So Shakespeare Scholars Also Have Weird Theories To Deal With..

Nice article here on the BBC about claims that William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him, and attempts by mainstream scholars to debunk such views.

[W]hat has stirred Prof Wells, who has edited the Oxford Shakespeare for 35 years, is his worry that this question about Shakespeare's authentic authorship seems to be entering the mainstream.

"What's annoying is that it's spreading," he says.

A Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare has gathered prominent signatories, with the claim that there is insufficient unambiguous evidence to link the man from Stratford and the plays attributed to his name.

And a movie, Anonymous, fanned the embers of the idea that the Earl of Oxford was the true author.

Prof Wells, like one of Shakespeare's own grey-haired faithful retainers, has gone into battle once again.

"It's quite true that we don't know as much as we would like to know about Shakespeare. However, we do know more about him than most writers of his period."

Demolishing rival claims is much more straightforward than standing up Shakespeare's.

Sound familiar?

TalkHistoricity Draft - What is Mythicism?

Some time ago, James McGrath of the Exploring our Matrix blog set up TalkHistoricity, a wiki intended to set out mainstream scholarly views on the historical Jesus and rebut mythicist claims about Jesus. 

Not much has happened with the wiki since it was set up, so I've decided to add a few entries myself in the hope that it will stimulate others too add their own contributions. 

To get started, I've written a draft "introduction to mythicism" type entry, adapted from an earlier post I wrote on the subject. If you have any suggestions for corrections, additions, or stylistic improvements please make them below. Otherwise, I'll upload the entry to the wiki in a few days. Once I've done that, I hope to follow up with an entry on mythicists' (mis)use of the argument from silence.

***** 

If you look at the Wikipedia entry for Jesus, and compare it to the entries for other figures such as Julius Caesar, Socrates, or Pythagoras, you might, if you read carefully, notice something interesting: there is a section devoted to the question of Jesus’ existence, and to the “mythical view”, that Jesus did not exist. In fact, there is a separate, and fairly extensive, wiki page devoted to the topic. But there is nothing similar for Caesar, Socrates, or Pythagoras: their existence does not appear to be in doubt. So is the existence of Jesus less certain than that of these historical figures?

There is a group of people who say that it is. These people are most commonly known as mythicists. Mythicists claim that there is no single historical person who lies behind the New Testament figure of Jesus. For mythicists, the figure of Jesus is nothing more than a religious or literary invention of early Christians. 

The arguments that mythicists make and the conclusions that mythicists reach are rejected by the overwhelming majority of scholars. That is, virtually all scholars of antiquity or the Bible agree that Jesus existed. Figures such as James McGrath, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Bart Ehrman, Maurice Casey, Stephanie Louise Fisher, and Larry Hurtado and have written extensive criticisms of mythicism. However, despite a lack of scholarly support, mythicist views have gained a certain degree of popularity,  particularly on the internet and among atheist activists. 

As evidence for their views, mythicists put forward a range of arguments, including unreliability of the Christian New Testament as a historical source, the relative lack of ancient references to Jesus from non-Christian sources, similarities between the figure of Jesus and characters of Pagan and Jewish mythology, and to perceived bias or incompetence among New Testament scholars.

The purpose of this wiki is to show how and why mythicist claims about Jesus, Christian origins, and New Testament scholarship are wrong. Rebutting mythicist claims is not the same as arguing for particular Christian beliefs about Jesus, such as that he was the Messiah or the pre-existent second person of the Trinity. Thus the purpose of this wiki is not Christian apologetics but instead to show why mainstream Biblical scholars reject mythicist claims about Jesus. Many Biblical scholars are of course Christians, but many others are Jewish, agnostic, or atheist.

 

A seperate wiki has been set up to set out the "positive" case for the existence of Jesus.

 

Questions on Mythicism and Denial Movements

A big thank you to those of you who participated in my Virtually University sessions on Mythicism and the question of Jesus’ existence. From talking to other teachers, I wonder if my class was more a chat about some stuff I find interesting than a proper university style lecture, but hey - it was more fun than teaching the ontological argument.

I was really impressed by the quality of some of the thinking and the questions you raised, and pleasantly surprised that many of you could anticipate some key Mythicist arguments and the counter-arguments to these. I was also pleased that a couple of you had even heard of exciting things like Q and the apocryphal gospels... though on reflection, perhaps you’ve just been watching The Da Vinci Code?

I did say that I would post some follow up work for you, so here it is. Below are a few questions that I think were raised in the course of our sessions:

• How strong is the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus?
• How convincing is the mythicist case against the existence of Jesus?
• Why makes some people reject the consensus view of experts in particular field?
• What is the role of ideology in shaping way denial movements use evidence and the conclusions they draw?
• Is mythicism a denial movement?
•  Is rejection of human-caused global warming a form of denial?
• Is denying scientific consensus (such as evolution or HIV as a cause of AIDS) different to denying historical consensus (such as the existence of Jesus)?

Please could you pick one of these questions, research the issues raised, and write me a response.  I won’t ask for it to be done by Monday – I’d rather you took your time doing some reading and thinking and came back to me later, even if it’s in the holidays. I’m also planning to post my own thoughts on a few of these questions over the next week or two, so you may wish to read those posts too.

You can either email me your work to my school account or post them as a comment below, though please remember the house rules.