A Note On Historical Method
A Note On Historical Method
because I just can't help myself, and might as well post something before going on holiday.
Edit to Add: Carrier has responded to this. If you come from there, or want to read what I have to say, this is my final word on that, unless he wants to actually, substantially address what I have to say.
As is probably obvious I’m kind of fascinated by Carrier’s book, and, given that I’m on break now, and also stressed because of upcoming family holiday stuff, haven’t had a huge amount of direction in what I’m working on. And, I keep bumping into people who really like Carrier, directing me to more sections of his book - it’s honestly a fascinating enterprise, as a lot of the questions asked are highly pertinent, but the analysis and presentation of evidence deeply perplexing. It appears to be a good resource for learning about early Judaism and Christianity precisely because the only responsible way to read the book is to double or triple check everything, which naturally leads you to more reliable sources. But I also decided to check some of the previous scholarship of his he directs his readers to in his footnotes: which seems to be something that not a lot of people have done. The results of one of these ended up in my post-original-post-additions to my previous note on this, but this one is particularly illuminating as a teaching moment I think.
Element 2 (p66) describes Jewish sectarianism in the first century, and is in broad strokes not incorrect (though some qualifers can be added). However the numbers are very strange, in particular, Carrier says “We know of at least ten competing sects, possibly more than thirty”.1 Even the lower bound is potentially inflated from those presented in the majority of the work I have read on the subject. The first source linked is an essay in a volume edited by Price and Lowder, which, luckily, my subject librarian was able to source for me. The “support” lists “over twenty groups, subgroups or sects (Charlesworth, 58 my emphasis), which, necessarily, is not “over twenty sects”. That this includes the Zealots, whose only difference from others was in terms of millitancy, rather than religious belief, makes this distinction important. Likewise, the evidence proffered by Charlesworth is all either contemporary or earlier (such as Philo and the Qumran material). So, what of Carrier’s paper? Comparing the two may be illuminating.
In the preamble to this elaboration of sects, we read the following:
[the diversity within 2nd temple Judaism] is often obscured by the fact that only one sect, a branch of the Pharisees, who had dominated the courts and held the widest influence, rose to sole dominance over most of Palestine and the Diaspora after the Jewish War (66-70 CE) and most extant Judaica (such as the Mishnah, Talmud, Midrash, etc) derives from only that sect. […] The Pharisees were the one sect against which the Christian sect was the most opposed, the least like. It is wildly inappropriate to attribute to the original Christians ideas only found advocated by their enemies.2
Firstly, we have obvious chronological errors. According to the traditional account, following the first revolt is a period of intense scholarly activity, restricted to the Galilee. It is only after the 2nd Revolt that the Rabbis become a major force, and even then this is largely restricted to the Levant and Persian terriroties, their influence in the Disaspora is still contested in the 9th century. And even the account of their ascendency in the Near East is unrepresented before the Bavli, and thus of questionable historical value. That there is archeological evidence of marked divergeance from Rabbinic custom well into late antiquity is counter-evidence to this. Likewise, the account of Pharisaic power here is not what is reflected in earlier literature: Josephus paints a more balanced picture of their influence (and numbers them at only 6,000),3 and they appear more marginal in the New Testament literature. We have no primary documentation of the mainstream of either of either the Pharisees or the Sadducees, even though they are generally considered the largest of the sects. And, as previously discussed, the judicial system during the second temple period is highly contested (briefly, we don’t know what it looked like). That much of Rabbinic custom appears unrepresented in the region until significantly later makes taking the traditional chronology at face value highly suspect.
However there are three additional, serious problems. First, in spite of Carrier’s insistence that they are entirely creative fictions, written after the period in which the beliefs of the earliest Christians cemented, the Gospel accounts are taken as representative of the relationship between the early Christian movement and their Jewish contemporaries. There is no critical assessment thereof, of how accurate this may be both on historical points and points of dogma – nor is there consideration of the fact that Mark has a significantly different relationship to the various competing sects than Matthew or Luke (or, for that matter, John).4 Nor is there consideration of the fact that, if these documents are dated as they nearly-universally are to the post-Temple period, that they might reflect that environment – when the Sadducees’ power was essentially nullified by the destruction of the Temple, and the Pharisees and Proto-Rabbis started to fill the power vacuum, rather than the previous environment that produced the early Christian movement.
