This is why I waited. It saves me much time. I now know I can avoid a lot of the things that I would have had to rant about and can stick to my main areas of research. I think I can get this written a lot sooner than I said.
So still expect intense snark on your claims about the Delay of the Parousia. But I will mostly stick to the spooky philosophy. Expect a reply from me in May (I’m not doing anything until finals week is over)
"So on the hypothesis that the argument from prophecy fails, I'd expect there to be many other passages from ancient literature that sound like they're about Jesus. About 7% of ancient writings from before 200 that have survived are from the Bible, so we'd expect the Bible to contain ~7% of the passages that sound most like they're about Jesus. In fact, it seems the Bible contains all the most impressive passages that sound like they're about Jesus!"
I think there is reason to expect that the rate would be higher than 7%, even if Christianity is false. Namely, even if they're in large part false, one would expect Christian texts to contain recurring themes and ideas or concepts. This is the case, because
a - there is a selection effect of what is written down. If the author knows about famous passages in their holy texts, they will make an effort to record any future observations lining up with these passages. This would extend even to actions those in the tradition might take, which would then be recorded (someone could purposely fulfill a prophecy, for instance).
b - other sources of correlation between passages in a specific tradition. The authors come from similar geographical areas. Have shared cultures. Have similar beliefs. Etc. If only one culture was obsessed with apples, it wouldn't be surprising if all of the fulfilled prophecies about apples are in that culture's texts.
It's unclear how much higher this should make the expected rate than 7%. It would depend on a lot of features of the Christian/Jewish tradition at the time of writing, and also the other ancient texts, and the specificity of the prophecies themselves.
However, I suspect it's easy to underrate the extent of subtle correlations of this kind.
That's a good point. However, many of the prophecies are about things that happened, not just recurring motifs. B cuts against this, but I'd imagine it's a pretty minor point.
1) This has moved my credence towards the burial being true. I previously leaned heavily towards Jesus not being buried in an individual tomb in part because I thought that was the common practice at the time. But the considerations here suggest that the base rate may be lower than I expected.
2) I don't really trust Catholic Answers to give an unbiased presentation of the dating of the Corinthian creed. I could believe it comes from early after Jesus's death, but it also seems pretty implausible that we'd have reliable evidence that a very short creed that first appears in Paul's letters must have come from an earlier source within a few years of Jesus's death. Do you know of any sources on the dating of the creed that are from neither apologists nor counter-apologists trying to debunk them?
3) I'm almost certain that your view of the Trinity is heretical according to most Christian denominations. I also just don't think it works as a way of explaining the three-persons-one-being thing. If you analogize it to time travel where you meet your younger self, it doesn't fit the "three persons" aspect of it. You and your younger self are the same person, not two distinct people. You are just different stages of that person's life. The three persons of the Trinity are definitely not just meant to be different stages in God's life, even if these stages are meant to be stages outside of time, in non-metric time, and in metric time rather than at three different moments in time. Furthermore, this would mean that God the Son and God the Holy Spirit depend on (non-metric and metric, resp.) time for their existence, which runs counter to divine aseity. Also, if you accept eternalism, which is required for making a distinction between your current and six-year-old self and treating them as separate persons, then your current self and your six-year-old self are just different temporal parts of the larger worldline containing your entire being. God is not supposed to have parts according to traditional Christian belief, so having temporal parts at all could be problematic. But even if you reject the partless view of God, it's definitely part of the doctrine of the Trinity that the three persons are not just three distinct parts of God, but that each of them is fully God, and they are consubstantiational with each other. So they can't just be three separate temporal parts of God. Nor does it work better if you treat them as different temporal modes of existence rather than temporal parts, because that would just be modalism.
I don't think the analogy to different versions of you existing in different timelines works either. Versions of you in different timelines are clearly different beings, not the same being. They could only be considered "the same being" in the sense that identical clones are considered "the same being" - that is, they have the same or very similar intrinsic properties as each other, while nevertheless being numerically distinct. Now maybe you could posit a more complicated situation where there's something shared between the different timeline versions. Maybe there's a common soul, or they started as the same being but split due to the many worlds interpretation, or they have some sort of psychological continuity or something between timelines. But even in that case, you're either going to allow so much contiguity between them that the versions of you in different timelines are actually all the same person, or you're just going to have multiple people who are all parts of some larger being. You'll never have a case where each individual timeline copy is fully identical to the whole of the same being, and yet they are not identical to each other. The closest you can get is two distinct people with overlapping temporal parts in the MWI case.
Also, I don't really think this provides a better explanation of why there are three persons than the explanation about types of love. Why are there exactly three "stages" of time that are treated separately? Wouldn't there be more if there were more universes with distinct timelines? And the non-metric time that is also a single moment causally prior to creation is of dubious coherence - I'm not sure how that's different from just not being in time at all. Basically, while you can tell a story about there being three different relations to time, it seems just as contrived to me about the story involving three types of love.
4) I'm not so sure Jesus expressed *every* virtue in his short life on Earth. It probably depends on how you want to individuate virtues - on a more fine-grained picture, you'll eventually find one he never expressed. But maybe this doesn't really matter - he just has to express certain virtues like courage that he wouldn't be able to express without the Incarnation and even the Passion. This explanation makes a lot of sense if you already have a view of God that uses relationship-building via acting virtuously as your theodicy and explanation of the material world's existence. Though I'm not sure how well it fits with the traditional idea that Jesus's death caused our sins to be forgiven. In this case, it's more like, seeing Jesus's virtue might cause us to repent, but God still could've forgiven us regardless.
5) It's not true on the null hypothesis that we would expect passages from outside the Bible to be equally likely to sound like they're about Jesus as passages inside the Bible. This is for a number of reasons:
a) Religious scriptures are probably a lot more likely to sound like they could be a prophecy in the first place, and to use a lot of vague and figurative language that's very open to interpretation, and thus could be interpreted as a prophecy about Jesus. I've heard that the ancient Jews were especially prone to this kind of writing (though I'm not sure how accurate that is), which would make it even more likely that Jewish scripture would have most of the apparent prophecies. So the Bible is going to be much higher than the base rate among all genres of surviving writing to contain things that sound like prophecies about Jesus.
b) Presumably something written by ancient Jews, especially very religious ancient Jews, is going to sound more similar to the life of a very religious ancient Jew than sources written by people from different cultures.
c) Jesus, the early Christian community, and the Gospel authors knew about the scriptures. That means that Jesus could just intentionally do things that imitate scriptures, and even if he didn't, the early community and Gospel writers might come up with stories about him doing things similar to what was in scripture. The Gospels more or less admit this is the case, since they sometimes state that Jesus did things in a certain way in order to fulfill the scriptures.
6) Even if it was to be expected that there would be just as many things that sound like they could be prophecies about Jesus in non-Biblical sources as there are in Biblical ones, it doesn't follow that we would be just as likely to know about them. Obviously, people are much more likely to interpret an ambiguous passage as being a prophecy about Jesus if it comes from the Old Testament than if it comes from some random ancient source that has nothing to to with Judaism or Christianity. So any such passages are much less likely to be discussed in the context of prophecies about Jesus. Now sure, you could respond, "Okay, then find those passages," but that's unfair. I can't read untranslated ancient literature, and even if I could, I don't have time to search through the entire extant corpus of ancient literature to find passages that sound kind of like they could be about Jesus. You might say, "But what about historians who have read those passages?" But this gets back to the original problem - they had no reason to interpret those passages as being about Jesus, since they were from completely unrelated sources. So they would not have remarked on any similarities, and even if they had, this would likely not be widely known outside of some niche academic circles.
