13 posts were split to a new topic: Side Comments on “Liar, Lunatic, or :ord”
Yes, and the difficulties are pretty well insurmountable. The texts are obviously corrupted with a great deal of miraculous material which tells us that their compilers were no judges of facts. This miraculous material, if it is to be defended, can never be defended with historical evidence; the only thing that could possibly rescue it from the dustbin would be evidence showing the possibility of the various impossibilities contained within it, and no historical text can ever be competent in that domain. Without that, we have no reason to trust the authors even on the mundane details, much less on niggling little turns of a phrase and how they might, given an ark-load of philosophical and theological precepts, be construed.
I am finding this thread a bit surprising in that I thought that the ordinary stance of the infidel was pretty well understood: that credibility of the sources is the issue and that, with not a smidgeon of trustworthy tradition, one can only conclude that the proposition is not shown to be true. But apparently it is thought that the infidel instead parses the texts in accord with Christian theology, finds small bits that seem arguably problematic, and then says something like, “sure, I accept that Jesus was raised from the dead. That much is obvious. But doesn’t that happen all the time anyway? I’ve played Ms. Pac-Man and it happens at least twice every time I stick a quarter in the machine. I broadly accept the truth of the NT and don’t believe in it.” Maybe, somewhere, someone like this exists. But I’ve never met one. Most of us are just unconvinced; we find the evidence absurdly short of the mark and cannot understand why we would be expected to reach any other conclusion.
Is there some historical core behind the NT? My suspicion is that there is. But I don’t think any part of the tradition is safe. And there’s very little difference for a modern evaluator of this evidence, in practical terms, between Jesus not having lived at all and Jesus having lived, but there being nothing that can be said about him with any reasonable degree of confidence.
I think that people easily forget that it is actually possible to have an inquisitive stance. Indeed, I sort of think we deploy the word “skeptic” too easily because to some people that suggests an opening stance which is hostile. Many of us are earnest seekers of the truth about this, and about other things, too. We formulate our mental habits on the basis of what seem to be the best practices for evaluating things. We come to it neither wanting there to be gods nor wanting there to be no gods, but wanting, instead, to know whether there are gods, and if so, which if any of those known to human tradition may turn out to be among those gods who actually exist. The NT stories, as folklore, can never be good evidence for their own claims; for that one has got to go and do the work of showing the existence of the entities referenced there through independent evidence extraneous to the text.
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Not really anything to do with your remark. It just reminded me of this:
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These appear to be two bald assertions, not a philosophical argument.
My starting position would be to reject the first assertion out of hand, as both unsubstantiated, and likely unsubstantiatable.
The second assertion seems potentially reasonable, given a finite universe, but would need to be expressed more rigorously for me to accept it unconditionally.
The juxtaposition of the two gives some suggestion of an attempt to make some variant of the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
I am however at a loss as to where you think you are going here, and skeptical as to whether it is a rabbit-hole I wish to go down. This line of reasoning seems to be off-topic to this thread’s stated topic:
Can the “Liar, Lunatic or Lord” argument be made to work?
Therefore, if you wish to discuss it, it would be more appropriate to make a new thread for it (I do not however guarantee that I will be interested in discussing it with you there).
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I still thought this thread might be an appropriate place to discuss what arguments do work.
Peter’s “therefore know for certain” from Acts 2:36, as I referred to in my initial comment is superior to the argument being considered here.
Well, as this thread seems to have gone ubiquitously off-topic, I might as well reply to this here.
Acts 2:36 is simply a bald assertion. Any credibility it has relies solely on what credibility the listener gives to the Bible. Those who accept the veracity of the Bible are already believing Christians. Those who doubt their faith in all probability doubt the veracity of the Bible. Those who are skeptics have no good reason to accept the veracity of the Bible.
Therefore it would seem obvious that the bald assertion of Acts 2:36 has zero apologetic value.
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A thinking person has to wonder what this has to do with whether Jesus was God.
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7 posts were merged into an existing topic: Side Comments on “Liar, Lunatic, or :ord”
Hi @Tim, @Faizal_Ali, @Puck_Mendelssohn, @Paul_King, @stlyankeefan, @colewd and others,
I hope we’re all agreed that the New Testament evidence fails to substantiate the assertion that Jesus claimed to be God. For that reason, the “Liar, Lord or Lunatic” argument collapses.
