Nugent's Nonsense: Spilt Ink in the Irish Times, Part 2

I'm getting to a point where I think I should be submitting articles to the Irish Times. It seems clear they'll publish any old muck, and will pay for it too. This week sees Michael Nugent attempting to put the first shreds of meat on the feeble argumentative bones he advanced last week, and it's far from a successful attempt.

God is not a 'god' (small 'g')
Mr Nugent starts this week's post with the following statement:

'There is good evidence that our universe came about naturally, which is more persuasive than the evidence that it was created by a god (small "g"). And there is good evidence that humans invented the idea of gods, which is more persuasive than the evidence that gods exist.'

Now, the first thing is that it's disappointing to see this 'a god' nonsense being trotted out, especially with the heavy-handed aside that we should note how Nugent spells the word with a 'small "g"'. As I explained last week, this this a massive category mistake; it seems logic's not Mr Nugent's strong point. There is not merely a different of degree between, say, Aristotle's Uncaused Cause and Homer's Zeus; there is a fundamental difference of kind between the latter, a mere 'god', and the former, identifiable with God as understood by the great monotheistic religions.

This isn't a mere pedantic distinction, as blurring these categories is a rhetorical trick indulged in far too often by those who either don't know or don't care that the terms 'God' and 'a god' are radically different. I have never met anybody who's believed that the Universe was created by 'a god', and I'm not aware of anyone who believes that there's evidence that 'gods' exist.

If you pay attention to the rest of the article, you'll also note that Nugent offers no evidence for his view that the Universe came about naturally, or indeed that humans invented the idea of gods. The latter point, at least, is hardly surprising, given that the more-than-11,000-year-old temple remains at Göbekli Tepe show that humans were religious in an era before what we normally call civilization. There is no evidence that this prehistoric religion was an 'invention'; how could there be? Does Nugent have access to prehistorical writings that detail how it'd be fun to tell people of life having a meaning beyond that which meets the eye? 

Another false contrast, Michael?

Onward he trundles, bizarrely contrasting science with theology as though they both were directed towards the same ends, despite one being the study of nature and the other being the study of God:

'... what scientists like Dawkins typically mean by evolution theory is the study of how biological life evolved after it came about. The study of how biological life first came about is called abiogenesis.The study of how our universe developed from the instant it began to expand is called cosmology. And science has consistently proved a more reliable way of studying all of these questions than has theology, which is like discussing the rules of quidditch with people who believe that Harry Potter is a documentary.'

I'm not entirely sure how much theology he's read, such that he feels so confident in dismissing it in this fashion, but I suspect it's very little, at least to judge by how he seems convinced that theology has ever really been devoted to the question of how the Universe developed or how life first came about. I'd be curious to know how many theologians have ever studied these question in the context of theology; as there can't be many of them, such questions being largely outside the theological remit. I can't even think what branch of theology such questions would fall within.

That said, it is worth noting that around 400 AD, the most influential Christian theologian of them all, St Augustine of Hippo, argued that the Scriptural accounts of Creation in Genesis were clearly intended as poetic expressions of deep truths about the Universe and not as a scientific description of how the world came into being. While exhorting Christians to learn more -- scientifically -- about the Universe, Augustine argued that God must have brought the Universe into existence in a single moment of creation, but endowed it with the capacity to develop, containing as it does divinely ordained causalities that can later emerge or evolve, arguing also that time is as much an element of the created order as space. Surprisingly modern, eh?

The Harry Potter reference, for what it's worth, is rather insulting, not to mention remarkably stupid. In what sense is theology like discussing the rules of Quidditch with people who think Harry Potter is a documentary? Harry Potter is intended as fiction, as an entertainment and nothing more, such that anyone who thought mistook it for a documentary would have to have missed the point in a spectacular fashion. Is Mr Nugent really claiming that theologicans miss the point of -- say -- the Bible, and that the Bible was never meant to be taken seriously? Because if he really is saying that, I think it's pretty clear who's missing the point.

But then, as we've already seen last week, it appears that neither reading ability or clear thinking are among Mr Nugent's strengths.

A Curious Gap

And so, misrepresenting religion as a kind of science-substitute dependent on a 'God of the Gaps', Mr Nugent considers the Big Bang, reeling off a list of scientists -- Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Thomas Wright, Edwin Hubble, and John A. Gowan -- whose work led, incrementally, to our current understanding of the Universe. For some reason he omits Georges Lemaître, the Belgian astronomer and professor of physics who first postulated the Big Bang theory. Can you imagine why this might be? Three explanations spring immediately to mind. 

1. Nugent doesn't know what he's talking about.
2. Nugent is embarrassed that his Wikipedia entry is longer than that of the man who came up with the idea of the Big Bang theory, and thinks it's better if he doesn't draw attention to this fact, as it might cause people to suspect that he's been bigging himself up.
3. Nugent is fully aware that his thesis would be somewhat inconvenienced by the fact of the Big Bang theory having been the brainchild of a Catholic priest -- for so Lemaître was, as well as being an astronomer and physicist, eventually becoming a Monsignor and a member of the Pontifical  Academy of Sciences.

I suppose it could be a mixture of all three.


Something Comes from Nothing (as long as that Nothing is Something)

Nugent crows about the consistent pattern of scientific explanations 'relentlessly replacing theological answers,' though I'm not sure what examples of such he has in mind, and then says that given this pattern he's confident that if there's a meaningful answer to the question of what preceded the Big Bang, it'll be a natural one, identifiable by science; Nugent is confident that however the Universe came into being, 'a god' had nothing to do with it:

'We are most likely to find the answer to this question in the field of quantum physics. This shows that, at a subatomic level, random energy fluctuations can and do cause tiny particles to randomly come into and go out of existence. And Stephen Hawking in his latest work suggests that these fluctuations plus gravity could have brought our universe into existence without inventing a god.'

Yes, just look at that for a minute, because it seems that Nugent takes seriously an argument that proposes that the Universe could have spontaneously come into existence, provided it was preceded by the natural phenomenon that is gravity, itself being a property of matter. Yes, you read that right. He's saying that the Universe could have come into existence, providing it already existed.

I know, this is a bit unfair: you'd not know it from Nugent's article, but Hawking doesn't really mean the Universe when he uses the word 'universe'. Rather, he's postulating that 'our' universe is a space-time contiuum which is just one of many such, which we might call a system of universes. Not that there's any evidence whatsoever for this, or any scientifically meaningful way of testing such a hypothesis, but whoever let such niceties stop people wheeling out untestable speculations while burbling about the 'scientific method'?

Nugent's Nonsense: Spilt Ink in the Irish Times, Part 1

In Edinburgh a few years back I saw a terrible play, but one which I'll not name as it was written by someone I know, and I'd rather not humiliate him further: the reviews at the time were bad enough, with one describing the play as 'flatulent'. Intended as an attack on religion, the play was -- aside from being dramatically dire -- embarrassingly ill-informed. Weeks afterwards the play came up in a conversation with the friend with whom I'd seen the play, and atheist though she was she was left in stitches as I scornfully explained how the author -- her friend, of a sort -- hadn't got even the most basic stuff right.

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher of war, got in right when he said:

'Know yourself and know your enemy, and in a hundred battles you will never taste defeat.' 

But then, my English teacher was spot on too when he used to advise us to write about what we know. It's the same principle: don't go attacking things unless you understand what you're attacking.

Michael Nugent: Superman

All of which brings me to Michael Nugent, who has a column -- the first of a series -- in today's Irish Times, and who seems no better informed than my friend's dramatic friend. The series is a response to a rather feeble series of articles in the summer.

I don't know if you know Michael Nugent, but if you take a look at his lengthy Wikipedia entry you'll see that he's clearly a Very Important Man, somebody destined to be remembered for all time. To put Michael's greatness into context, among those with more modestly sized entries are: Filippo Brunelleschi, inventor of linear perspective, architect supreme, and one of the greatest figures of the Renaissance; Charlotte and Emily Brontë, who respectively gave the world Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights; Ludwig Feuerbach, perhaps the most influential atheist ever; Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics; Ana Pavlova, the most famous ballerina the world has ever seen; Kevin O'Higgins, one of the most important founding fathers of independent Ireland; Georges Lemaître, first proponent of the 'Big Bang' theory; Sophie Scholl, martyred member of the White Rose, regarded by many as the greatest German of the last hundred years* ; Jack B. Yeats, arguably the greatest Irish artist of the last century; and Patrick Leigh Fermor, who was until his recent demise surely the Greatest Living Englishman.

The entries on Vermeer and George Eliot are only slightly longer than Michael's. And he's only fifty! Imagine how long his entry will be if he lives another ten, twenty, or thirty years! Michael Nugent, it would seem, is a giant.

Atheist Ireland: A Puzzled Parish

Michael is chairman of Atheist Ireland, a tiny pressure group, with a paid-up membership no larger than the typical Mass attendance on any given Sunday in my parish at home. It  first came to my attention while trying desperately to be prosecuted for challenging Dermot Ahern's blasphemy legislation, publishing as it did a list of 25 supposedly blasphemous quotations. Leaving aside how it's arguable that many if not all of the quotations had literary, artistic, political, scientific or academic value and that as a rule they were not intended to outrage substantial numbers of believers, it's quite clear that publication of this list in order to make a point about free speech was, by virtue of its political character, explicitly exempt from prosecution under section 36.3 of the Defamation Act 2009.

If Atheist Ireland had been trying to prove how toothless Ahern's legislation was, they made their point well, but if they genuinely believed it was a threat, well, all this shows is that they're not very good at reading. Ahern's law was designed to be unenforceable: in accordance with the needs of the Constitution it technically closed a legislative loophhole, while being worded in such a way that it would be impossible for anyone to be successfully prosecuted for blasphemy.

One of the most curious features of Atheist Ireland is its 'Read the Bible Campaign'; I'm not sure why it doesn't have a 'Read the Qur'an Campaign', though it might be because that might seem provocative, or a 'Read the Tanakh Campaign, though it might be because that might seem anti-semitic, or a 'Read the Bhagavad Gita Campaign', though it might be because they have no idea what any of the Hindu scriptures are. Anyway, it seems an odd campaign, as it suggests that far from having a secular agenda, Atheist Ireland has an almost exclusively anti-Christian agenda -- even an anti-Catholic one -- and that it pushes this agenda in an extraordinarily ignorant way.

