point of error margins is that the actual probability is not known beyond the margin-space. So we cannot say the consequent odds “are” ~1; we can only say they must be somewhere in between ~1/1000 and ~1. And where in between is unknown.
Of course I agree. The point of the AF estimates is to bend over as far as any plausibility remains. The AJ estimates are closer to what I think the results actually are. But of course, that amounts to bending back as far as any plausibility remains. So I could be as wrong as the other side. That’s why the results are unknown but “in between” the AJ and the AF. It might be closer to the AJ.
Note that the posterior AJ and AF are at the sweep, i.e. if we set all values to AJ or AF. More realistically, I’m more likely to be “off” on a few rather than all estimates, so more likely the correct posterior is at a mix of AJ and AF values, and thus somewhere more in between the posteriors I list. But since we don’t “know” which ones I’m off on, we can’t really say whether there are any or which ones, and thus we can’t develop a center-curve value.
So it’s just “somewhere between ~1/3000 and ~1/4” or just “below ~1/4.”
I concur. It does become clearer when you do that, and take seriously that the later books did not exist when the former books were written—and that all were developed over a span of almost a hundred years, not “one generation” as naive Christians think.
What would be your recommended order for a chronological reading of the books of the New Testament?
Good question.
We don’t actually know.
And in some cases can’t. For example, the authentic letters of Paul appear to be pastiches of several letters and thus may span dates that overlap the other letters. And scholars debate dating them by incorrectly assuming they were single letters. And some relative dating is impossible, e.g. we don’t know if Galatians was written before or after 1 Corinthians or even 2 Corinthians, etc. It’s all speculation.
But those caveats aside, here’s my “best guess”:
1 Peter could plausibly be pre-Pauline, so you can “pretend” it was the first written and put it ~ 35 AD.
James and Jude could date anywhere from ~ 40 to ~ 150 but as they fit in every period, you can “pretend” they were among the first written and put them in 40 AD.
Paul’s six authentics then span the 50s AD. Their exact order may or may not be (per all the caveats above):
1 Thessalonians
Galatians
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
Philippians
Romans
(I think Galatians and 1 Thessalonians could be somewhere else in this order but there is no way to know; their traditional placement is based on rather weak suppositions and inferences, but one’s as good as another)
Hebrews
1 Clement (not in the NT but surely a 60s AD text; might reference Hebrews, which may be based on 1 Peter)
Colossians (perhaps 60s or 70s; seems naive for a second century text, but dating it is important because it appears to be mythicist, so it would be convenient if it were first century, which can includes 80s or 90s; since I am against wishful dating, that it could be post-Markan or even second century should be allowed, I just put it here on a weak balance of probability and because Mark appears to maybe be aware of it)
Mark (late 70s, as it derives material from Josephus’s Wars which was published in 76, and yet seems urgently concerned with the loss of Jerusalem, and it not ending the world, as a recent existential crisis)
Matthew (probably 80s as it appears to be an immediate reaction to Mark from an opposing faction desperate to replace it)
Revelation (definitely mid-90s AD, though may have been subsequently redacted, that’s debated; its style is close to Matthew but not identical)
Luke-Acts (post-93 as it uses Josephus’s Antiquities; likely 110–130; scholars want to downdate Christian literature excessively and so will usually say 90s, but that’s just wishful not practical thinking)
Philemon (I now believe a fake, but not sure where to put this one, it seems to resemble a school exercise, adapting a letter of Pliny the Younger in emulation of Paul, with little ideological relevance to either side of the Marcionite controversy, so it may be anywhere between 110 and 150).
John (our John is a third edition, complicating dating of earlier editions we don’t have, but I think even the first redactional layer critiques Luke and thus post-dates that, putting that, and certainly the third edition we have, at 110–150; scholars usually say “100” but for no good reason)
2 Thessalonians (forged based on 1 Thessalonians but before the interpolation in 1 Thess. 2 which shows up in Marcion but predates him, maybe by only a year or two; possibly a reaction to the rise of Bar Jochba, which if so would put it ~ 132 as it puts the resolution of the war in the future, if that is what it is even talking about, which is debatable)
Ephesians (possibly forged by Marcion based on Colossians to pass it off as its referenced letter to the Laodiceans, as Marcion labeled it; this would put it 135–150 AD depending on when Marcion published his canon)
2 Peter (could be a little earlier or later; somewhere around the era of Marcion at least)
The Pastorals may have been forged in reaction to Marcion’s canon but even if not are from around that general period (they show stylistic influence from Luke-Acts and some have speculated they are by the same author): 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus might be their order (if they weren’t originally all published together)
Johannine Epistles—1, 2, 3 John (actually claimed to be by “The Elder” and not anyone named John, but still)—are also (probably) anti-Marcionite, post-Gospel-of-John texts, and so could have been forged together for the anti-Marcionite edition. But they might also predate Marcion, but still post-date John. Either way, like the Pastorals, around the same period.