7) I don't think that Wall's argument that, "I bet I could also find one or two remarks on your blog which also don't explicitly condemn slavery," works because the argument that the Bible doesn't condemn slavery isn't just that it doesn't explicitly condemn it in every breath. Rather, it's that it never condemns slavery and even seems to endorse it in some parts, despite it being a common institution (and commonly believed to be acceptable) at the time and despite the Bible containing a large amount of moral and societal instruction. This is not analogous to your blog because everyone reading your blog already knows slavery is wrong, so there's no need to tell them that. Plus, you've never said anything that could be interpreted as condoning slavery in the way the Old Testament did, and you have condemned slavery - you just don't talk about it all the time. A better analogy between your blog and the way we would expect the Bible to treat slavery if it were really God's word is how often you talk about shrimp welfare, an issue that you consider very morally important but which is not widely believed to be.
From a cross-cultural point of view, it looks quite odd to spend so much time on trying to argue a single putative miracle from 2000+ years ago. Claims of miracles are everywhere in all sorts of cultures.
The default skeptical response nowadays is to disclaim them all as unreliable one-off flukes, given how much we know about the unreliability of witnesses and memory, and the existence of group delusions, and how narratives change over time. But if one takes the other branch and accepts the evidence more or less at face value, what it points to is a wide variety of people throughout history with special abilities, either to bend matter, or (more likely) to bend the perception of others. That would be quite remarkable if confirmed, but in no way makes all those people into God-in-person, or makes their respective religions true.
Well, the Christian miracle is supposed to have more evidence than other miracles, and a higher prior because it's one of the core claims of the world's largest religion. If you think there's a non-trivial prior that one of the major religions would be right, you should think there's a non-trivial prior of the resurrection.
I think that's just Western familiarity. I've read biographies of popular Indian saints, with miracles galore, and it's obviously the same phenomenon that you find in Christianity, back in Roman times but also with later Saints, as well as in Sufism, and everywhere you care to look. The stories are all in the same template, special spiritual person has special abilities. You can find 'back from the dead' stories too; the Tibetans made a minor specialty of it, called 'delog', look it up.
When you find widespread evidence for the same kind of thing, I think it's logical to consider it all together, and to focus on recent cases.
Thanks for the update! Your honesty is refreshing.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on some of the positive arguments for the reliability of the gospels. In particular, I find the argument from onomastic congruence (as first proposed by Bauckham and then further developed by Luuk van de Weghe) to be one of the stronger ones. Perhaps a subject for a future post?
Thanks! I found your comment really thoughtful on the last article!
Haven't looked much into it. But I suspect that even if they were reliable enough to be roughly right about names, that doesn't much affect the reliability of highly specific claims they made with obvious apologetic purposes.
To some extent, that's right—onomastic congruence can only get you so far. I do find it striking, though, that as van de Weghe notes, the degree of onomastic congruence in the canonical gospels is comparable to some of the best works of ancient history:
"In our survey of twenty-five sources, the only works that bear onomastic congruence are those which Craig Keener suggests mark the height of historical sensitivity for the genre of the Greco-Roman βίος, and, especially in Plutarch, the apex of this genre within the Early Empire, when expectations of historical reliability were at their highest. Onomastic congruence appears to be a byproduct, however unintentional, of the information-driven nature of these historiographical works."
On a big-picture level, I see this as raising the probability that the gospel accounts come from historically sensitive individuals. And that reduces the probability that they felt free to drastically alter their or their sources' recollections of Jesus.
That said, I would only use the argument as part of a cumulative case. I get the hesitation. If you're interested though, Brian Blais and Kamil Gregor have published a rebuttal of the argument, and Luuk van de Weghe and Jason Wilson have responded to their paper (both in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus).
I'll be completely honest and say I haven't read their whole paper (maybe I shouldn't be plugging the argument—lol) and it's also been a while, so I'm a little rusty on the details. But some parts of their argument did strike me as fairly weak. For example, they exclude from their analysis any characters whose existence is extrabiblically attested, which drastically reduces the size of the sample. There was a debate over whether this was a legitimate move (Lydia McGrew definitely did not think so). They also, for reasons of scope, don't address Bauckham's comments on so-called "disambiguators," which is a big part of the argument. So they're only critiquing one part of the argument from onomastic congruence.
One of the common patterns in historical debates about the resurrection is to establish a sequence of facts A through Z as each individually more probable than not, then ask for the best explanation of those facts and go with that. But this isn't automatically valid. If the facts aren't individually all extremely high probability, then the conjunction of A through Z might end up having a much lower probability, maybe even less than 50%. Moreover, even if the conjunction is "merely" 99%, that might still be really bad! A 1% chance that your evidence for an epistemically load-bearing claim is wrong, even if the claim implies your desired conclusion with absolute deductive certainty, means under certain circumstances that your posterior odds on the conclusion should only go up by a factor of approximately 100. (Given a certain plausible-in-this-case condition[1], if you're probabilistically arguing for A based on B, and you have evidence which you think establishes B with probability X, then your posterior odds on A should only go up by a factor of at most about 1/(1-X).) So if you start out with negligible odds because you think most supernatural events are very implausible by default, 100 times that isn't going to be very impressive.
So all of this is very sensitive to numbers indeed. Which is kind of unfortunate, because using numerical probabilities to describe our doxastic states is a bit of an idealized abstraction to begin with, and in most contexts, especially historical ones like these, it might seem hard to precisely justify 99.9999% deserved credence vs. 99%. Still, I find it frustrating when authors forget about this point, and silently go from "this sub-claim is probable" to "we can automatically reason as if we're certain about the sub-claim in later stages of the argument." For example - and maybe this isn't the very best example, since it might not be truly essential to anyone's case - the dating of 1 Corinthians 15 to a few years after Jesus' death. There is no decisive evidence for this! Maybe it's plausible based on subtle phraseological factors of the passage, but it's not open-and-shut. Certainly Gerd Lüdemann, at least to my knowledge, does not provide reason to think it's open-and-shut, rather than mere surmise.
[1] The condition is as follows. Let E be your evidence for B. Suppose you have a certain alternate hypothesis C in mind to explain away E. Then you need that P(E|C) is relatively high, i.e., C *does* in fact explain away E, at least if it's true. And you also need P(C|~A) isn't too much different from P(C) - in other words, that C isn't too shocking if A is false compared to rivals, at least if you haven't yet collected any of the evidence E.
Interesting thoughts! I'm especially interested in this: "if you're probabilistically arguing for A based on B, and you have evidence which you think establishes B with probability X, then your posterior odds on A should only go up by a factor of at most about 1/(1-X)". Could you spell out the reasoning in favor of this for me? Perhaps mathematically, if possible? Thanks!
I unfortunately wasn't very precise in my comment you were responding to.
Imagine we have a piece of evidence E and a hypothesis H that it putatively supports/confirms. Suppose we have an undercutting defeater D with prior P(D). Consider/assume the following two facts:
(1) Since D is an undercutting defeater (in the somewhat idiosyncratic sense in which I'm using the term), it predicts E regardless of H: P(E|D&H) ~= P(E|D&~H) ~= 1.
(2) Suppose that P(D|~H) is not too different from P(D). This will be the case if D and H are (unconditionally) independent, but that's not strictly necessary.
Now, by Bayes' theorem, the posterior odds of H on E equal the prior odds times the likelihood ratio. So, examining the latter, we have:
P(E|H)/P(E|~H) = P(E|H) / [P(E|~H&D)P(D|~H) + P(E|~H&~D)P(~D|~H)] (by the law of total probability on the denominator)
<= 1 / [P(E|~H&D)P(D|~H)] (since we've made the numerator bigger and the denominator smaller)
~= 1/P(D|~H) (since P(E|~H&D) is high, by (1))
~= 1/P(D) (by (2)).
So, if you're arguing for hypothesis H based on testimonial evidence E, and you've established the veracity of E with probability X, then an undercutting defeater like D = "E is wrong/produced by some motivated or unreliable chain of transmission" will have probability ~= 1 - X. If you can then show that D predicts E specifically (as opposed to any other kind of hypothetical evidence) and that ~H doesn't really impact D absent E, then the above simple derivation kicks in and our posterior odds change only by a factor of at most about 1/P(D) ~= 1/(1 - X).
