Lately I’ve heard people attacking the veracity of the fairy tale book with statements like “Jesus wasn’t real” or it was a psy op operation by the Romans that got out of control. And I hate talking about reddit but it’s basically the atheism mods policy over there that Jesus wasn’t real.
I usually rely on the Wikipedia as my litmus test through life, which shouldn’t work in theory but is great in practicality:
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Virtually all scholars agree that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE. The contrary perspective, that Jesus was mythical, is regarded as a fringe theory.
While I do not disagree with a single bit of what you said, it does sum up perfectly why I am comfortable with my position.
The dearth of conclusive records and the necessity of making what are in all honesty very strong inferences on the basis of slim and to be quite honest generously interpreted textual evidence and without archeological evidence that goes beyond what would be expected of normal commercial exchanges among roughly adjacent civilizations at the time amounts to what I’d tend to categorize as interesting but speculative.
To try to align that oth what Josephus documented as Antiquities of the Jews goes beyond what is considered a generous interpretation and closes in on what I was originally commenting on, which is the propensity of modern and motivated historians to start with the idea that a mythology has to have had some basis in fact, rather than being just the kinds of mythologies we find from around the world where peoples are trying to explain where they came from and where they should be going.
George Washington as he exists in American mythology is a creation of myth. He was a slaver and he was “He who Burns Villages” among the Seneca, and he proudly referred to himself as such. But there is no end to the evidence he existed - what we have is an iconification, not a fabrication.
In the case of Jesus, most people like to claim the former and deny the latter, but in the case of Moses (and Abraham, and many others), it’s like trying to track down the “real” Romulus and Remus. I just can’t see it as anything more than speculative.
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I mean, it’s really not hard to identify what Josephus is referring to in quoting Manetho:
Could this be in reference to Manetho, the successor of Ramses II, son of Seti I, who reigned for 66 years?
Might this be rehashing the details of the Papyrus Harris?
This was describing the end of the 19th dynasty before Setnakhte came to power in 1189 BCE, exactly 13 years after Amenmesse (going by the nickname ‘Mose’ in at least one document) overthrew the grandson of a Ramses who reigned 66 years and forced him to flee Egypt - just like how the Egyptian historian Josepus is quoting talked about how Moses conquering Egypt caused the grandson of a Ramses ruling 66 years to flee Egypt.
You have it backwards.
Myth doesn’t dictate history, but history does very frequently inform and dictate myth, particularly myth that is presented as having been historical.
There really was a Mose who conquered Egypt in a situation that bears striking resemblance to the story of Moses conquering Egypt in Josephus. That’s a historical fact. As is his alleged doing so with help from without, and the subsequent eradication of Egyptian religious customs in primary sources at the time. Other details in the Manetho account are likely mythical or mistakes, but the core of it seems at least inspired by recorded history.
The much more interesting question is why the Biblical version of Moses doesn’t conquer Egypt, or doesn’t become the leader of another different foreign nation (another feature to the story found in Josephus and shared by Greek parallels). You’d think those would be things a tradition owing itself to the figure should want to claim or even embellish, not suppress.
Let me try explaining where I’m coming from using a different approach, because I feel like we’re focusing on different parts of the discussion and may be sometimes speaking past each other.
Let’s define a function, C(s1, s2) that takes as arguments a single possibly matching statement about two figures, historical or literary or both, and returns their correlation. There would be three classes of dimensions, let’s say. Historical (that is, the identity function in the historical record, in which the exactness and detail of the two records would describe a distance function in some metric space). Semantic - again a metric function that looks at conceptual overlaps in the idea-space concepts that capture the textual information surrounding the two statements. Semiotic - the cultural symbology surrounding the two statements. This function is a bit more complex because when some semiotic element is all but omnipresent (eg flood myths around societies that lived in flood plains) it’s actually evidence that the myths probably evolved independently and do not descend from a common ancestor, as it were.
So we could in theory take factual knowledge of Caesar and Augustus, compiled across a wealth of contemporary literature and exhaustive historical research, and compare them with the Caesar_2 and Augustus_2, which is how we will designate the characters in the Shakespearean play. We would expect C to return a value close but not equal to 1.
What is important is that any levels of indirection or redirection increase the metric space between the two variables in any of the dimensions, making identity less likely. That’s where you start to fall into the realm of historical coincidence and a generous interpretation to reach what might have been a predetermined conclusion.
We’d want to make a more complex function where we can weight with confidence factors and so on, but that’s the general idea as specifically as I can lay it out. Because I’ve left it largely descriptive and non-mathematical I’m concerned that there might still be a lot of opinion that you think can be factored in. I’m actually talking about realizing these concepts in a metric space and deriving a real distance function.
Does that help?
Two issues with your paradigm.
(1) What you are plugging into the function really changes the results. Are you plugging in the entire mythos, or only parts?
For example, in your Ceaser and Augustus examples you are selectively choosing a ‘factual’ picture of them, presumably leaving out stories like a baby Augustus climbing a tower when no one was looking to be found at its top staring at the sky.
If we pick and choose, something like Josephus’s story looks very close to an identity function to the events at the end of the 19th dynasty with some extremely specific details. We just need to ignore things like the claim of getting the Hyskos in Jerusalem to attack Egypt, as that detail is almost certainly false.
Presumably given the way you are discussing it, you see it necessary to evaluate the stories as a whole, which I do not (and despite that not being the convention you chose when it is convenient to what you are trying to prove vs disprove).
(2) This then feeds into the second issue, which is your sense that a greater distance between overall stories means we can’t trust sub-detail matches to be anything more than historical coincidence.
These texts are very heavily edited along the lines of “history is written by the victors.” But details that are left can be highly specific in matching against details elsewhere and help reveal what’s really going on under the layers of BS.
As a modern example, we can look at 9/11 conspiracy theories. Even though a bunch of crazy BS has been added to the history, while it in aggregate dilutes the identity between overall sets of claims and history, the part of the claims of “the two tallest towers in the US fell on Sept 11th” is very much grounded in truth and not coincidence.
There’s added benefit in taking a partial look as well, as it’s one of the only ways you can end up with testable predictions in this field.
So as an example, in the above comment regarding the Denyen being the tribe of Dan, we had two ‘coincidences’ - Dan are referred to as staying on their ships in Judges 5 and there’s Aegean style pottery made with local clay in early Iron Age Tel Dan. These might be happenstance coincidences, but if we consider the bubble of these details, we can hypothesize that if there’s something more to this identification, we might expect to find additional details in line with such an identification outside that bubble.
And indeed, in Ezekiel 27:19, the only other place the same form of Dan is used outside Judges 5, it’s in reference to Dan and the Greeks together trading with Tyre. Which fits pretty well with identifying Dan as the Denyen in Adana given the Denyen were right next to the Ahhiyawa (pre-Greeks) and the mentioned trade goods are in line with what would have been coming from that area of Anatolia.
But there’s a ton of historical inaccuracies surrounding these sections, so if we collect the Bible together in aggregate it’s not going to match pretty much anything as a historical “identity function”.
So there’s value in looking at the overlaps between multiple sources piecemeal, as if things are only random coincidence there shouldn’t be a collection of similar piecemeal details across multiple sources including emerging archeological details.
In the other direction too. If you look at the Noah story in the Bible in its entirety you might conclude that it’s a flood myth like other flood myths, much like in your comment. And yet if you look at the piecemeal details, instead it looks like a famine mythos that was reworked into a flood myth due to Babylonian influence.
So it’s more productive to look at details over the overall stories.
Make sense?