Paul�s basket escape from Damascus (Robert Eisenman)

[robrecht]

Ah. Maybe I'm not allowed there either.

If you want to continue to post in that PM a moderator that I said it is OK with me. There are specific moderators for each forum.

[OingoBoingo]

If you want to continue to post in that PM a moderator that I said it is OK with me. There are specific moderators for each forum.

Okay, thank you.

[Paprika]

I'm getting confused, but in a very round about way, we are actually coming upon one of Robert Eisenman's ideas of confusion of identities, namely that the account of Stephen's stoning in Acts was, according to Eisenman, Luke's revamped conflation of an attack on James by Paul and the eventual stoning of James by Ananus. The name of Stephen was borrowed from a different story in Josephus.

[robrecht]

Just trying to accommodate the OP:

I would like this thread to be about the work and ideas of Prof. Robert Eisenman.

[OingoBoingo]

Just trying to accommodate the OP:

What's your take?

[robrecht]

What's your take?

On Eisenman? I think I posted earlier in this thread that he's brilliant but too enamored of his own ideas. He reads characters from the New Testament into the writings of Qumran in very creative ways. It is challenging and provocative and makes the texts come alive and gives us a better feel for some of the dynamics that might have been operative at the time, but very few scholars take him seriously. A few do, especially if they studied under him. And a few conspiracy minded nonprofessionals have latched on to him. He was helpful in getting some of the later Qumran texts out in the open but I don't believe the conspiracy theories behind why there were delays in some of them being published. He also wanted to have C14 tests done, but the tests did not confirm his theories. But it is always good to have brilliant people around who challenge the stodgy consensus.

[One Bad Pig]

Ah. Maybe I'm not allowed there either.

Norm's not allowed because he's not a theist.

[OingoBoingo]

On Eisenman? I think I posted earlier in this thread that he's brilliant but too enamored of his own ideas. He reads characters from the New Testament into the writings of Qumran in very creative ways. It is challenging and provocative and makes the texts come alive and gives us a better feel for some of the dynamics that might have been operative at the time, but very few scholars take him seriously. A few do, especially if they studied under him. And a few conspiracy minded nonprofessionals have latched on to him. He was helpful in getting some of the later Qumran texts out in the open but I don't believe the conspiracy theories behind why there were delays in some of them being published. He also wanted to have C14 tests done, but the tests did not confirm his theories. But it is always good to have brilliant people around who challenge the stodgy consensus.

Thank you. I meant more your take on his idea of confusion of identities.

[OingoBoingo]

Norm's not allowed because he's not a theist.

Okay. I PM'd one of the mods just in case, but was told that robrecht would need to PM one of the mods himself. If it matters, I hold to something close to the following by Kierkegaard than to non-theism, or even conventional agnosticism:

"Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual's inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over 70,000 fathoms of water, still preserving my faith."

[robrecht]

Thank you. I meant more your take on his idea of confusion of identities.

If I understand the question, it's just a subset of my previous answer. It's a brilliant idea; it brings the text alive in a surprising way; it allows us to imagine how Paul, aligned with the high priest, might have acted toward James prior to Paul's conversion; it gives context to the later opposition between Paul and the men from James described in Galatians; it seems to deal with the difficulty of the execution; and while it is possible, it is more likely a figment of Eisenman's creative imagination than what actually happened. It is good to think outside the box and consifder hypothetical alternatives, but not every hypothesis is true and generally the more elaborate and creative ones that require more moving parts to explain a previously undiscovered conspiracy theory are less likely to be true, in my opinion.

[Doug Shaver]

I apologise for the lack of clarity: I was interested in seeing your Bayesian analysis with the prior probabilities and all that.

A Bayesian analysis of the Sanhedrin trial narratives

Part 1: Prior probability

[robrecht]

Hi, Doug.

I agree that there are indeed countless ways the story could be revised into a plausible version, and,
from an historical perspective, I myself am skeptical regarding our ability to reconstruct what most likely happened, and,
finally, I am not a Biblical inerrancist,
so I am not sure of how or if you might like me to interact with your presentation.

On the one hand, I might just agree with respect to the three points I just made above, but I also think the four statements that I have excised from your post are problematic for varying reasons.

1. The gospel of Mark, the earliest 'detailed' source of information regarding the trial(s) of Jesus, does not present Jesus' claim before the high priest as merely messianic. What is presented by Mark could indeed have been perceived as blasphemy by some 'Jewish' authorities.

2. Josephus' brief reference to the Jewish leaders involved in Jesus' death is an important, potentially independent, source of valuable information in any attempt to reconstruct what likely occurred.

3. The letters of Paul and others and the gospels are some of the most important sources of information we have for early first century Judaisms, thus I think they can be used judiciously as a kind of background knowledge.

4. It does seem plausible to me that at least some powerful priestly or other 'Jewish' authorities did perceive Jesus as a threat to their authority.

You yourself may agree with some or all of these four points to varying degrees.

[Paprika]

I'd prefer to look at the whole thing before making any criticism, but I don't mind analysing the first part as a part. For now, I just have a few comments, firstly on the general methodology, and on the derivation of the probability of #1:

1) There are no unconditioned probabilities, or probability without respect to any evidence.. All probabilities are based on evidence: properly it isn't P(A) but P(A|E) where E is a proposition, possibly a conjunction of all the evidence X_i, where X may be data observations.

