Sigh. I am tired of this conversation.

No one said the cone was picked at the root. Obviously the stem was cut not plucked out: the stem is included in the art. That’s the actual branch. The needles extend from the stem. You can’t see this because the mosaic pixelation cannot show a distinction between the exact point where the needles attach to the stem.

You keep doing this: assuming things exist that don’t, that this medium can depict things that it can’t, that universal principles of art shown everywhere else in this piece were abandoned precisely when you need them to have been, and other silly nonsense.

This is not a serious argument anymore. It’s just dumb apologetics and it’s tedious.

Unfortunately human history is far more messy and illogical and infuriating.

Then you don’t understand Ockham’s Razor. Such misunderstanding is common.

Ockham’s Razor does not say the simplest narrative is more likely true. That’s pop nonsense and anyone who uses it that way is bad at this.

Ockham’s Razor says that the simplest explanation of all the existing evidence is more likely true than a (thereby unnecessarily) more elaborate one.

And that’s an inviolable mathematical truth. So it cannot be gainsaid.

It is simply always the case that if I can explain the facts with no assumptions and you need 3 assumptions, my theory is always going to be epistemically more likely, because your assumptions, not being evidenced facts, are all improbable relative to evidenced facts, and improbabilities compound.

So we can never have any reason to believe your theory, when mine already explains everything.

You might notice the point of my article is not whether anything about history is important, but about whether we are using reliable methods to discern it—and if we’re not, what we are missing if we applied reliable methods instead.

So, for example, notice all we learn about historical facts of how Gospel authors composed if we use reliable methods, instead of using unreliable methods to “die on a dumb hill” like insisting Judas existed (which, as you note, doesn’t really matter to anything other than certain pet theories about how Christianity began).

Otherwise, all history is important in its own respect. It does not have to matter to you. It only has to matter to society.

It is the moral obligation of historians to ascertain and record the truth about history, no matter how trivial. For example, you personally don’t have to care about the history of soap textbooks; but human society needs someone to keep track of the history of soap textbooks. Because you never know when it’s going to matter.

And that is a real example: I demonstrate the importance of soap textbooks in my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire when dispelling contemporary Christian revisionist history in aid of their assault on truth in the culture war that leads all the way to the evils of the Christian GOP policy empire today. So you can never dismiss anything as too trivial to care about. You cannot predict what will become important.

If someone is a fundamentalist Christian, then it’s not even a question. He’s in the bible, which would be believed “entirely”, and is trivially historical. There would be nothing to counter, because a fundamentalist doesn’t entertain modern (much less skeptical) scholarship to begin with.

If someone is a nominal or progressive Christian, they are still going to generally consider the new testament historical. Most characters are going to default to historical, but you might be open to the idea that some are more theological (some extended parable) than historical. In either case, their inclusion is important to God’s story. If the Christians engage with scholarship, they can probably accept that Judas’ purpose is highly theological, and the historicity isn’t really an impediment to Jesus’ message.

If someone isn’t a Christian at all, what is the point? Judas’ purpose in the story is clearly theological in nature. Any potential historical truth we could discover about him has no real bearing on Jesus or the rest of the story (being so thoroughly buried as to be entirely mundane). Any appeal to what he really might have done in history must necessarily be a form of fanfiction (there’s just nothing in the Gospels to work from). Why is this something a modern scholar would spend any time on whatsoever?

To illustrate rate my point I will briefly use a different historical subject. Both the Bolsheviks and Kerensky agreed later that General Kornilov was attempting a coup just before the October Revolution. It’s about the one thing these implacable opponents agreed upon; e.g. together we stopped a rightist military coup. Occam’s Razor says – case closed.

But a closer examination of the primary sources reveals a much more complex – and far less heroic – tale. Kerensky fired Kornilov by telegram and the general, wrongly thinking the PM was a prisoner of the Reds in Petrograd, hastened with his army to defend the Provisional Government, not at first to overthrow it. Met by Trotsky’s Red Guards, who were also defending the regime, the two confused armies – finding themselves on the same side – never fired a shot. It was in both parties interest to pretend later that during this nonviolent misunderstanding they had acted with honour and courage. At least that’s one interpretation of incomplete, self-serving and contradictory data.

It is compatible with that conclusion, yes.

I don’t believe if we can be sure, but I incline toward yes. I think it’s slightly more likely the twelve were subordinates of Peter, a quorum he assembled to represent the twelve tribes (like the Qumran sect did, and indeed his may even be a renegade offshoot of that one). But that means it would be only slightly less likely he sat as its head, and thus “the twelve” in the creed means the council, and he’s being included (either with a second vision or counting his first as completing the twelve).

In general, the question is the same whether Jesus existed or not, since the “to Cephas, then the Twelve” entails the same ambiguity either way.

All your arguments apply more urgently to the first revolt: that was the time Christians most needed to distance themselves (not only because now “Jew” meant “rebel,” but also because now they had to avoid the Roman-imposed temple tax; an issue that was demonized by Jewish Christians in Revelation with the Mark of the Beast narrative).

All these concerns would be generations old by the second revolt.

As for why Mark didn’t act like a second century writer: making up tales about how that might have happened only illustrates how improbable it is (as now you have to make up stories to get it to work). That’s when you’ve lost the argument. Ockham’s Razor leaves us with a far simpler conclusion.

I incline to the idea that if we grant, arguendo, the historicity of Jesus, that neither Paul, Mark nor Matthew had any idea who Jesus’s father was, and that Matthew made him up by importing Joseph the son of Jacob from the book of Genesis into the story.

That’s definitely plausible.

I get the impression from Bart Ehrman that he believes that there is some historical reality to this New Testament Joseph character.

The only dispute would be as to the name. Since it is logical for a historicist to believe Jesus had a father, the only question is whether he really was named Joseph. Perhaps Ehrman offers arguments somewhere for that being authentic. If you find any, let me know here and I’ll analyze their logic. Though generally Ehrman doesn’t check things he isn’t specifically researching; so he might not even know, e.g., that Rabbinic tradition expected the messiah to have a father named Joseph.

Those are the same thing. His argument from late medieval art (p. 80) for the tradition of mushroom use in the ancient church builds from his argument that they derived it from mushroom Eve myths (pp. 154–56), which the medieval frescos “prove.” Those are not two separate arguments. It’s all one argument. And it’s all silly.