The Jesus Process

Following on from my previous post, and spawned by the recent furore over Bart Ehrman's attack on mythicism in Did Jesus Exist?, R Joseph Hoffmann has now posted three essays in what he calls 'The Jesus Process'. As a complete ignoramus on this subject (apart from reading Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus), I think this could provide some excellent resources. I've only skimmed them, but these are my initial observations.

The first essay, by Maurice Casey, is an attack on the internet mythicist phenomenon. Quoting Earl Doherty, he says:

The primary purpose of both site and book [Jesus: Neither God Nor Man] was to reach the open-minded ‘lay’ audience…[2]

This is as inaccurate as possible. The internet audience is ‘lay’, but it is not open-minded. It has both ‘Christian apologists’, whom mythicists love to hate, and atheists who are determinedly anti-Christian. Both groups consist largely of people with closed minds who are impervious to evidence and argument, a quite different world from the critical scholars among whom I am happy to have spent most of my life, whether they were Christian, Jewish or irreligious. We were not concerned by ‘peer pressure’ or the ‘constraints of academic tenure’, except that we were united by an absolute determination to oppose any threat to the academic freedom of people in our universities, regardless of status, colour, race, religion or creed.

Not a very auspicious start. This is an error of fact and judgement. Casey is foolish and plain wrong to label the 'internet audience' as closed-minded. Plainly many surfers are, but he would have some difficulty demonstrating that each and every surfer is not open-minded (are none of them members of the academy he lauds?), or that the 'internet audience' is some homogeneous whole that acts in a closed-minded way. So, a false and unsubstantiated statement, which is a shame. Perhaps he considers that most people are not open-minded, which may be true, depending on his definition of open-minded, in which case he could have moderated this claim by saying much of the internet audience is not open-minded, as far as it reflects the population at large, which would be easier to defend, and not obviously wrong.

He goes on to discuss the claims of Doherty, Dorothy Murdock, Tom Harpur, bloggers Neil Godfrey and Steven Carr, and Robert M.Price. Here I'm hoping he is on more solid ground, since it's his area of expertise. The essay appears to be well referenced, and I look forward to a discussion of the points he raises. Given his background, I take his criticisms seriously, so I'm bound to take his opinion on this difficult subject seriously too. As a layman, I would need to be given some extremely good reasons to disagree with his understanding of the consensus view of critical scholarship. I hope his reasoning is not infected by the sort of intolerant attitude to dissent shown by his initial outburst against the 'internet audience'. Needless to say, such obvious errors of fact and judgement do sway the reader's opinion of a piece.

Hoffmann himself has written an essay on 'the road' to an historical Jesus, countering mythicist claims:

The following remarks are designed as a kind of summary of what we know for certain about the conditions and the process through which historical tradition emerged. It is a preface of sorts to a more ambitious project on the myth theory itself and what we can reliably know–if anything—about the historical Jesus.

This looks closest to the sort of thing that will help a know-nothing like me to understand the process scholars have used to conclude that, yes, there is an historical Jesus. It appears well referenced and methodical, and Hoffmann eschews the intemperate language that characterises his wrong-headed attacks on new atheism. I look forward to reading up on his references and reading some of the background scholarship. Although he plainly disagrees (now, but not before?) with mythicists, I hope this is something that they can treat as a useful rebuttal. Maybe this is closer to the book that Carrier thought Ehrman was going to write? Hoffmann says towards the end:

And this brings me back to the starting point.  They [the gospels] preserve something, and I believe it is historical memory as well.  They might have gone off in all directions. The apocryphal Jesus story does just this, with tales of ascents into heaven, a divine brat who slays his playmates, and a revealer who descends to hell and puts demons in irons.[135] That is pure legend.  It “flies off in all directions.”  The Gnostic gospels do it too.  But the canonical gospels do not.  If a contrived mythology is the sufficient explanation of these literary artifacts, it is the job of the myth theorists to explain why they are such poor examples of the mythic tradition—not why they tell the tale of a man who ascends triumphantly into heaven, in some late accounts, like Romulus in the famous apotheosis of Livy–but why they begin with someone who bothered to touch the ground at all.

