The more the mythicist / historicist thing crops up in general readership the more silly it seems. And you can see from the comments on that post.

There are two questions here.

1. The narrow scholarly one about what historical events lead to the texts of the early Jesus movement being written (a question that shouldn’t be about the existence of Jesus, per se).

2. And there’s the one that everyone is interested in, about the validity of Christian truth claims.

Addressing the former in a context where clearly most people are interested in the latter is problematic.

It is rare for scholars to get any public interest in their areas (God knows, Huffpo wouldn’t have printed an article on my research area, even in general terms!), it is tempting to dangle the former question in venues where the latter question is overwhelmingly more important.

At the expense of going Godwin, here’s a thought experiment. Let’s say the nation is being gripped by a rise of politically active fascists. They are aiming to take control of the government and enact laws motivated by their ideology. There is a widespread discussion happening about the suitability of fascist ideology for national politics, with one side pointing out how badly that ended in 1930s Europe, and the other pointing out that Germany was an aberration because it did it wrong, and that Italy wouldn’t have been that bad without Germany and that the evils of Spain were really a reaction against internal unrest, and that ‘true’ fascism is the only way forwards.

In that context, it is hardly surprising that a group of European Social Historians suddenly find that their research on the affectionate courtship of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun has a ready audience. So one (staunch anti-fascist) historian takes to HuffPo to make the point that, while Hitler clearly did some bad things, he wasn’t all bad, and was actually quite nice to his girlfriend.

Is the scholar correct? Yes* Was Hitler an unmitigated demon? No. Did Mussolini make the trains run on time? Who cares? Well scholars do, and they should, the questions are interesting and important in a certain way.

But just because the prevailing social conditions mean there is a popular audience for their research, doesn’t mean the scholarly question is either comprehensible or able to be usefully applied.

What matters is “is fascism evil?”. “But historians can’t answer those questions!”, they might say. I disagree, but even if I didn’t, that objection only reinforces the point: in what way is it sensible to promote Hitler’s affectionate side in the context of our cultural discussion, then?

Back to Jesus. The point simply hasn’t got out that traditional Christian truth claims about Jesus are false. And I think that is often because scholars tend to tread very carefully there. Perhaps because they fear disaffecting their students, perhaps because they lack a certain kind of integrity (in the sense of integrating their scholarly truth seeking with their ‘spiritual’ truth seeking – I don’t mean in the sense of honesty).

I’ve listened to every Historical Jesus course I can find online, and all of them are peppered with these little caveats: “this is what we can tell historically, you’re free to have faith that Jesus rose from the dead, this won’t tell you if Jesus was really God, history can’t tell whether supernatural things occurred” and so on. And not in a “you’re free to believe any crap you like, as long as give the right answer” way, but said with seemingly genuine concern to give permission for students to retain their ahistorical views in the light of the history they will engage with.

Yet I’ve never heard a biology lecture series say “this is evolution from a scientific perspective, of course science can’t tell us what happened supernaturally, you’re free to have faith that it only looks this way, this won’t tell you if God actually created distinct kinds.”

Jesus Christ did not exist. This has been known for 200 years. That some of his legends may have been based on an obscure wandering exorcist is as unimportant beyond scholarship as the biographical details of Nicholas of Myra are to the question of whether Santa Claus brings presents down your chimney on Christmas eve.

The scholarly question is interesting. But pretending that the scholarly question is the important one in our political context is unhelpful. A sizeable organised polity wants to curtail our freedoms and impose laws on the basis of things that did not happen – is putting down mythicism really the important public battle?

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*Yes, for the sake of this analogy. I’ve no idea whether this is actually the case, but that’s not the point.

The great quarry for this was a statistical analysis of the synoptic problem.

The synoptic problem comes from the observation that the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are very similar, even down to using identical wording in many places. It is the similarity of exact phrases that means that they can’t be just connected by events: they aren’t similar because they are all describing the same story. They are more than that. They must have a literary dependency. There must be copying going on.

So the question scholars want to answer is: what order were they written, and who was copying from what?

Grizel linked me to some work online that applies simple statistical tests to this question. There was some similar work done on the authorship of Isaiah, out of BYU. That study wasn’t controlled at all well, statistically. The study in the link above is a little better designed. As part of my NT Math project, I also ran a statistical analysis of the synoptic problem, using a slightly different method that looked at larger phrases (a wider n-gram), but was basically the same. My results were very much the same as Dave Gentile’s.