Either the Johannines or the Pastorals were likely the last books published.
But note all of these books now exist only in the anti-Marcionite edition which also underwent editing, so won’t necessarily have exactly the same text as their pre-Marcionite editions (if they even had such editions, which we cannot assure for the Pastorals and Johannines for example).
Thanks! You omitted Philippians and Philemon, but I’m guessing they would slot in between Romans and Hebrews.
Oh, right, I forgot those. Fixed!
Note I am now convinced Philemon is a second century fake.
And Philippians might go anywhere before or after Romans because it is vague as to its circumstances but seems to postdate the other letters of Paul.
For my purposes I used the list at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/. No !its can be known with certainty. I skipped q which this list put at the top.
Regarding the dating of Mark, I have always found Randel Helms’s argument that it dates to the range of 70-74 AD impressive. (see quote of Helms at Gospel of Mark ). The argument is that Mark clearly identified the fall of Jerusalem as being the abomination of desolation prophesied in Daniel. As Daniel had said that the son of man would come 3 1/2 years after the abomination of desolation, Mark seems to be saying that the Son of Man will come within 3 1/2 years after the fall of Jerusalem, by 74 AD. Later writers were left to explain why it did not come as expected.
Whereas Daniel had a son of man coming with clouds, by the time of Mark, this had changed to a Son of Man coming in the clouds. (I discuss this at Prophecy Strikes Out). But it all comes from Daniel.
You argue based on a reference to Josephus that Mark wrote later, in which case Mark must have taken Daniel’s 3 1/2 years to be symbolic. That could be, but I wonder if he didn’t think it would be a literal return within the next 3 years after writing.
It’s unlikely Mark would have intended to revive the “any day now” rhetoric that he is trying to fix because it failed. And Mark lacks any such urgency (that we find more plausibly represented in Matthew for example, as the Sermon on the Mount is entirely based on what happens to us now being moot as the end is so near). He seems to have a long game in mind. Maybe Matthew wanted to push the short game, but even he doesn’t explicitly correct Mark on that. He just argues with more urgency, but is just as vague about timelines.
And indeed, it’s hard to get the Jewish War to be published in time for Mark to have used it before 74.
But more importantly, Mark conspicuously avoids ever discussing Daniel’s clock. That he avoids it tells us he found it a problem and didn’t want to call attention to it.
And even more importantly, Daniel’s clock starts with the messiah’s death. The destruction of Jerusalem is supposed to happen 3.5 years after he died, so if Jesus died in 30, the temple was supposed to fall in 33. The messiah then returns 3.5 years after that, which would be 37 or so. Obviously that got totally bollocksed. So Mark can’t rescue it. He thus just dumps it.
What we see in later Christian apologetics is to “float” the 3.5 years (Revelation has it floating in the future, after or in the 90s AD; Irenaeus has it be the period in which Jesus continued appearing after his death before the closing of the apostolate, and thus disconnects it from the fate of the temple altogether, and puts it firmly in the past). We don’t know what Mark did with it because he never says.
Why did the new book not get through peer review? If I remember correctly from one of the podcasts, it supposedly brings nothing new to the field, was it the only reason?
I’m gonna buy it anyway, but don’t you fear it will become the trump card of your opponents? It’s a golden opportunity to dismiss you, “look it didn’t even get past peer review, more like obsolete paradigm of mythicism lol”. It’s a shame.
It was indeed a bogus reason. I tell that story in my article on its release, which in turn links to a video where I and the host and two other published biblical scholars discuss it.
The original studies passed peer review (mine and Lataster’s). By contrast, no peer-reviewed studies specifically defending historicity have passed peer review in a hundred years. This state of affairs has caused a closing of ranks and now reviewers are trying to block further publication of a feared thesis.
