hairyfigment comments on Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points - Less Wrong

49 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 October 2007 01:59AM

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Comment author: hairyfigment 08 April 2015 01:37:33AM 0 points [-]

You have yet to tell us what you believe, apart from the tribal/political reassurance about evolution. What do you mean by "divine" (this is important for prior probability), and what evidence do you believe you have for this variety of Jesus?

I assume you know that scholars largely consider the Gospels unreliable. The earliest one dates from during or after the war that destroyed the 'Second Temple', and we know of no Christian leader in Jerusalem who survived it. Shortly before this Nero supposedly persecuted the Christians in Rome. We know nothing about the history of Christianity at the time when the Gospel of Mark likely appeared, which weakly supports the claim that all the leaders were dead. We can't name anyone who definitely had the power to insist on points of doctrine or prevent innovation.

On the assumption most favorable to the reliability of the early Gospels - that someone in the know wrote them to preserve original Christianity in this difficult time - we should still conclude that they have a lot to do with theological/political disputes of the time which we know nothing about. We should expect to misinterpret something in the text through not knowing this context.