Telling Fact from Fiction: A Test

[Jagella]

As many of you may be aware, real-Jesus apologists base their entire case for a historical Jesus on written stories. Scholars like Bart Ehrman, who says that a historical Jesus "almost certainly existed," is "almost certain" Jesus existed because he says he and his fellow Bible scholars can "tease out" fact from fiction in these stories using rigorous historical methods. Needless to say, many of the real-Jesus apologists in this forum agree that the stories of Jesus are, as one member here has said, "overwhelming" evidence that Jesus existed. Of course, not all of us are overwhelmed by these stories as evidence for a historical Jesus, and we appear to be at an impasse neither side proving their case.

So I have an idea: to see if people really can tell fact from fiction by reading and studying stories, I've decided to post four stories here. Please read and study these stories, and then tell me which are true stories with real people and which are fictional stories with made-up people:

• 1. Rick left Edinboro, Pennsylvania to return to his hometown of Pittsburgh. He earned a degree at a college in the Pittsburgh area and found work there.
  
  2. Clyde got bored on his family's horse farm in Kentucky and moved to Nashville to play guitar in a country-western band.
  
  3. Sandy met and married Josh, and the two of them started a successful tattoo parlor in Los Angeles.
  
  4. Joe became very ill when he came down with a case of pneumonia. He spent two months in a nursing home and was hospitalized twice.

Remember that the case for a historical Jesus stands or falls on the stories of Jesus being stories of a real person.

Question for Debate: Can you read and study these stories and use logic to tell if the persons in these stories are real or fictional?

[rikuoamero]

[Replying to post 27 by peterk]

But to me that's the clear force of your analogy. You've given us four narrative sentences. You've said that two are true and two are fictional.

Just to correct you, upon having re-read all of Jagella's posts on this thread, the closest he has said
Yet at least some of them are not true stories! (Post 18)

True, you didn't say in those exact words that "the New-Testament writers asked anybody to guess if what they were saying is true or not."

Do they need to have said something like that, something like what Jagella gave us in his challenge, before you'll treat it like Jagella's challenge? Notice my response to it on post 16. I couldn't figure out Jagella's challenge, and I was treating it the same way as I would the Jesus stories (albeit, if the Jesus stories contained only details similar to Jagella's stories, such as common names, places, and events).

And you've asked me to pick which is which. To me that's not scholarship, it's a guessing game.

Isn't this what we do with the Jesus stories, anyway? Try to figure out which of them are true? They don't need to say "Some of them are true, some of them are false, distinguish between them". They could say "All of the stories are true", but we can't just take that at face value.

I am happy to take at face value your testimony that two are true and two are false.

Jagella has not said that.

Theoretically you could be lying about the whole matter.

Just like how the NT writers could be lying about the whole matter. We can't exactly toss this away as a potentially viable explanation.

But I think there are sensible reasons for believing you. The most obvious being that it is in your interests to set up an example which has that true/false balance.

If I were him, I would have given four completely false stories, and not revealed this. But you and I don't know if he did do this.

I weigh your testimony and for better or worse I consider it to be true.

So which of his four stories are true, and how do you know?

In the same way I have weighed the testimony of the New Testament material and for better or worse I consider it to be true.

Do you use the same methodology for both groups of stories?

[Jagella]

Your reasoning is not persuasive to me, and I am quite happy to try and explain my thinking honestly if you want to listen. Do you?

Yes, of course I want to read what you have to say. But if you've read the OP, then you should understand that I want you to persuade me that you can tell fact from fiction by reading stories. I have no burden of proof.

For example, my understanding of "proof" is different from yours. So if we are to make progress together, we need to respectfully listen to each other.

The proof I asked for is to successfully pass the test that I outlined in the OP. If you know you cannot pass that test, then just admit it.

You've given us four narrative sentences. You've said that two are true and two are fictional. And you've asked me to pick which is which. To me that's not scholarship, it's a guessing game.

Maybe you missed the question for debate, so allow me to repost it here:

Question for Debate: Can you read and study these stories and use logic to tell if the persons in these stories are real or fictional?

So I hope you new see that I didn't ask anybody to guess; I am asking you to use logic to tell whether or not those stories are true.

But it just won't work. No methodology, no matter how impressively it might be named, can reliably tell truth from falsehood in stories. The only exception to this rule is in cases in which the reader knows independently from those stories that what they say is true or false. Unfortunately, in the case of the gospel tale, we have no such luxury, and we cannot tell if it is true or false.

[Jagella]

So, how to tell a factual from a fictional account? Many considerations come into play, such as (but not limited to) independent corroboration, internal consistency, and general plausibility.

If a story violates such criteria, then it might reasonably be judged as probably fiction. People may be less likely to corroborate a work of fiction than a true story, but we do know that in some cases people do conspire to deceive others. Also, if a story contradicts itself, then the part it conflicts over may be false. Finally, I agree that a true story needs to be plausible.

It doesn't work in the other direction, however. Two of the stories in the OP are false, yet those stories are internally consistent and are quite plausible. As for corroboration, it's very possible that I could get other people to corroborate those tall tales, yet those stories would still be fabrications. I should point out that the two true stories are not corroborated, but they are still true.

So go ahead and apply any criteria you think can discern fact from fiction to those stories in the OP. If your criteria can't pass the test, then please post so.

[rikuoamero]

Just to make things even more fun...a thought occurred to me. Do we know for a fact that Jagella is the one who wrote the stories in the OP? It could be that he asked other people for stories, and he himself doesn't know. Or that the people who may have given him those stories don't know for sure themselves.
This is the exact same situation I face whenever I examine the NT. The exact same conundrums.