'Atheist Ireland actively encourages people to read the Christian Bible,' it begins, though this surely invites the question of 'which Christian Bible?'

Do Atheist Ireland mean the 73-book Catholic Bible, as used by most Christians in Ireland and indeed the world? Or does it mean the sixteenth-century's 66-book Lutheran Bible, as used -- sometimes in association with other holy books -- by about a third of the world's Christians? Or does it mean the 77-or-so book Orthodox Bibles as used by the various Orthodox Christian groups? Do Atheist Ireland even realise that Christians don't agree on the contents of the Bible? Does Mister Nugent know this?

I'm rather intrigued by this question, because I'm assuming that when Mister Nugent thinks of the Bible he thinks of the 73-book Catholic version, that being by far the most common version to be found in Ireland. This would make sense, as he seems to be making the implicit case that if wavering Irish Christians read their Bibles they'd realise it was all rubbish. As he puts it, 'It makes many assertions that are scientifically absurd and ethically unjust. And it undermines two key cornerstones of the Christian faith: the Ten Commandments and the story of Jesus.'

Well, aside from errors and dubious assertions in his little proposal, the very notion of the proposal in itself shows how little Mister Nugent understands the Catholicism he opposes. A project like that could well prove deeply damaging to the faith of a Protestant who takes a Sola Scriptura approach to the Bible, but shouldn't have any impact whatsover on Catholics. 

Catholics ought to know that the Church predated even the earliest New Testament books by about fifteen years, that the New Testament was written within the Church reflecting the already existing belief of the Church, and that the books of the New Testament were primarily written to be proclaimed and prayed within the Church. They should further know that it was the Church that kept, protected, compiled, and canonised the Bible as we now have it, doing so informally from the second century on and formally at a series of local councils around the end of the fourth century, confirming the decisions of those councils at the Second Council of Nicea in 787.

The Church knows that Bible has no shortage of passages that are problematic, to put it mildly, if they are read out of their proper context. Reading them in context means understanding them as manifestations of whatever genre in which they were written, in connection with their time and intended audience, in association with other Biblical books, and as perceived through time by the Church which recognised and canonised them as inspired Scripture. The Church's traditional way of reading the Bible has always been nuanced and layered, wholly unlike the more obviously literal ways of reading the Scriptures that were promoted and became common during the Protestant Reformation.

If I can quote Yves Congar's The Meaning of Tradition on this, as it well expresses the mainstream Catholic line on this:

'The reality contained in the sacred text would be described as its literary, historical, or exegetical meaning, but its dogmatic meaning is found outside the text, considered materially, which supposes the intervention of a new activity, namely, the faith of the Church. The place where this is found is precisely tradition as understood by the Fathers; it is there, in this setting and in these conditions, that the holy Scriptures reveal their meaning -- a meaning that is not simply the one accessible to philologists and historians but that which must nourish God's people in order that it may be God's people in the fullest sense.'

Atheist Ireland seems a small and rather silly group, to be honest, and I doubt it's in any way representative of most Irish atheists. I certainly hope it's not. Still, it's a platform of sorts, I suppose, and something to justify Michael being given a series of columns in what was once Ireland's newspaper of record.

Thoughts on Today's Folly

Today's column seems to be little more than a parade of sweeping generalisations and questionable assertions, but I'd not fault it for that as it's clearly intended as an introduction; I imagine Michael's planning on putting a veneer of meat on these flimsy bones over the coming weeks.

Two things, though, are worth saying now.

Firstly, early on he says this:

'Do you believe in a god (small "g")? Atheists reject the idea that your preferred god exists, in the same way that you reject the idea that other gods exist: because there is no reliable evidence that they do exist, and lots of reliable evidence that they are ideas invented by humans.'

This is a colossal category error, and one that I've seen wheeled out loads of times by the likes of Richard Dawkins. Atheists  need to get past this 'I just believe in one fewer god than you do' nonsense.

I don't believe in 'a god', anymore than does your typical Protestant, Muslim, Jew, Deist, Aristotelian, Platonist, or a host of others; indeed, I'd say we all recognise that there's but one God, the God who is the Necessary Being, the Uncaused Cause, the Prime Mover, the Ultimate Standard, the Lawgiver. This is a concept of God wholly different from the gods of the Greeks and the Vikings, and so forth. 

No Greek would ever have claimed that the philandering Zeus was perfectly good, just as no Viking would ever have said that the existence of the Universe couldn't be understood without Odin's existence underpinning it. So no, I believe, not in 'a god', but in God. And I believe that God is one and the same with God as recognised by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Maimonides, Averroes, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson; we may understand Him differently, but we all recognise that the Godhead subsists in the one being.

And in case anyone thinks I'm off on a limb on this one, take a look at Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council's 'Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions'; just because Catholics believe Muslims are wrong on the nature of God, say, and on the divinity of Jesus, this doesn't mean they're wrong on everything. We all worship the one God.

The other thing worth homing in on is this. Nugent says the following early in his article:

'Why are atheists so certain that gods do not exist? Actually, most of us aren’t. We merely reject the assertion that one or more gods do exist, based on the best currently available evidence. We would change our minds if we were given new and credible evidence that we are mistaken.'

I shall be looking forward to him detailing what he would consider to be 'new and credible' evidence.

* And someone about whom everyone should know

Pearls Before Swine

With, of course, one or two possible exceptions, I’ve long thought the finest cartoon I’ve ever seen on the internet is XKCD’s classic ‘Duty Calls’ gag. It’s just far too true, and I found myself living it yesterday and earlier today.

Notes to self: Don’t do this. Don’t feed the trolls. Don’t argue with people who are incapable of taking new information on board. Don’t try to teach pigs to sing: it wastes your time and leaves you feeling dirty, while the pigs are left grunting in the muck at the end, still incapable of singing, and probably rather put out too.

So yes, what happened?

Well, as you’ll probably know, the rather minor amendment to UK abortion law that Nadine Dorries and Frank Fields are proposing has led to an awful lot of shouting. Pro-life people have made vastly exaggerated claims for what the amendment might achieve, and Pro-choice ones have been screaming about a sinister Pro-life conspiracy. The reality is that the proposal is very minor, and even if it passes, which it probably won’t, it’s unlikely to make a huge amount of difference.

UK abortion law is not, in principal, particularly liberal; in the main it theoretically only allows for abortion when two doctors sincerely believe that the continuation of a pregnancy would pose a risk to the health of a woman or her existing children. In practice, however, its application has become so loose that the UK effectively has abortion on demand up to a foetal age of 24 weeks, at which point the foetus magically becomes a person. Or something. Anyway, so many British people now widely regard abortion as a basic right that when the Lancet saw fit to comment on the many millions of females being aborted in China, it did so on the simple utilitarian grounds that its unwise to have a society in which for every 100 boys who are born, fewer than 85 girls see daylight.

Yes, that’s the Lancet’s line: it’s not sinful to kill millions of human beings because they’re female. It’s not evil to do so. It’s not immoral to do so. It’s not wrong to do so. It’s just imprudent.

When people fight, it's usually because they're trying to protect what they love...
... rather than because they're trying to destroy what they hate.

To say this is a highly polarised debate is putting it mildly, and I don’t think the situation’s helped by so many people on both sides shouting at each other, unwilling to concede the fact that their opponents are acting from good motives.

The Pro-choice crowd sincerely believe that a woman should have control over her own body, and that she shouldn’t be compelled to bring to term any child within her: they see it as a straightforward matter of women’s rights, and of privacy, as who is anyone else to tell a woman what she should do with her own body? This, I think, makes perfect sense, as long as you’re absolutely certain that the child within her isn’t a human being.

The Pro-life crowd, on the other hand -- and I count myself among them, naturally enough -- tend either to believe that the child in the womb is a human being, or that it might be one, and that it’s wrong to kill something which might be human. Sometimes they have religious reasons for this and sometimes they don't, but what they tend to have in common is a shared belief that one wouldn’t set a house on fire if one thought there was even a possibility that there might be someone inside. In the main, contrary to what a lot of Pro-choice people say, Pro-life people are not out to limit or destroy women’s rights; they just don’t believe that women’s rights trump the universal human right to life. Putting it another way, they don’t think it’s possible for anybody to have a right to choose anything, unless that person is first able to exercise their right to life.

As far as I can see, the discussion isn’t primarily about the rights of the mother. It’s really about two more fundamental things.

• The first is whether human foetuses, embryos, blastocysts, and zygotes are indeed human. Not whether they’re persons, because personhood is obviously a subjective quality, and not whether they can feel pain, as otherwise it’d be okay to kill anybody as long as one first took steps to ensure that they’d not suffer; just whether or not they’re human. 
• The second is whether human life is somehow more special than, say, bovine or algal life. 

I happen to think that the second question goes without saying, which is why I was more bothered by the fact that almost 3,000 human beings were killed in America in the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks than I was by 10,000,000 cattle and sheep having been culled in Britain during the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Outbreak. Granted, I appreciate that I may feel this way just because I am human, but I strongly suspect that we’re the only animals that can have this discussion.

Certainly, my housemates’ cat seems to have no interest in the topic.


Credit where it's due: to His Grace, for a change
Anyway, in the huge war of words that broke out over the topic, two bloggers struck me as being particularly reasonable. One was the pseudonymous Cranmer, whose blog I usually think is worth reading, but with whom I almost always disagree, often profoundly, and who I think I probably wouldn’t like at all in person. Writing on the topic, he noted how ironic and peculiar it was that all the most vocal and prominent objections to the Dorries-Field proposal were directed at Nadine Dorries, with Frank Field’s involvement being wholly sidelined:

‘But it is to be observed that these proposed amendments to the Health Bill also have the support of Labour’s Frank Field MP. He is backing the change, and explains: “I’m anxious that taxpayers’ money is used so that people can have a choice – we are paying for independent counselling and that’s what should be provided.”

But Messrs Harris, Green and Bryant ignore him, and all aim for the woman. It is a despicable Lib-Lab strategy to attack the easy target, because Frank Field is male and enormously respected on all sides of the House. His Grace asked Chris Bryant last night why he was focusing on the fairer sex, but reply came there none. Their attack is sexist; a reaction against conservative feminism which seeks nothing but the right to education. Shame on them.