Dr. Carrier I just thought of a funny.
Feel free to use it if you like.
You know how you point out that whole Christians claim that Paul killed other Christians (before converting), but in actuality he only says that he prosecuted Christian, but doesn’t say how.
Well I thought of a funny example to underscore this point.
Store Sign Reads: “Shoplifters will be prosecuted”
Dogmatic Christian: “That must mean the death penalty for Shoplifters!’
Not bad. 🙂
Indeed, it’s unlikely Paul killed anyone, not only because he never says he did (yet surely that would have been a serious issue he’d have had to defend himself against and apologize for repeatedly) but also because no one does (there are no mentions of an executed Christians anywhere in Paul’s letters; he says Christians should obey the Romans; and the Jerusalem leaders and churches remained there unmolested for Paul’s entire career—Acts is revisionist, contradicting the actual eyewitness evidence in Paul). Paul only references harassment and non-capital punishments (e.g. 2 Cor. 11; even Philippians 1, where Paul makes clear he can choose whether to provoke the death penalty against himself or not, and chooses not even while in jail so he wasn’t charged under any capital crime). And when 1 Clement does, it appears to be by proxy, i.e. Christians were falsely accusing rival Christians of unrelated crimes to get them killed, not for being Christians, but some other trumped charge (see Interpreting 1 Clement’s Supposed Descriptions of Fabulous Murders).
I pre-ordered the paper book on September the 5th and Amazon Italy said it would deliver it on November the 19th then on November the 20th it sent me a mail saying it would be delivered on may the 22nd next year …
I bought the ebook and I’m looking around for the paper version.
Okay the “next year” thing must be an error, unless it said January. If that doesn’t change let me know and I’ll look into this.
It’s still may 2026 and if I order it again it’s June 2026. I hope it changes to January as soon as possible
Me too!
I hope that’s just some kind of default report when the site has no specific data on availability.
Otherwise, there would seem to be something wrong with Italy’s imports regime.
There is a lot of good new material in your latest book.
The chapter on Docetism is beneficial. The idea that Christianity would begin with a historical man who, within a few decades, was commonly thought to be just an illusion makes no sense. It makes more sense that the debate was with those who clung to mythicism as historicism became popular.
I haven’t seen you discuss the second-century apologists much. Earl Doherty contended that they largely promoted a logos religion that had almost nothing to do with the gospels and little to do with Paul (see JESUS PUZZLE: Preamble – Century of Apologists ). That the second century apologists would come from a variety of philosophical views with little reliance on the gospel Jesus is something to be expected if Christianity began from a variety of Jews influenced by Greek culture with a common tendency to look for a Messiah, with many finding mythicism. But I don’t think those writings are what one would expect from a religion grounded in a single historical man.
I am sympathetic to that reaction, but on reflection I came to disagree, because there were weird evolutions in the religion over dumb things like whether a revered angelic fugure would take shits or sweat or feel fear, and that could motivate the illusionism that modern scholars invented.
Also, in the latter part of that chapter I document recent scholarship on the war between mystics and traditionalists (which is what we see happening in 1 John for example), which on the historicist model arose from a disagreement on organization and authority. The original movement was egalitarian and non-hierarchical and deferred to continuing revelators, i.e. basically a shamanic model. The traditionalists were hierarchical, i.e. a priestly model, and thus could not allow continued claimants to revelation. They had to close the canon by saying Paul was the last one (and this process was already occurring in Paul’s day with the revelatory model, so the problem was already evident when he wrote Galatians 1) and that only those who could claim a pedigree to one of the “authentic” past apostles counted as authoritative, and all newcomers were “heretics” etc. See my article on Christian literalism.
This also could drive an evolution toward a novel mythicism. The pedigree model depended on taking the Gospels literally, yet the Gospels first started being written on the idea of not taking them literally. So the literalism was new, and driven by a need to control the church more effectively, affirming a stable leadership and doctrine. And we know a new literalism does not entail mythicism (a historical man can have edificatory myths and allegorical stories written about him). The fight driving them to that extreme could also have driven the allegorists to the opposite extreme to distinguish themselves and (in their own way) retake control of doctrine (it’s just a less effective method to gain control of an institution and thus usually loses, as I show was argued by Noll in OHJ). Thus the mystics (continuing revelators claiming authority over the purportedly pedigreed) would be incentivized to totally mystify the Gospels and thus Jesus, to take away their opponent’s tools and place control entirely in the hands of revelators. That it failed is besides the point. That it would be attempted is at least as plausible as not.
