Stephen,
In the context of this topic, I am using “followers of Paul” as shorthand for “people who adopted the belief that Jesus was divine as a result of direct or indirect contact with Paul, in contrast with people who may have adopted this belief as a result of direct or indirect contact with the disciples”. The original question on this topic was whether the disciples shared Paul’s belief.
In 2 Cor 12:1-5 Paul does say that he had been caught up into Paradise when he heard Jesus speak to him. The accounts of appearances in the Gospels all occur on earth so are fundamentally different.
I agree that since we have no direct account of their experience from the disciples, any conclusion to this discussion will be speculative.
My conclusion of what is most probable, from the available evidence, is that the belief that Jesus was divine started with Paul and the disciples did not share this belief when they met Paul on his return from Damascus although they (particularly Peter) may have changed their minds later.
Robert said
How do you quantify which scenarios are more or less probable than other plausible scenarios? I’ve never been very good at this.
Richard C. Carrier in, “Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus” explains how to use probability and the Bayesian theorem in History.
This article: ** you do not have permission to see this link ** could be a good starting point.
Even if Bart despises him, I would recommend it.
And what my native language would be?
Anyway. Only bad comedians explain their jokes.
When you evaluate if something happened before, it’s where you get your prior probability. In the Bayesian theorem, roughly, you have two pieces of data, the current likelihood and the prior probability of the event happening. Even if you don’t know something about A, if it happened or not, either it’s “A” or “NOT A”. So the prior probability in any case (complete ignorance) is 50/50. We could also go into propositions either false, true, or undecidable, but in any case, it would be 1/3 for each.
Since historians look “only” back into the past finding clues and priors, they would not be able to apply any reasonable estimate for the probability of an event happening.
Hence the joke.
I’m not sure what Richard is trying to achieve. From his personal life, he looks more like a troubled philosopher than a historian. And I’m a bit surprised that he gets along with Mark S. Goodacre. Maybe Bart should give him another try.
Didn’t say Jesus forgive your enemies? Well, ehm…
Carrier’s response to Prof Ehrman’s book Did Jesus Exist? was semi-hysterical. I think it was at least partially because Carrier has spent considerable time and effort trying to distance his own conception of Mythicism from other, less scholarly approaches. Prof Ehrman did not make such a distinction sufficiently clear for Carrier. When Ehrman debated Robert Price many mythicists thought Carrier would have done a better job but Carrier had already so poisoned the well that why expect Ehrman to give Carrier a platform?
Carrier has frequently attacked scholars who criticized his conclusions as being mentally ill or deranged. Not a methodology that tends to endear you to other members of the community.
I originally found mythicism quite provocative and investigated it deeply. But the further I got into it the clearer its liabilities became. At some point I lost interest because it’s almost completely based on strained and ad hoc reinterpretations of familiar texts. Mythicists also demonstrate a staggering lack of knowledge about fields outside NT studies. This ignorance doesn’t prevent them from attempting to speak authoritatively about these fields.
Uncharitable perhaps but I have reached the conclusion that mythicists begin with the idea that Jesus did not exist and marshal the sources to support a conclusion they already reached.
Robert said
How do you quantify which scenarios are more or less probable than other plausible scenarios? I’ve never been very good at this.
The most probable scenario is the one with the most probable supporting evidence.
Assessment of probability of evidence is subjective and depends on individual estimation. For example, Richard Carrier estimates that Jesus is twice as likely to be mythical than historic because his name meant “Yahweh Saves”, whereas I would estimate that, since Jesus was such a common name at that time, the probability that he was mythical just because of his name is only very slightly increased, say 1% rather than 200%.
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