Why do the canonical gospels begin with a man who is far from divine? If this is true, then he makes a good point. If the purpose of the gospel writers was to tell the story of a divine visitation, they would start with those details. That they start with a more mundane story suggests the story of an 'ordinary' man is their message. However, I'm not sure how he was unaware of this in 1996, when he wrote, apparently sceptical of an historic Jesus:

...Why is the core historical episode of the gospel tradition, the story of Jesus's death on the cross, completely lacking in convincing historical detail, being rather a liturgical drama built up from the psalms and prophetic texts?...

And I'm still not sure how scholars know that a narrative is documentary and not fiction; much modern day story-telling deals with fictional characters who do not behave supernaturally, so presumably they did too 2000 years ago? Nonetheless, I'm grateful that he has given us, the non-paying public, the benefit of his many years of scholarship. This would be impossible in pre-Internet years, Professor Casey should note! I will invest in a Hoffmann book, as a form of thanks.

The third essay, by Stephanie Fisher, a pupil of Casey's, appears to be a critique of Richard Carrier's Bayes Theorem approach to Jesus historicity. Carrier is referred to as 'atheist blogger Richard Carrier' twice in the first couple of paragraphs, which seems to be an attempt to denigrate Carrier's standing, and is an unnecessary flourish, if so. Carrier is a published historian, which is more than one can say of Fisher at the time of writing, however flawed his arguments may or may not be. The essay also seems imbued with too much snark; odd from a protege of a man who seems to be forever railing against the the snark of the new atheists. The use of 'Dickery' in the title is calculated to insult Carrier, and, as such, is unnecessary; a scholarly approach would pay more dividends, I think. She starts:

Most analysts would say that Bayes’ theorem is not in the least amenable to complex and composite historical texts. 

I hope she supports this with a reference (none at the initial assertion); prima facie it seems an unlikely claim, but I'm no expert on Bayes, or history! So maybe she's right, and she's supported her case below. She goes on:

Bayes theorem was devised to ascertain mathematical probability. It is completely inappropriate for, and unrelated to historical occurrence and therefore irrelevant for application to historical texts. 

I'm not sure about the grammar here, but that Bayes is 'completely inappropriate for, and unrelated to[,?] historical occurrence' is quite an assertion, and needs to be backed up by evidence and argument below. After all, Carrier has written a whole book to support his view.

Carrier doesn’t have a structured method of application, but worse, he is dealing with mixed material, some of which is primary, much of which is secondary, legendary, myth mixed accretion. He has no method, and offers none,  of distinguishing the difference and this renders his argument a complete muddle. Effectively in the end, he can conveniently dispose of inconvenient tradition, with a regrettable illusion that Bayes provides a veneer of scientific certainty to prior conclusions he is determined to ‘prove unarguable’.

This gets closer to some substance; Carrier has a problem with method, apparently, in particular with how to deal with mixed, primary and secondary, material. Here some examples are required to explain how Carrier's proposal lacks method, and how his approach would cause problems with primary and secondary material. Hopefully Fisher supports this, and her other objections to Carrier, in the body of her essay, which I look forward to reading in detail in the coming days.

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The Tall Tales of Hoffmann

"Hic!"

I'm not sure if this Hoffmann's first love was Olympia, the automaton, (or was it Ophelia? She's certainly no automaton.) or if his further loves were Antonia and Giulietta, but there is more than a whiff of the old Hoffmann about this New Oxonian. It's as if some gnu atheist Lindorff has gone off with his Stella,  leaving him drunk in the tavern crying into his beer, "Muse whom I love, I am yours!". I've been that drunk too, though in humbler company than Hoffmann. He certainly loves the Muse, but perhaps he has spent too long musing while nimbler, more successful courtiers of Stellar Street have taken the plaudits and bouquets. That seems to be part of the complaint (h/t Screechy Monkey):

Part of that has to do with (as I suggested) a record that goes back long before most Americans had heard of Richard Dawkins. Some of us older and old atheists remember what a lonely battle that was. Many who came to the movement since 2000 will not. And that is precisely the pojnt. Without saying jealousy is involved, there are many (not just me) who know that the Dawkins revolution could not have taken place without th almost invisible work of many of my associates in and out of the academy over many many years. On the one hand, we need to be grateful that the New Atheists have been successful in garnering support; on the other hand, and I know this from experience, nothing ensured the death of a book in this country before 1995 like putting the word atheism or humanism in the title. So, there were laborers in the trenches.