Now, showing that D predicts E well enough can be hard, since just because a testimonial chain of transmission is unreliable doesn't imply it would likely falsely produce E anyway - there are usually many other kinds of erroneous stories it could have theoretically produced instead. In the case of the empty tomb, though, it's kind of obvious why people would have been motivated to make up *that* particular detail over time if it didn't actually happen.
You move from the relatively modest (and almost certainly true) claim that many facts constitute evidence against Christianity to the relatively strong claim that there's a good cumulative case against Christianity. But is this move warranted? It's trivially easy to come up with lots of evidence against a proposition, P, if any fact that's less like given P than given ~P counts as evidence against P. But it's much more difficult to show that P is less likely than ~P given one's total evidence. Do you think you've accomplished the latter with respect to Christianity? Or do you merely think you've identified many facts that constitute evidence against Christianity? (If the latter, I don't see why you should hesitate to accept Christianity.)
I don't think there's some formula for deciding whether considerations against a view are decisive. At some point, you just have to think about the considerations on both sides and see which ones have more force.
I agree with a lot of your points, but a few lines still stuck out to me:
"It’s unlikely they’d have made up the burial just a few years after it allegedly occurred—when people could have easily investigated the matter for themselves."
I don't think the "it can't be a lie because people would have verified it for themselves" defense is particularly reliable - shouldn't the rise of things like QAnon, for example, pretty decisively convince us that people regularly come to believe obviously false statements that could be easily disproved? And that's in the modern era, with Google and Wikipedia and all that at your fingertips. I don't actually think the average Corinthian who was sympathetic to Christianity would have either the means or the motivation to actually travel to Palestine and ask about something that happened in the previous decade. It sounds plausible in the abstract to say that kind of skepticism would be a check on early Christians inventing things, but when you actually ask people to lay out the specific process by which these sorts of claims could be verified, I haven't seen a good explanation for it.
Similarly, it's not odd to me that early critics accepted the empty tomb narrative and just gave their own explanations for it - they also wouldn't have any particularly reliable method for determining what happened, and it's not uncommon for people who are criticizing a particular story to argue "on their opponent's terms" as opposed to just rejecting the entire story from the get-go.
"About 7% of ancient writings from before 200 that have survived are from the Bible, so we'd expect the Bible to contain ~7% of the passages that sound most like they're about Jesus. In fact, it seems the Bible contains all the most impressive passages that sound like they're about Jesus!"
This just seems straightforwardly wrong to me. The other 93% of ancient writings we have (just using your numbers here) are not all religious texts filled with prophecies, right? Many of them are histories, personal letters, whatever. And those things wouldn't have the sorts of prophecies that would apply to *anyone,* so expecting prophecies that apply to Jesus to be evenly distributed through that corpus seems confused. To me, it's like saying "This cookbook has so many great recipes, and it's only 1% of my library of 100 random books - if it wasn't inspired, then why doesn't it just have 1% of the good recipes in the total collection?" Because it probably contains a disproportionate amount of recipes, period!
But most of the passages in question aren't intended to be prophecies. The passage in the Psalm is music. The passage in Isaiah in context--if you didn't know about Jesus--would seem to be about Israel. The passage in Wisdom is--or at least appears to be--about a generic righteous guy.
For the things you point out, they require doing actual research, not just literally visiting some location.
Sure, but they're still what you might call "prophecy compatible," in that they describe situations or courses of events in enough generality that they could be plausibly embodied by a particular person later on down the line (the ones that don't, but are still claimed to be prophecies, shouldn't be invoked as evidence here anyway imo). Something like, idk, Caesar's history of the Gallic wars won't have something like that just as a basic feature of its genre.
Otherwise, I don't think framing it as "just literally visiting some location" is fair - did anyone ten or fifteen years later know the specific location of the tomb? Would someone in Corinth who was interested in Christianity have the means to easily travel there and identify it? Presumably the tomb was used by Joseph's family in the meantime anyway. How could you prove who was or wasn't there for a few days a decade before?
Even if an early Christian convert in Jerusalem knew the location of the tomb and went there in (say) 40 AD, and the tomb was open for public viewings, and they found a mangled corpse there, would they have assumed it was Jesus and not just trickery by the Jewish authorities? It would've been deteriorated to the point of unidentifiability. So this particular skeptical theory hinges on whether it's plausible such a fraudulent story could start at this later period of forensic plausible deniability, where you'd have to rely on at least some of the early disciples (who presumably would've known the truth) around to circulate corrections, and whether those guys in fact all would've wanted to do so with extremely high certainty.
>shouldn't the rise of things like QAnon, for example, pretty decisively convince us that people regularly come to believe obviously false statements that could be easily disproved?
Would also be worth pointing out Scientology. It's more easily verifiable that Scientology is a fraud and was explicitly designed to be a fraud from the ground up than the overwhelming majority of claims in all of human history. Literally anyone with access to a library computer can do it in an afternoon. But there's still tens of thousands of believing Scientologists.
(1) QAnon (and other similar conspiracy theories) persist largely because they're unfalsifiable. Q was (allegedly) an anonymous whistleblower; Trump's real enemies were (allegedly) a secret cabal of Satanists; etc. Ordinary people don't have the resources to track down anonymous whistleblowers or infiltrate secret cabals. So, ordinary people aren't able to falsify QAnon -- at least, not via direct observation.
Not so with the empty tomb. The claim that Jesus' tomb was empty would have been easily falsifiable by almost anyone. Moreover, the Sanhedrin would have been highly motivated to falsify it, as evidenced by the fact that they went to so much trouble to crucify Jesus.
(2) The cost of affirming QAnon isn't very high, especially for anonymous online posters. In fact, in many cases, affirming QAnon comes with all sorts of social benefits. So, it's not surprising that people are willing to affirm it despite having no evidence. Again, not so with the empty tomb. The gospels themselves admit that Jesus' closest followers initially abandoned him for fear of social or legal repercussions. So, it's not plausible that they accepted the empty tomb despite having no evidence.
Scientology is falsifiable. You could, for example, falsify e-meters as demonstrating anything of interest. You can present scientific evidence that we didn't evolve from clams. In a looser sense of falsifiability, you can find the many eyewitness testimonies of people who say things like personally hearing L. Ron Hubbard explicitly bragging about how he's starting a cult for money, or David Miscavige doing insane abusive things as the head of the Church of Scientology. There's a lot of high-budget glossy reporting on all of these things, you can find amazing resources and documentaries in five minutes of google searches. But I'd still bet money there's a lot more Scientology adherents even now than there were Christian converts in 40 or 50 AD.
The empty tomb narrative, by contrast, was not significantly falsifiable after the first few years, since Jesus' body would've decayed to the point of unidentifiability by then regardless of which corpses were in which tombs. And it's not clear to me that the empty tomb story was even circulated until that point of plausible deniability. Moreover, Acts 5 has the Sanhedrin initially pull away from actively opposing the early Christians, at least for a time - maybe they didn't start their efforts up again until years later, when that window of physical deterioration had elapsed. (The chronology of later persecution in Acts is highly unclear.) Finally, I don't think there's good reason to think that most early Christian converts or even Sanhedrin officials were diligent skeptical investigators to begin with, at least not with overwhelming probability. (Paul, for example, didn't even go to Jerusalem for three years after his conversion, so he wouldn't have hunted for missing bodies before then. Not that he shows any evidence in his epistles of believing in an empty tomb to begin with!)
You can replace QAnon with the 2020 election being stolen. This was the most recounted, audited, and reverified election in history, so it's easily falsifiable, and dozens of people were disbarred or went to prison for trying to overturn the election for Trump like Giuliani, Powel, Eastman, the Jan 6 insurrectionists, etc. People believe all sorts of crazy shit for nonsensical reasons.
