If authentic, the James Ossuary may be evidence of a historical Jesus.

Personally I don't really have an opinion on Jesus. As far as I am concered Jesus could have existed close to portrayed, be completely fictional or anything in-between. Probably something in-between.

Trouble is I don't really trust any expert opinion on the subject. People are too likely to have opinions for reasons other than the evidence. I would need to spend some serious time studying the evidence to obtian an optnion, and I have never got around to it.

There are plenty of atheist scholars of ancient history, including the aforementioned Ehrman. It doesn't seem like there's much reason to doubt their objectivity

Do you believe that the opinions you arrive at will be based on evidence? Why do you think you are more likely to be evidence-based than "people"?

I'm not even an amateur, let alone a professional, historian, but I've worked enough with primary sources that this sounds strange to me. Except for the recent past, history is almost always a matter of making conjectures based on imperfect evidence. We don't find out what was going on in ancient Rome by reading what the journalists of the New Rome Times were writing about the daily news. We have to work around the superstitions and non-scientific beliefs of original sources all the time. So yes, the authors of the gospels, Paul, and the other early letter writers all had some very strange beliefs and an agenda we have to navigate around in trying to figure out what, if anything, was real about Jesus and the early church. But that isn't really different from the sources we use in secular history as well.

Thus, I'm not willing to start with what seems to me the crucial move by the mythicist*: the claim that if evidence is "tainted" by being unreliable in adding or subtracting to the true story of Jesus with fabulous and supernatural events that it can be ignored.

I think this error is causally connected to the autodidact and amateurish nature of most mythicist defenders. Being trained in an academic discipline is not just a matter of learning a lot of information, but also of learning a set of epistemic norms and practices for dealing with the evidence for the guiding paradigms of that discipline. I think the problem here is that mythicists are importing a set of norms that are somewhat foreign to the study of ancient history and so end up with highly skeptical outcomes and outlandish hypotheses.

So yes, between the two hypotheses that the writers of the Bible made up Jesus out whole cloth and that they exaggerated, lied and were overly credulous in their telling of the life, significance, and teachings of Jesus, I think the second seems prima facie much more likely. After all, we have many examples of the latter, and much fewer of the former. For example, if read about the Emperors of Rome, or the saints of medieval times, you'll find, often within their lifetimes, clearly mythological stories embellishing the lives of real people (presumably!). However, it is hard for me to think off-hand of a case of a public figure completely made-up so soon after their putative death. I'm sure it must exist, so if anyone has examples, tell me.

I've never seen anything presented by mythicists that seriously tries to overcome this prima facie disadvantage. They sometimes develop interpretative matrices for understanding the New Testament that, if true, would go some way of overcoming it. But I have always found these attempts at interpretation strained and unconvincing. So while I am not opposed in principle to mythicism (for instance, even though The Odyssey is one of my favorite books, I am agnostic about whether Homer was a real person), I just don't see a good intellectual motivation for it with regards to Jesus.

*To his credit, Richard Carrier goes beyond this in paying closer attention to biblical passages about Jesus.

**I'll note that this continues to follow along with my earlier comparison of mythicism to Intelligent Design. What you find among the defenders of both is a mix of hacks driven almost exclusively by ideological motivations, and more serious thinkers who reject some crucial aspect of the norms of the mainstream scholars or scientists in their respective disciplines.

This is controversial, and I think the majority of scholars would probably disagree. The crucial case here is Josephus, writing in the 90s A.D., who referred to a "James, the brother of Jesus, who is called the Christ." There is debate over the authenticity of this passage, but Wikipedia says that the modern scholars generally think it is authentic.

Yeah, this argument doesn't work. It would be one thing if the experts disagreed, especially if the disagreement was along ideological grounds. That would be good grounds to be skeptical of expert opinion on a topic. But we don't see that disagreement here. In fact, we see something much closer to almost universal consensus, even between experts with different religious and non-religious ideologies. So you'll have to use a different reason to justify distrust of expert opinion on this topic.

If there is not enough evidence to draw a firm conclusion, we shouldn't draw a firm conclusion.

The historicity of Jesus discussion differs from much of the conversation on the rest of history only because there is a religious faction bringing religious certainty to the table, overstating the significance of the historical evidence. There are certainly mythicist crack pots in whom we see the pendulum swung far to the other extreme, however, they are a tiny reactionary minority; the pro-historicity extremists are much more numerous and mainstream.

From what little I've read on this topic, it seems there are mainstream, consensus believing historians who are nevertheless not "certain" about Jesus, and who accept that there are a variety of mythicist ideas that are interesting, reasonable, etc.; just that they don't add up to a convincing enough account to overturn the consensus. It isn't all/only crack pots.

