Hi Lamar,
Sorry about not responding to your post. I forgot about this forum for a while because I've been busy. In hindsight it probably looked like I fled from the discussion after your monster-post. Can't let that happen
Quote:
That really means a lot to us, and regardless of the criticism you are about to get from me, I see you as a very bright guy and your opinion of our show carries more weight than you may realize.
Alright. And thanks, I appreciate it. I do love the show, and no amount of criticism would chase me away: I have the skin of a bull elephant.
Quote:
After reading this thread and the comments you've made regarding this very subject in other threads, it appears that your argument against mythicism boils down to an appeal to authority. I find this kind of argument woefully unconvincing, and the analogy you offer leads me to believe that you're missing the point in the evolution vs. creationism debate as well.
No, it actually doesn't, and if my reason for ‘believing’ in the historical Jesus was just because of appeal to authority then that would indeed be unconvincing. I'm very familiar with the evidence for and against Jesus Mythicism, actually. I didn't go into them in this particular thread because I found that to be peripheral to my criticism. However, I have done so many times on the Nexus and elsewhere. I can't blame you for thinking that I'm appealing to authority, but it's wrong. Here I wasn’t trying to make an argument: I was just criticizing the format of the show on this point.
The reason I have a problem with you bringing Salm and Zindler on the show is that you implied that they were authorities and had done their research well. And they are not. I wouldn't have a problem with this if we were talking about a subject of which I know that people will think critically (like creationism), but I have more than enough experience with the Mythicism case to know that most atheists will gobble up the Jesus Myth case without thinking twice. And since I didn't yet know that this was going to be a series that also included the arguments in favour of the historical Jesus, I think you can understand my disappointment.
We’re actually going to agree a lot here, since it’s now clear that my post was based on the misunderstanding (which Eli cleared up) that you weren’t going to cover the other side. Now that I know that you do, my criticisms in the original post actually clear up like snow in a hot summer sun.
Quote:
If all creationists had doctorates in their respective disciplines, and came from only the best of academic pedigrees, they would still be just as wrong. If all evolutionary biologists, geologists and cosmologists were high school dropouts, they would still be just as right. One's qualifications in any particular discipline is not, in and of itself, evidence that his or her claims, research or conclusions within that discipline are true or accurate.
And that’s absolutely true. Yes, evolution is still right regardless of the qualifications of its proponents. But let’s be serious: we don’t know what the “truth” is up front, we need to deduce it from the actual evidence. Now, we could go study all the relevant evidence ourselves and take 10 years to do so and check all the tenets of evolution and do several experiments, OR we could look at the published material on the subject and see what the people who have devoted their lives to the subject have to say. Peer-reviewed studies say that strains of Flaviabacterium have developed a nylon digestion system? I’m gonna go ahead and believe that; I won’t repeat the study. Creationist un-peerreviewed author claims that his experiment shows that it happened through the hand of god? Thanks, but I’m gonna go ahead and think that that is crap.
Peer-review is important. Claims that have gone through peer-review are believable. Claims that haven’t gone through peer-review might be true, but they are not believable. The only alternative is to go out and test the claims yourself. Salm and Zindler’s claims fall into the latter category: I was pointing out that until they go through peer review of any kind, they are not believable.
Again, you need to view this in light of me thinking that you actually bought into Salm and Zindler’s claims. In that regard, I don’t think it’s futile to point out that they have the license to make as many claims as they want without anyone ever checking them.
Quote:
We absolutely should not respect academia for academia's sake, and that's what having "great respect for scholarly circles" sounds like to me.
Again, I can’t blame you for jumping to that conclusion, but that’s actually not what I meant at all. I don’t have respect for someone just because they have a PhD. Richard Carrier – for example – has a PhD and I regard him as a biased atheist apologist with a massive axe to grind.
What I meant by having respect for scholarly circles is that we don’t cluelessly accept statements from people unless we know that they have been checked by others with the necessary qualifications.
Quote:
Here it seems you've gone from an appeal to authority to poisoning the well/ad hominem. You resort to the same fallacy with Rene Salm, the lowly pianist and "new-age kook." The only legitimate criticism you've levied against either of them is their lack of peer review.
Which I don’t see as poisoning the well as much as I think it’s pointing out why we shouldn’t accept these guys claims as automatically reliable. And I thought you did.
Quote:
The meat of Zindler's argument is that there's no evidence that first century Jews knew about Jesus and that it was later legends of him that eventually made it into the Talmud. Instead of offering a counter argument, you paint him as a nutcase with an ax to grind; a loose cannon biologist who stuck his nose where it doesn't belong.
A counter-argument which I’ve offered later in the thread. Again, I’m not discrediting his statements simply because he’s a biologist. I have discredited them because I’ve researched this topic in detail and know why they are wrong. I was pointing out that you guys should have known better than regard them as a reliable authorities. As, again, I thought you did.