[2ndRateMind]

[Replying to post 33 by Jagella]

So my general approach to the 'truth' is, I regret to say, rather more aesthetic than logical. For me to place my credence requires surely, internal consistency (does the story contradict itself?), external coherence, (is it consistent with other facts we might know or believe?), and general comprehensiveness (is the story incomplete in some way?). And, should the story pass these basic logic tests, then, yes, where two opposing stories are incompatible, I would tend to choose the one most profound, elegant or beautiful.

As for your examples; I see no way in what you have said to distinguish between the true ones and the false ones. But, I think if you were subjected to a sustained, rigorous interrogation, which were which would eventually come clear. But, I am not in an interrogating frame of mind right now, so I leave that to others who might be so inclined.

Best wishes, 2RM.

PS. It occurs to me just to add that we need not decide, when confronted with two opposing accounts of reality, that one is 100% false and the other 100% true. In statistics there is the notion of 'degree of confidence'. It could be extended such that we hold one story to be say, true with a 80% degree of confidence, and a another competing story true with only a 20% degree of confidence. Should we decide to adopt this strategy universally, then we would be discussing how confident we have the right to be in our beliefs, rather than when someone else's belief is either cynical or credulous. And I think this would tend to reduce the ill-tempered friction occasionally apparent on these forums. As far as your examples go, then, I would hold that each of them are an equally likely 50% to be true or false, with a 50% degree of confidence either way. 2RM.

[Tart]

Well you could do whatever you want, go pay people to lie for you or whatever... Are you making a correlation between this and Christianity?

What I'm saying is that the corroboration among the early Christians proves little aside from their agreeing on what they said. Like any religion or political or social movement, the early Christians worked in concert as their faith grew. They obviously held common beliefs, so the common grounds in their writings about Jesus could just as easily reflect common beliefs as it reflected common knowledge. We cannot know the difference between writing about beliefs and writing about knowledge. A piece of paper or papyrus or any other medium will stand every bit as still for fiction as it will for facts.

So as far as the historicity of Jesus is concerned, you can have it if you're convinced that the stories written about him are true. Make your case, and hope people agree with you. But I've demonstrated that one thing you can't have is the ability to consistently tell the difference between a true story and a fable, and that includes the gospel tale.

Ok, and how could we then tell fiction from nonfiction? With any written documentation in history? How would you suggest we can tell if its true? Or are you making the case that we cant tell if written documentation of this kind, is true? Like if we brought up Socrates, for example, you are claiming we cant know if that is true? (his trial that Plato wrote about)?

[StuartJ]

[Replying to post 36 by Tart]

Ok, and how could we then tell fiction from nonfiction?

That's a very good question.

We have seen Christians here believe that the Gospel of Jagella was a real fake.

How can we tell that the "real" Gospels are real, or real fakes, or fake real fakes ...

Or how can we tell that they are or are not mutually-corroborating political propaganda ...

Or some other fiction or quasi-fiction or non-fiction ...?

When Christians simply "believe them by faith" (or whatever) and the "real" Gospels contain magical things and claims that the Divine Leader is the "Son of God" ...

And there is not a shred of anything outside the "real" Gospels and the faith of the believers ...

Then I suggest it's prudent to treat the "real" Gospels as fiction ...

And possible cult charlatanry.

Until - of course - independently verifiable evidence sweeps through the WIDE open door ....

[Jagella]

Just to make things even more fun...a thought occurred to me. Do we know for a fact that Jagella is the one who wrote the stories in the OP? It could be that he asked other people for stories, and he himself doesn't know. Or that the people who may have given him those stories don't know for sure themselves.
This is the exact same situation I face whenever I examine the NT. The exact same conundrums.

If I tell you that I wrote those stories, then will you take the word of an anonymous person whom you know little about?

[Jagella]

Ok, and how could we then tell fiction from nonfiction? With any written documentation in history? How would you suggest we can tell if its true?

I don't know, but you better find out if you have only stories to offer as evidence for your "historical" Jesus.

Or are you making the case that we cant tell if written documentation of this kind, is true?

Scholars and historians can offer their educated guesses if you choose to believe them. But I don't think you can tell unless you successfully tell me what stories in the OP are fact and which are fiction.

Like if we brought up Socrates, for example, you are claiming we cant know if that is true? (his trial that Plato wrote about)?

I don't know what the evidence for Socrates is, but if it's all in the form of stories, then we cannot know for sure if he lived. I have no doubt, though, that many scholars would become very upset with me and denounce me as "unscholarly."

And that's what happens when anybody questions the historicity of Jesus. Bible scholars will huff, and they will puff, but they can't blow the mythicist house down. They have no proof for Jesus because all they have as evidence for him are stories, and as I have proved on this thread, nobody can really tell if those stories are fact or fiction.

We have then a crisis for Christian apologetics as it cannot honestly say it can tell if the stories of Jesus are true. It has been tested, and it has failed the test.

And I love it!

[Jagella]

[Replying to post 36 by Tart]

Ok, and how could we then tell fiction from nonfiction?

That's a very good question.

That question has been answered on this thread. Unless you have "insider information" about a story, then you cannot know if it is true. In some cases you can know a story is false if elements of that story are not possible--you know--like levitating zombies.

What's so great about this thread is that it has finally disproved all the obnoxious and arrogant tripe that the real-Jesus apologists have been feeding the gullible public. Their boasting of their "critical historical method" that they claim demonstrates a historical Jesus has been demonstrated to be a lot of empty hot air. We have no good evidence for the historicity of Jesus, and I'm so glad this fact is coming to the fore.