I agree that, as you say, "People believe all sorts of crazy shit for nonsensical reasons."
But the crazy shit people are most prone to believe is crazy shit that (i) isn't falsifiable by direct observation and (ii) can be affirmed at little to no cost.
The Big Lie isn't falsifiable by direct observation. (It's a conspiracy theory with many moving parts.) And affirming the Big Lie comes with little to no cost for most people.
Guiliani, Powel, Eastman, and the Jan 6ers are exceptions to the latter generalization, of course. It's not surprising that there are a few dozen exceptions among literally tens of millions of believers.
Moreover, it's not clear that Guiliani, Powel, and Eastman really believed the Big Lie. They peddled it in hopes of retaining power unconstitutionally.
None of this applies to the empty tomb. The claim that Jesus' tomb was empty was falsifiable by direct observation; the cost of affirming it was extremely high; and those who affirmed it did not stand to gain wealth and power by doing so. (The apostles famously led pretty difficult lives, and probably some of them were martyred.)
So, again, I don't think the empty tomb is comparable to QAnon or the Big Lie. It's true that people believe false things for bad reasons. But the claim that Jesus' tomb was empty is not the sort of thing that Jesus' earliest followers likely would have falsely believed for bad reasons.
I'm still not clear on how exactly it would be falsifiable - did early Christians know exactly where the tomb was, or have the means to go and check it out themselves even if they did? How long was the tomb empty for, anyway? Presumably they didn't leave it empty forever as some sort of exhibit or something. Even if it had been used for Jesus and was later found empty, they'd probably just reuse it for its original purpose as a tomb for Joseph's family, right?
All four gospels agree that Jesus’ earliest followers knew the location of the tomb, had access to it, and found it empty soon after Jesus’ death. And Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin, so Jesus’ opponents presumably also knew the location of the tomb.
Of course, the claim that Jesus’ tomb was empty did not remain falsifiable via direct observation in perpetuity. The tomb was probably eventually reused or lost. But the relevant claim was falsifiable via direct observation by the earliest Christians -- i.e., those who believed when the apostles first preached the gospel in Jerusalem.
Is it possible that the empty tomb was fabricated? Yes, of course. But the point is that explaining why the earliest Christians believed that Jesus' tomb was empty is more difficult than explaining why many Americans believe conspiracy theories. The rise of Christianity was different from the rise of QAnon or the Big Lie in many relevant ways, two of which I outlined above.
The answer that Jesus didn’t talk about slavery because he wasn’t speaking to an audience of slave owners is unconvincing since the discussion is about whether Jesus was a manifestation of an omniscient divinity. Surely Jesus was aware that his audience in the long term included many slave owners, stretching all the way into the 19th century, and that he could save millions of slaves a huge amount of suffering with a farsighted message about the evils of slavery.
>Ordinarily, when facts are included in all four Gospels, historians think they probably happened, unless they’re particularly outlandish.
Who are these historians, and what reasoning are they using?
First of all, Luke and Matthew are generally seen as deriving from Mark (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcan_priority). So "appearing in all four Gospels" , in terms of independent evidence, is (almost) equivalent with "appearing in Mark and John".
Secondly, the earliest actual texts we have of the Gospels are from 125 CE (an extract of John); most are much later (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript). We can infer the earlier texts in various ways; and we can even infer something about the oral traditions which the texts were based on. But it gets much more speculative the earlier we go, needing more and more assumptions of varying plausibility.
It is incorrect to summarise this complex and contentious scholarship as "Ordinarily, when facts are included in all four Gospels, historians think they probably happened, unless they’re particularly outlandish."
The problem with that kind of summary is evident in arguments like:
>It’s hard to see how early Christianity could have taken off if Jesus remained in a tomb at a known location.
That argument makes assumptions about how people in first century Judea assess evidence, assumptions about how religions grow in mainly-illiterate societies, and combines this with our very speculative reconstructions about what actually happened in Jesus's life.
Because of this, it's a weak argument when used by trained historians. It's an even weaker argument when used by amateurs like you and me. We just can't assess all the ways the argument might fail.
If we were perfect Bayesians, we would be capable of listing the millions of alternative possibilities ("these are five hundred different historical examples of how different subcultures use evidence about religious claims; here are three hundred plausible oral traditions that could have developed into the Gospels we know today; here are a hundred models on how rapid belief growth in society correlated with underlying accuracy of the claims - some models have the correlation being positive, some of them have it being negative;...”) and put a probability on each one.
Since we are far from Bayesian, we have to content ourselves with saying "I can't think of many alternative narratives, and this argument sounds intuitively plausible to me. However, since the evidence is weak and requires multiple assumptions, I need to assert that the argument is quite unlikely, even if I can't spell out explicitly all the ways it is likely to fail".
I know that it sucks that we don't have better sources, but we have to make do with what we have, and be more comfortable with uncertainty.
For me, there are multiple reasons I'm not a Christian.
Among them is the notion that Jesus Christ died to forgive our sin(s). What sin(s)? Usually I'm told the flaw to be corrected is Original Sin, but (A) all the penalties are listed in Genesis and are still in effect; (B) going to hell after death isn't among the listed penalties; and (C) knowing good from evil is not itself evil. Another possibility is that (D) in Christian dogma, parthogenesis is required for birth w/o sin (normal human reproduction is sinful), but disapproval of normal human reproduction as evil or "unholy" is not healthy. Christian theologians do not offer other specification of what sin is supposed to have been forgiven by the sadistic torture and humiliation of Jesus Christ.
As in this article and the attached comments, the idea of the "sin(s)" is not convincingly presented by the authorities.
This article mentions that a few religious doctrines claim that all human cultures are morally flawed (not flawed in the same way for each doctrine) and proponents of those doctrines have the solution. That is beside the point and could have been omitted. Since it is in the article, the reader can wonder what sin(s) can be found specified in the other religions to apply to Christianity as the big sin that we have now been forgiven of.
Actually, I enjoyed the article and some of the attached comments, I appreciate the chance to discuss these matters, and I am hoping for a direct reply that disagrees with at least one of my statements. :)
>Suppose there’s a copy of me in each universe. It seems that the mes across universes are both me—identical in being—but distinct in person.
Invoking time travel and possible worlds is superfluous. Here is a better example: Refer to me as identical to you and to yourself as identical to me but different persons. If you're willing to accept this discourse you can also accept the trinity, because we're partaking in a meaningless naming ritual that has no practical consequences whether or not we accept it besides whether we adopt the naming ritual.
God the Son is atemporal sans Creation. and temporal with Creation.
God the Spirit is eternally temporal.
Since we are eternally temporal, we need the Holy Spirit. And Jesus is our bridge between our eternally temporality and the Father's eternal atemporality.
You might enjoy reading Eleonore Stump's book on the atonement (called, helpfully Atonement). She rejects Anselmian/PSA theories entirely and heavily modifies the Thomistic one to create a novel theory centers on the agony in the garden and Jesus' cry of dereliction on the cross, with some influence from moral exemplar accounts as well.
I don't entirely agree with it (she gives short shrift to Anselm on more than a few points), but if you're already inclined to reject those accounts, you will probably get a lot out of it. She is also willing to engage extensively with scriptural accounts, the historical theologians and exegetes, and contemporary psychology and neuroscience to make her case, which sets it apart from more siloed works of philosophy and theology.
This is why I waited. It saves me much time. I now know I can avoid a lot of the things that I would have had to rant about and can stick to my main areas of research. I think I can get this written a lot sooner than I said.