This is the third or so time I’m repeating this so I’m just going to go ahead and snip the similar passages: I assure you that I understand perfectly well what your point is.
Quote:
This may have been an oversight on your part, but that statement is incorrect. It is common knowledge that Origen never references the Testimonium Flavianum. Origen does discuss Josephus and even states that Josephus did not believe Jesus to be the Christ, which clearly contradicts the TF.
No, it’s really not. This was part of Zindler’s argument but it’s logically incoherent and here’s why:
The passage in Josephus we have right now seems to suggest that Josephus believed Jesus to be the Christ (“rose after three days”, etcetera). However, Origen tells us that Josephus did not believe Jesus to be the Christ, so we know that the current passage we have is not genuine. However, Zindler then makes the strange leap from saying that because the passage is not in accordance with what Origen says about it, therefore the whole passage is forged. There’s an alternative: Origen says that Josephus does not believe in Jesus because that’s what the original passage in the TF suggested.
And this is the explanation that makes the most sense, since we can all agree that Josephus only mentions Jesus twice at the most. Yet Origen somehow deduces from this that Josephus did not believe in Jesus (he has to have gotten this from Josephus’ works, since Josephus was dead by the time Origen was writing). Did he get this from the second reference (whether or not it is genuine is irrelevant) to Jesus, concerning James? No, because Josephus doesn’t say anything about whether or not he believes in Jesus or not. So he can only have gotten it from the first reference, which is the TF. And this is consistent with the paraphrases of the TF in the Syriac, which talks about Jesus but does not mention the interpolations about “he was the Christ” and “rose after three days”. Which means we can reasonably deduce that while those interpolations are not genuine, there was an original passage concerning Jesus there.
So no, not a slip of the tongue: an actual criticism of Zindler’s sloppy argument.
Quote:
Now, your claim that it would be "far-fetched" for Josephus (who spoke Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek) to introduce a traditional concept from one language into his writings in another language doesn't fly either. This is common among people who are multilingual. My wife speaks Japanese as a first language and she does this in speech. Here you seem to be making a poorly thought out claim to counter another poorly thought out claim.
It’s a far-cry from saying that he might have done this to that this is the most reasonable explanation of that sentence though. Of course he might have done this, but that he had this strange multilingual influence (for which we have no precedents for in his other work) in coincidentally the place where he talks about a “brother James” who is also attested to by Paul and the gospels… that’s clutching at some very small straws.
Quote:
Every archaeologist on the planet? Hyperbole much?
No, not hyperbole much. Try and find me one. I think you’ll quickly find that this idea is the production of Salm and Zindler.
Quote:
All of the above comments I made about "every historian on the planet" apply here as well.
Try and find me some and you’ll quickly be disappointed. Robert Price is pretty much the only scholar who takes the Jesus Myth hypothesis seriously (even though he flip-flops back and forth). Then there’s Richard Carrier, who is a PhD who is just beginning to become active in the field and gives some credence to the theory as well. But then we’re pretty much done and we’re left with guys like Freke and Gandy, Acharya S, Earl Doherty, Dan Barker,… It quickly goes downhill.
So no, no hyperbole here as well: saying that Jesus Mythicism is a fringe idea would be understating it. Which is again not an argument against their ideas per se, but it certainly is an indication that their ideas apparently don’t get through peer review. Which is telling.
Quote:
Your explanation that Matthew fabricated the prophecy to justify an existing Nazareth tradition is no less unlikely than Zindler's belief that Nazareth was made up to justify an existing Nazarene prophecy.
Surely you are now engaging in rhetorical exagerration. The two are by no means equivalent, considering even Salm and Zindler admit that Nazareth was a town that existed before Jesus was born (he needs that to explain away some of the artifacts whose dates fall in the First Century BCE), and was inhabited after he was born (though curiously, not inhabited during the time that Jesus lived). And especially since there was an existing prophecy that dealt with where the Messiah was supposed to come from: Bethlehem. And since Jesus living in Nazareth is attested to in Luke and John too (and very arguably Mark) – both of which most likely did not have access to Matthew – that requires us to believe that all three authors made up or upheld this invented prophecy; considering the various contradictions throughout the gospels on other points, that’s rather unlikely too.
So no, I can’t agree that this explanation is “just as unlikely” as any other.
Quote:
And, it's around this point that I thought you were being an ass. We do not debate our guests; we interview them. We do not do the kind of "hot seat" interviews that political pundits often engage in. Unlike Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews, we're not in a position where we can afford to piss people off.
Point taken. Again, I had no idea that you were going to bring up people from the other side too. “Uncovering the Jesus Myth” suggested to me that you had made up your mind already, and after two Mythicists in a row I was starting to wonder. If you weren’t planning on doing so then I think you would have to challenge your interviewees, in order to give the other side of the argument. But since you will do exactly that, you obviously don’t have to.