However, some contributors to this thread have taken their skepticism one step further, querying whether Jesus made any extraordinary claims about himself or any extraordinary demands on his followers. They argue that the lapse of time between the historical Jesus and the Gospel reports of his life, coupled with the fact that the Gospels were written in Greek while Jesus spoke in Aramaic, are enough to warrant skepticism about any saying ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels. I think that’s taking skepticism too far, and I would also add that very few New Testament scholars would endorse that degree of skepticism.
In part 5 of my post over at The Skeptical Zone, I made a point of quoting from the writings of the atheist skeptic, the late Professor Hector Avalos, author of The Bad Jesus: The Ethics of New Testament Ethics (Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd., 2015). I quoted passages in the Gospels cited by Professor Avalos, in which he denounced “the hegemonic, despotic, egomaniacal and unethical view of submission that Jesus was demanding” (2015, p. 89). Avalos took the trouble to engage with the text. The skeptics on this thread seem to be deliberately minimizing its significance.
Or again: Paul is clear that in the early Christian community, only twenty years after Jesus’ death, Jesus was called “Lord.” It’s all very well to point out that Paul hadn’t had any personal contact with Jesus, but he was not writing in a vacuum. Letters circulated, even back in those days. The passage Paul quotes in Philippians 2 is acknowledged by scholars to be pre-Pauline. Any reasonable person, examining the evidence, would conclude that whoever Jesus was, he made some pretty tall claims about himself and demanded extreme loyalty of his followers. The vast majority of scholars would agree.
Now of course, it’s entirely fair to ask whether Jesus was a con-man or a deluded individual. We can have a discussion about that. But to suppose that Jesus never claimed to be any more than a teacher, and that his followers foisted upon him all the radical demands for unswerving loyalty, as well as the extravagant claims to lordship that we find in Paul and the Gospels, and to liken Jesus to John Frum (a mythical cult figure who never even existed) is to go far beyond the findings of critical scholarship, and enter into the realm of conspiracy theory. I would challenge the radical skeptics by asking them: why do you feel you need to take your skepticism that far, and why don’t serious scholars agree with you?
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You know, I suppose that’s one of the very few merits of the “Lunchbox, Lagomorph or Linguine” argument. It is, at least, specific to the particular god in question.
I always find that aspect of a lot of the classic arguments, like those aimed at establishing a “first cause,” really puzzling. You get through the argument and, if you accept its premises and structure, you wind up at “so, there was a first, uncaused cause of some sort or other.” At that point it seems we are all supposed to say, “well, there’s only ONE possibility for what that could be: the most popular god of my particular culture.” For myself, even if I set aside the fact that I think arguments that mostly operate on abstractions rather than on things are useless, I find that it just stops short of that point, and I am left with, “okay, maybe there was some uncaused cause. I guess we should think about whether we could find out what that was.” Though, to be honest, more often my thought at that point is “this sure is a waste of time!”
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Once you put the possibility that Jesus was a god on the table as a subject for academic consideration, all other rules that usually govern serious scholarship go out the window. Suggesting that Jesus was seriously misquoted and misconstrued after his death is pretty mild in comparison. I really can’t see how that is anywhere near as radical as claiming he was a god who rose from the dead.
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I think it is quite clear that early Christians believed that Jesus was some sort of supernatural being. Unfortunately I don’t think we can conclude from this that Jesus taught any such thing. In my view the Christian response to Jesus’ death could easily result in some radical changes in how Jesus was viewed.
Likewise it is at least possible that Peter was acting like a cult leader and the claims attributed to Jesus were in fact made to justify Peter’s actions. (I would also note that criticising “New Testament Ethics” relies on the content of the New Testament - not its historical accuracy. It is enough that a saying is attributed to Jesus - whether Jesus actually said it would not be relevant in that context).
The Gospels are not contemporary records of Jesus’ ministry. They were undoubtedly influenced by changes in Christian belief over the following decades, and we must be aware of that.