So still expect intense snark on your claims about the Delay of the Parousia. But I will mostly stick to the spooky philosophy. Expect a reply from me in May (I’m not doing anything until finals week is over)
"So on the hypothesis that the argument from prophecy fails, I'd expect there to be many other passages from ancient literature that sound like they're about Jesus. About 7% of ancient writings from before 200 that have survived are from the Bible, so we'd expect the Bible to contain ~7% of the passages that sound most like they're about Jesus. In fact, it seems the Bible contains all the most impressive passages that sound like they're about Jesus!"
I think there is reason to expect that the rate would be higher than 7%, even if Christianity is false. Namely, even if they're in large part false, one would expect Christian texts to contain recurring themes and ideas or concepts. This is the case, because
a - there is a selection effect of what is written down. If the author knows about famous passages in their holy texts, they will make an effort to record any future observations lining up with these passages. This would extend even to actions those in the tradition might take, which would then be recorded (someone could purposely fulfill a prophecy, for instance).
b - other sources of correlation between passages in a specific tradition. The authors come from similar geographical areas. Have shared cultures. Have similar beliefs. Etc. If only one culture was obsessed with apples, it wouldn't be surprising if all of the fulfilled prophecies about apples are in that culture's texts.
It's unclear how much higher this should make the expected rate than 7%. It would depend on a lot of features of the Christian/Jewish tradition at the time of writing, and also the other ancient texts, and the specificity of the prophecies themselves.
However, I suspect it's easy to underrate the extent of subtle correlations of this kind.
That's a good point. However, many of the prophecies are about things that happened, not just recurring motifs. B cuts against this, but I'd imagine it's a pretty minor point.
Praying for you, BB!!! 🌈🩸✝️🩸🌈
Various thoughts from reading the article:
1) This has moved my credence towards the burial being true. I previously leaned heavily towards Jesus not being buried in an individual tomb in part because I thought that was the common practice at the time. But the considerations here suggest that the base rate may be lower than I expected.
2) I don't really trust Catholic Answers to give an unbiased presentation of the dating of the Corinthian creed. I could believe it comes from early after Jesus's death, but it also seems pretty implausible that we'd have reliable evidence that a very short creed that first appears in Paul's letters must have come from an earlier source within a few years of Jesus's death. Do you know of any sources on the dating of the creed that are from neither apologists nor counter-apologists trying to debunk them?
3) I'm almost certain that your view of the Trinity is heretical according to most Christian denominations. I also just don't think it works as a way of explaining the three-persons-one-being thing. If you analogize it to time travel where you meet your younger self, it doesn't fit the "three persons" aspect of it. You and your younger self are the same person, not two distinct people. You are just different stages of that person's life. The three persons of the Trinity are definitely not just meant to be different stages in God's life, even if these stages are meant to be stages outside of time, in non-metric time, and in metric time rather than at three different moments in time. Furthermore, this would mean that God the Son and God the Holy Spirit depend on (non-metric and metric, resp.) time for their existence, which runs counter to divine aseity. Also, if you accept eternalism, which is required for making a distinction between your current and six-year-old self and treating them as separate persons, then your current self and your six-year-old self are just different temporal parts of the larger worldline containing your entire being. God is not supposed to have parts according to traditional Christian belief, so having temporal parts at all could be problematic. But even if you reject the partless view of God, it's definitely part of the doctrine of the Trinity that the three persons are not just three distinct parts of God, but that each of them is fully God, and they are consubstantiational with each other. So they can't just be three separate temporal parts of God. Nor does it work better if you treat them as different temporal modes of existence rather than temporal parts, because that would just be modalism.
I don't think the analogy to different versions of you existing in different timelines works either. Versions of you in different timelines are clearly different beings, not the same being. They could only be considered "the same being" in the sense that identical clones are considered "the same being" - that is, they have the same or very similar intrinsic properties as each other, while nevertheless being numerically distinct. Now maybe you could posit a more complicated situation where there's something shared between the different timeline versions. Maybe there's a common soul, or they started as the same being but split due to the many worlds interpretation, or they have some sort of psychological continuity or something between timelines. But even in that case, you're either going to allow so much contiguity between them that the versions of you in different timelines are actually all the same person, or you're just going to have multiple people who are all parts of some larger being. You'll never have a case where each individual timeline copy is fully identical to the whole of the same being, and yet they are not identical to each other. The closest you can get is two distinct people with overlapping temporal parts in the MWI case.
Also, I don't really think this provides a better explanation of why there are three persons than the explanation about types of love. Why are there exactly three "stages" of time that are treated separately? Wouldn't there be more if there were more universes with distinct timelines? And the non-metric time that is also a single moment causally prior to creation is of dubious coherence - I'm not sure how that's different from just not being in time at all. Basically, while you can tell a story about there being three different relations to time, it seems just as contrived to me about the story involving three types of love.
4) I'm not so sure Jesus expressed *every* virtue in his short life on Earth. It probably depends on how you want to individuate virtues - on a more fine-grained picture, you'll eventually find one he never expressed. But maybe this doesn't really matter - he just has to express certain virtues like courage that he wouldn't be able to express without the Incarnation and even the Passion. This explanation makes a lot of sense if you already have a view of God that uses relationship-building via acting virtuously as your theodicy and explanation of the material world's existence. Though I'm not sure how well it fits with the traditional idea that Jesus's death caused our sins to be forgiven. In this case, it's more like, seeing Jesus's virtue might cause us to repent, but God still could've forgiven us regardless.
5) It's not true on the null hypothesis that we would expect passages from outside the Bible to be equally likely to sound like they're about Jesus as passages inside the Bible. This is for a number of reasons:
a) Religious scriptures are probably a lot more likely to sound like they could be a prophecy in the first place, and to use a lot of vague and figurative language that's very open to interpretation, and thus could be interpreted as a prophecy about Jesus. I've heard that the ancient Jews were especially prone to this kind of writing (though I'm not sure how accurate that is), which would make it even more likely that Jewish scripture would have most of the apparent prophecies. So the Bible is going to be much higher than the base rate among all genres of surviving writing to contain things that sound like prophecies about Jesus.
b) Presumably something written by ancient Jews, especially very religious ancient Jews, is going to sound more similar to the life of a very religious ancient Jew than sources written by people from different cultures.
c) Jesus, the early Christian community, and the Gospel authors knew about the scriptures. That means that Jesus could just intentionally do things that imitate scriptures, and even if he didn't, the early community and Gospel writers might come up with stories about him doing things similar to what was in scripture. The Gospels more or less admit this is the case, since they sometimes state that Jesus did things in a certain way in order to fulfill the scriptures.
6) Even if it was to be expected that there would be just as many things that sound like they could be prophecies about Jesus in non-Biblical sources as there are in Biblical ones, it doesn't follow that we would be just as likely to know about them. Obviously, people are much more likely to interpret an ambiguous passage as being a prophecy about Jesus if it comes from the Old Testament than if it comes from some random ancient source that has nothing to to with Judaism or Christianity. So any such passages are much less likely to be discussed in the context of prophecies about Jesus. Now sure, you could respond, "Okay, then find those passages," but that's unfair. I can't read untranslated ancient literature, and even if I could, I don't have time to search through the entire extant corpus of ancient literature to find passages that sound kind of like they could be about Jesus. You might say, "But what about historians who have read those passages?" But this gets back to the original problem - they had no reason to interpret those passages as being about Jesus, since they were from completely unrelated sources. So they would not have remarked on any similarities, and even if they had, this would likely not be widely known outside of some niche academic circles.
7) I don't think that Wall's argument that, "I bet I could also find one or two remarks on your blog which also don't explicitly condemn slavery," works because the argument that the Bible doesn't condemn slavery isn't just that it doesn't explicitly condemn it in every breath. Rather, it's that it never condemns slavery and even seems to endorse it in some parts, despite it being a common institution (and commonly believed to be acceptable) at the time and despite the Bible containing a large amount of moral and societal instruction. This is not analogous to your blog because everyone reading your blog already knows slavery is wrong, so there's no need to tell them that. Plus, you've never said anything that could be interpreted as condoning slavery in the way the Old Testament did, and you have condemned slavery - you just don't talk about it all the time. A better analogy between your blog and the way we would expect the Bible to treat slavery if it were really God's word is how often you talk about shrimp welfare, an issue that you consider very morally important but which is not widely believed to be.