So I completely retract that objection.
Quote:
Wouldn't it be more constructive to offer evidence that Nazareth was a first century Jewish settlement? Here you're just referring to Salm as a "kook" and referencing Dr. Dark's disparaging remarks about him without discussing any evidence that Dark may have offered to justify those remarks.
You should be able to look into that review online; I found it a while ago. I’ll try to track it down for you.
Quote:
When you use hyperbolic expressions like this, or talk about "every historian/archaeologist on the planet," you give the mistaken impression that all archaeologists and historians have at some point worked with, or even give a fuck about, first century Palestine. That just isn't the case.
OK. But of those who do, how many of them buy into Salm’s thesis?
I can say “every archaeologist who has excavated in Nazareth” if that’s better.
Quote:
Besides, of all the archaeological excavations done in Nazareth, how many were not funded by religious institutions? Maybe none? Perhaps zero?
Many of them are funded by the Jewish authorities, and many of the archaelogists on the scene at any given moment are Israeli. So the objection that they’re all scared or biased won’t fly.
Quote:
How you manage to make multiple references without offering the argument they supposedly support is beyond my comprehension. When I first read the above blurb I thought I missed something. It wasn't until my third time reading it that I realized that you didn't actually say anything; you just skipped right to the footnotes.
If you have compelling evidence that Nazareth was a first century town in Palestine then share it. Citations are only useful when telling us where your evidence came from. They are not evidence themselves and neither is your single sentence quote from Zvi Gal.
I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time or patience to type the entire works down, if that’s what you’re asking. The references are from the time that I read those works, and I’m showing them as evidence that Salm’s statement that First-Century artifacts have not been found. Yet several archaelogists clearly have.
I can’t send you the artifacts over the internet; all I can do is show you where you can read about them if you so please. And to show that Salm’s statement is disagreed with by the people who actually did excavations.
Quote:
And here we have the climactic conclusion to your footnotes. You offer a list of citations as the non plus ultra on the Nazareth argument and you drive your yet-to-be-made point home with another appeal to authority. Damn it man, did you even read this before submitting it?
Sorry Lamar, you can shout about my horrible “appeals to authority” all day long, but that doesn’t make it a fallacy necessarily. Salm has never excavated a single thing in his life, yet he’s very comfortable claiming that no First Century artifacts have been found in Nazareth. The actual archaeologists who did the excavating work disagree. It’s not an appeal to authority to point this out, any more than it is an appeal to authority to point out to a Shroud believer that the Shroud was dated to the 14th century by three of the best carbon dating labs in the world. Yes, this is appealing to authorities. But more specifically, it’s appealing to the results they have found.
Unless you expect me to excavate the place myself or send you the found artifacts, I can’t see what more I can do.
Quote:
Actually, what we've been doing so far would be more comparable to bringing out Kent Hovind to educate us on creationism; not evolution. And, regardless of what you may thing of Hovind, that would be entirely appropriate.
Absolutely, and that’s perfectly fine. See above: I just had no way of knowing that this was what you were planning to do. From my perspective it looked like an entire series on evolution versus creationism, given by Kent Hovind and Ray Comfort.
Maybe I should have asked about the format before I started ranting; that would be a fair criticism, and one that I would completely accept.
Quote:
Actually Matt, you've said some pretty nasty things about us in your post.
I’m sorry if you feel that way; I don’t think criticizing the format (or rather perceived format) of the series and the way you handled it qualifies as saying “nasty things about you”; I was just very blunt and didn’t pull my punches. So I don’t think your representation is fair, but regardless, if it came across that way then I apologise. I do love the show and I wouldn’t want to say nasty things about you guys in particular.
Quote:
Much of what we know about Jesus is myth. Only the most conservative Christians believe otherwise. Hell, the overwhelming majority of what we know about him is myth. Whether there was a real man behind Christianity or not, Jesus Christ, as we now understand him, is a mythological figure. The title isn't loaded.
It depends on exactly what you mean by that. If we look at the gospel of Mark and we subtract the (lame) miracles and the minimalistic resurrection story (empty tomb) then I don’t see anything there that doesn’t fit with a Jewish apocalyptic preacher.
I know what you mean though, and see where you’re going with the title. Again, we’re still working from my initial misunderstandings about the format.
Quote:
Well, I'll be damned. After multiple posts and thousands of words you finally took a break from extolling the authority of "real scholars" and made a point. Why can't your entire argument be like this?
Because it would be long and I get tired of having the go after this stuff on the Nexus and elsewhere :p
For the umpteenth time: I’d happily spend more time explaining my arguments, but I was under the impression that you weren’t going to let the opposing side answer, so ranting was first on the agenda; as you can see I went into a little bit of detail on the actual arguments in the ensuing discussion.