I stand by my previous statements on the topic. The prima facia evidence that a religion about Jesus existed a couple generations after his putative death is not in my view very strong evidence that he is a real person. It does not seem like a stretch or a strain at all to believe that a fledgling religion could invent a living god founder that exited a generation or two back; I don't know if that happened, but the point is, I don't see any reason to dismiss this possibility in favor of some kind of doctrine which states that people written about in fictional ways tend to be real.

I don't know of any specific cases of mythical people being taken for real that would match the Jesus incident, if indeed that is the way it happened; but that kind of example isn't required. The specifics don't have to match. Ordinary healthy people are capable of being fooled, of fooling others, of fooling themselves, of making mistakes, of having delusions, of believing delusional people, of "first-handizing" second hand stories, of exhibiting an extremely wide range of biases, of exhibiting cognitive dissonance, etc., including believing in fictional characters, reporting first hand encounters where none really happened, and so on, that I am not compelled to think that a miracle God-man founder from a couple generations back most likely was based on a real guy. But I guess I'm repeating myself!

I erased the last part of your message, so without going back to requote it, I will just add that my understanding is that the state of historical consensus on the patriarchs of Judaism stood less than 50 years ago where the consensus on Jesus stands today. Not only was it a very strong consensus, but there was a tenancy by some to lump any critics in with the crackpots. And that consensus has totally flip-flopped. Such is the weakness of the combination of evidence and scholarship when trying to determine the facts of things that occurred thousands of years ago. I don't know if the Jesus-consensus is as volatile as that, but I don't know enough to rule it out.

This sort of position makes it virtually impossible to learn from history. And I disagree. There's pretty firm evidence to draw a firm conclusion about the existence of Jesus as a historical figure. Way more than most persons of antiquity.

Doesn't this make the movement purely reactionary and non-intellectual? And isn't this nothing more special pleading, just as I had claimed?

Is the historicity of Jesus less likely to be true if someone overstates the evidence? Does this mean that mythicists overstating their arguments make it more likely that Jesus was a historical person? This is a pretty nonsensical position to take.

So... you've been debating this since the pre-internet days, but you've read little on the topic?

So for what I would guess is essentially two decades, you've debated this belief out of a position of ignorance?

You may think it's not a stretch to believe something that's historically unprecedented, but that's not really a problem with history, professional historians, logic, common sense, or anything else like that. Mostly, it stems from not having considered deeply the extremely high level of improbabilities in order for it to come about in the manner that you suggest.

* What was the basis of that fledgling religion? What was is before Jesus was invented?
* What caused Jesus to be invented? How was it decided that a purely fictional creation would be what would rescue the religion from obscurity?
* What explains the consistency of information as it spread if the story was completely made up?
* What accounts for the sudden success of the fledgling religion within a couple generations? Certainly, it's not just "they came up with a really awesome story" (especially if you take the mythicist view that it wasn't anything more than a recycled version of other myths).

Essentially, you have no historical observations to explain anything. It's just a bold and bland assertion.

Yes, you're repeating yourself. And you're creating the conspiracy theorist argument in which you claim one argument trumps all other arguments. There are no examples to support your case, but you don't even need examples to support your case because you have an extremely generic observation about humans. Yet this general observation about humans has not resulted in any known instances of the behavior you're describing. None at all. But you don't need examples of general human behaviors resulting in a specific outcome that has not been observed in history.

A couple notes:

1) Without citing anything specific, and in conjunction with your claim of not being particularly well read in the other argument you're making, it would be useful for you to present the evidence for why you believe what you believe. Making unsupported assertions does not do anything of value.

2) By this standard, we should just throw out any beliefs about anything. Because who knows? Maybe in another 50 years, archaeological evidence may surface and change the consensus again.

3) You're making another common mythicist move, and you've now done it multiple times in this thread. You claim a level of ignorance on one hand and express a high level of confidence on the other. This is a tough nut to crack because your lack of knowledge allows you to construct ignorant arguments and believe them to be solid, and your confidence further blinds you to the ability to gain new information and evaluate your arguments successfully.

My basic instinct is to be sceptical of anything, and treat “I don't know” as the default state.

I have seem superficially convincing arguments from people presenting the Jesus might not have existed theory. So I am not convinced it is as one sided as claimed. A significant percentage of Christian scholars are going to be Christians, and are likely to have a biased world view on the subject of Jesus. E.g. Visions from god being treated as evidence in favour of the vision, rather than evidence that the person having the visions is an unreliable witness. I have also read that it is easier to get money when presenting an “Of course Jesus existed” front to funding bodies.