Yes, “well, nobody’s perfect” fails as an argument for Jesus’s divinity.
From a cross-cultural point of view, it looks quite odd to spend so much time on trying to argue a single putative miracle from 2000+ years ago. Claims of miracles are everywhere in all sorts of cultures.
The default skeptical response nowadays is to disclaim them all as unreliable one-off flukes, given how much we know about the unreliability of witnesses and memory, and the existence of group delusions, and how narratives change over time. But if one takes the other branch and accepts the evidence more or less at face value, what it points to is a wide variety of people throughout history with special abilities, either to bend matter, or (more likely) to bend the perception of others. That would be quite remarkable if confirmed, but in no way makes all those people into God-in-person, or makes their respective religions true.
Well, the Christian miracle is supposed to have more evidence than other miracles, and a higher prior because it's one of the core claims of the world's largest religion. If you think there's a non-trivial prior that one of the major religions would be right, you should think there's a non-trivial prior of the resurrection.
I think that's just Western familiarity. I've read biographies of popular Indian saints, with miracles galore, and it's obviously the same phenomenon that you find in Christianity, back in Roman times but also with later Saints, as well as in Sufism, and everywhere you care to look. The stories are all in the same template, special spiritual person has special abilities. You can find 'back from the dead' stories too; the Tibetans made a minor specialty of it, called 'delog', look it up.
When you find widespread evidence for the same kind of thing, I think it's logical to consider it all together, and to focus on recent cases.
In challenge you to find a miracle claim that rivals the Resurrection in please plausibility and importance.
Thanks for the update! Your honesty is refreshing.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on some of the positive arguments for the reliability of the gospels. In particular, I find the argument from onomastic congruence (as first proposed by Bauckham and then further developed by Luuk van de Weghe) to be one of the stronger ones. Perhaps a subject for a future post?
Thanks! I found your comment really thoughtful on the last article!
Haven't looked much into it. But I suspect that even if they were reliable enough to be roughly right about names, that doesn't much affect the reliability of highly specific claims they made with obvious apologetic purposes.
To some extent, that's right—onomastic congruence can only get you so far. I do find it striking, though, that as van de Weghe notes, the degree of onomastic congruence in the canonical gospels is comparable to some of the best works of ancient history:
"In our survey of twenty-five sources, the only works that bear onomastic congruence are those which Craig Keener suggests mark the height of historical sensitivity for the genre of the Greco-Roman βίος, and, especially in Plutarch, the apex of this genre within the Early Empire, when expectations of historical reliability were at their highest. Onomastic congruence appears to be a byproduct, however unintentional, of the information-driven nature of these historiographical works."
On a big-picture level, I see this as raising the probability that the gospel accounts come from historically sensitive individuals. And that reduces the probability that they felt free to drastically alter their or their sources' recollections of Jesus.
That said, I would only use the argument as part of a cumulative case. I get the hesitation. If you're interested though, Brian Blais and Kamil Gregor have published a rebuttal of the argument, and Luuk van de Weghe and Jason Wilson have responded to their paper (both in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus).
I know there was a back and forth about it but I didn't really follow the details. DO you think Gregor and Blais were clearly wrong?
I'll be completely honest and say I haven't read their whole paper (maybe I shouldn't be plugging the argument—lol) and it's also been a while, so I'm a little rusty on the details. But some parts of their argument did strike me as fairly weak. For example, they exclude from their analysis any characters whose existence is extrabiblically attested, which drastically reduces the size of the sample. There was a debate over whether this was a legitimate move (Lydia McGrew definitely did not think so). They also, for reasons of scope, don't address Bauckham's comments on so-called "disambiguators," which is a big part of the argument. So they're only critiquing one part of the argument from onomastic congruence.
Do you have discord? I'd be happy to chat on discord about this in more detail.
I do—my tag is @cjore
One of the common patterns in historical debates about the resurrection is to establish a sequence of facts A through Z as each individually more probable than not, then ask for the best explanation of those facts and go with that. But this isn't automatically valid. If the facts aren't individually all extremely high probability, then the conjunction of A through Z might end up having a much lower probability, maybe even less than 50%. Moreover, even if the conjunction is "merely" 99%, that might still be really bad! A 1% chance that your evidence for an epistemically load-bearing claim is wrong, even if the claim implies your desired conclusion with absolute deductive certainty, means under certain circumstances that your posterior odds on the conclusion should only go up by a factor of approximately 100. (Given a certain plausible-in-this-case condition[1], if you're probabilistically arguing for A based on B, and you have evidence which you think establishes B with probability X, then your posterior odds on A should only go up by a factor of at most about 1/(1-X).) So if you start out with negligible odds because you think most supernatural events are very implausible by default, 100 times that isn't going to be very impressive.
So all of this is very sensitive to numbers indeed. Which is kind of unfortunate, because using numerical probabilities to describe our doxastic states is a bit of an idealized abstraction to begin with, and in most contexts, especially historical ones like these, it might seem hard to precisely justify 99.9999% deserved credence vs. 99%. Still, I find it frustrating when authors forget about this point, and silently go from "this sub-claim is probable" to "we can automatically reason as if we're certain about the sub-claim in later stages of the argument." For example - and maybe this isn't the very best example, since it might not be truly essential to anyone's case - the dating of 1 Corinthians 15 to a few years after Jesus' death. There is no decisive evidence for this! Maybe it's plausible based on subtle phraseological factors of the passage, but it's not open-and-shut. Certainly Gerd Lüdemann, at least to my knowledge, does not provide reason to think it's open-and-shut, rather than mere surmise.
[1] The condition is as follows. Let E be your evidence for B. Suppose you have a certain alternate hypothesis C in mind to explain away E. Then you need that P(E|C) is relatively high, i.e., C *does* in fact explain away E, at least if it's true. And you also need P(C|~A) isn't too much different from P(C) - in other words, that C isn't too shocking if A is false compared to rivals, at least if you haven't yet collected any of the evidence E.
Interesting thoughts! I'm especially interested in this: "if you're probabilistically arguing for A based on B, and you have evidence which you think establishes B with probability X, then your posterior odds on A should only go up by a factor of at most about 1/(1-X)". Could you spell out the reasoning in favor of this for me? Perhaps mathematically, if possible? Thanks!
I unfortunately wasn't very precise in my comment you were responding to.
Imagine we have a piece of evidence E and a hypothesis H that it putatively supports/confirms. Suppose we have an undercutting defeater D with prior P(D). Consider/assume the following two facts:
(1) Since D is an undercutting defeater (in the somewhat idiosyncratic sense in which I'm using the term), it predicts E regardless of H: P(E|D&H) ~= P(E|D&~H) ~= 1.
(2) Suppose that P(D|~H) is not too different from P(D). This will be the case if D and H are (unconditionally) independent, but that's not strictly necessary.
Now, by Bayes' theorem, the posterior odds of H on E equal the prior odds times the likelihood ratio. So, examining the latter, we have:
P(E|H)/P(E|~H) = P(E|H) / [P(E|~H&D)P(D|~H) + P(E|~H&~D)P(~D|~H)] (by the law of total probability on the denominator)
<= 1 / [P(E|~H&D)P(D|~H)] (since we've made the numerator bigger and the denominator smaller)
~= 1/P(D|~H) (since P(E|~H&D) is high, by (1))
~= 1/P(D) (by (2)).