So, given the scant data we have, we actually can’t rule these things out. Accordingly, this now extensive 2nd century evidence of mythicists could have come about equally either way. It therefore doesn’t really change anything—except psychologically: anyone who was resistant to these facts owing to an excessive and unrealistic expectation that “we should have evidence of these guys” (that is a non sequitur as I explain in OHJ) now has that stumbling block removed by there in fact being lots of “evidence of these guys.” And that has merit in terms of persuasion (removing emotional blocks to the implications of the original data).
P.S. I mostly don’t discuss the 2nd century sources after 125 AD owing to their lateness and derivativeness (and thus uselessness for ascertaining the origins and early development of the church). I explain this methodologically in OHJ. But I have nevertheless covered this angle some on my blog. See:
How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity
Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians
Did Polycarp Meet John the Apostle?
On the Historicity of Jesus and the Rhetoric of Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho
And probably more. Those are just the articles that come first to mind. But these show how none of these later sources had any earlier sources. This is why they are useless for reconstructing origins and why, as you note, Christianity looks largely bogus as soon as we start getting any significant amount of discursive literature from them. This is in a sense the overall thesis of Vinzent that I agree with (see Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century?).
Thanks. You know a lot more about second-century Christianity than I do, so I will defer to you. I had just found that Doherty’s argument on the second-century Christian apologists was impressive, and I was wondering what you thought of it.
Doherty argues that these apologists identified as Christians and defended a gospel of the Logos that seemed deliberately to bypass a historical Jesus. Your response seems to be that there were many other Christians by that time who defended historicity that Doherty does not mention.
And yes, the fact that second-century people defended historicity is basically meaningless to determining whether Jesus existed, since these later Christians are merely repeating what they heard from other sources.
I understand that Christianity began with a wide range of enthusiasm for a Messiah (Christ) and for concepts like the Logos. So, in a sense, all of these were followers of Christ, and could call themselves Christ-ians, even if they followed a Jewish militant “Messiah”. Paul and the other apostles were just some of the many people in the broad movement. And a large portion of that movement later gelled around a historical Jesus.
But not all Christians agreed. As I understand Doherty, there were still authors calling themselves Christian apologists in the second century whose religion appears to have nothing to do with a historical Jesus. He writes,
In particular, Doherty refers to Minucius Felix, who appears to condemn the very idea of a Christ crucified on Earth. And yet Felix presents himself as a Christian apologist. I don’t have access to the original writing, so I am going by what Doherty tells me. I don’t see that you mention Minucius Felix on your site.
Thanks for the links. There are many things I would like to learn more about, and these links are now on my list.
On Doherty’s analysis, mixed bag. But it can be a useful start point, if you approach it critically.
I don’t know if he “does not mention” them. But in fact almost all surviving Christian sources from the second century assiduously defend historicity (almost desperately, which is a tell).
He does not. Doherty is misreading the text. Felix is reacting to people mocking Christians for worshiping a criminal, not the idea that Jesus was crucified; he is actually defending his worship of a crucified man (by saying he was innocent and came from space and lives there now, a standard historicist position).
He also comes to the wrong conclusion about Theophilus (that appears to be a messianic Jewish text that received one or two small Christian interpolations centuries later to be passed off as a Christian text; it therefore is wholly uninformative of extant second century Christian texts).
And Athenagoras (the Apology isn’t about Jesus so can’t be expected to discuss him, it is solely a defense against the charges against current Christians of atheism, cannibalism, and sex crimes; and the Resurrection is for a philosophical opponent unfamiliar with and unimpressed by Christian literature, e.g. it also makes no OT scriptural argument for resurrection, so it too won’t have referenced any of that, so we can’t say what he would have used against, say, a Christian or Jewish opponent).
There was also a lot of interest in Paul. Saying otherwise is kind of silly. Marcion popularized that nexus of debate and it ends up, accordingly, all over Tertullian and Irenaeus for example, as well as generating endless apocrypha (e.g. more than one Acts of Paul). We know Justin wrote a treatise against Marcion so definitely knew about and discussed Paul (just not in what we have). Acts and 2 Thessalonians (even 2 Peter) are reactions to the Pauline letters. Mark is built out of them. And so on.
