To illustrate once and for all some of the chief aspects in mythicists' methods that trouble me so, I'm going to provide here another posting that I submitted, goodness knows when(!), to another board. I was just starting my journey to real impatience with some of the mythicists at the time, but I wasn't yet where I am now. The discussion centered around an on-line extract of some of G.A.Wells, in response to a Holding piece against Wells's argument. I frankly find many of Holding's arguments dubious as well, so I found some of what Wells says rather cogent. What the appraisal of Wells's piece did for me, though, was help clarify, in my own mind, just why I'm troubled so by so much of the type of reasoning I see among the mythicists. I realize that Wells isn't really a true mythicist, but it strikes me that he buys into some of their methods.
The article in question is at:
A Reply to J.P. Holding...
Here's what I wrote at the time --
[POST] People who've cited Wells as another all-out mythicist -- and I include myself, unfortunately -- are simply wrong. If mythicists think to cite Wells as a way of showing that there is yet one more researcher out there who shares their views on historicity, they are sadly mistaken. This article makes it quite clear that Wells has concluded that there was definitely a real Galilean preacher who was called Jesus, who said the things credited to him in Q, and who lived in the first half of the 1st century c.e. At the same time, where most secular historians assume that this Jesus's purported Birth and Resurrection constitute ad hoc tales not associated with the real history of the Galilean preacher, Wells simply extends that to the actual execution as well, the crucifixion as an ad hoc tale as well.
Wells makes this argument in the first half of the article and points, among other things, to the absence of anything to do with the Christ figure in Q. (OTOH, the name Jesus does appear 12 times [I made a count] in the Q passages, at least two of those being in a passage like Luke 9:57-60, where there is no mention of anything supernatural or miraculous. And this does not contradict Wells's contention, since he accepts the historicity of Jesus the Galilean preacher anyway.) He also points to the presence of the "Christ" term in numerous New Testament letters, not just Paul's, reminding the reader that many of these -- again, not just Paul's -- are presumed to be earlier than the Gospels.
I have to say that up to a point (outlined below) Wells's case seems fairly persuasive that the Christ is one figure -- a supernatural entity envisioned purely by Paul -- and Jesus quite another -- a real Galilean preacher who lived during the first half of the 1st century c.e. In fact, the texts he describes in the article's first half, texts reflecting one figure or the other, appear consistent with his theory. He uses logic up to that point and seems ready to retain that logic for the article's second half. Throughout, his main focus is on Holding's argument against all his theories, and he seeks to show, by constantly referencing Holding, that his reasoning is far sounder than Holding's. Up to a point, it is. And one is prepared to expect him to maintain the disciplined logic that typifies his argument in the first half.
But he doesn't. And when he drops that logic, he loses credibility and this reader's trust and his case collapses like a house of cards, IMO.
The final section starts responsibly enough. Towards the end of the second half, after going through the most important secular non-Scriptural references to Jesus, and after showing their relative lateness and their essential "second-tier status", so to speak (possibly using hearsay from Christians), he finally addresses the two passages in Josephus's Antiquities from the 90s in the 1st century c.e. He spends quite some time on Antiquities 18, the T.F. passage, which has seemed, to scholars of various persuasions, somewhat corrupted, via Josephus's use of Christian terms and assertions. To those like myself who are fairly familiar with (and suspicious of) the odd Christian-like assertions here, and also familiar with the second-earliest text of this passage, which appears in an Arabic quote by someone else from the 10th century where none of the Christian glossing seems present (Eusebius's 4th-century citation is the earliest), Wells adds nothing new. But Wells is useful in that he assembles all the arguments against the authenticity of the fuller version extant in all the actual Antiquities mss., a manuscript tradition that only starts in the 11th century.
So far, so good. But after using up eleven paragraphs on Antiquities 18, he only spends one paragraph on Antiquities 20, the Josephan reference to James as the brother of Jesus, called Christ! In that one paragraph, he writes:
"The shorter passage in the Antiquities that mentions Jesus consists of a reference to James "the brother of Jesus, him called Christ". Holding recognizes that some scholars regard the phrase as interpolated, for reasons which I have given in JL, pp. 52-55. Certainly, the use of the term 'Christ' (Messiah) without explanation in both passages is not to be expected of Josephus who takes considerable care not to call anyone Christ or Messiah, as the term had overtones of revolution and independence, of which, as a lackey of the Roman royal house, he strongly disapproved. Also, it is not true that the phrase 'him called so-and-so' is either invariably dismissive in Josephus' usage (so that it would mean 'so-called', 'alleged' and so could not here be from a Christian hand), nor that 'him called Christ' is an unchristian usage an interpolator would have avoided. (On the contrary, the phrase occurs, as a designation of Jesus, both in the NT and in Justin Martyr's Apology, 1, 30.)"
That's all. No acknowledgement that this account of James cannot come from Scripture, since it's different in substantive detail from anything about James we see in the canon. How likely then that this account ever came from believers? No discussion either of the target of the general outrage that Josephus describes in his paragraph 20, an outrage aimed at one Ananus for exceeding his authority. The focus of this paragraph is Ananus, not James, who remains incidental to Josephus's story here.