But in his latest offering he is far from a-musing, letting off at every gnu he can think of, like a drunk sending texts to former lovers. He starts off with the usual suspects and regurgitates well-worn non-arguments against the Four Horsemen (three of whom he might call Gnu Oxonians?). Interesting that he seems to admire Hitchens the most ("the only true intellectual and by far the best-read of the group"), since Hitch's arguments were always the worst of the four, even if his polemics were the best. More ire is aimed at the gnu bloggers who dare to offer an opinion on religion that has not been informed by years of study in the Divinity School at Harvard. He starts with Jerry Coyne, quoting him comparing religion to leprechauns in their compatibility with science, to which he responds:

Just a flash: While leprauchauns didn’t copy the books that were turned into the books that led to the science Dr Coyne eventually studied, monks and rabbis did. Why does the perfectly reasonable opposition to religious craziness have to descend to this caricaturing of the history of religion?

Strange, isn't it, that religion has morphed into the history of religion? What a befuddled argument. It's difficult to know what Hoffman's point is here. Is it that a deep and complex history justifies an ontology? But Coyne doesn't deny religion's history. It's as if he thinks the involvement of religious people in the history of science invalidates the Conflict Thesis, but none could be that dumb. Leprechauns don't exist so they couldn't have copied early science books, so Hoffmann's comparison doesn't work. Coyne, on the other hand, is pointing out that religion is a superstition, like leprechauns, not that religion doesn't exist, or, even more foolishly, that the history of religion doesn't exist or isn't complex. Hoffmann's argument wouldn't pass muster at infant school, sadly, let alone any philosophy department.

A Gish Gallop of mud-flinging follows, aimed at PZ Myers ("If ever atheism got dumber and less impressive, it is in the work of this dissolute insult- monger"), Greta Christina ("She sees everything as a weird sexual joke"), Ophelia Benson ("...has turned her once-interesting website (I used to contribute regularly) into a chat room for neo-atheist spleen"), Eric MacDonald ("doesn’t seem to know bloody anything about the academic study of religion") and Jason Rosenhouse ("I sometimes wonder why people whose only contribution to blogdom consists of sentences like “Most religious rituals leave me beyond cold,” find themselves titillating?"). Like one or two other misguided critics of new atheism, Hoffmann is often pragmatically self-refuting!

But Hoffmann has an illustrious history, if not an illustrious future, so I do wonder what has got under his skin so much about people who aren't guilty of the things he thinks they're guilty of. Apart from the self-confessed jealousy above, he gives a clue to one of his concerns in a comment below his latest rant:

The new atheists don’t oppose the study of religion. Not true: in fact the famous “Pinker Intervention” at Harvard in 2006 prevented religion from becoming a part of Harvard’s core curriculum, on the premise there was no difference between theology and religion-studies, though Harvard was the first university in America to introduce such study in the 1930′s, apart from its Divinity School. Read all about it here: http://www.somareview.com/godandmanatharvard.cfm Stephen Pinker (who is far more considerate of religion in general) is not the issue here, btw; a number of the newbies have gone on record as saying that the study of theology does not belong in a university, though in some places like Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, this would mean closing down their divinity schools where the study of religion is alive and well. That’s half the problem: the other half is that rank amateurs like the newbies have already pronounced their verdict on such study by mixing up the objectives. Frankly if this confusion is any indication of the state of their information, they’d better hold off on the God thing for a few years. If you want to see the nadir of this imbecilic conversation, here you go:http://www.newstatesman.com/2011/06/dawkins-myers-religion-faith