All across Europe, there is legislation requiring informed consent, and these countries have significantly lower abortion rates. In the UK, there is no requirement in law for women to be informed about the abortion procedure or the alternatives. If you want evidence of the present ‘conveyer belt’ approach to abortion, read this report in the Telegraph, and then thank God there are people like Nadine Dorries and Frank Field in Parliament with the conviction to confront this systematic state slaughter of our children. Oh, and they're both Anglican, by the way.’

He’s absolutely right, and should be commended for having pointed this out. It’s not even that opponents of the Dorries-Field amendment are engaging in ad hominem attacks. They’re engaging in an ad feminem one.


And then there's Blondpidge
The other blogger who’s done impressive work on this topic has been Caroline Farrow, who unlike Cranmer and like me is a Catholic, and therefore, apparently, incapable of thinking for herself.

Or so you would think to judge from the deluge of abuse she’s been subjected to on Twitter over recent days, with a pack of brutes haranguing her in the presumed misconception that R.C. stands for ‘remote-controlled’. I won’t repeat what’s been said to her, other than that at one stage she seemed to have been engaged in simultaneous debates on whether Jesus actually existed, on whether Jesus’ ideas were more important Jesus himself, on whether Catholic teaching allows Catholics to support abortion, on Ireland’s maternal death rate, and on God killing babies in Africa. The language that’s been used towards her has been -- aside from anatomically problematic -- viciously offensive, to a degree that's prompted at least one person to consider giving up on Twitter altogether.

Why has this happened? Well, Caroline initially wrote a blog post in which she sensibly opined that the proposed amendment was unlikely to change things to any significant degree. Contrary to the rhetoric from the loudest voices in the abortion debate, the amendment does not propose a major shake-up to UK abortion law. It merely proposes that if any person considering an abortion decides they would like counselling while thinking the matter over, then there should be a legal obligation on the counsellor, whoever it might be, to be financially independent of the abortion provider. That’s all. As things stand, with counselling provided by Britain’s major abortion providers – though ultimately funded by the taxpayer – the counsellors are by definition subject to a conflict of interest, in that the abortion providers are only paid for abortions which take place, rather than ones which women choose not to have.

As she straightforwardly put it:

‘Before pro-lifers and pro-choicers get over-excited, a little word to the wise. Sorry to disappoint you all, but nothing has changed. The abortion laws and/or access to abortion is not being altered and neither is the time-limit. Mandatory counselling is not being introduced. All that is being suggested is that if a woman requests counselling prior to an abortion, then the counselling should not be provided by someone with a vested financial interest in the outcome of the counselling, but an independent provider. That.is.all.’

Somewhere along the way, in the aftermath of that, and while watching a decidedly disingenuous interview with Evan Harris, who was launching ad feminem attacks at Nadine Dorries and illogically trying to maintain that absence of evidence is identical to evidence of absence, she tweeted a description of Harris as ‘the smiling face of evil’. This, frankly, was an error, and one for which she subsequently apologised, with Harris eventually accepting her apology. Her point was that she regarded abortion as an objectively evil act – not that those who have abortions or indeed who provide them are themselves evil – and that by seeming to defend abortion in the way he was doing, Harris was in fact acting as an apologist for evil.

There’s a separate debate about Harris was defending as a good thing abortion or access to abortion, and about whether there’s any meaningful distinction between the two positions. That’s for another day.

Anyway, in the aftermath of that ill-judged – if theologically and philosophically precise – tweet, the swarm roused, and online nastiness became the order of the day.


Sometimes it's hard to let egregious error go unchallenged...
And eventually I got involved, intruding with uncharacteristic gallantry into a debate about whether or not Jesus historically existed, with one fellow ridiculing Caroline, saying that, ‘There is no contemporary evidence to suggest JC even existed as a human being, whilst there is lots of evidence to suggest that he was/is nothing more than a fictional character.’

Caroline, who’d previously taken the somewhat shakier approach of contrasting what we know of Jesus Christ with what we know of Julius Caesar, and thoroughly fed up with this nonsense, pointed out that there’s a far better historical case for Jesus’ existence than for that of, say, Carthage’s most famous son.

‘Actually, there is lots of contemporary evidence that Hannibal existed,’ sneered her ignorant gadfly, ironically adding, ‘Your grasp of history seems to be lacking. There are Roman writings at the time about Hannibal. Difficult for archeological evidence seeing as the Romans completely wiped Carthage off of the face of the earth as a warning to other states that may challenge them. Contemporary evidence from the Greek historian Silenus, & also from Sosylus of Lacedaemon who wrote a seven volume history...’

‘Years after his death & that is fragmentary,’ retorted Caroline, correctly. ‘Earliest full account is a patriotic one 200 years later. Now goodbye.’

‘You've read this from forums about trying to prove Jesus was real. It's the same old argument that "people believe in Hannibal despite there not being a vast weight of contemporary evidence, so then why not Jesus?" - Well there are huge differences. Not least that there are no claims that Hannibal was anything more than a mortal man and a great general. Not the son of a god.’


I'd like to teach the pigs to sing...
Now, annoyed at how this fellow was already starting to shift his ground from the actual discussion -- whether Jesus had existed, not whether he was divine – in the face of Caroline showing that she had a better handle on the question of Jesus’ historicity than he did, and disgusted at his swaggeringly erroneous claims about our sources for Hannibal's exploits, I weighed in.

‘Earliest complete accounts are those of Livy and Cornelius Nepos, c200 years after invasion,’ I said. ‘No archaeological evidence of even one camp, siege, or battle in Italy despite fifteen-year occupation. No numismatic evidence either despite his father and brother-in-law having minted coins in Spain.'

‘Wrong,’ said the Ignoramus, ‘As well as the sources mentioned, there are also the contemporary writings of Polybius. However, it is only correct to examine the evidence, & even be sceptical about aspects of it. As any good historian should. This in turn also applies to the argument of the existence of Jesus (either as a man or a son of a god) and let's face it, the evidence is poor to say the least.’

I was a bit reassured that he seemed to be willing to stay with the topic of Jesus’ basic historical existence, so felt it might not be a complete waste of time to carry on, by pointing out the partial nature of our earliest source*, who was rather less a contemporary of Hannibal than, well, Paul was of Jesus. ‘None of the sources you mentioned exist now,’ I pointed out. ‘They've all been lost since Antiquity. Polybius started writing his history in the mid-160s and was still writing it in the mid-140s, and most of it is lost. Only the first five of his 40 books are intact, the rest existing to a greater or lesser degree in fragmentary form. Putting it bluntly, the ONLY intact part of Polybius about Hannibal deals with events prior to 216BC and was written more than fifty years afterwards. And for what it's worth, he's a really good source.’

‘You Iffy [sic] have missed that you're actually proving my point for me. I'm not saying that Hannibal did exist as described,’ the Cretin countered, while nonetheless not disputing Hannibal’s basic historicity, ‘I'm well aware of the murky history & political advantages of creating such a monster for a man such as Cato (whose records were later to be accepted by some as fact). Only that the history of these historical figures is sketchy at best. Especially that of Jesus (back to the crux, finally). The evidence for his so called existence, as either a man or a son of (a) god, both being very poor.’

‘No, not especially that of Jesus,’ I insisted. ‘Evidence of Jesus is better than for most people in Antiquity.’

Well, The conversation got longer and longer, and more and more convoluted, and at times I got very condescending, infuriated as I was by this fellow’s flaunting of historical factoids and flouting of historical reality and the historical method. It wasn’t among my better moments.

‘Did you really just suggest that no credible historian refutes that Jesus (a man) existed?’, he continued, somewhere along the way. ‘Given the whole Hannibal chat that went on...? There are numerous writings which dispute Jesus having existed as a man. There is no contemporary evidence (we've been over this). And even if a man called Jesus did exist & was crucified by Pilot [sic], then there is nothing to suggest he was in any way the man we have come to *accept* as Jesus. It could have merely been Jesus Smith who lived down the other end of the street.’


Back in the sty...
And that was all yesterday. Today, in my folly, I returned to the fray, vainly hoping to make this fellow see sense. I wasn’t trying to maintain that Jesus was God, or that his miracles were real, or that every single detail in the Gospels can be taken as historically accurate. I was just trying to make the case that the basic structural facts of Jesus’ public life are as historically sound as pretty much anything we know about the ancient world.

‘Ok then, so what is this indisputable evidence that JC did exist in ancient history?’ he asked. ‘Seeing as the earliest written works referring to him were written years after his death, & the gospels which do speak of him all have differing accounts of his lineage, birth, life, etc... All written of course with a pretty obvious agenda.’

I thought it best to direct him to this very old blog post of mine, adopted from my old blog. It deliberately keeps miracles, prophecies, and the whole issue of divinity off the table, simply showing why I believe that the historical evidence is very solid that during the reign of Tiberius an itinerant Jewish preacher by the name of Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem under the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

Before my antagonist read it, he wanted to know whether I was a creationist. I had to press him several times before he would explain why he wanted to know this, with him eventually saying that he felt it was important to know how literally I take my religion. This despite the fact that creationism isn’t in any sense doctrinal in Catholicism, and how you can, if you so wish, look back at Augustine more than 1,600 years ago explaining that there’s no need to read the Genesis creation accounts as being historically literal. And there's the fact that even were I a creationist, I’m still not sure what bearing it would have had on the argument.

And, of course, he wanted to know whether I’m religious, or a Christian in any sense. I am, I said. I wasn’t always, and indeed I was once an ardent atheist, but historical training and a phenomenal amount of reading and thinking compelled me to change my mind.


A Casebook Bigot
Having dismissed what I’d written, both on the historicity of Jesus and on the impact of Constantine on Christianity, as biased by my religious views, he sneered at the idea that I was ever other than a crypto-theist. ‘For such a *learned* man,’ he opined, ‘I doubt that you were ever a staunch atheist. One cannot look beyond the sheer ridiculousness of religion, all religions, and the evidence, both historical & scientific against such religions.’

And there you see what is, pretty much, the definition of bigotry: not the belief that you are right, but the belief that there is no conceivable way that you could be wrong, or that views contrary to your own could honestly be held by any sane person equipped with intelligence, integrity, and information. At this point I really should have patted this bigoted oaf on the head and walked away, but instead I basically went nuts and started pulling rank in the pettiest of ways. It really wasn’t a good moment, and I am rather embarrassed about it.