These are the kinds of thing I mean by mixed bag. You have to treat Doherty’s work critically. That means checking what he leaves out, checking if he is getting the context right when interpreting sources, and so on.
To be clear, that would not be useless if those “other sources” were actual identifiable sources we don’t already have. The problem is not that they cite sources (often they don’t even do that, but even when they do) but that they name no first century sources at all, or any we don’t already have (and have already found to be mythical or apocryphal or don’t say what they claim).
I give examples of this difference in today’s post about Aristotle.
You say “he (Felix) is actually defending his worship of a crucified man (by saying he was innocent ….
Where does Felix say this, please?
It’s the entire argument of §29. When Felix meets the accusation he worships a crucified man, he does not deny it (he does not say he was not crucified), but defends the man. As Lejay puts it, “To the accusation of adoring a criminal he contents himself with replying that the Crucified One was neither a man nor guilty,” referring to 29.2:
The answer to “you worship a crucified man” is that “you err in thinking he deserved it, or that he wasn’t divine” and thus would have survived being killed, which entails the author believed he was an earthly man, and was crucified, but did not deserve to be (and thus is not a “criminal” in the accused sense), and survived it because he was divine (and thus was not mortal; the accuser is assuming he was mortal, just as they are falsely assuming he was guilty).
He then goes on to complain that pagans worship men on crosses, so what’s wrong with him doing so? (“Your victorious trophies not only imitate the appearance of a simple cross, but also that of a man affixed to it!”) He never argues that his man wasn’t on one. He only says he is not an idolator (therefore they do not worship “crosses,” rather than the man himself). Conspicuously missing is any denial of the man he worships being crucified.
I have read Felix’s Octavius very carefully, and I do not find any explicit reference to a “crucified He,” that is, to a specific historical individual who was crucified and whose innocence or divinity Octavius would be defending. The passage contains no statements such as “He was innocent” or “you are mistaken in thinking that He deserved it or that He was not divine.”
While one may interpret the accusations put into Caecilius’ mouth within a broader context of early Christian polemic, such an interpretation goes beyond what the text itself explicitly states. For this reason, I do not see how Doherty can be said to be “misreading the text,” especially when the supposed correction relies on claims that are not actually present in the text.
Are you serious? Was the “criminal” he speaks of nonbinary? He never challenges the charge that he is a man as described. He defends it.
The phrase “when you attribute to our religion the worship of a criminal and his cross, you wander far from the neighbourhood of the truth, in thinking either that a criminal deserved, or that an earthly being was able, to be believed God” entails no disagreement with the charge that he was a man, and was a criminal (he merely did not “deserve” it). He simply says Jesus was not a mortal man, but a divine (and thus immortal) one. He never says “we do not worship a man” or “our god was never crucified as a criminal” or “you do not understand that this happened in celestial not earthly realms” or any such thing.
This is even clearer in the Latin:
Literally:
The distinction is thus whether the man was mortal and guilty, not whether he was a man. Felix thus says exactly the opposite of what your proposal would have entailed him to say instead.
Moreover, in Latin, terrenum (“terrestrial”) is an adjective and thus must take a noun. The only noun it can be modifying is hominem, “man.” So the grammar entails Felix did say “man.” That “man” is also the apposite of deum (God) and the only available subject of the verbs credi and meruisse (“believed” and “deserves”). Likewise the adjective noxium, “guilty,” in the denial can only take the noun hominem as well, and that is even directly paralleled between the statement and the denial. So grammatically his being a man is not the aspect being denied but is being affirmed.
So there is no way to get the text to mean anything else.
Moreover, if your really bad argument could be replaced with a slightly better one, that Felix does not deny he was a man (even Doherty’s theory requires the first and all Christians to have believed Jesus was a man) but where he died (as if somehow that would answer the charge of “whether” he died; it would not), that is also conspicuously absent here.
Felix does not challenge “where” this happened, and where it happened is not part of the charge he is answering. So Felix is not meeting any question of where. He is assuming everyone agrees on where, including his accusers, and himself. So there is no dispute about the where here. The adjective “terrestrial” is not positioned grammatically as disputing where the cross or god ever were, but as a synonym of mortal, as the following line explains. It is not a reference to where he died. It’s a reference to what sort of man he was when he died: earthly or divine.