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But there’s an argument being used there, irrespective of what skepticism you can attach to the text, it’s the argument I am looking at.
I’m simply interested in what kind of science fiction will be written when atheism is as impossible as an infinite number of planets in space or events in time.
Sure, the cause of the universe may be unaware of its action, which is a real philosophical possibility, but that’s not atheism, probably more like solipsism if push comes to shove.
I don’t think you understand. Nobody is propounding any thesis about Jesus here at all. No such “supposing” is going on. What we have is a very poor set of documents: basically sales literature constructed from a stream of folklore – like time-share brochures composed of fairy tales. Nobody can reach into that and say with any reasonable confidence that any part of it is true, or how precisely the tales evolved. I have no idea what Jesus may or may not have claimed. With folkloric sources, we are left empty of evidence on all manner of points. All we can say is that at some point people began to tell this constellation of tales. We can see that the constellation of tales is unreliable in various ways, including its propounding various silly paranormal claims. It being the nature of those claims that they cannot in any way be upheld by mere folklore, their credibility must find its defense elsewhere – but it doesn’t. We are left with nothing upon which any reasonable person could rely.
I don’t think we know that John Frum never existed. It is likely that some things said about him are false, and the name is likely a corruption. But he is, in the form he is currently understood, exactly like Jesus: a character described only in folkloric sources (or, later, in sources derivative of those folkloric sources), whose tale taken as a whole is highly unlikely to be true. The credibility of the tellers of those tales is, in both cases, deeply suspect. I cannot see how this fits into any sort of “conspiracy theory,” however badly you define that term. Nobody is claiming the existence of some great cabal. False folkloric traditions can arise without dishonesty, conspiracy, or anything of that nature.
What would help here? Surely calling this a “conspiracy theory” doesn’t. What would help would be decent corroboration of the core claims of Christianity from non-folkloric sources. But that, of course, doesn’t exist.
Well, I’m certainly no “radical skeptic.” But I take you to mean me and so I will answer you. If I allow that folkloric sources are to be treated as history and that claims of the paranormal in no way dilute the credibility of their tellers, the result is that I believe in Jesus. So far, so good, from your point of view. The difficulty is that I then also believe all of the other religions ever created.
And there again: I do not think you understand what it is to have a genuine interest in learning the truth. You think that an inquisitive stance, where one carefully evaluates the character and quality of evidence, is “radical skepticism.” It is not. You need to ask: if a person came to this without a prior commitment to Christian faith, wanting to know if any of the world’s religions were true and also wanting to know whether there are any gods, whether corresponding to those described by those religions or not, what would he do? He would look for that religion which was supported by a comprehensive body of evidence running along multiple independent lines, converging upon a common conclusion. Historical inquiry would be of almost no value in this – merely knowing what tales have been told and what others have believed just opens a vast book of tale-telling and there is little in that vast book to distinguish wheat from chaff.
I can’t believe your religion without believing them all. One must have a method to scrutinize propositions and decide which ones hold up under scrutiny. I must narrow the list of candidates down. There is simply no way to do this other than by evidence. And to bear upon the paranormal claims of religions, one cannot use historical or folkloric accounts; they are not competent evidence on these points. If that is “radical skepticism” then I suppose I am a radical: the kind of radical who thinks that extraordinary propositions ought to be supported by some type of evidence of a character that could justify their acceptance.
I suspect that people of a serious scholarly bent who do not incline toward treating folklore as though it were history, and who do not think that historical claims of paranormal events are useful, do not generally waste their time counting non-angels on the heads of pins. If someone wants to found a school of Not-Theology somewhere, I suppose he can do it, but I know of none. Whether the people who do count those angels are “serious scholars” is another question for another day, but so long as they do treat folklore and paranormal stories as history, speaking for myself, I cannot regard them as such.
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Let us examine this “radical skepticism” of @vjtorley’s accusation.
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Let us assume, for sake of argument, the existence of a set of oral teachings of Jesus, in Aramaic.
Our earliest source, Paul, makes no mention of such teachings, and appears to base his ministry on personal revelation, not human-transmitted teachings (see here). But we cannot know with certainty that they didn’t exist – so let us assume that they did. -
We know, with reasonable certainty, that Paul, based upon his personal revelation, taught that Jesus is “Lord”, and that these teachings were widely disseminated.