‘The fact remains,’ said the vociferous buffoon, ‘despite you looking to attack me & change the subject, that you believe in the super-natural.’

My belief in God had never been the subject of the debate, and so I pointed out that I had never sought to change the subject, linking to the original posts where I’d intervened, saying that I had only ever been arguing that the basic historical evidence for the existence of Jesus was something that’s as demonstrable as anything in ancient history. If anyone had tried to change the subject, it had been himself.

‘The point being,’ he said, shamelessly ignoring how I’d shown him as being guilty of that very thing of which he’d accused me, ‘the only evidence you have given are the gospels, which I'm sorry but cannot be taken as accurately reliable historical sources. The fact that you state that you are a Catholic, albeit one who picks & chooses the specific parts of his religion in which to believe, shows that despite your self-confessed credentials, your bias shall always lean towards trying to prove in the affirmative.’

‘If you make fantastical claims,’ he added, ‘you'd better have some bloody good proof.’

‘My claim is that a man existed,' I said, thinking that wasn't a particularly fantastical claim. ‘That's all I've been arguing for. Miracles etc are a separate debate.’

And then we were off again, with him saying, ‘And it is in your interests to try & prove the man existed. Again, with the only real evidence you have put forward being the gospels. Those bastardised, plagiarised, contradictionry [sic] gospels...’

It wasn’t long after that that I gave up, and I think the other fellow’s done so too. What’s annoying me most about the discussion at this stage is the complete failure to engage with the main aspects of my blog post on the historicity of Jesus. It was most certainly was not the case, despite my antagonist having said so twice, that the only real evidence I had put forward had been the Gospels.


It's worth applying Occam's Razor to this...
The Gospels do have historical value, and they really weren’t written that long after the Crucifixion; even if they were written around 70 AD, and I think they predate that by five to fifteen years, that’d still mean they were no further removed from the Crucifixion than we are from Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War.

More importantly, though, the key structural facts of Jesus’ public life are all referred to in Paul’s letters, the earliest of which was written, in all probability, within sixteen to eighteen years of the Crucifixion. To put that into context, remember the mid-nineties? John Major was Prime Minister, John Bruton was Taoiseach, Bill Clinton was President, Boris Yeltsin was drunk, Toy Story was in the cinema, Brian Cox was playing keyboard in a not particularly good band, and a rash of young Manchester United players were starting to replace the stalwarts of an English team that had failed to qualify for the World Cup. The Pauline letters – not the Gospels -- are the earliest documentary testimony we have to Jesus’ existence. Any attempt to discuss the matter of Jesus’ historicity without engaging with this fact must be recognised as ignorant, foolish, or dishonest.

What’s more, Paul’s letters are addressed to people who are already aware of the basic facts of Jesus’ life, and evidently more besides. Indeed, it’s clear from the letters that lots of people had been aware of these basic facts since at least the mid-thirties, when Paul was persecuting Christians. This introduces the second important set of data that points to Jesus having existed, this being the wide-ranging testimony to the existence of the Church, this Church clearly dating back to the immediate aftermath of the Crucifixion. It’s disingenuous to claim to be engaging with the question of Jesus’ existence if you’re not willing and able to argue a plausible alternative case, allowing for all the evidence, for where the Church came from.

Finally you have the fact of people other than Christians testifying to the existence of the Church during its early history, these including such opponents of Christianity as: Josephus, a Jewish aristocrat and rebel leader who became a historian in Rome; Tacitus, a Roman senator and historian; Suetonius, a Roman imperial official who served as director of the imperial archives and as secretary to the emperor; Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor; Trajan, a Roman emperor; and Celsus, a Greek philosopher who wrote the earliest known polemic against Christianity.

Not one of these seems to have disputed for one moment that Jesus was a Jew who had been crucified in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, and whose followers took to worshipping him as a god. Given how at least some of these would have had access to records of executions enacted in the name of Rome, I think it’s safe to say that had Jesus not existed, it would have been very easy for his existence to have been contested. And yet as far as we can see, that never happened.

Any attempt to argue that Jesus didn't exist has to explain away documents about him written within twenty years of the Crucifixion for an audience that was clearly familiar with his story, the existence of a Christian Church from the mid-thirties onwards under the leadership of people who were willing to die for things they claimed to have witnessed, and the fact that none of the opponents of this Church ever seems to have argued that Jesus had indeed been a real person.

I'm not saying that Jesus was God. I believe that too, of course, but that's a separate debate. I'm just saying, here, that he was Man. Nobody in Antiquity ever seems to have challenged this. It's only modern fools who do that.

__________________________________________________________________
* For the record, we have enough of Polybius' Histories to fill six volumes of the Loeb series of Classical texts. He talks about a lot of stuff -- wars in Greece and a whole series of Roman wars around the Mediterranean. What he says about Hannibal is scattered through the first four volumes of the series. The intact book III, in volume two of the set, takes Hannibal as far as his greatest victory, that being at Cannae. Beyond that, however, the text starts to fall apart, such that whereas volumes one and two of the set contain two full books on the Histories each, volume three contains a full book and three fragmentary books, and volume four -- the Hannibalic content of which takes us as far as Hannibal's defeat at Zama -- contains seven fragmentary books.

Polybius seems to have started writing in the mid-160s BC, about seventeen years after Hannibal's death in obscurity in Bithynia on the shores of the Black Sea. This, curiously enough,  is pretty much exactly the same length of time that transpired between the Crucifixion of Jesus and Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians.

Atheist Buses and Religious Labels

Just reading the Guardian this morning I saw that the Atheist Bus campaign is moving to its second -- and apparently final -- phase. You remember the campaign, of course, where buses were festooned with large ads declaring 'There's probably no God. No stop worrying and enjoy your life.' I know, that slogan could do with a lot of unpacking, but then so could all the ones for, say, the Alpha Course, so I'll let it lie for now.

Anyway, phase two is, I gather, intended mainly as an attack on Faith schools, and is based around the slogan, 'Please don't label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself.' Apparently adults shouldn't tell children what to think; the irony of the slogan, supposedly voiced by a child, almost certainly being composed by an adult is difficult to ignore.

It seems to me that there are two major problems with this campaign, the first of which is that I'm not convinced its authors actually understand what religion is.

Take a look at the posters, and look at all the labels that the poster's backers have cited: Agnostic Child, Atheist Child, Scientologist Child, Mormon Child, Jehovah's Witness Child, Buddhist Child, Catholic Child, Protestant Child, Zoroastrian Child, Muslim Child, Sikh Child, Post-Modernist Child, Humanist Child, Anarchist Child, Libertarian Child, Conservative Child, Socialist Child, Capitalist Child, Marxist Child...

I think the point being made here is that all of these are, in the views of the poster's backers, belief systems, and that it's abhorrent to label children with beliefs held by their parents. Presumably if there were space we'd see such terms as Jewish Child, Hindu Child, Orthodox Child, Bahá'í Child, Wiccan Child, Rastafarian Child, Animist Child, Shintoist Child, Nationalist Child, Unionist Child, Fascist Child, Feminist Child, Pacifist Child, Modernist Child, Social Darwinist Child, Objectivist Child, Existentialist Child, Logical Positivist Child, and so forth.

The first questions we need to ask when looking at this sort of litany of belief-systems are whether it's a valid list, and where this whole anti-labelling mission comes from.


Because It's Always Fun to Quote Richard Dawkins
The intellectual underpinnings, and I use that phrase generously, of this thesis seem to lie in chapter nine of Professor Dawkins' lazy and ignorant The God Delusion. If I may quote:

'To put it another way, the idea that baptizing an unknowing, uncomprehending child can change him from one religion to another at a stroke seems absurd -- but it is surely not more absurd than labelling a tiny child as belonging to any particular religion in the first place. . . Even without physical abduction, isn't it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about? . . . Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place. . . I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life, and of morals. The very sound of the phrase "Christian child" or "Muslim child" should grate like fingernails on a blackboard. . . Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them -- "Catholic child", "Protestant child", "Jewish child", "Muslim child", etc. -- although no comparable labels: no conservative children, no liberal children, no Republican children, no Democrat children. Please, please raise your consciousness about this, and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening. A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents.'

Sometimes Children Can See Shades of Grey...
Where do you start with this? Well, back when I started secondary school, my very first religion class began, once we'd settled down, with an open question to the class from our teacher: 'Can anyone here tell me what the word 'religion' means?' After an awkward silence, I put up a tentative hand, and ventured, 'The belief in and worship of a deity or deities.' That was chalked up on the board, and the discussion began.

Now, I'm not saying I'd quite stick with that definition now, but I think my twelve-year-old self was onto something significant in identifying religion as requiring both belief and worship. As a rule, religion's a matter of both creed and cult; it's about what you do just as much as it is what you think.

This, I think, is why people who describe atheism as a religion are essentially wrong; atheism may be a belief system, but it generally lacks a cultic element, save in regimes where race, nation, state, class, party, leader, or something else is deified.

And therein lies a huge part of the problem with this thesis. Religion is only partly about what you think, and is very much about what you do, whereas political ideologies and philosophical stances are at heart simply about what you think. As such, I think it's pretty easy to make the case that it's reasonable to describe children as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and so forth, in a way that it's not reasonable to describe them as Conservative, Marxist, or Postmodernist.

In short, Dawkins' thesis, to which his acolytes and fellow-travellers have so unthinkingly signed up, is not so much incorrect as it is simply invalid. It's not even that he's comparing apples and oranges; he's comparing apples and tractors.


Post-Protestant Atheism in Action
Why might he be doing this? Well, part of the problem is that Professor Dawkins clearly retains a somewhat Protestant worldview; by his own terms a cultural Christian, he is, rather like Philip Pullman, an Anglican Atheist. Indeed, in the tail-end of his God Delusion chapter on 'religion as child abuse' he bangs on for a handful of pages about how great the King James Bible is, and how we should all be familiar with it as a literary reservoir.

Until the Printing Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, as Karen Armstrong has pointed out, religion was usually at least as much about orthopraxy as it was about orthodoxy. It was about doing -- whether in terms of rituals or ethics -- at least as much as it was about believing.