If Felix were keen to rebut the charge that Jesus was executed as a criminal on Earth, he would answer that he was not executed on Earth and by no human court but a demonic one which is illegitimate. But that is not what he argues. He argues that “he was not guilty” and “he was not mortal,” which assume he died at the hands of a human court on Earth, and that this can’t be mocked because he wasn’t guilty, and he rose again and lives on in outer space whence he came.
So there is no way to get Felix to be a mythicist or even unaware of historicist accounts of Jesus.
I finished reading it and I have two more points I’d like to make on it.
1) On Galatians 4:4, while I agree overall that a literal interpretation of “born of a woman” isn’t conclusive enough to use as evidence that Jesus really existed (by that logic 4:19 proves that the Galatians were literally Paul’s children and he was in the middle of giving birth while writing the letter), I do disagree with some of your arguments in support of it. In particular around 4:24 and him saying that it’s figurative. In my opinion he’s referring specifically to the story of Abraham’s two sons. He’s saying that, while Paul himself believes the stories are literally true, they can also be used as an allegory to the whole pre- and post-resurrection thing and why they don’t need to follow the law. So it doesn’t have anything to do with 4:4.
In fact 4:4’s “born of a woman” is only relevant to the “under the law” of the same verse. All Paul is saying with “born of a woman” is that, because Jesus took human form, he too was under the law until his death and resurrection made it so they weren’t under the law any more.
But this actually touches on something I’ve wondered about for a long time. If Peter was Torah observant, then surely Jesus was as well. But isn’t this in itself an argument for mythicism? If Jesus was Torah observant then shouldn’t Paul have faced the obvious criticism that he’s arguing against what Jesus himself said?
But Galatians 4:4 could actually be a sign of this. He’s essentially saying that the only reason that the historical Jesus had to follow the law was because he hadn’t been crucified yet, giving a quick answer to the complaint he must have received if Jesus was actually a historical person.
2) In the big picture it seems pointless to keep arguing the evidence. It’s clear that historicists aren’t interested in actually taking the arguments seriously and actually making logical arguments. What’s needed more is a book like Avolos’s The End of Biblical Studies. You touch on it a bit in OPHJ, but there needs to be more of a discussion on why biblical scholars are so hostile to even the possibility of mythicism before any progress can be made on evaluating the evidence.
On a final note, did you see that Tim O’Neill interviewed Bart Ehrman on mythicism a couple days ago? There’s nothing new so it’s probably not worth responding to, but I thought it was funny how Ehrman struggled to answer even O’Neill’s version of the arguments for mythicism. Ehrman tries so hard to dismiss mythicism as ridiculous on it’s face but when he’s asked to explain his reasoning he just embarrasses himself.
As I note, that exegesis started in Gal 3 and continues in Gal 4 right up to Gal 4:4–7. Paul then digresses on the state of affairs in Galatia but then returns to the point he was making at Gal 4:21. In fact you can cut everything from 4:8 to 4:20 and see that there is no break in the stream of thought: 4:21 immediately comments on 4:4–7. It is not a new point. It is the same point he made across 4:1–7. I do show this line by line in OPH.
But also, as you note, it won’t matter, since even if we think maybe he has started a new point there, it still remains too ambiguous to use either way. We simply don’t know what Paul meant in 4:4. And at that floor of dispute, either interpretation of it is as likely as the other, since the question is, if Mythicism is true, how likely is it that he’d write that, given what he writes after verse 20, and the answer is, “quite probable,” and if Historicity is true, how likely is it that he’d write that, given what he writes after verse 20, and the answer is, “just as probable” (particularly as its ambiguity is somewhat improbable on that theory), so it’s a wash. It can’t be used as evidence for either theory. We simply would need more information, and we don’t have it (which is itself peculiar, but that’s the general point made in the first section of Ch. 11 of OHJ and scored on its own as collective evidence of oddity across Paul’s corpus).
