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There were quite a few troublemaking preachers who fell afoul of the law in Judaea at the time, many of whom were called Jesus - it was a very common name at the time.
However, one of the big problems with assuming one of these fellows (or another we have no documentation of) was the human seed for Christianity is the early Christian tradition of docetism - that Christ had no corporeal existence at all, and was just an idea. Paul of Tarsus certainly seems to think along these lines, despite the later caution against said notion in John.
This also helps explain the curious lack of non-Biblical evidence for such a person, in histories where one would expect it.
It is often noted by apologists that scholars think there's enough evidence to say there was a human seed for Christianity. However, "scholar" in this context is a weasel word - most are Christians and theologians, who would have tremendous trouble (personal and professional) coming to the opposite conclusion at all. The epistemological standards accepted in Biblical history in particular are generally bloody awful and an embarrassment to other ancient historians.
For a pile of stuff on this issue I recommend the RationalWiki article, which I have worked extensively on. (One of the other main contributors just so happens to be an atheist who was a student of Biblical history.)
(I find this stuff fascinating, if only for the psychopathology. And, as such strident atheists as Mencken, Dawkins and Hitchens have noted, you can't be highly literate in English without knowing the KJV, much as you need to know Shakespeare and Greek mythology. The trouble is that ... well, it's like you wanted to study the Odyssey or the Iliad but the only people to learn from were people who (a) actually believed in all the gods named therein (b) really wanted you to as well.)
We have pretty good records of letters from Paul from the second half of the first century (as well as a bunch of frauds, but AFAIK there are several that stand up under analysis as being written by the same person at a very early date), who (in several of those letters) was adamant that his sect believed in an individual Christ in the flesh. So if the legend of the historical Jesus sprang from whole cloth, it did so pretty quickly- not to mention the synoptic gospels, which the most skeptical of scholars still date to around 100 AD.
More generally, I'd caution fellow atheists against getting drawn into the existence-of-Jesus debate in meatspace: unless you've done a lot of relevant study (and why on earth would you?) you won't be able to point to basic evidence that your interlocutor has heard of, only to the statements of experts that they won't trust. Better to say "Well, I'm not sure there's enough evidence even to conclude that there was a historical Jesus- but even granting that there was, and that there came to be a group of followers convinced of his divinity, that's still nowhere near the kind of evidence to make Christianity a viable hypothesis, compared to the hypothesis that it was just a rabidly successful example of what happens within cults." That's a much better place to draw up battle lines, IMO.
The overarching problem you outline in your second paragraph - the more general problem, faced in many fields, of having to compress a degree into a few sentences to properly answer an objection - is sadly well known. This is why the RationalWiki article (which is still patchy as heck) is a sea of nuance and caveats - it attempts to get it right in less than a book for an audience who are frequently just realising that there's actually historical thought on this matter (and look how that line of inquiry worked out for Lukeprog!). I'm very much looking forward to Richard Carrier's book on the historicity of Jesus later this year. (And not just so I can crib furiously from it.)