In effect it’s saying that you trust the validity of the accounts that the people in the bible wrote, but you believe that you (A person who was not there at that time and who has even less knowledge about the actions of Jesus) are more qualified to judge his motives than the people who actually witnessed Jesus’ actions in person.
This happens all the time in real life. It only sounds silly if you ignore the fact that the writers are a subject one can have knowledge about.
If Sam tells me stories about A and B, and I know a lot about A, I can compare Sam’s account of A to my knowledge of A to make inferences about the distortions introduced by Sam’s narrative, and I can use those inferences to arrive at a different story about B than the one Sam told, which I consider more reliable than the one Sam told, despite my knowing less than Sam does about B.
That kind of reasoning is definitely possible, and maybe in some cases useful.
But I think the inferred story B is much less reliable than an account of B from a reliable source. Usually when people do this type of historical profiling, they treat their inferences of how things “really happened” with the same weight as an eyewitness account. Probably because “Jesus may have possibly been a schizophrenic narcissist but there’s no conclusive evidence to support this” doesn’t sell as well.
Edit: I’m not sure if I explained myself propperly so here’s a little more to show why I don’t like this kind of second hand reasoning.
If you ask a bank robber if he just robbed a bank, most likely he will tell you “No I did not rob that bank.”
He has reasons to lie to you, so it makes sense that you shouldn’t trust him.
However, just because a known bank robber tells you that he didn’t rob a bank doesn’t mean its not true. Perhaps he was out of state when the bank was robbed. Or perhaps he intended to rob the bank, but someone beat him to it. Or perhaps he DID rob the bank and is trying to prove his innocence. The point is, you don’t know.
Knowing how someone would falsify a story, does not prove or disprove the validity of it. It just gives you cause to be wary. Any assumptions you make based off of an untrustworthy source are just as likely to be correct as they are to be false.
Sure, if I have a reliable source handy, that’s optimal. It doesn’t happen very often.
Even contemporary eyewitness accounts just aren’t all that reliable, and only become less so as they are edited and refined and told and retold. Of course, you’re right that an arbitrarily selected account from someone who wasn’t even a witness is even less reliable.
In any case, I haven’t read Elst’s book, so I don’t have a worthwhile opinion about it in particular. That said, I certainly consider “Jesus was a schizophrenic narcissist” more likely than “Jesus was a demigod,” based on the relative frequencies of schizophrenic narcissists and demigods in the general population. The question is whether either theory is likely enough to be worth considering in the first place.
This happens all the time in real life. It only sounds silly if you ignore the fact that the writers are a subject one can have knowledge about.
If Sam tells me stories about A and B, and I know a lot about A, I can compare Sam’s account of A to my knowledge of A to make inferences about the distortions introduced by Sam’s narrative, and I can use those inferences to arrive at a different story about B than the one Sam told, which I consider more reliable than the one Sam told, despite my knowing less than Sam does about B.
That kind of reasoning is definitely possible, and maybe in some cases useful.
But I think the inferred story B is much less reliable than an account of B from a reliable source. Usually when people do this type of historical profiling, they treat their inferences of how things “really happened” with the same weight as an eyewitness account. Probably because “Jesus may have possibly been a schizophrenic narcissist but there’s no conclusive evidence to support this” doesn’t sell as well.
Edit: I’m not sure if I explained myself propperly so here’s a little more to show why I don’t like this kind of second hand reasoning.
If you ask a bank robber if he just robbed a bank, most likely he will tell you “No I did not rob that bank.” He has reasons to lie to you, so it makes sense that you shouldn’t trust him.
However, just because a known bank robber tells you that he didn’t rob a bank doesn’t mean its not true. Perhaps he was out of state when the bank was robbed. Or perhaps he intended to rob the bank, but someone beat him to it. Or perhaps he DID rob the bank and is trying to prove his innocence. The point is, you don’t know.
Knowing how someone would falsify a story, does not prove or disprove the validity of it. It just gives you cause to be wary. Any assumptions you make based off of an untrustworthy source are just as likely to be correct as they are to be false.
Sure, if I have a reliable source handy, that’s optimal.
It doesn’t happen very often.
Even contemporary eyewitness accounts just aren’t all that reliable, and only become less so as they are edited and refined and told and retold.
Of course, you’re right that an arbitrarily selected account from someone who wasn’t even a witness is even less reliable.
In any case, I haven’t read Elst’s book, so I don’t have a worthwhile opinion about it in particular.
That said, I certainly consider “Jesus was a schizophrenic narcissist” more likely than “Jesus was a demigod,” based on the relative frequencies of schizophrenic narcissists and demigods in the general population.
The question is whether either theory is likely enough to be worth considering in the first place.