The results show that, statistically, there’s almost nothing one can say about the synoptic problem beyond some minimal statistical evidence for Markan priority: i.e. it confirms that Mark came first and was used by Luke and Matthew.

His study shows that the bits that are shared between Mark and the others are a fraction more similar, linguistically, to the bits that are unique to Mark, than to the bits unique to either of the others. So the bits that Mark shares with the others are much more likely to have been written by Mark. Good result.

But Markan priority has long-since been settled in the academy anyway, so the rather weak statistical result is unlikely to set the world on fire.

The interesting question is whether Luke used Matthew, or whether both used a lost source. (The ‘Farrer’ hypothesis says the former, the ‘Q’ hypothesis the latter). And Dave Gentile, and I, both found that the error in our statistical analysis was far too great to make any conclusion on that. The experiment neither confirmed or denied either hypotheses. And, as Dave points out in his analysis, there are many many other possible situations with intermediate forms of the gospels which the statistics are also consistent with.

So one of those (very common) statistical experiments where the results tell you nothing of interest. Which is a shame.

I came to the conclusion that the decisive arguments were likely to arise out of close analysis of textual patterns, like Mark Goodacre’s beautiful fatigue argument for Markan priority, rather than from coarse aggregate statistics.

I won’t detail the story here, because it is far better told elsewhere. The key part that interested me is the mismatch between the official church biography of the man, and the independent historical evidence: such as official records, his own contemporary diary entries, and reports of his colleagues and friends.

The official story is thoroughly messianic. LRH was a prodigious rider, breaking broncos by three years old, a blood brother of the Blackfeet tribe while still a child, the country’s youngest eagle scout. He was travelling the orient on his own in his mid-teens, being schooled in ancient wisdom from gurus and lamas. He was one of the first nuclear physicists, and lead vital scientific expeditions to the amazon. On the eve of war he enlisted and a meteoric rise saw him commanding a fleet of ships into WWII. He was gravely wounded in battle, and healed himself totally of his injuries using the techniques he developed. He made numerous hollywood movies to support his research, before his breakthrough Dianetics book made him fabulously wealthy. He then spent his life discovering the true nature of reality, dodging persecution, and creating the world’s first complete and workable religious technology. When he could no longer continue his research in his earthly body, he deliberately left it behind, to continue his work as an eternal soul. But he will return again in the future and lead mankind onwards once more.

Messianic indeed.

I suspect the same process is at work in all messianic biography-building. Historical Jesus studies point to the clearly mythological extrapolations and exaggerations in the gospels. Critical works on the biographies of Muhammad likewise focus on the likely distance between the myth and the real man.

But, by and large, we have no direct evidence that Jesus wasn’t a virgin-born sinless miracle worker who fed thousands with a few fish, commanded storms to still, and rose from the dead two days after his execution. Even for relatively recent messianic figures (say Baha’u'llah, the messiah of the Baha’i faith), we have limited ability to go back and check.

But that’s not the case for anyone born now. The chances of anyone reaching adulthood without a sizeable information trail is pretty slim.

LRH certainly hasn’t got away with it. There’s too much evidence that basically none of the above information is true. Where kernels of truth exist they have been stretched out of all recognition. We have the records. The church of Scientology claims they are fabricated, of course, but they are well documented and well disseminated.

Now there have always been polemic and insinuations against messianic claimants. There have always been counter-evidence. But the kind of information density we have today is something that has never existed before, not even nearly. It is no longer the case that the only systematic information someone can easily access about a messiah, is the claims of that messiah’s followers.

I wonder if it is possible to construct a messiah now, for anything but a tiny number of adherents. I wonder if the empirical power of data means that building a religion around a super-human figure isn’t a much harder task.

What kind of messiah could we create nowadays? Is it naive to think the era of the ‘big messiah’ is lost to the era of ‘big data’?

“Non semper, ergo numquam” means “Not always, therefore never”.

In response to pointing out some cause of an event, or a criticism of an idea, a person finds a counter example. That can’t be true because of a particular example when it is not true.

It is a kind of quantification fallacy, a false conversion, but from my research I could not find a name for it.

It is a fallacy because most of the time we make general statements not with the purpose of suggesting they apply in all cases, just that they are general enough to remark on. To undermine such a general statement it is not enough to respond with a counter-example.

So “natural selection drives evolution”… “here’s a situation where natural selection doesn’t drive evolution.”

Or “religion promotes supernatural nonsense”… “I’m religious and I don’t believe in the supernatural.”