So, if you're arguing for hypothesis H based on testimonial evidence E, and you've established the veracity of E with probability X, then an undercutting defeater like D = "E is wrong/produced by some motivated or unreliable chain of transmission" will have probability ~= 1 - X. If you can then show that D predicts E specifically (as opposed to any other kind of hypothetical evidence) and that ~H doesn't really impact D absent E, then the above simple derivation kicks in and our posterior odds change only by a factor of at most about 1/P(D) ~= 1/(1 - X).
Now, showing that D predicts E well enough can be hard, since just because a testimonial chain of transmission is unreliable doesn't imply it would likely falsely produce E anyway - there are usually many other kinds of erroneous stories it could have theoretically produced instead. In the case of the empty tomb, though, it's kind of obvious why people would have been motivated to make up *that* particular detail over time if it didn't actually happen.
Great post!
You move from the relatively modest (and almost certainly true) claim that many facts constitute evidence against Christianity to the relatively strong claim that there's a good cumulative case against Christianity. But is this move warranted? It's trivially easy to come up with lots of evidence against a proposition, P, if any fact that's less like given P than given ~P counts as evidence against P. But it's much more difficult to show that P is less likely than ~P given one's total evidence. Do you think you've accomplished the latter with respect to Christianity? Or do you merely think you've identified many facts that constitute evidence against Christianity? (If the latter, I don't see why you should hesitate to accept Christianity.)
I don't think there's some formula for deciding whether considerations against a view are decisive. At some point, you just have to think about the considerations on both sides and see which ones have more force.
I agree with a lot of your points, but a few lines still stuck out to me:
"It’s unlikely they’d have made up the burial just a few years after it allegedly occurred—when people could have easily investigated the matter for themselves."
I don't think the "it can't be a lie because people would have verified it for themselves" defense is particularly reliable - shouldn't the rise of things like QAnon, for example, pretty decisively convince us that people regularly come to believe obviously false statements that could be easily disproved? And that's in the modern era, with Google and Wikipedia and all that at your fingertips. I don't actually think the average Corinthian who was sympathetic to Christianity would have either the means or the motivation to actually travel to Palestine and ask about something that happened in the previous decade. It sounds plausible in the abstract to say that kind of skepticism would be a check on early Christians inventing things, but when you actually ask people to lay out the specific process by which these sorts of claims could be verified, I haven't seen a good explanation for it.
Similarly, it's not odd to me that early critics accepted the empty tomb narrative and just gave their own explanations for it - they also wouldn't have any particularly reliable method for determining what happened, and it's not uncommon for people who are criticizing a particular story to argue "on their opponent's terms" as opposed to just rejecting the entire story from the get-go.
"About 7% of ancient writings from before 200 that have survived are from the Bible, so we'd expect the Bible to contain ~7% of the passages that sound most like they're about Jesus. In fact, it seems the Bible contains all the most impressive passages that sound like they're about Jesus!"
This just seems straightforwardly wrong to me. The other 93% of ancient writings we have (just using your numbers here) are not all religious texts filled with prophecies, right? Many of them are histories, personal letters, whatever. And those things wouldn't have the sorts of prophecies that would apply to *anyone,* so expecting prophecies that apply to Jesus to be evenly distributed through that corpus seems confused. To me, it's like saying "This cookbook has so many great recipes, and it's only 1% of my library of 100 random books - if it wasn't inspired, then why doesn't it just have 1% of the good recipes in the total collection?" Because it probably contains a disproportionate amount of recipes, period!
But most of the passages in question aren't intended to be prophecies. The passage in the Psalm is music. The passage in Isaiah in context--if you didn't know about Jesus--would seem to be about Israel. The passage in Wisdom is--or at least appears to be--about a generic righteous guy.
For the things you point out, they require doing actual research, not just literally visiting some location.
Sure, but they're still what you might call "prophecy compatible," in that they describe situations or courses of events in enough generality that they could be plausibly embodied by a particular person later on down the line (the ones that don't, but are still claimed to be prophecies, shouldn't be invoked as evidence here anyway imo). Something like, idk, Caesar's history of the Gallic wars won't have something like that just as a basic feature of its genre.
Otherwise, I don't think framing it as "just literally visiting some location" is fair - did anyone ten or fifteen years later know the specific location of the tomb? Would someone in Corinth who was interested in Christianity have the means to easily travel there and identify it? Presumably the tomb was used by Joseph's family in the meantime anyway. How could you prove who was or wasn't there for a few days a decade before?
Even if an early Christian convert in Jerusalem knew the location of the tomb and went there in (say) 40 AD, and the tomb was open for public viewings, and they found a mangled corpse there, would they have assumed it was Jesus and not just trickery by the Jewish authorities? It would've been deteriorated to the point of unidentifiability. So this particular skeptical theory hinges on whether it's plausible such a fraudulent story could start at this later period of forensic plausible deniability, where you'd have to rely on at least some of the early disciples (who presumably would've known the truth) around to circulate corrections, and whether those guys in fact all would've wanted to do so with extremely high certainty.
>shouldn't the rise of things like QAnon, for example, pretty decisively convince us that people regularly come to believe obviously false statements that could be easily disproved?
Would also be worth pointing out Scientology. It's more easily verifiable that Scientology is a fraud and was explicitly designed to be a fraud from the ground up than the overwhelming majority of claims in all of human history. Literally anyone with access to a library computer can do it in an afternoon. But there's still tens of thousands of believing Scientologists.
Two notes about the comparison to QAnon:
(1) QAnon (and other similar conspiracy theories) persist largely because they're unfalsifiable. Q was (allegedly) an anonymous whistleblower; Trump's real enemies were (allegedly) a secret cabal of Satanists; etc. Ordinary people don't have the resources to track down anonymous whistleblowers or infiltrate secret cabals. So, ordinary people aren't able to falsify QAnon -- at least, not via direct observation.
Not so with the empty tomb. The claim that Jesus' tomb was empty would have been easily falsifiable by almost anyone. Moreover, the Sanhedrin would have been highly motivated to falsify it, as evidenced by the fact that they went to so much trouble to crucify Jesus.
(2) The cost of affirming QAnon isn't very high, especially for anonymous online posters. In fact, in many cases, affirming QAnon comes with all sorts of social benefits. So, it's not surprising that people are willing to affirm it despite having no evidence. Again, not so with the empty tomb. The gospels themselves admit that Jesus' closest followers initially abandoned him for fear of social or legal repercussions. So, it's not plausible that they accepted the empty tomb despite having no evidence.
Scientology is falsifiable. You could, for example, falsify e-meters as demonstrating anything of interest. You can present scientific evidence that we didn't evolve from clams. In a looser sense of falsifiability, you can find the many eyewitness testimonies of people who say things like personally hearing L. Ron Hubbard explicitly bragging about how he's starting a cult for money, or David Miscavige doing insane abusive things as the head of the Church of Scientology. There's a lot of high-budget glossy reporting on all of these things, you can find amazing resources and documentaries in five minutes of google searches. But I'd still bet money there's a lot more Scientology adherents even now than there were Christian converts in 40 or 50 AD.
The empty tomb narrative, by contrast, was not significantly falsifiable after the first few years, since Jesus' body would've decayed to the point of unidentifiability by then regardless of which corpses were in which tombs. And it's not clear to me that the empty tomb story was even circulated until that point of plausible deniability. Moreover, Acts 5 has the Sanhedrin initially pull away from actively opposing the early Christians, at least for a time - maybe they didn't start their efforts up again until years later, when that window of physical deterioration had elapsed. (The chronology of later persecution in Acts is highly unclear.) Finally, I don't think there's good reason to think that most early Christian converts or even Sanhedrin officials were diligent skeptical investigators to begin with, at least not with overwhelming probability. (Paul, for example, didn't even go to Jerusalem for three years after his conversion, so he wouldn't have hunted for missing bodies before then. Not that he shows any evidence in his epistles of believing in an empty tomb to begin with!)