All in all is seems murky enough, that I don't feel confidant in any position. I don't see why this is a problem. 'I don't know because I have not studied the subject enough' is always a valid position.

Partly arrogance, partly I know my biases and prejudices, and have a decent grip on when I am lying to myself. Plus I feel under no commitment to reach a conclusion. It is possible that there is just not enough evidence to conclude how much of the Jesus legend is founded in actual history. We already know that as a significant part of the Jesus legend is actually not scientifically possible hence is not founded in history. There are clearly people with an active imagination involved in developing the Jesus legend.

At least you're partly able to admit it.

And you don't think "people" can do this? And the "people" being referenced are people trained in the discipline under consideration?

Okay. But I speculate that a thorough examination of your beliefs would show that this is a belief that is mostly "for show" because of the number of beliefs you've committed to in the absence of the same type of scrutiny you're claiming you would need to apply to come to a conclusion on the Jesus question.

In other words, I believe you're lying to yourself here.

Superficially convincing arguments on one side and a thorough historical analysis on the other. This is obviously a close debate. (And you weren't skeptical of the superficially convincing arguments, yet you're skeptical of the thorough historical analysis?)

Why are you limiting yourself to "Christian scholars"? Do you believe that there are no historians of antiquity that aren't Christians? Are you willing to admit at least that there are Jewish scholars of that era? It's not like anything important happened around that time historically to the Jews or anything like that. And it's not as if there hasn't been historical animosity between Christians and Jews (this would be a motive over history for Jewish historians to find reasons to not believe that the historical Jesus existed).

And this doesn't even take into consideration that there are atheist historians who have studied that time period and that region as well. It doesn't seem to account for the absolutely failed Jesus Seminar that really challenged the historical Jesus and failed in all sorts of ways.

I would be interested in seeing the source of this claim. And I wonder how one's funding for historical research might be compromised if you said that Abraham Lincoln didn't exist.

(By the way, were you skeptical of this claim when you read it? Did you pursue further information to attempt to find out how common the practice was or if there was any other supporting documentation that this happened? Or did you just accept it at face value when you read it?)

"I don't know" is fine when you really don't know anything about a subject, but I think that the consensus view of experts, if it exists, should be your default state when dealing with history. Since the consensus view of historians is that Jesus did exist, in my opinion you should accept that as the default state viewpoint instead of "I don't know." In fact, when first learning a subject, what you might be most interested in learned is what the consensus view actually is rather than the evidence for that view.

Of course, if you don't think that there is expert consensus, then you can go back to "I don't know." However, being able to present a superficially convincing argument doesn't make someone an expert. I can present a superficially convincing argument on this topic, and I am no expert. Indeed, the ability to distinguish between experts and non-experts on a subject is an important skill. Here are a few of the things you should be looking at: a person's education credentials, publication history (are they publishing in reputable journals and academic presses), whether they are on university faculty, and if so, at how reputable a school, how other experts in the field view them or the ideas they are putting forward, and so on. I am aware of less than a half-dozen people who could plausibly be considered experts (and even here, somewhat fringe experts, like Carrier) who are sympathetic to mythicism.

You'll also have to do better in your speculations about Christian bias. As I noted before, since non-Christian scholars also agree that Jesus was a real person, Christian bias doesn't seem like a likely cause for this belief among Christian scholars. Instead, you'll have to find some more universal bias among historians and biblical scholars.

Your description of how Christian historians treat evidence is also mostly wrong. They generally accept the same canons of history as everyone else, which means that they distinguish between what they will accept as scholars through historical evidence and what they believe on the basis of faith. I know of no reputable Christian historian that would take a vision putatively from God as historical evidence that the vision is true.

No it isn't.

But how much of the thorough historical analysis is by historians with an open mind, and no preconceptions?

I am sceptical of both, which is why I am not adopting a Rig like position.

However I initially just assumed Jesus must have existed because everyone else did, but without giving it any real thought. Then I saw some presentations of the Jesus myth argument, and came to the conclusion that if what they were saying is actually true, its fairly convincing. However other people are saying they are just factually wrong, and then there is the smoke without fire argument, so I am quite confused by it all and not currently in a mood to believe anyone. Fortunate I have no need to believe anything on the topic at the moment.

Entirely the opposite. I am mistrustful of results from theistic scholars. To the extent that for this particular subject I am inclined to limit myself to only atheist scholars or just possibly agnostic scholars. I can imagine it being difficult for some Christians to objectively criticise the Jesus myth theory.