Religion changed, at least in Europe and the West, after Luther posted his theses and issued his battle-cries of 'faith alone' and 'scripture alone'. Out went prayers for the dead, clerical celibacy, pilgrimages, penance, Our Lord's command to commemorate him in the mass, and active participation in other sacraments as visible rites that make present divine grace. St James's emphasis on good works and compassion was nudged aside, and for many people the definition of a good Christian became someone who believed in Jesus and who read his or her Bible.

It's this essentially Protestant understanding of Christianity that nestles in the mind of Professor Dawkins, and indeed that leads blowhards like Christopher Hitchens to limit the term Christian to those who have read the New Testament, a criterion that would exclude most of history's Christians, most notably the Apostles.


Practising, not Professing
Religion, then, can be a practical thing, and this surely lies at the heart of the idea that a child who goes to Mass can be fairly described as a Catholic child, or a child who observes the Sabbath can be no less accurately described as a Jewish child, or a child who prays facing Mecca five times a day can be with equally good reason be described as a Muslim child. I can't help but think of how bemused the then unitarian G.K. Chesterton used to be when first getting to know the woman who would eventually become his wife:

'She practised gardening; in that curious Cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident, brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more puzzling than professing it.'

This incomprehension surely lies behind Professor Dawkins' failure to grasp that terms such as 'Catholic child' and 'Jewish child' can be meaningful in a way that 'Marxist child' and 'Logical Positivist child' can not.


Not Just What You Do... But What You Are
Betraying his prejudices most thoroughly, though, is his dismissal to understand the Catholic -- and indeed Orthodox -- understanding of what happens at Baptism. Here he is:

'It was a central part of the Roman Catholic belief-system that, once a child had been baptized, however informally and clandestinely, that child was irrevocably transformed into a Christian. . . Amazingly, for a rite that could have such monumental significance for a whole extended family, the Catholic Church allowed (and still allows) anybody to baptize anybody else. The baptizer doesn't have to be a priest. Neither the child, nor the parents, nor anybody else has to consent to the baptism. Nothing need be signed. Nothing need be officially witnessed. All that is necessary is a splash of water, a few words, a helpless child, and a superstitious and catechistically brainwashed babysitter. . . the idea that baptizing an unknowing, uncomprehending child can change him from one religion to another seems absurd.'

Leaving aside his apparent failure to grasp that extraordinary baptisms ought only to be performed in situations of dire necessity, and his evident ignorance that the Church only regards such baptisms as efficacious if performed by someone who genuinely intends to perform what the Church performs when administering the sacrament, what's striking here is that he sees baptism as simply something that changes someone from one religion to another.

For Dawkins, as we've seen religions are simply belief-systems, and if we define them as such then it goes without saying that baptism has no real effect whatsoever: it's a washing of the head, not of the brain! The thing is, though, that they're rather more than that.

Catholics and Orthodox Christians see baptism as a sacrament that enacts an ontological change in the recipient. It is a mechanism by which, in the words of the Catechism, 'we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers into her mission.'

Baptism, then is a process of divine adoption, wherein we are reborn as sons of God, and as part of the Church that is the body of Christ. The word 'Christian', in its original form, basically means someone who belongs to Christ. It has, in its essential form, surprisingly little to do with belief. This shouldn't be surprising, given Christianity's Jewish ancestry. After all, what is a Jew?

'A Jew is any person whose mother was a Jew or any person who has gone through the formal process of conversion to Judaism. It is important to note that being a Jew has nothing to do with what you believe or what you do. A person born to non-Jewish parents who has not undergone the formal process of conversion but who believes everything that Orthodox Jews believe and observes every law and custom of Judaism is still a non-Jew, even in the eyes of the most liberal movements of Judaism, and a person born to a Jewish mother who is an atheist and never practices the Jewish religion is still a Jew, even in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox.'

Professor Dawkins, who has some interesting opinions about Jews, would doubtless dismiss this as nonsense, but that doesn't the change the fact that the traditional definition of Jewishness relates to what one is, rather than what one does, let alone what one thinks.

So much for labelling, anyway. That leaves the second big question, which concerns whether parents should be free to educate their children in accordance with their beliefs, or whether they should be compelled to educate them in accordance with, say, those of Professor Dawkins. I'll get into that in a day or two.

More things in Heaven and Earth...

I mentioned a week or so back how, the subject of the impending canonisation of Cardinal Newman coming up, some friends of mine expressed some unease at there being a miracle attributed to him. I can't say I blame them, as if you hold to a wholly materialist understanding of the Universe, then miracles are, by their very nature, impossible.

C.S. Lewis puts it pretty well in 'Miracles', a 1942 essay which seems to have been the seed that later grew into his book of the same name:

The experience of a miracle in fact requires two conditions. First we must believe in a normal stability of nature, which means we must recognise that the data offered by our sense recur in regular patterns. Secondly, we must believe in some reality beyond nature. When both beliefs are held, and not till then, we can approach with an open mind the various reports which claim that this super- or extra-natural reality has sometimes invaded and disturbed the sensuous content of space and time which make our 'natural' world. . .

If we frankly accept this position and then turn to the evidence, we find, of course, that accounts of the supernatural meet us on every side. History is full of them -- often in the same documents which we accept wherever they do not report miracles. Respectable missionaries report them not infrequently. The whole Church of Rome claims their continued occurence. Intimate conversation elicits from almost every acquaintance at least one episode in his life which is what he would call 'queer' or 'rum'. No doubt most stories of miracles are unreliable; but then, as anyone can see by reading the papers, so are most stories of all events.

Each story must be taken on its merits: what one must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation. Thus you may believe in the Mons Angels because you cannot find a sufficient number of sensible people who say they saw them. But if you found a sufficient number, it would, in my view, be unreasonable to explain this by collective hallucination. For we know enough of psychology to know that spontaneous unanimity in hallucination is very improbable, and we do not know enough of the supernatural to know that a manifestation of angels is equally improbable. The supernatural theory is the less improbable of the two.

When the Old Testament says that Sennacherib's invasion was stopped by angels (2 Kings 19:35), and Herodotus says it was stopped by a lot of mice who came and ate up all the bowstrings of his army (Hdt. 2.141), an open-minded man will be on the side of the angels. Unless you start by begging the question, there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in the existence of angels or in the action ascribed to them. But mice just don't do these things.

Granted, the absurdity of Herodotus' tale shouldn't lead us to automatically assume that the Biblical narrative is historically correct, but Lewis's basic point is sound: we can be absolutely confident that whatever thwarted the Assyrian invasion, it wasn't an overnight assault by a swarm of field-mice on their quivers, bowstrings, and shield-handles; we cannot be quite so confident about the behaviour of angels!

The first question, really, concerns whose side we take, Hamlet's or Horatio's. You know the line, of course: 'there are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosphy'. If you accept that, than all manner of things can fall into place.

I found myself pondering this quite a bit last April, when the papers were awash with stories of the curing of Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre. It's worth reading Matthew Parris's response to this:

During Holy Week we are treated to a variety of decent-sounding people in print and on the airwaves explaining that religion — or “faith” as they now prefer to call it — is basically all about shared moral values, making the world a better place and gaining a proper sense of awe at life’s mystery. We are given to understand that the great world religions are all really fumbling towards the same truth.

And by doveish voices we are urged to join what is essentially a campaign for increasing the amount of goodness in the world. Who could be against that? Such faith sounds so reasonable. Churlish nonbelievers like me are made to feel it is we who are being arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded. How can we be so sure? And then this. A nun has apparently been cured of Parkinson’s disease through writing the name of John Paul II on a piece of paper.

Ecclesiastical authorities in the Roman Catholic Church have been investigating the alleged miracle, interviewing neurologists, graphologists, psychiatrists and medical experts. The diocese of Aix-en-Provence is now satisfied that it has a putative supernatural intervention on its hands, and this week submitted its dossier to Pope Benedict XVI, who may declare an official miracle and begin procedures for making the late Pope a saint . . .

Where are you, intelligent Christians? Where is your voice, your righteous anger? Where is your honest contempt for this nonsense? Take that claimed recent miracle, for instance. I know lots of nice, clever Catholics — friends, thoughtful men and women, people of depth and subtlety, people of some delicacy, people who would surely cringe at the excesses of Lourdes. Do they believe that John Paul II may have cured this nun from beyond the grave?

Where are the shouts of self-respecting bishops and cardinal-archbishops, raised against the woeful confusion of faith with superstition? I have a theory about their reticence. I think they know this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter. And they may be right. But what a melancholy conclusion: that the thinking parts of a religion should be almost extraneous to what moves it; far from the core; just a little fastidious shudder; a wink exchanged between the occupants of the reserved pews.

There is, of course, an alternative: that they too believe the nonsense; that the Prime Minister’s wife (and maybe the Prime Minister), and the Communities Secretary, and the Chancellor of Oxford University and former Governor of Hong Kong — not to mention several of my colleagues on these pages in The Times — honestly entertain the possibility that from beyond the grave the late Pope John Paul II interceded with God to cause a woman to be cured of Parkinson’s disease.

You are living, dear reader, at a watershed in human history. This is the century during which, after 2,000 years of what has been a pretty bloody marriage, faith and reason must agree to part, citing irreconcilable differences . . .

“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.

Well, maybe He didn't, though if Mr Parris really accepts the possibility that there's a He who didn't do this, I'm surprised he's so closed to the possibility that this same He might have done so had he so wished. After all, Parris hasn't answered the question he poses. How can he be sure? That demands an explanation of why he is so certain, and he doesn't provide one. Instead he just shouts louder. Assertion is, however, no substitute for argument.

Let's look at the facts, as we know them. Back in 2001, a French nun was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and over time her symptoms worsened so that she could barely drive, walk, or write. By 2005, she could barely move the left side of her body at all, could hardly sleep for the pain, and could only write in an illegible scrawl. She couldn't bring herself to watch the aged John Paul II on television, trembling with Parkinson's himself. Her illness worsened after his death, and her order prayed for his intercession on her behalf. Then, one evening, she apparently heard a voice telling to take a pen and to write the name of the late pope. She did so, and was amazed at how her handwriting was clear and legible. She slept then, and woke the next day, at about half past four on the morning of 3 June 2005. She was cured.