Interesting. The New Statesman piece compares religion to knitting, which is presumably what upsets Hoffmann, but this is nothing more than Myers's view of what religion's status should be in society, not a judgement of its historic worth, I think. Despite people like Dawkins and Hitchens regularly supporting the study of religion, he genuinely believes they don't, and his evidence is the "Pinker Intervention" and a throw away remark from one of the more strident new atheists. I'm not familiar with the background to the Pinker story, so it would be good to hear some more about this other than what Hoffmann's written, cloaked in dense references as it is ("Pinker Intervention" throws up just one link on Google, to Hoffmann's piece).

So maybe his concern is that divinity schools should not be closed down? But opposition to divinity schools is not opposition to the study of religion, so it's still not clear why he is so exercised about this. In the piece he links to, about the study of religion at Harvard, he says:

In short, all the wrong reasons for studying religion—because it is popular, widespread, and personally significant—triumph over the good reasons for studying it.

I confess, though, that I'm not clear from the piece what the good reasons are for studying it. I could guess at a few. Hoffmann does say earlier:

But religion puts itself forward as something that ought to be studied in its own right, not because in doing so the student learns to value its influence or validate its claims, but so that the student will be able to evaluate it within a particular analytical frame of reference. And it is in providing that context that Harvard excels.

This may be true, but it does not go any way to justifying separate divinity schools - religion can still be studied in its own right without that - so I'm still left struggling to understand the nature of Hoffmann's complaint, once again. Unless he thinks that the only frame of reference that is sufficient for good religious study is in divinity schools? Maybe, but he would have to be clear why he thinks this, or it's just special pleading for religion; something that new atheists are (obviously) against.

I dare say he has other complaints; if only he could write clearly, without so many distracting straw men and errors of fact, then we might have a better chance of understanding them. Maybe one day he'll sober up and tell us fellow drunkards what he means.

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Hit and Myth

R. Joseph Hoffmann has been making a lot of news in the blogosphere recently, through his intemperate attacks on gnu atheists - consider this comment highlighted by Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels:

There are no butterflies there [at B&W] anymore just gasbags like the seminally under-qualified Eric McDonald and clowns like PZ Myers, who could benefit from a reading comprehension course with an emphasis on analogies.

Calling Eric Macdonald 'seminally under-qualified' is indicative of a critical faculty that has become unhinged, and now Richard Carrier has cause to question Hoffmann's sanity:

But in private conversations about some of the problems I had with the book, Hoffmann was a complete dick to me, and wouldn't own up even to the mistakes I had actual proof he had made.

...and...

Thereby tempting me to conclude that he [Hoffmann] must be a lunatic.

This all comes in an analysis of Hoffman's book, Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth. Sadly Hoffmann also supports the view of Jacques Berlinerblau that new atheists think that:

Unless you as an atheist are willing to disparage all religious people, describe them all as imbeciles and creeps, mock every text and thinker they have ever produced, then you must be some sort of deluded, self-hating, sellout, subverting the rise of the Mighty Atheist Political Juggernaut...

A straw man of dickish proportions, to be sure. I don't know what's happened to RJH, but it's worth reading about Carrier's concerns for his editorial skills. Despite that, the book's still worth purchasing, apparently!

UPDATE: Hoffmann has replied to Carrier's criticism, including this paragraph:

Hoffmann, probably

I am still not sure what “mistakes” he’s referring to other than his own, which were as substantial as his contribution was irrelevant, a long discursus on Bayes’ theorem that never once budges above pedantic lecturing to engage the literary material – the New Testament – to which its application is implied to be relevant. A cautious, or less sympathetic editor would have cut it eo ipso as being totally to the left of the topic, though Carrier shows a fleeting acquaintance with some of the methods (and limits) of conventional New Testament criticism. It does not rise to the level of convincing expertise.

One wonders why he included Carrier's chapter, in that case! He displays little sympathy, so maybe he was just being incautious.

And Carrier's reply.

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