It just seemed to make perfect sense for the reason you give. I strongly suspect there are people in influential positions who believe the existent of Jesus is at least as certain as the existence of Abraham Lincoln so your comparison is not so far off. Still I have no experience in getting research grants in the area of biblical studies so I am willing to be corrected by someone who has.

What does this even mean? Do you know what a historical analysis looks like? They use specific data from the culture under study plus general observations about human cultures gathered across multiple cultures and at different points in history to reach conclusions. What types of closed-minded analyses are you talking about?

Well, there's a useless standard.

So, it's an emotional decision?

You may have "no need" but that doesn't make your position justified in the slightest. There's "no need" for me to believe that the positions of electrons can be represented by probability waves. I don't use that in my life in any meaningful way and there is no change in my life if I don't believe it. But failure to adopt that belief is nothing more than intentional ignorance.

Then ignore the theistic scholars. You will still find a strong academic consensus. Also, this is a genetic fallacy and a form of intellectual bias. You would be best to rethink your thinking.

Edit: It's also an un-even-handed approach. Don't atheists have a reason to want to disprove the existence of Jesus? So ignoring arguments and data based on the person presenting the information is just a useless way to approach the discussion.

What you can imagine is irrelevant because it's not true.

Why don't you start with actual data. Where did you hear of this?

Once you find that, then you can ask questions like "Why was this even an issue?"

As far as pursuing research grants, it's true that academic quality is not the only data point people use for giving these grants. There are other parts to it. I'm not saying that there might not be some sort of bias in the way that particular grant was funded.

But just imagine for a moment that you're trying to fund a researcher, and the researcher is claiming that he's going to use the money to prove that Abraham Lincoln doesn't exist. Would you put your money with that person? It doesn't matter if you're a religious or secular person, that's wasted money. So it is with Jesus Myth.

I suggest you go read the tale of the Jesus Seminar. They set out to disprove the existence of the historical Jesus and failed miserably. That people don't want to throw good money after bad should not be a reason to distrust the results.

This is an eminently reasonable position; however, if we are nitpicking, I don't think historians are in a position to say that Jesus "did exist" - they are in a position to say that Jesus "probably existed" (or "probably did not exist", or perhaps "may or may not have existed, we don't have enough evidence to conclude either way with much conviction").

Again, this kind of distinction usually is not important. It only becomes relevant when "Jesus existed - history proves it" is a premise in an argument, for example.

If nothing else, something that appears to differentiate Richard Carrier from garden variety cranks is that I've seen him articulate (can't find the link, but it is out there somewhere!) that he doesn't really expect people to take him at his word; he expects people to continue to assume the consensus is correct, which is exactly what he did until his research led him to another conclusion*. What he does expect/hope is other Jesus/origin of Christianity experts to respond to his work, and then shift the consensus if they find that they cannot refute him. In the same way that the historicity of the Jewish patriarchs was the consensus view until recent archaeological finds not only dislodged those views but (my initial reading on the topic suggests) revealed that these views were built on a foundation of sand to begin with; a la, "they speak about him 50 years later, therefore we take it for granted he was real."

*There are works of his from before this time in which he assumes that Jesus did exist, as it is/was the consensus, so that is a good sign.

And when he receives criticisms, he will summarily dismiss all of them with things like "possibly insane".

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/5730

Again, cite something. Anything! Don't go off into the world of unsubstantiated claims and characterizations.

And again, we see you boasting both in your ignorance (your "initial reading" means that you really haven't looked into it in detail) and your confidence ("In the same way that this other thing that I know virtually nothing about happened...").

Not really. I think things read more like he found himself a niche and is trying to play it out for all it's worth. He's probably more famous and making more money doing this than he would have as a pure academic.

So I finally took the time to read through this post, and it's clearly completely arbitrary.

So we see that the initial assumption places mythicism at a 2:1 advantage over historicism? He couldn't even bring himself to start with a neutral 50-50? What is that prior probability based on?

"Brother of our Lord": Where does he come up with there being a 25% chance that this reference would be made if it's a myth and a 40% chance of this reference being made if it's historical?

And then assigning 100% to other things seems ridiculous to me (it's basically just asserting the conclusion over and over again).

So this type of mathematical analysis is pretty worthless.

he explains the brother of the lord thing in a fairly detailed earlier post. I linked the index if you're looking for it.

Note I'm not saying he's right, but he attempts an explanation based around the fact that αδελφος is used in a symbolic way very often in the N.T.

Thanks. I might have to read it more closely later, but I jumped to what looked like the summary:

How did this 100% turn into 40%?

Upon a deeper reading, I see no reason why 100% turned into 40%. If I missed it and someone can explain it, I'll be interested in seeing the reasoning.

I still find the whole venture to be totally arbitrary.