Or “marijuana is not a particularly harmful drug”… “But my cousin did weed, and ended up in a psych hospital.”^[1]

But still, the counter example is a tempting rebuttal, and a strong rhetorical trick. I’ve found myself often trying to justify the counter-example: trying to reject it or cast doubt on it. Which is a tacit acceptance that the generalization was supposed to apply in all cases. It inverts the discussion, so a reasonable statement gets turned into an unreasonable exclusive statement, and the person is forced to defend that unreasonable position. The correct response is more like “so?” But even that can feel like a weakening of the argument. Though I fight it, I instinctively love black-and-white certainties. And even when I am intending to suggest a matter is only a very dark shade of grey, it can be galling to be reminded it is not entirely black.

It is particularly galling when faced with someone with a tendency to commit the opposite fallacy: “aliquando ergo semper” (sometimes therefore always) – someone who will take the valid counter example as evidence that the matter is entirely white. Who’ll conclude that, if natural selection is not the mechanism behind all evolution then it can be entirely discounted, or that the presence of any historical material in the bible means the bible is historically accurate. In those cases an unambiguous counter claim would be preferable, for the same of rhetoric. But this fallacy is always there for the over-eager.

Evangelical Christian culture has a specific idea of what the third commandment entails and goddammit, they won’t hear anything else.

….

The evangelical definition of taking God’s name in vain is so far-reaching that it has become the mainstream (secular) definition. Ask someone what it means to take God’s name in vain and regardless of their faith tradition or religious persuasion they will probably tell you that it means using one of God’s many pseudonyms in an exclamatory or thoughtless manner.

….

Much of western Christianity doesn’t even know that the commandments were issued to the same Israelites who, when they asked God his name, weren’t given a straight answer. They still don’t have an answer…. The commandment issued on Mount Sinai wasn’t intended to censor careless bandying about of a literal name, but rather was stating we are not to use God to justify or legitimize an action that is not justified or legitimated by God.

Getting this detail wrong has resulted in Christian culture declaring God’s position on causes such as war, marriage rights, evolution and megachurches, all while staunchly refraining from typing “omg” lest they blaspheme the name of G-d. The irony is excruciating.

From Stuff Christian Culture Likes

One of the best things I’ve read for a long time! Head over to the site to see plenty more excellent posts.

But it is interesting how progressive Christians respond. The progressive Christian involved have previously said that they are not theists. They believe in a ‘ground of all being’ or a panentheist God of ultimate concern. But when a commenter attempts to define God,

“I believe in the God of the Bible: who created humans in his image, who came and lived among his people first in the tabernacle, then in flesh as Jesus, who died and rose back to earthly life, then ascended to heaven.”

they seem very reluctant to say

“That God doesn’t exist.”

rather preferring to build a bridge

“You can’t be sure God is like that.”

And even then there seems to be a hesitation to say

“God isn’t like that, God is…”

It appears that the desire to retain a connection between progressive Christianity and the wider Christian world is stronger than the desire to counter bad theology. Which strikes me as odd.

It is all a matter of subtleties, and I’m sure I could be accused of reading too much into this. The progressives don’t make a secret of what they believe, and they don’t make a secret of opposing fundamentalism. I’ve heard it said several times

“I don’t believe in the God that Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in, either.”

I just find it odd that they feel the need to retain some connection to the words. An assumption that they are referring to the same thing when they talk about “God”, but just differ in the qualities they assign to it. Which seems to me to be a bizarre assumption.

[NB: Quotes above are paraphrases of several discussions.]

It seems the influx is motivated by a (sadly false) report that Harvard researches announced they found a message from God in our DNA. The report was an Onion-style satire and purely false.

But my post on my own discovery of a message from God in our DNA is showing up high on Google searches. It has been linked to from several forums. And, unlike the Harvard article, the results I claim in my article are quite genuine. I didn’t not make it up, as anyone can easily check.

At some point I’ll explain why we have that message in our DNA, for those who can’t immediately see. But let’s see how far this little storm blows first.

But all of them have failed to turn education around.

Because all of them have fundamentally treated the problems in education as a supply problem. We must attract and retain better teachers, improve teaching, disseminate best practice, improve monitoring and assessment, set targets, improve curricula, upgrade classroom resources, provide extra support for weaker students, improve school facilities. The list goes on and on.

But I suspect that education doesn’t have a supply problem, and never has.

It has a demand problem.