I'm not saying that there's not another explanation for this, but it seems that nobody's got one. The whole scenario seems to be medically inexplicable. It really looks as though a miracle took place, and this possibility -- despite Parris's shouting -- can't be dismissed out of hand except on grounds of prejudice. Mark Shea tore into this impressively at the time, quoting extensively from chapter nine of Chesterton's Orthodoxy to do so. It's worth a read.

I've no idea what the miracle being associated with Newman is, by the way.

Christopher Hitchens: Self-Satisfied Sophist?

I'm rather fond of On Faith, the Washington Post's forum for discussing religion; at the moment, as well as the usual discussion topic, you can watch a fairly substantial interview with Christopher Hitchens, who explains at some length his deep-seated opposition to religion, his contempt for religion and religious people, why he believes Islam in particular to be deeply dangerous, and why for all that he believes in the importance of religious education, even going so far as to opine that creationism should be taught in schools, albeit not -- rightly -- in science classes.

It's fascinating to watch, not least to marvel at how gifted a speaker Hitchens is: he comes across as urbane, charming, witty, and supremely articulate, all of which serves to marvellously mask his sophistry. Yes, sophistry. It's worth listening to him very carefully, because if you do it'll not take long before you start to realise how flimsy his arguments really are.

In explaining his atheism, he cites Paschal's observation that some people are simply unable to believe in God. Having done that he casually treats this observation as a scientific fact -- he says that perhaps 10 or 11 per cent of people are incapable of religious belief. I would love to know what he's talking about here. Is he claiming that some people simply lack cytosine at a particular spot in VMAT2, the so-called 'God gene', the discovery of which was so proudly trumpeted two or three years back? Even if this was what he had in mind, it wouldn't prove anything: the absolute most that can be said about Dean Hamer's research into this 'God gene' is that it demonstrates that some people are biologically inclined to be more 'spiritual' that others. It's entirely possible to believe in God in some sense, with this belief being wholly rooted in reason, without being remotely spiritual. Certainly the Catholic Church -- of which half of all the world's Christians are members -- has always maintained that the act of faith has its seat in the intellect, rather than the emotions.

Still, Hitchens claims that he didn't so much become an atheist as realise that he was one. He apparently discovered this when very young; he tells a story of a teacher trying to persuade him of how the existence of God could be demonstrated from how our world surrounds us in greenery, the perfect colour for putting us at our ease. In essence, she was using a version of the argument from design. Hitchens intuitively knew that this was codswallop, that surely the causal relationship was the other way around!

It's a fair point, the argument from design is a very easy target, the ropeyness of which has enabled Richard Dawkins to rake in heaps of cash over the years. As Ronald Knox so well demonstrates both in The Belief of Catholics, and in his sermon 'The Cross-Word of Creation' -- published in 1927 and 1942 respectively -- the argument from design is really no more than a foolish and dangerous corruption of the argument from order. As he explains in the latter piece, which reads better as an essay than I'm sure it ever sounded as a sermon, the argument from order, as distorted into the argument from design is:

'on the whole, the stupid man's argument [...] also it is the argument which is most discussed nowadays, partly for the same reason, and partly because the scientific materialists are always discovering, every fifty years or so, that they have now found a way of giving it its death-blow. [...] I don't believe that St Thomas meant to use the argument from design when he gave his fifth proof. I don't think what impressed St Thomas was the fact that everything conspires together for a beneficient purpose; what impressed him was the fact that things conspire together at all.'

Words mean what I SAY they mean...
Hitchens's story of his childhood epiphany is an interesting one, and certainly explains where he's coming from in the main, but I cannot see any explanation for his nonsensical endeavours to prove that agnostics are really atheists:

'If you say you don't believe, which is what an agnostic has to say, because an agnostic says "I can't decide," well, it means you don't believe in God, otherwise you would have decided. Well, if you don't believe, you're an atheist. Q.E.D.'

Rot, of course, and there's no justification for his smug smirk after coming out with such tosh. It's not that all those who don't believe in God are atheists -- if that were the case then babies, unconscious people, dogs, and trees would probably all qualify as atheists. Atheists are not those who don't believe there is a God; atheists are those who do believe there isn't a God! Atheism is a positive belief in a negative, not a negative belief in a positive! Strictly speaking, what we colloquially call 'atheism' is what philosophers more accurately refer to as naturalism or materialism.

Actually, Hitchens goes even further than claiming that all agnostics are actually atheists, saying that he doesn't believe that anyone is really religious, that he's sure that nobody believes in a personal God, led alone an interventionist one, they just pretend to, or wish they could. He can believe what he wants on that, of course, since none of us really knows what goes on in anyone else's head; it's when he twists logic to argue that agnostics are really atheists by definition that I get annoyed.

He gets away with a lot in this interview purely by redefining terms to suit himself, as it happens, perhaps most strikingly when the interviewer doesn't pick him up for the absurd claim -- uttered as an aside to a discussion of the tale of the Good Samaritan -- that none of Jesus' disciples could have been Christians becauses they hadn't read the New Testament!

For Hitchens then, it would seem that being a Christian demands both that you should be able to read and that you should have read the New Testament. This is ludicrous, and denies the title of Christian to the vast majority of Christians throughout history, not least all those who lived before the New Testament was effectively canonised by the Church of the Fourth Century. The term 'Christian' simply means 'follower of Christ' -- or, more literally 'one who belongs to Christ', and it is in that context that the New Testament records the term as having first been used at Antioch, and that St Ignatius of Antioch uses the term of himself a few decades later, the first Christian we have a record of so doing.


Religion is apparently about pestering your neighbours...
Despite his constant warring on religion and the religious, Hitchens purports to believe Thomas Jefferson had it right when he wrote in 1782 that 'it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.' You might wonder then why he feels a need to be so vociferous about his atheism, but I think he adequately explains it when he says:

'In the last instance the religious person cannot keep to a promise to leave me out of it, because he wouldn't be true to himself -- or herself -- if he said "I'm not going to bother you with what I think," because that's watching me go to Hell, and how can a friend do that?'

It explains why he does what he does; it doesn't for a moment mean that the explanation is correct. He's ignoring the fact that religious friends might pray for him, unbeknownst to him; granted, he wouldn't value this, but that wouldn't obviate its righteousness in his friends' eyes.

Further, aside from what he ignores, he's assuming that evangelism must be a vocal and intrusive thing. It certainly can be that, but it need be nothing of the sort, and can simply take the form of evangelizing by example, something which is often rather more effective than just spouting Scripture at people: think of the famous exhortation so often attributed to St Francis of Assisi that we should 'preach always, and when necessary use words.'


One Emperor is much the same as another...
Part of problem with Hitchens is that he's so confident in what he says in that marvellously rich voice that unless you're paying very careful attention you're liable to simply trust him when he starts reeling off stuff about religion arising at a time when people didn't know the earth was round, or when people thought the earth was about 6,000 years old, or when he comes out with this:

'In a way the first efforts at philosophy are made by the schoolmen, if you like, by people who were in holy orders. Apparently no one else was allowed to practise it after the Christian empire closed the schools of philosophy in Greece after Justinian made Christianity the official religion of the empire. After that happened, philosophy was a branch of religion.'

Yes, of course he's right to say that during the medieval period philosophy was pretty much studied solely by monks and friars; but then, it's hard to think of anything in the Middle Ages that wasn't studied more of less exclusively by monks and friars! And yes, it's obvious that when he says 'the first efforts at philosophy' he means 'the first modern efforts at philosophy', so he shouldn't really be picked up on for that, but as for the rest of it?

It was Theodosius -- not Justinian -- who in the late Fourth Century made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. Justinian's closing of the Athenian schools -- part of a general programme to suppress religions other than orthodox Christianity -- didn't take place until 529 AD, so a good century and a half after Theodosius had decreed Christianity the state religion. It's worth pointing out that this isn't an insignificant bit of accidental conflation: for all that Justinian called his empire a Roman empire, his was really that which history remembers as the Byzantine empire. Despite the conquests of his general Belisarius in Italy and Africa, Justinian's imperium consisted of little more than Asia Minor, the Balkans, the Levant, and the newly reconquered Italy and North Africa. His successors' empire rarely stretched far beyond Asia Minor itself.

As such, Hitchens' is massively overplaying the importance of the closing of the Athenian schools; it had a massive effect on Athens, of course, reducing the city to provincial insignificance, but it's difficult to see how he could maintain that this had a massive effect on philosophical thought in the successor kingdoms of the West. They had other concerns.


Morality and monkeys...
I was glad to see him addressing the issue of morality in the interview, although that part of the discussion is cluttered with straw men and red herrings, not least in his laughable attempt to equate social solidarity with morality.

He claims that animals have a sense of social solidarity, and that we have it innately, simply by virtue of being primates: the only thing that's special about us, he insists, is that we're the only animals that think so highly of ourselves that we think we must have got our sense of morality from something divine!

That's fighting talk, but it's not as potent as it sounds: shouldn't he have stopped that sentence when he reached the word 'think'? After all, does he think animals are self-conscious, or that if they are that they are self-conscious but humble, recognising their own sense of social solidarity but thinking, well, it's just like blood, isn't it? It's just one of those things that goes with being alive and moving around?

So for Christopher Hitchens, then, morality is innate; the Golden Rule, as classically formulated by -- he says -- Confucius, is something which most people are born knowing. It's simply common sense that you should treat others as you would have them treat you, unless, I suppose, you're in a position of authority in a University.

I think he's right, up to a point. The Golden Rule is indeed common sense. Everyone knows that it's nice to be nice. But is it more than that? Is it good to be nice? What do we mean when we say things are good? Aren't we assuming that there is a standard of goodness by which things are judged? Because if there isn't, if there isn't an objective morality, then the Golden Rule really is reduced to a trite observation that it's nice to be nice.

It is, of course, but that doesn't offer any answers to someone in a position of power, who knows that he can do whatever he likes to people, happy in the conviction that they will never be able to do the same to him. You can imagine the scene, I'm sure:

'But sire, you shouldn't burn down villages because the people haven't paid their taxes!'
'And why not?'
'Well, how would you like it if they came and burned down your castle?'
'Is that likely to happen?'
'Well, no...'
'So, your point is?'
'Um.'

This what happens when we confuse morality in the sense of a 'moral law' with morality as understood as meaning our moral perceptions, or even our our moral habits. There may be no 'moral law', of course, but if there is, then this is a fact with consequences.

