Is Mormonism so bad?

[dastardly stem]

Hold up...I didn't say he's all about the history. I suggested he's respectful in his work to the discipline of history. I think that's largely true. And I don't think his personal business argues well against that position.

Oh, I think the fact that he has become a counter-apologist for hire is very much about his personal business. I do not agree that he is motivated by a respect for the discipline at all. He barely operates in the discipline. His treatment of the discipline is more akin to John Gee's, truth be told.

I grasped it, I just didn't think it carried the weight you thought it did. To a first century Greek speaking Jew, what other historic figure would have been behind it if not Pilate? That was my question, essentially. It seems to make sense to me that he would have been used, fitted into the story if it were made up. goddammit I'm doing it again. But seriously, if you in your expertise do not think a first century Jew would have felt it reasonable to include Pilate, I say, fine. That is genuine disagreement. I don't think the genuine disagreement amounts to anything near the conclusive claim of error though.

Let me ask you this, stem: how many different provincial governors or Herodian rulers do you think were in charge of Jerusalem in the first century CE? Do you have even the foggiest idea? You say Pilate because you know the name, and then you assume that he must have been just as important and obvious to all the people of ancient Jerusalem as he is to you. You should test that theory.

Moreover, do you think that the Gospels were written by people who lived in Jerusalem? How many people agree with you? What other views do they hold? Would you agree with the Fundamentalist Christians that the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses? Or do you agree with Carrier that they were made up by people who really had no idea what was actually going on at the time, and thus they were forced to make it up?

So, if you agree with Carrier that they must have made all this Crap up, and perhaps threw in some history-ish tidbits to make people buy into it, then why pick Pontius Pilate? Why would we assume that these historical fiction writers would not pick someone else governing Judea under Tiberius, such as, say, Annius Rufus or Valerius Gratus?

The more arguments you make that suggest they did so for historical verisimilitude, the more you also add to the positive arguments for the likelihood these accounts are simply based on an actual historical situation.

I want to thank you for forcing me to think these things through more thoroughly. The more I dig into this, the less persuasive I find the argument that Jesus is a figment of someone's imagination, and, yes, that matters because his movement eventually developed into one of the world's dominant religious communities.

To get back to the topic, let's say for the sake of argument that Mark is the first Gospel. Mark provides no information about when Jesus was born. Moreover, I don't think he even mentions the emperor Tiberius. Tiberius is only mentioned by Luke. Now we are left to float freely and pick any procurator, equestrian prefect, or Jewish toparch who may have controlled Judea in the late first century BCE or first century CE.

Why pick Pilate? And why do the details about Pilate match his portrait in Philo and Josephus?

Take for example the little bit I quoted about the Tower of Siloam and the butchered Galileans from Luke 13. There we find out that Pilate butchered Galileans who were sacrificing. I love how this part is a lot more accurate in its depiction of Pilate in comparison with the governor who washes his hands of Jesus' death. The latter part is less believable. The butchery is absolutely believable.

You might say that the author of Mark had to have read his Philo. It is most unlikely that he read Josephus. Yet we have no good reason to believe that he had read Philo. So where is this interest in Pilate in particular coming from?

You said it yourself:

He was a miserable governor who provoked and murdered Jews.

If you know he was a miserable governor who provoked and murdered Jews, then it's no stretch to think Jews in the first century knew he was a miserable governor who provoked and murdered Jews. I think we already went over this. They didn't need a high level royal person because they very well would likely already know there was a Pilate who "was a miserable governor who provoked and murdered Jews". His name could have lived in infamy for these Jews based on that alone.

I get that verisimilitude is often needed for history from that era, in that we simply don't have enough to connect enough dots...but I don't think it the best tool to claim strong evidence of something. Its difficult to even call it evidence. It seems far more logical to reason out, "the Jews of the first century knew, as we know now, there was a miserable governor who provoked and murdered jews names Pontius Pilate. Including him in the story seems reasonable"

Then to reason out, "since we know there was a miserable governor named Pontius Pilate who provoked and murderd Jews and the first century Jews wrote about him in the Jesus story, that that alone gives good evidence, strong evidence even, to think Jesus really lived".

[Kishkumen]

You said it yrourself:

He was a miserable governor who provoked and murdered Jews.

If you know he was a miserable governor who provoked and murdered Jews, then it's no stretch to think Jews in the first century knew he was a miserable governor who provoked and murdered Jews. I think we already went over this. They didn't need a high level royal person because they very well would likely already know there was a Pilate who "was a miserable governor who provoked and murdered Jews". His name could have lived in infamy for these Jews based on that alone.