2) Therefore, because of 1), there is no P(TH) but P(TH|E). P(TH|E) will vary depending on what evidence E you use.

Now, you rule out the use of the other parts of the gospel narratives as evidence:
Since the question isn't "Are the Gospels historically accurate", it is clearly not begging the question to use other parts of the gospel narratives as part of E to calculate P(TH|E). What you are doing is cherrypicking the X that forms the E without sufficient justification. Which is not, of course, to say that the gospels can be take uncritically as "all true", but that ruling them out is unjustified, not least because historical scholars from a wide spectrum of worldviews do use the gospels as historical sources.

3) At this point, given your claim that "Our evidence for the hypothesis is the New Testament", one wonders why you do not even consider the texts of Acts and 2 Thessalonians.

4) I see no reason to take your prior probability of 0.1 seriously. You haven't laid out clearly what is the evidence E you're using, and though you may trust your judgment I fail to see why anyone else should with regards to historical matters.

a) No, the response will be, why should the actual nature of the movement established later by some of Jesus' followers imply that the priests could not have a certain expectation of the movement led by Jesus, given that if Jesus was crucified it must have had some, if not great impact on what remained of his movement? You're do not address this probability at all.

b) We know from both NT and non-NT sources that Jesus was considered by his many of his followers to be the Messiah. Now, given that, I do wonder why you do not consider the very relevant evidence that many people claiming to be Messiahs in the same time period started violent revolutions against the Roman authorities. I would counter argue that with the inclusion of these data points, it is plausible that many considered him to be Messiah when he was alive. And on this, it is plausible that the priests would have had the expectation that Jesus' movement could be violent, and thus pose a threat to them.

5) Your conclusion for point #1 means very little.
Firstly, of course, the consequent probability is conditioned on your judgment. Secondly, there is no such thing as an unconditioned probability, thus P(#1|E) will of course vary on what E you used (my point 2)). Hence, it may be so that P(#1|E_{considered by Doug Shaver}) may actually be 0.1, but given that there are other pertinent evidence that you have not considered in your analysis at all, I see no reason why your P(#1|E_{considered by Doug Shaver}) should be taken seriously.

[Doug Shaver]

I am not a Biblical inerrancist

So I have gathered. I am not much concerned with addressing inerrantists in this thread. From their perspective, there is really nothing to debate. As far as they're concerned, if the Bible says it happened, then it happened, end of discussion.

What is presented by Mark could indeed have been perceived as blasphemy by some 'Jewish' authorities.

Josephus' brief reference to the Jewish leaders involved in Jesus' death is an important, potentially independent, source of valuable information in any attempt to reconstruct what likely occurred.*

For the sake of discussion, I am stipulating the authenticity of that portion of the Testimonium. Given Josephus's failure to cite any source for this report, I think the most parsimonious supposition is that he was relying on testimony from Christians. The Antiquities was written near the end of the first century, almost 30 years after the First Jewish War, a time when Christians would have been eager to disassociate themselves from their Jewish roots. They would have found it expedient to say, for the benefit of any Roman officials who might have been listening, "Yes, a Roman governor unjustly executed our founder, but only because some Jewish priests bullied him into it. We don't think he was really responsible for this miscarriage of justice." Josephus would not have spoken so harshly about the leaders of his own religion, so he toned it down to "the accusation of the principal men among us."

But let's suppose he had some better source, someone in a position to know what actually happened. What, according to the Testimonium, did that source tell Josephus? That Jesus' execution was ordered by Pilate, and that the accusation leading to the execution came from "the principal men" among the Jews. We are taking it for granted that Jesus was executed by Pilate, and that the crime for which he was executed was probably sedition or some equivalent. But whatever the crime (and Josephus gives no hint of what it was), somebody had to accuse him of it, and Josephus is just saying that those accusers happened to be prominent members of the Jewish community. This is consistent with the gospel narratives, insofar as it does not contradict them, but it does not quite confirm them.

The letters of Paul and others and the gospels are some of the most important sources of information we have for early first century Judaisms, thus I think they can be used judiciously as a kind of background knowledge.

Background knowledge, by definition, cannot include the evidence at issue. Nothing that is in dispute with respect to the hypothesis in question can count as background knowledge, at least for Bayesian purposes.

For background knowledge on first-century Judaism, I would suggest that we need first-century Jewish sources. Among those, we can count Josephus, Philo, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I don't think we can count any Christian writer. Some of the NT authors might have been Jews, but we don't know that any of them was, though I will stipulate one exception: Paul. And even Paul can hardly be treated as representative of anyone's thinking except his own.

It does seem plausible to me that at least some powerful priestly or other 'Jewish' authorities did perceive Jesus as a threat to their authority.

My argument is not that it couldn't have been so. My argument is that I'm justified in thinking it probably wasn't so.

You yourself may agree with some or all of these four points to varying degrees.

I think you and I have just enough common ground to make our discussions, to me, very interesting.

[Doug Shaver]

Paprika, it might take me a few days to respond to your post. Please stand by.