The other aspect to this issue is whether or not belief in God inherently renders religious people more moral than atheists and agnostics. I hate when people say things like this, wheeling out nonsense about people being religious as grounds for assuming that they're to be trusted, as though atheists are somehow less trustworthy by virtue of their beliefs. It's offensive, but more importantly it's blatantly wrong and something to which no thoughtful religious people would subscribe. For all that, though, it's a favourite straw man for the likes of Hitchens to tear to pieces, presumably because it's so ridiculous a claim. He surely can't be so stupid as to believe that religious people, as a rule, believe this.

His favourite way of shredding this straw man is to ask a question, a question to which he says he has never received a satisfactory answer:

'Can you name a moral action or a moral statement made by somebody who's a believer that couldn't have been made by a nonbeliever or uttered by one?'

Apparently nobody has ever been able to answer this. He says somebody once ventured 'exorcism' but he said that that wouldn't count; I'm not entirely sure why, but even if that's excluded I can still think of two answers,bpth of which I suspect Christopher H would rule both out of bounds.

One is petitionary prayer. Only a religious person can pray for something to happen -- or at any rate for his or her will to be united with that of God in willing that something should happen. And assuming that what's being prayed for is something good for somebody else, then surely this constitutes a moral action. Granted, Hitchens might consider it an action devoid of efficacy, but surely he'd have to recognise it as a moral action nonetheless. Its inspiration and motive would have been wholly good, and its execution would have been a moral action that no atheist could perform.

And what of prayers of thanks, and prayers of worship? Isn't the expression of gratitude a moral act? And yet who can an atheist thank for Creation itself? Hitchens might rave about the majesty of the Universe, he might talk about how humbled by it he feels and about how awed he is by its beauty, but assuming that there is a Creator, he can never thank Him.

Indeed, you might wonder about societies beyond our own, where they have different concepts of morality than us, including a higher sense of the sacred. There are probably loads of moral things they could do, by their lights, that atheists could never do. Of course, Hitchens would probably rule these out of court as not matching his definition of 'morality', but that merely opens the question of what is morality, because for most people in the world morality goes beyond 'it's nice to be nice'.

That's just me thinking. I'm sure you can do better.

Even if he wasn't God, he was certainly a man...

This week's Catholic Herald has a peculiar story from Italy on the front page. It seems that three years back an Italian priest, Father Enrico Righi, used his parish newsletter to denounce Luigi Cascioli, a onetime seminarian and author of The Fable of Christ, for having questioned the existence of Jesus. Cascioli began legal proceedings soon afterwards, demanding that the priest provide historical proof of the existence of Jesus, and though Judge Gaetano Mautone refused to hear the case, Cascioli has since been backed by Italy's Court of Appeal, which agreed that Righi was 'abusing popular credibility'. Mautone has since ordered that Righi appear in court to prove that Jesus existed.

It all seems very peculiar, and I can't help wondering if there's rather more to this than meets the eye. This isn't about whether Jesus was God, or whether he rose from the dead, or whether he walked on water, or was born of a virgin, or was tempted in the wilderness, or healed people or anything so specific. It's simply about whether or not he existed.

And really, as facts go that's about as solid as anything in our knowledge of ancient history.


The trouble with ancient history...
Gore Vidal opens his introduction to his historical novel Creation with the following wonderful anecdote:

'In the stacks of the library of the American Academy on Rome's Janiculum hill, I came face to face with M.I. Finley, whose The World of Odysseus had a great influence on me, not to mention on two generations of classical scholars. He was an American academic who had been driven out of his native land in the 50s when the spirit of Titus Oates was in the land. He settled in England; he became a leading authority on the Greek world of the Fifth Century BC. We praised one another politely. He had liked my Julian while I told him that, for Creation, I was mercilessly borrowing from him. I asked him about one of his colleagues who had written on Zoroaster. Was he reliable? "The best in the field." Finley's great dentures shifted slightly in his mouth. "Of course, he makes most of it up, like the rest of us."'

It's obvious that Finley was being both modest and facetious when he said that, but he nonetheless was making an important point. We don't know nearly as much about Antiquity as we'd like to, and we have to rely to a certain degree on conjecture and educated guesswork in assembling the jigsaw puzzle we have, combining written sources of all sorts with archaeological, numismatic, iconographic, epigraphic, paelographic and other evidence in order to get a picture. It's much easier to do this for public and official figures than it is for people who weren't office-holders. Even then, though, there are serious problems, as you'll see.


I'm Spartacus! No, I'm Spartacus!
If you ask anybody nowadays to name a few major figures from ancient history, there are a handful of names you'd expect to hear, most of them because they've been in films. Typically they're kings and generals and so forth, and among that depressingly short list one name that's likely to pop up is Spartacus. The subject of what's still surely by some distance the best sword-and-sandal film, Spartacus is unique among Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Nero, Marcus Aurelius, and all those other lads in not having been a formal office-holder. He was a gladiator who escaped, who led a rebellion that threatened the Roman state, and who was eventually killed in the suppression of the rebellion.

This all happened between 73 and 71 BC. Would you like to know our main sources for these cataclysmic events? I have to warn you: they're on the scanty side.

There are literally no more than a couple of fleeting references to Spartacus in the few fragments we have of Sallust's Histories, written just a few decades after the Spartacist revolt, but other than that we basically have to rely on Plutarch's Life of Crassus, written about 100 AD, and Appian's Civil Wars, written about 150 AD. Yes, almost everything we know about Spartacus is based on the writings of two people writing a couple of decades either side of the two hundredth anniversary of Spartacus' death. And as far as I can tell we have no physical evidence whatsoever for Spartacus himself, the Third Servile War, or Crassus' mass crucifixion of six thousand rebellious slaves along the Appian Way.

Despite this paucity of evidence, which is such that his historical existence has to be recognised as a damn sight less well attested than that of Christ, I've yet to hear even one ancient historian ever claim that Spartacus didn't exist.

What of 'official' figures, though? The kind of people who you'd expect to be well-attested? Kings and consuls and commanders and so forth?

Take Julius Caesar, for instance, the other JC...
Caesar's probably the most famous figure of Antiquity, with the exception of Christ, and is someone whose existence is attested through a large amount of written evidence. Most of it, however, with a couple of key exceptions, was written a century or more after Caesar's death, and it's survived to this day in the form a handful of manuscripts dating from many centuries after the events they describe.

His nose is more impressive in Asterix comics

Caesar was assassinated in the middle of the first century BC, but Lucan's Pharsalia was written in the middle of the first century AD, the short biographies of Caesar by Plutarch and Suetonius were written just as the first century AD ended and the second began, and Appian wrote a few decades later, almost two hundred years after Caesar's death. There are bits and pieces of evidence before them, of course, but in the main, aside from these late narratives, the real meat of our written evidence of Caesar's life comes down to two things -- Caesar's own memoirs, and Cicero's speeches and letters. These, one would think, are absolutely contemporary, and thus wholly reliable. Except for when the documents' respective authors are lying, of course, or are unconsciously biased, or are just plain wrong.

Except there's a problem, which is that we don't have the original manuscripts of these documents. Indeed, the manuscripts we have are rather late. I'm not sure when the oldest extant collections of Cicero's letters date from, but if you look at the Loeb collection of his letters to his closest friend, you'll see they seem to be drawn from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts, themselves transcribes from older and long-lost collections. The earliest extant manuscript of Caesar's own writings dates from the ninth century, if I remember rightly.

Given how such manuscripts date from many centuries after Caesar's death, it wouldn't be hard for people to make a case that these manuscripts could be forgeries, and that had never been such a person as Julius Caesar. Of course, they'd need to explain the many contemporary coin portraits of him, and statues, and inscriptions, and so forth, but still, if you had a bloody-minded determination to defy reality you could make the case that Julius Caesar had been a fictional -- or heavily fictionalised -- figure.


What I'd do for a contemporary life of Hannibal...
I've spent a lot of time studying Hannibal over the years. I've read dozens upon dozens of books and hundreds of articles about him, and I've read all that Polybius, Livy, Appian, Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch, and other ancient writers have said about him, and I've read a depressing amount about those writers. I've visited the Italian fields where he won his greatest battles, and aside from having flown over two of them, I've wandered along the Ofanto, trudged from Barletta to the hill of Cannae and back, and have walked the northern and eastern shores of Lake Trasimene, as well as visiting the probable sites of the battles of the Ticinus and the Trebbia.

And for all that, I'm painfully aware of how little we know about Carthage's greatest son.

What evidence do we have for the Hannibalic War? We depend, in the main, on Polybius' fragmentary history, which he spent more than twenty years on and started writing almost forty years after Hannibal was defeated at Zama, and on Livy's Augustan account of the war, written about two hundred years after Zama. Nepos wrote just before Livy, and did so in a brief and colourful way of little historical value. Appian wrote a century or so later again, and is far from reliable on the period, notoriously describing a duel between Hannibal and Scipio! Plutarch's Life of Fabius Maximus and Life of Marcellus are roughly contemporary with Appian, written about three hundred years after those Roman heroes fought against Hannibal. We have, basically, nothing contemporary to go on.

Polybius is our best source by far, and only five of his forty books are intact -- these surviving in an eleventh-century manuscript -- and what he says is not infrequently contradicted by Livy.

Sure, there were contemporaries of Hannibal who wrote accounts of his invasion, but barring an occasional snippet, these are all lost: just one fragment of Silenus of Caleacte exists, and while we have a sizeable chunk of a description of a naval battle by Sosylos of Sparta, that battle was fought in Spain, far from Hannibal, and never mentions him. Fabius Pictor exists as mere fragments too, as do Cato the Elder and Lucius Cincius Alimentus. All our contemporary evidence is lost. As an example of how desperate the situation is, a tiny reference to dust in the fragmentary eighth book of Ennius' lost Annales has been tentatively linked by some scholars with Hannibal's greatest victory, which was notorious for the dust that was blown into the Roman eyes. This isn't so much a case of clutching at straws as it is one of clutching at specks of dust...