Secondly, there is the issue of the relationship between the Pharisees as the Rabbis. The identification of one with the other is a commonplace assumption, particularly among lay people, but has been significantly problematized over the last half-century. Not least of the problems is that the Tannaitic literature, while broadly favouring the positions representative of the Pharisees in earlier literature, is not univocal on this point. Take for example Mishnah Yaddayim. While this Tractate clearly represents the halacha polemicized against in Mk 7 (and, importantly, attributed to “the Pharisees and all the Jews” 7:3), and also presents a case of the Rabbis arguing with the Sadducees, this section also contains the following:
אומרין5 צדוקין קובלין אנו עליכן פרושין שאתם אומרים כתבי הקדש מטמאין את הידים וספרי הומרים6 אין מטמין את הידים אמר רבן יוחנן בן זכי וכי אין לנו על הפרושים אלא זו בלבד הרי הם אומרים עצמות חמור טהורין ועצמות יוחנן כהן גדול טמאין
The Sadducees say “we complain against you, Pharisees, that you say holy scrolls defile the hands, but the books of Homer do not defile the hands”. Said Our Rabbi, Yochanan Ben Zakkai, “so, do we have nothing over the Pharisees than this alone? They [also] say that the bones of a donkey are pure, but the bones of Yochanan the High Priest are unclean”.
Here it is clear that Yochanan Ben Zakkai does not identify himself as a Pharisee, and appears to align himself with the Sadducees.7 And Yochanan Ben Zakkai is traditionally presented throughout the Rabbinic literature as the founder of the Yeshiva at Yavneh which is the birthplace of Rabbinic Judaism. We get further complication in Tosefta Berakhot:
שמונה עשרה שאמרו חכמים כנגד שמונה עשרה אזכרות שבהבו לה' בני אלים וכולל של מינים בשל פרושין ושל גרים בשל זקנים
Eighteen [blessings] are established by the sages corresponding to the eighteen mentions of the Divine Name in [Psalm 29]. And one should include the [blessing of] the heretics in [the blessing of] the separatists (פרושין), and [the blessing] of the converts in [the blessing] of the elders.
Here the word that means Pharisees is used in its literal sense to mean “separatists”. This Tosefta has significant implications regarding the textual history of Birkat Haminim, though that is a tangent that I will not address here. Regadless, being one of the פרושין is not a good thing here, and is related to being a מין, and is also different from being one of the חכמים.
There is now an extensive body of literature demonstrating that the continuity between the Pharisees and the Rabbis is largely surface level resemblance, and that Rabbinic ideology instead represents a significant re-calibration of the social structure of Judaism in the aftermath of the two revolts and the destruction of the temple.8
However, conversely, the Tannaitic literature can provide some clear information about the nature of second temple Judaism, when read in tandem with earlier sources, and in light of archaeological evidence. This itself also clearly undermines some common readings of the New Testament, in which certain practices are, because of their presentation, assumed to be sectarian, but a broader survey of evidence demonstrates that at least in the Levant they were close-to-universally observed. That these practices, including a near universal observation of the strictest interpretation of the ban on images, and concerted maintenance of ritual purity status, were observed by nearly all Levantine Jews also gives us particular information about the environment in which Christianity first emerged.9
All that being said, what of Carrier’s actual survey of the sources? And, indeed, what sources are used? A chunk of them are standard, but those do not produce these numbers, nor some of the qualities attached to said groups. The Pharisees’ adherence to Babylonian astrology is extracted by Carrier from the fourth Century Heresiologist Epiphanius, also cited (among others), and primary evidence for many of these purported sects are Justin Martyr (2nd C), Hippolytus (3rd C), the Clementine literature (probably late 4th or early 5th C), Jerome (4th C), Tertullian (2nd-3rd C), Pseudo-Tertullian (naturally after Tertullian), the Apostolic Constitutions (4th C), Philaster’s Liber de Haeresibus (late 4th C), Eusebius (3rd-4th C), and Origen (3rd C)– and even a single passage in the Tripartite Tractate from Nag Hammadi (probably 3rd Century).10
There is not a single word of comparable caution to that proffered regarding the Rabbinic literature for these Patristic sources (or for the Valentinian Nag Hammadi text). That the Patristic literature itself represents a “sect” (in terms of a group that has separated itself from others based on its own “correct” beliefs, and is actively polemicising against those it has disidentified with) is not considered, nor is the accuracy of these later, often explicitly polemical (and explicitly hostile to Judaism) accounts in terms of the information they convey about the first century. In fact, we find the opposite: that two contemporary reference volumes doubt the assertion that the Herodians (if they even were a sect, rather than just political supporters of Herod) claimed that Herod was the messiah, Carrier asserts they give “no sound reasons” for this.11 That the sources for this claim are late Patristic writers, writing outside Judaea, with little if any first-hand knowledge (and often very little knowledge of Judaism at all), engaged in a protracted exercise in