Stephen Law

(Published in Faith and Philosophy 2011. Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011. Stephen Law. Pages 129-151) EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS Stephen Law Abstract The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testament documents alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of indepen...

The journal Faith and Philosophy have accepted my piece on "Miracles, Evidence and The Existence of Jesus", which evolved from discussions on this blog. So thanks for all your comments, provocations, etc. I will put the final version up here eventually. That's three papers in Philosophy of Religion now published. "The Evil God Challenge" has just been published in Religious Studies . "Plantinga's Belief-Cum-Desire Argument Refuted" appears in Religious Studies shortly. If you want a copy of any of these, let me know...

The case of the sixth islander [another extract from a paper I am writing, this time a thought experiment related to the preceding post]. Suppose five people are rescued from a large, otherwise uninhabited island on which they were shipwrecked ten years previously. The shipwrecked party knew that if they survived they would, eventually, be rescued, for they knew the island was a nature reserve visited by ecologists every ten years. As the rescued party recount their stories, they include amazing tales of a sixth member of their party shipwrecked along with them. This person, they claim, soon set himself apart from the others by performing amazing miracles - walking on the sea, miraculously curing one of the islanders who had died from a snakebite, conjuring up large quantities of food from nowhere, and so on. The mysterious sixth islander also had striking and original ethical views that, while unorthodox, were eventually enthusiastically embraced by the other islanders. Eventually, fi...

Here is an extract for comments... A skeptical argument I want now to show how our two principles - P1 and P2 - combine with certain plausible empirical claims to deliver a conclusion that very few Biblical scholars are willing to accept. Let me stress at the outset that I am not endorsing the following argument. I present it, not because I am convinced it is cogent, but because I believe it has some prima facie plausibility, and because it is an argument that any historian who believes the available evidence places Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt needs to refute. 1. (P1) Where a claim’s justification derives solely from evidence, extraordinary claims (e.g. concerning supernatural miracles) require extraordinary evidence. In the absence of extraordinary evidence there is good reason to be skeptical about those claims. . 2. There is no extraordinary evidence for any of the extraordinary claims concerning supernatural miracles made in the New Testament documents. 3. Therefore (f...

Hi Georges You commented on the last jesus historicity post : I'm trying to imagine how the religious cult that became Christianity got started assuming there never was a charismatic Jesus character for people to coalesce around. Try to imagine Islam spontaneously coming into existence without Muhammad, Sikhism without Guru Nanak, Mormonism without Joseph Smith or Scientology without L. Ron. How would it work, exactly? Any examples? Perhaps it coalesced around some other individual or individuals, such as e.g. the "disciples", or Mary Magdalen. There are many candidates. Hell, I don't know. But the fact that I don't know doesn't mean it's probably true there was a historical Jesus. Compare a case where e.g. several people claim to have witnessed a person in a house, who then, amazingly, walked through a wall. Why do we possess such testimony? How does it arise? I don't know. People often seem terribly convinced. Now not only does the miraculous nature...

Rev Sam writes (comment on my last Jesus historicity post ): Hi Stephen, if you ever get around to resuming this element of the conversation, you might find this of interest. He's much more of an expert than me. Stephen's response: I did watch it. His argument is that the early Christians would not make up a crucifixion story as the Messiah was not someone they would expect to be crucified. The expectation was the Messiah would defeat the Romans, not be executed by them. Of course this is a bog standard argument that gets repeated over and over. He concludes anyone who thinks the story is made up is living in a fantasy land. This seems to me an amazingly weak piece of evidence. He is second guessing people's motives for why they would invent a story in which the expected Messiah dies. First, there may be reasons why they would want their Messiah to die and come back to life. In fact, aren't there some very, very obvious reasons why they would want that? You want to...

As Rev. Sam (who said earlier that anyone who doubts there was an historical Jesus must be insane) is struggling to follow my argument for being cautious about accepting that any such person as Jesus existed (I'm not sure either way), I'll set it out a bit more formally (the bare bones of it, anyway). 1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In the absence of extraordinary evidence there's excellent reason to be skeptical about the claims. 2. There is not extraordinary evidence for any of the divine/miraculous stuff in the NT documents. 3. Therefore (from 1 and 2), there's excellent reason to be skeptical about those extraordinary claims. 4. Where testimony/documents combine both mundane and extraordinary claims, and there's excellent reason to be skeptical about the extraordinary claims, then there's pretty good reason to be skeptical even about the mundane claims, at least until we possess some pretty good independent evidence of their truth (a...

Sam, you say: "My point here is to say that it is illegitimate to expect certain forms of high-quality evidence to be available. That doesn't make the lower-quality evidence that is available more true, it just means that it isn't a criticism of that evidence to say 'it's not higher quality than it is'." If I understand you correctly, I am amazed and shocked by this - genuinely. Crap evidence - i.e. evidence no where near good enough to rationally support a belief - is crap evidence. Pointing out that, were the belief true, better evidence couldn't necessarily be expected, is simply irrelevant to the question of whether or not it's crap evidence. If my toddler says a fairy came in the night and did magic tricks in her bedroom, that's crap evidence it's true. Saying "Ah, but Stephen, you forget that, if there were such a fairy visitor, well, she'd be very unlikely to leave much better evidence of her visit - so it's no critici...

Hi Sam You're going to give me the evidence for Jesus' historicity. But you start with more questions. Gosh, a lot of questions. Here are answers to some. SAM ASKS First you say: P1: there are various historical texts which describe Jesus P2: these texts explicitly or implicitly refer to miraculous events P3: miraculous events cannot happen (they are 'pretty obviously silly') therefore P4: these texts have no (or: very little?) historical validity. Is that a fair summary?" MY REPLY: No. It's not. It's a bit of a caricature. I don't say miracles are impossible. My view is miracles are extraordinary events such that, to be reasonably confident one happened, we need more than just the kind of evidence that would be reasonable for mundane events. We need really good evidence. As Carl Sagan said - "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Do you disagree (yes or no)? I then say that the fact that there are very many miracles attributed...