You can replace QAnon with the 2020 election being stolen. This was the most recounted, audited, and reverified election in history, so it's easily falsifiable, and dozens of people were disbarred or went to prison for trying to overturn the election for Trump like Giuliani, Powel, Eastman, the Jan 6 insurrectionists, etc. People believe all sorts of crazy shit for nonsensical reasons.
I agree that, as you say, "People believe all sorts of crazy shit for nonsensical reasons."
But the crazy shit people are most prone to believe is crazy shit that (i) isn't falsifiable by direct observation and (ii) can be affirmed at little to no cost.
The Big Lie isn't falsifiable by direct observation. (It's a conspiracy theory with many moving parts.) And affirming the Big Lie comes with little to no cost for most people.
Guiliani, Powel, Eastman, and the Jan 6ers are exceptions to the latter generalization, of course. It's not surprising that there are a few dozen exceptions among literally tens of millions of believers.
Moreover, it's not clear that Guiliani, Powel, and Eastman really believed the Big Lie. They peddled it in hopes of retaining power unconstitutionally.
None of this applies to the empty tomb. The claim that Jesus' tomb was empty was falsifiable by direct observation; the cost of affirming it was extremely high; and those who affirmed it did not stand to gain wealth and power by doing so. (The apostles famously led pretty difficult lives, and probably some of them were martyred.)
So, again, I don't think the empty tomb is comparable to QAnon or the Big Lie. It's true that people believe false things for bad reasons. But the claim that Jesus' tomb was empty is not the sort of thing that Jesus' earliest followers likely would have falsely believed for bad reasons.
I'm still not clear on how exactly it would be falsifiable - did early Christians know exactly where the tomb was, or have the means to go and check it out themselves even if they did? How long was the tomb empty for, anyway? Presumably they didn't leave it empty forever as some sort of exhibit or something. Even if it had been used for Jesus and was later found empty, they'd probably just reuse it for its original purpose as a tomb for Joseph's family, right?
All four gospels agree that Jesus’ earliest followers knew the location of the tomb, had access to it, and found it empty soon after Jesus’ death. And Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin, so Jesus’ opponents presumably also knew the location of the tomb.
Of course, the claim that Jesus’ tomb was empty did not remain falsifiable via direct observation in perpetuity. The tomb was probably eventually reused or lost. But the relevant claim was falsifiable via direct observation by the earliest Christians -- i.e., those who believed when the apostles first preached the gospel in Jerusalem.
Is it possible that the empty tomb was fabricated? Yes, of course. But the point is that explaining why the earliest Christians believed that Jesus' tomb was empty is more difficult than explaining why many Americans believe conspiracy theories. The rise of Christianity was different from the rise of QAnon or the Big Lie in many relevant ways, two of which I outlined above.
The answer that Jesus didn’t talk about slavery because he wasn’t speaking to an audience of slave owners is unconvincing since the discussion is about whether Jesus was a manifestation of an omniscient divinity. Surely Jesus was aware that his audience in the long term included many slave owners, stretching all the way into the 19th century, and that he could save millions of slaves a huge amount of suffering with a farsighted message about the evils of slavery.
>Ordinarily, when facts are included in all four Gospels, historians think they probably happened, unless they’re particularly outlandish.
Who are these historians, and what reasoning are they using?
First of all, Luke and Matthew are generally seen as deriving from Mark (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcan_priority). So "appearing in all four Gospels" , in terms of independent evidence, is (almost) equivalent with "appearing in Mark and John".
Secondly, the earliest actual texts we have of the Gospels are from 125 CE (an extract of John); most are much later (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript). We can infer the earlier texts in various ways; and we can even infer something about the oral traditions which the texts were based on. But it gets much more speculative the earlier we go, needing more and more assumptions of varying plausibility.
It is incorrect to summarise this complex and contentious scholarship as "Ordinarily, when facts are included in all four Gospels, historians think they probably happened, unless they’re particularly outlandish."
The problem with that kind of summary is evident in arguments like:
>It’s hard to see how early Christianity could have taken off if Jesus remained in a tomb at a known location.
That argument makes assumptions about how people in first century Judea assess evidence, assumptions about how religions grow in mainly-illiterate societies, and combines this with our very speculative reconstructions about what actually happened in Jesus's life.
Because of this, it's a weak argument when used by trained historians. It's an even weaker argument when used by amateurs like you and me. We just can't assess all the ways the argument might fail.
If we were perfect Bayesians, we would be capable of listing the millions of alternative possibilities ("these are five hundred different historical examples of how different subcultures use evidence about religious claims; here are three hundred plausible oral traditions that could have developed into the Gospels we know today; here are a hundred models on how rapid belief growth in society correlated with underlying accuracy of the claims - some models have the correlation being positive, some of them have it being negative;...”) and put a probability on each one.
Since we are far from Bayesian, we have to content ourselves with saying "I can't think of many alternative narratives, and this argument sounds intuitively plausible to me. However, since the evidence is weak and requires multiple assumptions, I need to assert that the argument is quite unlikely, even if I can't spell out explicitly all the ways it is likely to fail".
I know that it sucks that we don't have better sources, but we have to make do with what we have, and be more comfortable with uncertainty.
For me, there are multiple reasons I'm not a Christian.
Among them is the notion that Jesus Christ died to forgive our sin(s). What sin(s)? Usually I'm told the flaw to be corrected is Original Sin, but (A) all the penalties are listed in Genesis and are still in effect; (B) going to hell after death isn't among the listed penalties; and (C) knowing good from evil is not itself evil. Another possibility is that (D) in Christian dogma, parthogenesis is required for birth w/o sin (normal human reproduction is sinful), but disapproval of normal human reproduction as evil or "unholy" is not healthy. Christian theologians do not offer other specification of what sin is supposed to have been forgiven by the sadistic torture and humiliation of Jesus Christ.
As in this article and the attached comments, the idea of the "sin(s)" is not convincingly presented by the authorities.
This article mentions that a few religious doctrines claim that all human cultures are morally flawed (not flawed in the same way for each doctrine) and proponents of those doctrines have the solution. That is beside the point and could have been omitted. Since it is in the article, the reader can wonder what sin(s) can be found specified in the other religions to apply to Christianity as the big sin that we have now been forgiven of.
Actually, I enjoyed the article and some of the attached comments, I appreciate the chance to discuss these matters, and I am hoping for a direct reply that disagrees with at least one of my statements. :)
Wow, you've spent a lot of time on this, even more time than I'm willing to spend reading it, and I'm even a Christian. More power to you!
>Suppose there’s a copy of me in each universe. It seems that the mes across universes are both me—identical in being—but distinct in person.
Invoking time travel and possible worlds is superfluous. Here is a better example: Refer to me as identical to you and to yourself as identical to me but different persons. If you're willing to accept this discourse you can also accept the trinity, because we're partaking in a meaningless naming ritual that has no practical consequences whether or not we accept it besides whether we adopt the naming ritual.
Ah yes,
God the Father is eternally atemporal.
God the Son is atemporal sans Creation. and temporal with Creation.
God the Spirit is eternally temporal.
Since we are eternally temporal, we need the Holy Spirit. And Jesus is our bridge between our eternally temporality and the Father's eternal atemporality.
You might enjoy reading Eleonore Stump's book on the atonement (called, helpfully Atonement). She rejects Anselmian/PSA theories entirely and heavily modifies the Thomistic one to create a novel theory centers on the agony in the garden and Jesus' cry of dereliction on the cross, with some influence from moral exemplar accounts as well.
I don't entirely agree with it (she gives short shrift to Anselm on more than a few points), but if you're already inclined to reject those accounts, you will probably get a lot out of it. She is also willing to engage extensively with scriptural accounts, the historical theologians and exegetes, and contemporary psychology and neuroscience to make her case, which sets it apart from more siloed works of philosophy and theology.