Or as I frame it in the original study, it is not inherently probable that in 20,000 words Paul would never face that argument, so as to have to respond to or mitigate it. It’s bigger than just his take on Torah (which was not, at least originally, that Jews could abandon Torah, but that Gentiles could convert without it), it extends to his entire authority about anything whatever, including claiming the status of apostle. He clearly was operating in an environment when revelation counted for everything. It’s hard to explain how that could be if there was a “Jesus said things in public and to disciples when alive, and hand picked apostles” regime to compete with that. There is no sign of that regime existing at all (even the creed in 1 Cor 15 conspicuously forgets to even mention a ministry, much less handpicking leadership, or anyone seeing him before his death, apostles or public—a point explicitly even said in Rom 10:14–15, which in the original Greek basically says there was no public ministry, only private messages to apostles, which concurs with Romans 16:25–27 that it was all revelation and scripture).
I don’t follow this reasoning. Paul is responding to the complaint that Gentiles have to become Jews to be Christians (the argument starts in Gal 3); not to any claim about Jesus. He only mentions Jesus to establish his cosmic relationship to undoing slavery and establishing inheritance (Gal 4:1–7) as a means to rebut the complaint that Gentiles have to become Jews. There is no hint of any dispute over whether Jesus “followed” the law. Paul is not even saying he did. He means Jesus was subject to the law, i.e. all men die, and the only way to escape death is the Contract (the Torah covenant and thus Hebrew Law), but Jesus dying eliminated that. Which by Paul’s reasoning would work for Jesus as well as the Galatians, so it would not matter whether Jesus “followed” the Law. That would have no relevance to what Paul is arguing here. He’s talking about how Jesus conquered death, for himself and the Galatians. Not what he did when he was alive.
I agree. But all that could be said on that has been. So there is nothing more to do. If they won’t hear out critiques of their own biases and corrupt practices, more books about their biases and corrupt practices won’t do anything. Indeed, Lataster’s entire peer reviewed study corroborating mine was about this. It was ignored.
Moreover, their position can be psychologically defended by accusing any such argument as sour grapes. So if it’s to have any impact at all, it has to come from an outsider. But that’s already been tried. Davies, posing as a historicist, publicly tried it in response to Ehrman and was completely ignored; Dykstra tried it, and was ignored; Meggitt tried it, and was ignored; hell, even Grabbe tried it, before this was the particular point in contention, and was ignored (these are all cited on this very point in OPH).
The eventual acceptance of Thompson’s exposure of the ahistoricity of Moses and the Patriarchs never came from any acceptance in the field of their bias and corruption, but simply from half the field dying off and being replaced by younger scholars less emotionally invested in defending the bulwark. Thompson’s role, and his treatment, was largely forgotten and everyone just claims they are just more enlightened now, as if by magic they woke up one day and saw the light, repenting of nothing.
That’s my impression as well. See my other thread on that.
Testing
Approved.
testing (per agreement, checking if this fixes the problem).
Cool. I approved this one. So your next comment should go through without stalling in mod.
Now I see it is not working. Sigh. I’ll have to try something else.
Your chapter 5 on the math is a good overview. I might simplify it further as listed here.
We are interested in the odds of Jesus being historical (P(H)) vs. nonhistorical (P(~H). We know that specific evidence exists (E). So, what we are really looking for is the probability that both the evidence and Jesus exist, versus the likelihood that the evidence exists and Jesus did not exist. Mathematically,
Odds of Jesus existing = P(H+E) / P(~H+E)
When analyzing the probability of two events, one can take the probability of the first independent of the second and then multiply that by the likelihood that the second would be true if the first is true. Mathematically, P(H+E) = P(Hb) * P(E|Hb), where Hb represents the conclusion that Jesus is historical based solely on our prior knowledge of the ancient world before considering the specific evidence. Substituting this and a similar expression for ~H back into the original equation, we get:
Odds of Jesus existing = P(Hb) * P(E|Hb) / [ P(~Hb) * P(E|~Hb) ]
We can rearrange to make it simpler to analyze:
Odds of Jesus existing = [ P(Hb) / (P(~Hb) ] * [ P(E|Hb) / P(E|~Hb) ]
We now have two factors based on two ratios. One represents the odds based on our prior knowledge (prior odds), and the second represents the odds based on the evidence that arises from the actual events (consequent odds). Although the actual probabilities may be impossible to estimate, these two ratios can be estimated.
And you then take us through calculations for these two ratios.
I think that’s more confusing to most people, because you are making a lot of mathematical assumptions here that most people have forgotten (or were never taught) to make, much less apply. I learned that lesson over the years. That’s why my chapter goes through it more slowly, at a lower level of analysis, and skips no steps.
But you are right. That’s all we are doing.