No discussion either of the most salient aspect in the written documentation for this sentence: the fact that written references to this sentence, complete with "Jesus, him called Christ", are extant almost immediately upon Josephus's writing it, whereas with Antiquities 18 -- reflecting a pattern that Wells does not hesitate to underscore -- we have no reference until Eusebius's first as late as the 4th century, after which many centuries pass before we even get a second. Wells spends time on that curious pattern for Antiq. 18, but totally covers up the contrasting pattern for Antiq. 20. Here is where he loses credibility in my eyes. His integrity as a historian, all the careful reasoning that he displays in the first half -- all this seems abandoned in this perfunctory, dishonest and evasive paragraph on Antiq. 20.
Finally, we have a truly evasive tactic in Wells's airy reference to "some scholars" feeling that this too is interpolated -- without explaining why "some" feel it's interpolated, as if the mere suspicion were good enough to put it under a cloud! Well, he does explain in detail why Antiq. 18 could have interpolations or could be interpolated wholesale; so why not provide the same detail for Antiq. 20? His merely saying that Josephus was unlikely to have ever used the term "Christ" does not deal in any disciplined way with this particular use of the term "Christ" in this particular passage! More evasion.
In any case, there are a fair number of Jesus figures throughout Josephus. Specifying which Jesus Josephus is writing of by merely citing the term that distinguishes him in the public's mind is not endorsing that term! What's he supposed to have done? Leave the reader hanging without specifying which Jesus at all? Furthermore, the use of the turn of phrase, "some scholars", intimates a fair number of real scholars, when there are only the tiniest handful of dabblers out there, many of them amateurs. That may not be mendacious of Wells, but it is misleading. [/POST]
-- That's what I wrote.
Someone at that other board responded to what I'd written on Wells by asking which "canon" I was referring to, suggesting that the believers' "canon" of the '90s in the 1st century c.e. might have included a thing or two on James that Josephus was merely parroting. A fair question, but it still falls afoul of Occam's Razor in a way similar to the manner in which a number of other mythicist arguments do, and I pointed that out in my response --
[POST] Too convenient. You're violating Occam's Razor to suppose that there was a lost Scriptural text that just happened to address an alternate fate for James. What we have is a continuous non-variant flow of text that is attested to with no variants in Josephus's own time, in a number of contemporary citations, describing an uprising against Ananus in which this James figures tangentially. Furthermore, the kinds of writings that appear to have slipped between the cracks in the canonical process are texts like Thomas, etc., in which doctrinal aspects are directly involved, suggesting that texts that were "lost" were texts that really violated the steadily hardening doctrines of the 3rd and 4th centuries. Nothing doctrinal is involved in the person James. And even those texts that are both in Scripture and outside it but presented as faith works (like letters from Clement or Gospels like Thomas) simply don't bother with James or Jesus's siblings in general. I understand what you're saying, but it remains a very forced argument. [/POST]
-- That was my response.
Finally, someone else thought that I was somehow applying Occam's Razor to this reading of Josephus 20 as a way of showing "proof" that the familiar reading of the passage is right and the mythicist reading is wrong. He took exception to this, since, as he stressed, Occam's Razor is strictly a rule of thumb for ascertaining the preferable, not the proved. Somehow, he had thought I intended to apply Occam's Razor in order to establish "proof" rather than relative likelihood. But I had plainly intended the latter only. Once again, you see, here was someone (effectively) conflating evidence and proof as one and the same.
I wrote back:
[POST] Very well, then: To establish an arbitrary premise that there is this hypothetical lost "faith text" that describes a different fate for James than we have in known Scripture is tantamount to making this "explanation less preferable to those other theories that contain" fewer "premises", thus going against the principle of Occam's Razor. And the degree to which this notion is less preferable to others is exacerbated by shaky speculation that (another hypothesis here!) this hypothetical lost "faith text" is the basis of a paragraph in Antiquities that (unlike the one in Antiq. 18) just happens to run seamlessly with everything before and after it! Such a convoluted theory is hardly preferable to the more straightforward reading of this passage as simply a unified account by Josephus of events that he knew of in the same way that he knew of most of the other events narrated in his chronicle: his personal spadework.
I certainly didn't intend -- and if the implication seems otherwise, that's unintentionally misleading on my part -- to present the application of Occam's Razor in this case as a way of proving anything absolute when it comes to "the correct" reading of this passage. I was speaking strictly to preferability only, not to proof. There is no "proved" way of reading anything in the ancient world.
After all, there is no lack of evidence for an historical Jesus. There is a lack of proof, such as we might see in something like the most carefully researched Times article on some current-day headline, say, that vexes those who doubt there is a historical Jesus. This distinction between evidence and proof is rarely addressed. By necessity, historians of the ancient world can deal only in evidence, never in proof. Extending that further, in cases like the present one of this ancient chronicle by Josephus, proof on any one reading of a given passage is likewise not out there either. In fact, in all studies of all documents related to the ancient world, proof is never an option, only likelihood and and preferability. That's the nature of this beast. Whether we are assessing one sentence in one contemporary chronicle of that distant period, or assessing an entire biography back then, the same thing applies: ancient documents yield only evidence pointing to relative likelihoods and preferabilities; they never yield proof.
Consequently, when I apply something like Occam's Razor, in this kind of ancient context, to show the ridiculousness of some far-fetched notion, I am always dealing strictly in relative likelihoods and preferabilities only, never in disproof and/or proof. The latter is not an option. You can take this as a given: evidence and preferabilities and likelihoods are the sum total of what any historian of the ancient world can tell you. If we allow only proof to determine history, then history would have to start strictly with the Renaissance and no earlier! [/POST]
That concludes the third post.
(continued)