Quote:
Also, your embarrassment of the crucifixion argument is weak sauce. Christianity is long predated by martyrdom and atonement through sacrifice, and while martyrs often possess a celebrated humility, there's no humiliation in being a martyr or revering one religiously. Were Christians mocked for it? Sure they were; they still are. Does this mean that there must have been a martyr since there was a story about a martyr and martyr worshipers get picked on by the cool kids? That's the argument you seem to be making but I find it hard to buy.
It requires an explanation though: we know a great deal about Intertestamental Second Temple Judaism and we know quite well what their expectations about a Messiah were (and the prophecies he was supposed to fulfill); and we know quite well what apocalyptic preachers of the time believed and what their theology was. Some of the ideas involved the Messiah having a military reign over the Earth; some of them involved an esoteric form of the Kingdom of Heaven; some (many) involved the immediate overthrowal of the Romans. But none of them involved the idea of the Messiah getting killed and dying.
So when we see that the early Jesus sect – despite being very close to Judaism everywhere it can (including the way it depicts the Virgin Birth and the way it associates itself with apocalypticism) – does not involve any of these things but instead we find a Messiah who gets brutally killed and who hardly conforms to any of the OT prophecies at all (in fact they need to fabricate extra prophecies – from Psalms etcetera - so Jesus can fulfill more), then we need an explanation. And a good one, since from the historicist standpoint this makes perfect sense: the reinterpretation of the various prophecies and the sudden emphasis on the death of a Messiah makes sense if they are in response to their Messiah actually dying. And so does the awkward shoe-horning of Jesus (birth narratives trying to get him to Bethlehem) into OT prophecies.
Of course this isn’t a waterproof argument in the sense that it is absolute proof; nothing is absolute proof. But I consider it a pretty serious nail in the coffin for the Jesus Myth hypothesis.
Quote:
I think you may have missed dEvilmatE's point about the church's power. He used his own country as an analogy to illustrate the point that the church had the power to revise their history (as well as doctrine, theology, etc.). He was not claiming that the church had absolute power over the whole of Europe; the idea you appear to be arguing against.
That’s what “the church had over a thousand years of ABSOLUTE power to do as they pleased ...” sounded like to me… but regardless, the point remains: I can’t think of a single period in history when the Church had the power required to revise history (and certainly not without it leaving traces) in anything more than their immediate surroundings.
Quote:
If you are so passionate about this topic, and you clearly are, then build your case. Hell man, I think you're on the right side of the argument, you just have yet to make it. Whatever you do, let the appeals to authority and well poisoning end here. If the evidence is on your side then you don't need that crap anyway.
Make it again
?
Some of that has happened in the discussion already, but to be honest I wasn’t too concerned about ‘converting’ you guys or convincing you to begin with. I was just concerned that the topic was not going to get treated objectively and thoroughly and so that you would effectively be misinforming people. That’s why my post took the ranting format: I wasn’t trying to make a serious case for the historicist thesis (as you seem to assume that I am), I was trying to make you guys realize that you were buying into a very fringe thesis. As long as the topic gets treated fairly though, and counter-arguments are offered to either side of the discussion, I have absolutely no problem with Salm or Zindler or anyone else coming on the show. Hell, I wouldn’t even have had a problem with Salm and Zindler alone coming on to say what they thought, as long as it’s made clear that what they are saying may or may not be true and is highly controversial. And it was that part that I felt unsatisfied with.
I know you probably hold most of your listeners in high esteem and that you expect them to know automatically that nothing should be taken on faith and that everything should be checked, but I’m a little bit more cynical in that regard: I’ve seen plenty of atheists watch badly researched nonsense like Zeitgeist and – because it appealed to their biases – come out thinking that they had just witnessed the fruits of fine historical analysis. I get to counter claims like “Horus had 12 disciples” every other week; claims made by atheists who didn’t do the slightest inkling of fact-checking. And so I just feel that when we’re talking about these issues, a disclaimer up front can be useful. Otherwise I think you’ll find that for many people, the emotional appeal of these ideas will win out against skepticism any day of the week… That’s just my personal experience of course, but then: I was the one ranting
That said I also clearly underestimated you guys in thinking that you weren’t going to offer the other side of the argument. Cut me a little slack though: this is the first time you’re getting deep enough into a topic that you have people on both side of the argument; previously it were always shows against a specific issue (like creationism) and you (in that case I think wisely) didn’t feel the need to get an opposing view. I assumed the same would be true here.
So please accept my apologies in that sense, for jumping to a conclusion. And thank you for responding Lamar
... i'm betting against neither happening ... Matt, you seem to be convinced, I'm not and nothing that has been found so far will move us in either direction ...