Someone who wants to be able to do something or to know something, will suck in that knowledge or skill at an incredible rate.

The reason it is tough to teach, and teachers so often fail is because they are shovelling truck loads of education at unmotivated ‘learners’ and hoping that at least some of it will stick to them.

Who’s fault is that: apathetic students, uninspiring teachers, or the assembly line model of education?

I don’t know, and I offer no solutions. But it might be worth at least admitting that we’re spending vast amounts of time, money and anxiety solving the wrong problem!

Death Spiral is a term that came into business-speak originally to refer to a spiral of debt, where more debt is needed to service the previous debt, and so on, until the company is bankrupt. But if the company had not taken on more debt, it would have risked having to miss orders, miss salary payments, default on its loans, and spoil its reputation: so the best option at each point in time was to take on more debt. And hope.

Hope is the key feature of the death spiral. As a business owner, you see where things are going. But the choice is to severely damage what you have, or to keep on hoping. Hoping that there’ll be a sudden influx of customers, hoping that productivity will suddenly soar. You can’t afford to invest in those things to make them happen, so all that is left is hope.

Many mainline churches are stuck in their own death spiral, clinging on to hope. The church is shrinking, those people who remain are being pressured (overtly or implicitly) for more money, more of their time, their responsibilities are growing, the minister (if the church even has one) finds their time is getting more stretched, even as their salary shrinks. Meanwhile a very small handful of churches are growing, are glitzy and attractive, full of great worship and enthusiastic children’s work. Growing mostly by sucking people out of the surrounding churches, particularly those people who are impatient to see something happen, leaving behind those who prefer to be, rather than do.

But death spiral churches can’t just change direction. That would alienate those already in the congregation, disrupt important relationships and damage the community. And the church owes those stalwarts continuity and support. They have been loyal, and their giving keeps the church running, even as there are fewer and fewer of them. No, radical action is unfair, as well as dangerous. If many of them left, before new folks came, the end would come much faster, and with more certainty.

Better to hope. Hope for a new influx of people, hope for a wave of enthusiasm, hope for fresh ideas, hope that God sends help.

Stephen Lingwood, the Unitarian minister and blogger, posts every year on the numbers of Unitarians in Britain. The numbers shrink, churches close, others struggle with no minister, or prospect for growth. Some grow, most don’t. It is a pattern repeated across different denominations. It is easy to focus on the politically brash and big churches and ministers, the mega-churches, and the tv-stations. But most churches aren’t like that, and most are doing poorly.

If you are in a death spiral, what do you do? What’s the right answer?

There isn’t one. Breaking out of the spiral isn’t the right thing to do. At any point it is a bad choice. In a business it might mean putting people out of work, in a church it might mean alienating people from their community. Sometimes the right thing to do is to ride the spiral down, to live in hope, and when the time comes, face the end with dignity.

Some businesses and churches try new things, but that’s often not a good solution. A friend of mine was involved with a business in a death spiral, they set up a completely unrelated business on the side. The new business grew, and the old one was allowed to fizzle out. This was fine for their management team and shareholders, but not for their highly skilled staff nor the companies in their supply chain.

Some churches are doing similar things, running parallel congregations, different expressions of church. A church in my town growing up did this: it started a new all-singing service alongside its traditional one, and gradually over a couple of years, the traditional one continued to decline, until it was stopped all together. The old church initially celebrated the influx of new people, but when it became clear they were not going to invigorate the congregation, but replace it, things got nasty. The minster left, a new replacement was hired, one with even less reason to sustain what had gone before. A successful new project can accelerate the death spiral in the old one. While the management/minister and a few others can make the transition, most will suffer the same fate in either case.

There is no right answer. But it is a miserable process. I reflect on the business ventures I’ve started that have failed, and there is nothing quite so soul destroying and knowing where things are going, but being powerless to avoid it. And I can’t help but feel sorry for those I know who’s congregations are going the same way. Particularly as, in many cases, the churches who are struggling this way are those that I think are positive forces for community and support.

[This is an extended and bloggified version of a conversation I had today with an online friend who is a former Methodist minister.]

Also very thrilled to see my former boss, now ABCORI (American Baptist Churches of Rhode Island) bigwig, among the crowd celebrating on the steps of the state house. And great to see at least a dozen of the people I knew and worked with in ABCORI voicing their excitement too.

Its easy to frame anti-gay bigotry as a problem caused by Christianity. The reality, as usual, is more complex. I proudly stand together with my Christian friends and former colleagues on this issue.