He was not the only such person, stem. You have to explain why he was chosen at the exclusion of others. If we assume that the author cared about historical verisimilitude, and wasn't just putting someone in there as a stock character--and we have to assume that, I believe, because the details therein are too close to what we know about Pilate from other sources--then why him in particular?

Moreover, you do not know that the author was familiar with Jerusalem. Most scholars who do not hold more Fundamentalist scriptural views believe the Gospel of Mark was written in Rome or Antioch. So, given the fact that there is almost no reason for an author living in Rome or Antioch to know much about Pontius Pilate or spend the time to insert him into the Gospel of Mark in a way that is historically convincing, why was Pilate chosen, and how is it that the Pilate of the Gospels is consistent with what we know of him from other sources?

I get that verisimilitude is often needed for history from that era, in that we simply don't have enough to connect enough dots...but I don't think it the best tool to claim strong evidence of something. Its difficult to even call it evidence. It seems far more logical to reason out, "the Jews of the first century knew, as we know now, there was a miserable governor who provoked and murdered jews names Pontius Pilate. Including him in the story seems reasonable"

Then to reason out, "since we know there was a miserable governor named Pontius Pilate who provoked and murderd Jews and the first century Jews wrote about him in the Jesus story, that that alone gives good evidence, strong evidence even, to think Jesus really lived".

Yes, of course. Unless I make the complete argument and show you the relevant passages in Philo and Josephus, unless I regale you with all of the careers of the other bad governors of ancient Palestine, unless I go through all the various historical fictions with stock governor characters, you will not really understand why what you are saying sounds nuts. I don't blame you because you just don't know, and I have not taught you. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to write the book that will show you why your view on this single point is blinkered.

[Kishkumen]

The following passage is taken from the Acts of Paul and Thecla, an apocryphal work of the second century CE:

14 And Demas and Hermogenes said: Bring him before Castelius the governor as one that persuadeth the multitudes with the new doctrine of the Christians; and so will he destroy him and thou shalt have thy wife Thecla. And we will teach thee of that resurrection which he asserteth, that it is already come to pass in the children which we have, and we rise again when we have come to the knowledge of the true God.

15 But when Thamyris heard this of them, he was filled with envy and wrath, and rose up early and went to the house of Onesiphorus with the rulers and officers and a great crowd with staves, saying unto Paul: Thou hast destroyed the city of the Iconians and her that was espoused unto me, so that she will not have me: let us go unto Castelius the governor. And all the multitude said: Away with the wizard, for he hath corrupted all our wives. And the multitude rose up together against him.

16 And Thamyris, standing before the judgement seat, cried aloud and said: 0 proconsul, this is the man-we know not whence he is-who alloweth not maidens to marry: let him declare before thee wherefore he teacheth such things. And Demas and Hermogenes said to Thamyris: Say thou that he is a Christian, and so wilt thou destroy him. But the governor kept his mind steadfast and called Paul, saying unto him: Who art thou, and what teachest thou? for it is no light accusation that these bring against thee.

17 And Paul lifted up his voice and said: If I am this day examined what I teach, hearken, 0 proconsul. The living God, the God of vengeance, the jealous God, the God that hath need of nothing, but desireth the salvation of men, hath sent me, that I may sever them from corruption and uncleanness and all pleasure and death, that they may sin no more. Wherefore God hath sent his own Child, whom I preach and teach that men should have hope in him who alone hath had compassion upon the world that was in error; that men may no more be under judgement but have faith and the fear of God and the knowledge of sobriety and the love of truth. If then I teach the things that have been revealed unto me of God, what wrong do I O proconsul? And the governor having heard that, commanded Paul to be bound and taken away to prison until he should have leisure to hear him more carefully.

Castelius, the governor of Galatia in this text, is otherwise unknown, and he is probably made up. This is the kind of thing I am talking about. We have in this text a story about Paul, a person about whom we know precious little outside of a few letters he wrote, and that story seems to be largely fictional. The author does not bother to research who the governors of Galatia were in the first century CE. He just makes one up.

[Physics Guy]

Considering the fact that applying Bayesian analysis to historicity is a relatively new approach, and because of his thoroughness, I would venture to say that there are very few people who are qualified enough to competently assess his works' significance.

Why do you consider Carrier's analysis to be thorough? I'm not planning to read his book myself, but I've gotten a bit curious about how it's presented, so I'd be grateful for a quick indication of what it is that makes it seem thorough. Lots of checking and testing things, somehow?

[Kishkumen]

And I think all of that should be obvious to anyone who actually understands Bayesian inference. If Carrier thinks Bayesian inference is going to be this great tool for historians then he's not being a pioneer who will be proved right in time. He's not being controversial. He's just being an idiot.