self-definition by polemicizing against their opponents (often by projecting the origins of “heretical” Christian sects back into pre-Christian Judaism, as they consider “Jewishness” to in itself be an imputation) is, in itself, reason to doubt these accounts. Epiphanius, one of the most heavily cited sources for this material, appears to not even know nonsectarian Jewish custom regarding immersion in Mikvaot that was normative even at the time of Jesus, and continues to be so for many Orthodox Jews today (Panarion, Bk. I 30.2.3-4). It is, frankly, very strange to see a degree of critical caution advised for one type of literature, and then, immediately following that, the expected similar level of caution is ignored on this point for the gospels, which Carrier himself beliefs to be entirely literary fictions, but then, even beyond that, that caution to likewise be thrown to the wind regarding far later literature which exhibits clear biases and is part of a concerted polemical project of cementing the ideology of Orthodox Christianity, which, itself, demonstrates a significant degree of ignorance and inaccuracy regarding matters of fact that are easily checked, as well as marked degrees of internal inconsistency, both between different Heresiological catalogues, with the mythological etiologies and genealogies growing in baroque scope, but also even within the accounts of individual Heresiologists (just reading Epiphanius’ account of the Ebionites is enough to demonstrate this).
Sure, it’s possible that at least some of the material in these accounts may, maybe, be correct on one point or another, but Carrier himself knows how little such a technical possibility matters.12 Their correctness on any of these matters would have to be demonstrated. For many of these groups, these are the only attestations, so we can’t know, and it is also very possible that they are entirely fictitious, or fictitious to such a degree that they don’t contain any independently verifiable, much less useful information at all. This latter point is the most likely in my opinion, for every point that cannot be found is some other, less partisan, and more contemporary source. And the reasoning that leads me to that point is standard historical methodology grounded in a consistent hermeneutic of suspicion.
The key lesson here is consistency. If one is going to treat one body of literature (or, in this case, two) with a high degree of critical skepticism (something that I would also advise), this should be extended to all others, unless one can proffer a significant, methodologically sound reason to suspend such criticality. And, likewise, if you treat a body of literature critically in one paper (here on the Rabbinic literature) you should, probably, do that elsewhere. That that isn’t done here is highly questionable.
Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014. 66.
Carrier, Richard. “The Spiritual Body of Christ”. in The Empty Tomb : Jesus Beyond the Grave. Ed. Robert M Price and Jeffery Jay Lowder. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 2005. 108.
Josephus, Antiquities, XVII.32.
There is a very readable overview of this (if not particularly in-depth) in Elaine Pagels’ volume The Origins of Satan, New York: Vintage. 1996.
All early MSS are inconsistent in their plural forms, often, as here, favouring the aramaicized suffix for this but not doing so consistently. Printed editions may standardise this but this is not a feature of any early MSS tradition.
There is a probable scribal error here in Kaufman, other major MSS have this reading as “Homer”.
There is also a very, very insightful analysis of these halachic issues in Friedman, Shamma. "The Holy Scriptures Defile the Hands—The Transformation of a Biblical Concept in Rabbinic Theology" in Brettler, Marc Zvi, and Michael A. Fishbane. Minhah Le-Nahum : Biblical and Other Studies Presented to Nahum M. Sarna in Honour of His 70th Birthday. London: Bloomsbury 2009. This is worth comparing to the discussion of bones and hides in Noam, Vered. "Pharisaic Halakha as Emerging from 4qmmt." In The Pharisees, edited by Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine. 50-65. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021.
Good starting places for this are the many essays in The Pharisees, edited by Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021; and Boyarin, Daniel. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. as well as the final chapters of Cohen, Shaye. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. 3rd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.
see the chapters on purity and aniconicism in Adler, Yonatan. The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal. The Anchor Yale Reference Library. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022.
Carrier, “Spiritual Body”, 199n15-201n31. Note also the strange assertion that the Samaritans are distinct based in part in that they “rejected the Mishnah (“oral law")” (109) when their split from mainstream Judaism was centuries prior to the codification of the Mishnah, that occuring 200 years after the purported time of Jesus. I know of no legitimate account of them that considers “Moses as the Christ”, nor do we have any Samaritan literature (bar their Penteteuch) dating before the 2nd Century.
Ibid. 200n21.
Carrier, Historicity, 600, states that a possibility he considers vanishingly low “to a historian is for all practical purposes a probability of zero”.