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We know from scientific research that human memory is malleable.
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We can also surmise that before these teachings were written down in the gospels (decades later) they would have required multiple retellings, likely including off-the-cuff translations into Greek (as Paul’s ministry was mostly Greek-speaking), and decisions as to which variants resulting from this process to accept or reject.
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It seems credible that the recall, translations and decisions would likely be influenced (consciously or subconsciously) by knowledge of Paul’s teachings.
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It is therefore not at all unlikely that ambiguous wording where Jesus appears that he might be claiming to be “Lord” (or, I seem to remember, in most cases, might be acceding to a disciple’s claim that he is “Lord”) could have crept into the set of oral teachings, when this was not contained in the original.
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Beyond this, we also have evidence that the gospel-writers were not above making stuff up to push their religious agenda (e.g. Luke’s ludicrous claim that the Romans would make Joseph go to Bethlehem for a census), further lowering their credibility.
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Finally, we have the early existence of groups such as the Ebionites, that rejected this view. As we have no information on the formation of these groups, but only of Orthodox Christianity’s post-formation criticisms of them, it would seem to be impossible to tell exactly how early they were. However, their bare existence speaks of a degree of disagreement within the early church as to Jesus’ status. This does not disprove that Jesus claimed to be “Lord”, but further clouds certainty that he did so.
(Parenthetically, given that many cult leaders, and many other leaders with cult-like influence over their followers, even those that don’t claim to be God, have made “extraordinary demands on his[their] followers”, I don’t see Jesus’ demands as being particularly probative.)
This means that, although we cannot prove that Jesus didn’t claim to be “Lord”, we have a fairly low certainty that he did, given the flaws in the basis for the claim.
Is this “radical skepticism”, or merely normal every-day skepticism based upon well-understood sources of human fallibility?
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I think you’ll need to substantiate this. Certainly some in the early Christian community saw Jesus as a ‘supernatural being,’ but the majority of the New Testament writings don’t make that claim. The gospel of John comes the closest to making that claim, but IMO even that text, if we read it in its Jewish context, only claims that Jesus is the human Messiah who was resurrected and exalted to God’s right hand. (Although admittedly I’m in disagreement with most NT scholarship on that point.)
The Ebionites of course did not deny that Jesus is the Lord (as in the Lord Messiah, Psalm 110:1). What they denied was that Jesus is “Lord” (Yahweh), but they were actually in agreement with mainstream Christianity on this point during the first and second centuries. (Of course later Christians latched onto this point as ‘heretical,’ but at the time they existed, it wasn’t a unique belief of theirs.) Their main defining feature as a ‘heresy’ was their denial of the virgin birth, and belief that Jesus wasn’t born as God’s son, but adopted at his baptism because he perfectly kept the Law.
Hi VJ
I only agree with this based on the limited skeptics argument. This argument by Bart Ehrman and others must discount the Gospel of John to be coherent. I see arguments for discounting this documented evidence but do not think the evidence holds up when you consider how John’s testimony is supported by the Old Testament writings.
Isaiah 9 6
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Deuteronomy 18 18
I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites, and I will put my words in his mouth. He will tell them everything I command him.
I myself will call to account anyone who does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name.
John 10:30
I and the Father are one.”
A supernatural being includes lesser beings than God. Even Mark hints at identifying Jesus with the “one like a son of man” in Daniel (in my view, the Angel, Michael). The appearance stories in Luke seem pretty supernatural to me.
But what Vince Torley was referring to is Philippians 2:5-11 I’ll quote the most significant portion (from the NRSV)
5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
6 who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
It would be more correct to characterise what you are doing here as “supported by [Christian reinterpretations of] the Old Testament writings.”
Christians may see Isaiah 9:6 as a prophesy of Jesus, but then it is a Christian translation of the Bible you are quoting at us. Jews see it as talking of Hezekiah, and point out that a more accurate translation would be “was born” not “is born” – making it something that has already happened not a prophesy of the future.
Skeptics therefore are perfectly reasonable in not seeing this as “evidence” of anything.
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