Ouch! OK. I had not seen this argued in that way, and I think I understand what you are saying. I have never really bought into his use of this method, but I also don't really know about these things, and I have reserved judgment to an extent for that reason.

[Physics Guy]

[Kishkumen has managed to reply to the future, because he is a prophet!]

Bayesian inference is becoming more popular in social sciences generally, and that strikes me as a good thing, because too many social scientists whom I have known have used statistics constantly and yet with the trepidation of a sorcerer's apprentice, always worried that they might screw up the ritual. Bayes seems to me to be the obviously sensible way to think about weighing evidence numerically; if you understand it then you can figure out anything without having to rely on rote methods.

Applying it to history, however, is not a clever original stroke. It's a dumb idea, for this basic reason: Bayesian inference is an approach to statistics.

For Bayes's theorem to tell you anything reliably you have to have enough independent copies of the evidence data B to talk about probabilities of any particular set of evidence. There's a temptation to regard this as a mere technical quibble that can surely be gotten around by some simple dodge like dividing probabilities into likelihood ratios. But the sample size of one is not just a technical quibble with Bayes. It's a fatal flaw in applying Bayes to history. You can't do statistics with sample size one, no matter how much math you use.

It's only having many realisations of the data that can make your probabilities be more than arbitrary guesses dressed up in bogus numerical authority. How do you know you haven't overlooked the most likely alternative? How do you know you haven't crippled one of your hypotheses unfairly, making it a straw man, by including a condition in it that makes it conflict with the data but that isn't actually important to the hypothetical idea?

If you've got a wealth of quantitative data then you actually can do a lot to check things like that, for example by ensuring that all your hypotheses are at least reasonable enough to assign decent probabilities to some instances of the data, and that your best hypotheses make most of the data reasonably probable. But when your sample size is one then all such efforts are circular. In history you just have no real idea how likely any other scenarios were, besides the one that actually happened.

If you don't have a wealth of quantitative data then all you have is a historian's best guesses and arguments, being as careful as you can in estimating how likely it was that things could have been different. And that's fine for history if it's the best we can get, but it means that Bayes is never going to give you anything more than those best guesses and arguments. All the messing around with probabilities is just window dressing, when nothing that comes out is or ever can be better than the guesses and arguments that went in to start, but there's a lot of opportunity to make things worse by giving a false impression of rigour and confidence and inflating speculations into strong conclusions.

Applying Bayesian inference to history is like trying to build a jet engine from plywood. You've got a design that can deliver thousands of pounds of thrust, but it needs to be made of materials strong enough to contain that much force. The kind of data that is available to a historian just isn't enough to make any Bayesian probabilities solid.

And I think all of that should be obvious to anyone who actually understands Bayesian inference. If Carrier thinks Bayesian inference is going to be this great tool for historians then he's not being a pioneer who will be proved right in time. He's not being controversial. He's just being an idiot.

[huckelberry]

Physics Guy has presented us with a worthy review of the use of Bayes's theorem.

[Meadowchik]

Why do you consider Carrier's analysis to be thorough? I'm not planning to read his book myself, but I've gotten a bit curious about how it's presented, so I'd be grateful for a quick indication of what it is that makes it seem thorough. Lots of checking and testing things, somehow?

I looked over academic papers reviewing him.

[Kishkumen has managed to reply to the future, because he is a prophet!]

Bayesian inference is becoming more popular in social sciences generally, and that strikes me as a good thing, because too many social scientists whom I have known have used statistics constantly and yet with the trepidation of a sorcerer's apprentice, always worried that they might screw up the ritual. Bayes seems to me to be the obviously sensible way to think about weighing evidence numerically; if you understand it then you can figure out anything without having to rely on rote methods.

Applying it to history, however, is not a clever original stroke. It's a dumb idea, for this basic reason: Bayesian inference is an approach to statistics.

For Bayes's theorem to tell you anything reliably you have to have enough independent copies of the evidence data B to talk about probabilities of any particular set of evidence. There's a temptation to regard this as a mere technical quibble that can surely be gotten around by some simple dodge like dividing probabilities into likelihood ratios. But the sample size of one is not just a technical quibble with Bayes. It's a fatal flaw in applying Bayes to history. You can't do statistics with sample size one, no matter how much math you use.

It's only having many realisations of the data that can make your probabilities be more than arbitrary guesses dressed up in bogus numerical authority. How do you know you haven't overlooked the most likely alternative? How do you know you haven't crippled one of your hypotheses unfairly, making it a straw man, by including a condition in it that makes it conflict with the data but that isn't actually important to the hypothetical idea?

