The Resurrection, Scripture, History, and Batman

[Faizal_Ali]

@david.heddle

Whose plausibility filter? Yours? Mine? Is there an objective plausibility filter? What about historians who are believers who find the biblical accounts plausible? Do they count? Or by definition, as believers, is their plausibility filter fatally flawed? What about atheist Jesus mythicists vs. atheist Jesus historicists? Which have reliable and unbiased plausibility filters? Is Richard Carrier or Bart Ehrman the gold standard?

You might find it helpful if you applied that question to your own field. Are you able to determine which ideas are representative of the consensus views of modern physicists, and which views are on the fringes or just outright wrong? Or do you just have to helplessly treat every opinion as worth taking seriously?

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Patrick When you post an 1:40 long video with no text description or suggestion of a topic, I have to suspect you have not even watched the video yourself. The result is off-topic comments and free-for-all argument, which is not constructive.

I am going to close comments. If anyone cares to start a new thread on the history of scripture, or Batman, let me know and I can move existing comments over.

/fnord

[Dan_Eastwood]

I am reopening the discussion under a new title due to a request (easier than moving everything). Please continue politely.
@moderators

[Faizal_Ali]

@colewd

I think we agree he is a fictional character. This is different than the Jewish Messianic King (Yeshua/Jesus) from the line of King David.

I disagree. There is no good reason to think there is any difference.

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Faizal_Ali

There is no good reason to think there is any difference.

There are parallels, but the analogy will have limits. This concludes my scriptural speculations for the day.

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

@david.heddle

What about historians who are believers who find the biblical accounts plausible? Do they count?

But nobody finds them plausible in general terms – the very point of all the stress laid on the resurrection is its IMplausibility. If you’re going to say “I believe in this paranormal schema because it’s clear that these events, otherwise implausible, happened despite their implausibility,” you cannot also say “I find these events completely plausible because they fit into a paranormal scenario in which I believe.” That’s completely circular.

So, NOBODY thinks these events are the sort of thing that just ordinarily happen. If we have a witness who says the Duke of Marlborough was raised from the dead, we disbelieve him without regard for his credibility. If he says the Duke of Marlborough ate eggs for breakfast, we may believe or disbelieve his account, but we have no ground, on plausibility alone, to reject it.

If you generally reject resurrection accounts – and there are many of these, outside of Christian belief – because they are the sort of thing that doesn’t really happen, you cannot reasonably make a special exception here.

@david.heddle

Even though you keep bringing up a modern versus an ancient example, I will still point out that the only difference is a matter of degree. Any argument that presents consistency as adding to plausibility is subject to the batman analogy. It’s only a matter of degree.

But when events are not inherently implausible – when it is NOT alleged that the Duke successfully ordered the sun to hold its place in the sky to give himself an extra hour of daylight battle, but it is instead alleged that he ate eggs for breakfast, plausibility is no longer the issue. Then we are down to just weighing the evidence. If ten known eyewitnesses whose credibility is otherwise well-attested all insist that they personally watched the Duke eat the eggs, we are liable to find the account convincing; if the evidence is weaker, we find it less convincing; but plausibility doesn’t come into it because we understand from the outset that there is nothing inherently absurd, or apparently impossible, about the Duke having eggs for breakfast.

And, by the way, “modern” versus “ancient” has nothing to do with it. Events are not more plausible if ancient. And the fact that we often, for practical reasons, have got to make judgments about ancient events upon thinner evidentiary grounds than we would like, does not excuse our going completely off the rails and accepting the most extraordinary and implausible tales simply because the historical record is poor.