Almost Certainly Not Hannibal

What's more, not merely is Hannibal's invasion not attested in contemporary written sources, neither have we discovered any physical evidence to support the fact of it having happened. We've yet to come across a tranche of Carthaginian coins in Italy, of the sort that might have been used to pay Hannibal's mercenaries. Indeed, what numismatic evidence there is provides no support for his existence at all: we have coins, minted in Spain, bearing the image of his father and of his brother-in-law, but as yet nobody has ever found a coin portrait that can be confidently identified as Hannibal. The famous sculpture of him found in Capua, currently in the Quirinal Palace in Rome, is generally regarded as having been made centuries after his death.

Perhaps most remarkably, despite Hannibal having marauded his way around the Roman countryside for fifteen years, with Roman armies shadowing him and occasionally fighting against him as he went, we have no archaeological evidence of even one Roman or Carthaginian camp from the period, no archaeological evidence of any battles having been fought, and no archaeological evidence of towns having been ransacked. There was a time when my life would have been made a lot easier if somebody had found a big pile of spearheads with 'made in Carthage' stamped on them, or even a mass grave containing the remains of a few thousand late third-century corpses. Preferably with a skeletal elephant or thirty-seven among them.

And yet, despite this paucity of physical evidence we all believe Hannibal existed, and we believe this for a host of good reasons, all of which come down to common sense and -- for historians -- a sensible, careful, balanced, and sophisticated examination of the evidence that exists.

It's important to remember that just because the Hannibalic War seems like ancient history now, it wasn't ancient history for Polybius: the gap between Zama and Polybius first putting, er, stylus to tablet is about the same as the gap between Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon and my typing this.


Whereas Hannibal was a major figure with a dearth of evidence...
Jesus was a relatively minor figure, someone who held no office, who wrote nothing down, and who lived and died in a provincial backwater of the Roman Empire. He was, as John P. Meier says, 'a marginal Jew', and yet we have a remarkable amount of written evidence for his existence, much of it dating even in its extant form right back to Antiquity.

An itinerant Jewish peasant-preacher who was executed as a common criminal is hardly the sort of person for whom you'd expect to have physical corroborative evidence for, and I don't really think there is any, though some would make the case for a couple of relics.

We do, however, have a lot of written evidence of his existence, despite him not having been the sort of person whose existence you'd expect to find attested by any surviving writers, especially ones who were high-ranking imperial officials who viewed Christianity with contempt.

When we look at Jesus, an obvious starting point is the fact that we have the four gospels. Sure, they contradict each other in loads of details, but that's par for the course in dealing with historical sources in the ancient world, even in connection with important official figures; it's more striking, in fact, that the so-called 'synoptic gospels' agree to an astounding degree, despite obviously having been composed in different places for different audiences. There's really nothing comparable in ancient historiography. What's more, all four accounts are remarkably early, which must lend them a certain degree of credibility. Biblical scholarship has, over the years, tended to date the gospels between the years 65 and 90, with Mark being earliest and John being latest. Although there's still no consensus, more recent academic work  increasingly favours earlier dates for all four gospels, with Matthew, for example, arguably having been composed before 60 AD.

By the standards of ancient history, this is extraordinary -- even unique. We have four accounts of Jesus' life -- or at any rate of the last year or so of it -- all composed within the lifetimes of his contemporaries, eye-witnesses to many of the events described in the accounts. That just doesn't happen.

What's more, these accounts are substantially or wholly preserved in ancient manuscripts, with the oldest of such dating from less than two hundred years after the events described. Indeed, there are fragments of much older manuscripts scattered here and there, including an early second-century piece of the Gospel according to John in Manchester; the Rylands Papyrus looks to postdate the text itself by just a few decades. This isn't in itself an argument for the historical reliability of the New Testament documents but it is an important argument for their textual reliability, and is the sort of argument that really cannot be made for any of the documents that tell us about the likes of Hannibal, Spartacus, or Caesar.

It's useful to remember that the ancients had brains every bit as good as our own, and that many of them -- particularly among the Jews -- had well-trained memories, practised in memorising long poems and passages from scripture. Christians and opponents of the new religion would have been well able to contradict stories about Jesus that had been clearly invented, but we have no evidence of the central public facts of Jesus' life, as laid out in the four canonical gospels, ever having been challenged on historical grounds.

The central public facts -- the structure facts of the story, if you like -- are that Jesus travelled around the parochial backwater that was first-century Palestine during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, preaching to large crowds, and that in Jerusalem he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of the region. These central points do not appear ever to have been contested in Antiquity, even by those with a serious interest in challenging them and with an obvious ability to do so.


So who exactly was Paul writing to?
There's a really annoying Irish joke that people in England tell about a man visiting Ireland who asks directions to somewhere in Ireland, and is greeted with a response that begins, 'Well, I wouldn't start from here...'

I don't really think it makes sense to start any discussion of Jesus' historicity with reference to the gospels, since the gospels almost certainly aren't the earliest extant Christian sources. Rather, there are earlier documents, all of which presuppose a high degree of preexisting knowledge.

The earliest of Paul's letters, First Thessalonians, can be confidently dated to 51 AD if not a couple of years earlier, with his other letters being written over the next decade or so. Paul's letters were written to established Christian communities, at least one of which had been founded under his guidance; his letters thus say little about the 'historical' Jesus, instead concentrating on the 'theological' Jesus; they presuppose that the Christian communities were already clued in on who Jesus was. For all that, though, they reveal a small number of key points about Jesus. They refer to Jesus as a real man, a Jew of the House of David, whose followers included a man known as Cephas and a kinsman called James; they say Jesus instituted the Christian ritual of the Eucharist, that he was tortured and crucified, and that his followers were persecuted by Paul himself, before his conversion.

Luke's Acts of the Apostles is well worth looking at alongside Paul's letters; it's a sequel to his gospel, after all, and details the establishment of the early Church. But if Jesus didn't exist, as Cascioli argues, then what on earth were the apostles doing running around founding churches in the 30s, 40s, and 50s? Whose word were they spreading? Why were they risking persecution and even execution at the hands of the authorities in Jerusalem and elsewhere? Or was Luke simply writing fiction? Didn't this happen?

Because if it didn't happen, I'd be curious to know where the churches came from to whom Paul preached and wrote his letters. I'd be curious how there came to be so many Christians in Rome during the reign of Claudius as to lead to constant disturbances and the eventual exile of all Jews -- Christians being considered as such -- from the city around 52 AD.

This is, after all, a crucial point: the Bible does not predate Christianity. Even the earliest books of the New Testament do not predate Christianity. It's the other way round: Christianity -- and the Church, even if we want to call it 'the Jesus Movement' as many modern scholars tend to do -- predates the Bible. In light of how the Church came first, the core question those who argue against the basic historicity of Jesus need to address is this:

'Given the evidence for a Christian movement in the late 30s and 40s, what explanation would you venture for how it came to be other than one depending on the historicity of Jesus himself, and what evidence would you put forward in support of your explanation?'

Would you die for something you knew to be a lie?
I'd be especially curious to find out why there were so many Christians in Rome at the time of the great fire of 64 AD, and why they were willing to die for somebody who hadn't even existed in the first place. Tacitus, a pagan author, writing around the turn of the second century, recorded that:

Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.

Look at how casually Tacitus alludes to the origins of Christianity: he considers it an absurd superstition, but doesn't for a moment doubt the fact of Jesus having lived and died in Roman Palestine. Indeed, given that Tacitus was a Roman senator, who would surely have access to any records there might have been of Pilate's actions in Judaea, it's telling that he doesn't dispute the historical fact of Jesus having lived and been executed under Pilate.

It's striking too that Suetonius, who likewise testifies to the existence of a large Christian community in Rome in the middle of the first century, was an official -- indeed an archivist -- at the imperial court and yet never takes the opportunity to dismiss or contest Jesus' historical reality. More telling still is that Tacitus and Suetonius' approximate contemporary Pliny the Younger, a man who as governor of Bithynia persecuted Christians, likewise seems not to have challenged the fact of Jesus having existed. In a letter to the emperor, Pliny refers to the Christians singing a hymn to Christ as to a god, in such a way as to imply that he has no doubt that the Christ in question had been a man. Trajan, in his reply, doesn't give any indication that Jesus had not existed.

Indeed there's no evidence at all of the Romans ever having tried to make the case that Jesus had never existed. Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, and Trajan, then, none of them friends of Christianity, do not seem to have doubted for a moment that Jesus had lived and died in Judaea during the reign of Tiberius.


Tampered with, but with a historical kernel for all that...
Neither, for that matter, did Flavius Josephus, a Jewish author who wrote in the last third of the first century. One passage in Josephus' Jewish Antiquities dwells on Jesus at some length, and does so in a manner that's suspiciously favourable to him:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

Many scholars think that the passage may have been interpolated, or at least altered, over time, as an Arabic version of Josephus, dating from the tenth century, has a different version of this passage, one which looks rather more plausible:

At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. His conduct was good and (he) was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive; accordingly he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.

What's striking about this is that even in the shorter version, Josephus doesn't for a moment doubt the fact of Jesus' existence. This is reinforced by his cursory account elsewhere in his writings of the condemnation in 61 AD of James, who he describes as 'the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ'; like Tacitus, he casually acknowledges that Jesus lived, even if he doubted that after dying he lived again.


Leave the Miracles out of it, for now...
There are, I think, three levels of discussion in debating the historicity of Jesus. The first is his historicity as a man, his basic existence. If we can accept that, then it's possible to consider the historicity of the miracles. If we can accept them, then we can get into the question of Jesus' divinity. The basic level, however, is the simple question of whether Jesus lived and died, and given the evidence we have, I think this is beyond reasonable doubt.

There was no other possible way to look at it. There are things that are facts, in a statistical sense, on paper, on a tape recorder, in evidence. And there are things that are facts because they have to be facts, because nothing makes any sense otherwise.

So wrote the great Raymond Chandler, in the last Marlowe novel he completed, the relatively weak Playback. It's a useful principle, especially when dealing with ancient history, where our evidence is often scanty, to say the least. You can't prove that Jesus lived, not in an absolute, mathematical sense*. If that's what Signor Cascioli wants Judge Mautone to demand of Father Righi, then Righi's guaranteed to lose this case. But I think you can prove it beyond reasonable doubt. After all, there's far better evidence for the existence of Jesus than there is for Hannibal and Spartacus, after all, and nobody in their right mind doubts their existence.

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*Though having read about Non-Euclidian Geometry I have no idea if there's such a thing as mathematical proof either...