If you've got a wealth of quantitative data then you actually can do a lot to check things like that, for example by ensuring that all your hypotheses are at least reasonable enough to assign decent probabilities to some instances of the data, and that your best hypotheses make most of the data reasonably probable. But when your sample size is one then all such efforts are circular. In history you just have no real idea how likely any other scenarios were, besides the one that actually happened.

If you don't have a wealth of quantitative data then all you have is a historian's best guesses and arguments, being as careful as you can in estimating how likely it was that things could have been different. And that's fine for history if it's the best we can get, but it means that Bayes is never going to give you anything more than those best guesses and arguments. All the messing around with probabilities is just window dressing, when nothing that comes out is or ever can be better than the guesses and arguments that went in to start, but there's a lot of opportunity to make things worse by giving a false impression of rigour and confidence and inflating speculations into strong conclusions.

Applying Bayesian inference to history is like trying to build a jet engine from plywood. You've got a design that can deliver thousands of pounds of thrust, but it needs to be made of materials strong enough to contain that much force. The kind of data that is available to a historian just isn't enough to make any Bayesian probabilities solid.

And I think all of that should be obvious to anyone who actually understands Bayesian inference. If Carrier thinks Bayesian inference is going to be this great tool for historians then he's not being a pioneer who will be proved right in time. He's not being controversial. He's just being an idiot.

It seems to me that there are very qualified experts who take Bayesian analysis to history seriously:

"The Bayesian perspective on historiography is commonsensical: If historiography is not certain like a priori knowledge or sense data, and it is not fiction, historiography is probable." Aviezar Tucker in "THE REVEREND BAYES VS. JESUS CHRIST", Gvirtzman Memorial Foundation Fellow, Harvard

"This article examines the effect of material evidence upon historiographic hypotheses. Through a series of successive Bayesian conditionalizations, I analyze the extended competition among several hypotheses that offered different accounts of the transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age in Palestine and in particular to the “emergence of Israel”. The model reconstructs, with low sensitivity to initial assumptions, the actual outcomes including a complete alteration of the scientific consensus. Several known issues of Bayesian confirmation, including the problem of old evidence, the introduction and confirmation of novel theories and the sensitivity of convergence to uncertain and disputed evidence are discussed in relation to the model’s result and the actual historical process. The most important result is that convergence of probabilities and of scientific opinion is indeed possible when advocates of rival hypotheses hold similar judgment about the factual content of evidence, even if they differ sharply in their historiographic interpretation. This speaks against the contention that understanding of present remains is so irrevocably biased by theoretical and cultural presumptions as to make an objective assessment impossible." Efraim Wallach PhD, in "Bayesian representation of a prolonged archaeological debate," Hebrew University

I'm not saying that Carrier is correct--the first citation's author is critical of his work--but it looks like your evaluation of Bayes applied to history is off.

[dastardly stem]

He was not the only such person, stem. You have to explain why he was chosen at the exclusion of others. If we assume that the author cared about historical verisimilitude, and wasn't just putting someone in there as a stock character--and we have to assume that, I believe, because the details therein are too close to what we know about Pilate from other sources--then why him in particular?

Not to be the butt, but I don't think you need to show that. We only need to know it was a possibility. That is if, we'll say, the author of Mark was intent on writing the story already in existence orally, then Pilate would be already included in that story. I don't see why anyone would need to show why Pilate was the one, when all we really to need to know is he was one. As it is, the claim was the mention of Pilate is strong evidence Jesus actually lived...not the other way around.

Moreover, you do not know that the author was familiar with Jerusalem. Most scholars who do not hold more Fundamentalist scriptural views believe the Gospel of Mark was written in Rome or Antioch. So, given the fact that there is almost no reason for an author living in Rome or Antioch to know much about Pontius Pilate or spend the time to insert him into the Gospel of Mark in a way that is historically convincing, why was Pilate chosen, and how is it that the Pilate of the Gospels is consistent with what we know of him from other sources?

This is a good point. It's certainly possible a Jew in Antioch or Rome could have heard the legend of a particular miserable governor. Again as the legend goes, though, the story of Jesus was shared orally. It's certainly not the case that the author of Mark was witness to the events in that gospel. So he had to rely on someone or some ones to tell him at least some portion of the story with details.

Yes, of course. Unless I make the complete argument and show you the relevant passages in Philo and Josephus, unless I regale you with all of the careers of the other bad governors of ancient Palestine, unless I go through all the various historical fictions with stock governor characters, you will not really understand why what you are saying sounds nuts. I don't blame you because you just don't know, and I have not taught you. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to write the book that will show you why your view on this single point is blinkered.

Ok.

[Jersey Girl]

Stem. Employ the Law of Parsimony.