I shall here critically analyze Jonathan Sheffield’s new attempt to defend the authenticity of Daniel (which I published Saturday). We’ll then discuss it on MythVision this October 2 (10am PST / 1pm EST). Thoughtful or constructive comments are strongly encouraged on both this and Sheffield’s...
Debating the Authenticity of Daniel: Methodological Analysis of Sheffield’s Case
Richard Carrier
20 September 2021
I shall here critically analyze Jonathan Sheffield’s new attempt to defend the authenticity of Daniel (which I published
Saturday). We’ll then discuss it on
MythVision this October 2 (10am PST / 1pm EST). Thoughtful or constructive comments are strongly encouraged on both this and Sheffield’s entry.
Why a Jewish Records Argument for the Authenticity of Daniel Is Pseudohistory
by Richard Carrier, Ph.D.
-:-
Sheffield’s Argument
In a nutshell, Jonathan Sheffield’s argument is that after many centuries we find a legend in Josephus about Alexander the Great being presented a copy of a book of Daniel predicting his victory, and this legend should be taken as proof that our book of Daniel existed already by then in its entirety, and thus can’t have been forged in the first century B.C.—if, after all, Alexander was reading it in the
fourth century B.C. In support of this singular purported evidence of an early complete copy of Daniel, Sheffield adds the “background” argument that we should simply believe every myth and legend any Jewish author ever wrote down, without criticism or question, because ‘Jews are special’. And in aid of that conclusion, Sheffield spends time trying to claim the same thing actually happened to Cyrus the Great, by citing
another legend also only (conveniently) found in Josephus that Cyrus was
also persuaded to magnanimity toward the Jews by being presented a copy of
Isaiah (contrary to the conclusion of mainstream critical scholarship that the passages in Isaiah about Cyrus were written
after Cyrus’s decree, not before). Thus, in essence, Sheffield is trying the same “Argument from Legends” for both the authenticity of Daniel complete
and Isaiah complete. As this is a discussion of Daniel, I will only address that here. The evidence against his claims about Isaiah are already well-enough provided in standard references.[
1] But many of the same points I will make regarding Daniel here, will apply to Sheffield’s argument regarding Isaiah.
First Problem
A key point of confusion here renders Sheffield’s argument a non sequitur, which is that I already discussed scholarship on the possibility that Daniel 1-6 was forged in the fourth century B.C.[
2] So even evidence that “a” book of Daniel existed around then would not support its authenticity. Indeed, Sheffield has inadvertently given us a reason for it to have been forged then: precisely to influence Alexander the Great. They’d accomplish this by crafting the text up and then spinning
Daniel 2:39-45 as foretelling Alexander’s world dominance, while later selling to their own people the notion that that kingdom is actually the one that will
follow his, just as the later forgers of Daniel 7 would do for Antiochus. I don’t personally believe any of this; but it’s all plausible, and perfectly consistent with all of Sheffield’s evidence on the point. Consequently, he actually has not presented
any argument for the authenticity of Daniel. At most he has presented a creative hypothesis regarding why its first half was forged in the fourth century B.C. as many scholars conclude it was. That doesn’t really advance his case.
I could drop mic there. Sheffield’s conclusion does not follow
even if his premise is true. Fallacies are indeed vexing that way. But I think it’s important to go into the severe methodological defects of Sheffield’s entire case, because I see this too often from apologists, and it belies a deep failure to understand modern historical methodology and why our methods are now as they are. That failure may be in part wilful, as the apologetic methods substituted in for it are conversely (and conveniently) designed to accomplish exactly the opposite task that professional historical methods have been refined to achieve. Apologetic methods are engineered to
evade discovering or admitting the truth. Real historical methods have instead been refined for the specific purpose of
getting at the truth, and avoiding precisely such errors as apologists are committing themselves to.
Survey of Remaining Problems
The rest of Sheffield’s case commits several other errors common to apologetics as a methodology:
- Leaving Evidence Out. Such that if you put back in the evidence left out, the conclusion reverses.[3] Sheffield commits this error both at the particular and the general level.
- Formalized Gullibility. A peculiar naivety about sources and what constitutes evidence of reliability.[4] This constitutes an abandonment of the entire methodological apparatus of history as a field of knowledge.
- Reverse Incredulity. “A repeated declaration of ‘incredulity’ that something would happen, that in factual reality easily happens and happened all the time.”[5] And then conveniently switching between this irrational incredulity and their equally irrational gullibility along exactly the lines needed to preserve their pre-chosen belief.
Just as with modern scientific methods, modern historical methods evolved to avoid such errors and fallacies as these—as well as many others, especially after 1950, such that most history published before then tends to be unreliable by current standards.[
6] Any argument that proceeds from pertinent evidence being omitted is automatically unsound. Any argument that ignores critical thinking and engages no critical evaluation of sources and their content is automatically unsound. And any argument that follows from premises about what was common or usual or easy (or uncommon or unusual or hard)
that are demonstrably false is automatically unsound. Only apologetics deploys such tactics. Sound, professional, rational history eschews them for the fallacies they are. Indeed, the particular deployment of such tactics
specifically as needed to preserve a pre-chosen belief (thereby cherry-picking “when” to be irrationally incredulous, “when” to instead be gullible, and “which” evidence to leave out) is entirely what historical methods were invented to avoid. Because engineering a result with such tactics can never arrive at the truth about anything—it can only serve to preserve a false belief. History only became a scientifically reliable field of knowledge when it realized and admitted that, and adjusted its methods to suit.[
7]
A Foundation of Special Pleading
Sheffield opens by quoting the late 19th and early 20th century theologian Nikolai Berdyaev as if somehow an authority on historical methodology. Berdyaev was actually a Christian mystic, apologist, existential postmodernist, and eccentric, none of whose views have been deemed credible in the field of history.[
8] Berdyaev never acquired any relevant credentials (he studied law, but never completed any degree). He thus didn’t actually conduct any historical study demonstrating his bizarre assertions, much less a legitimate one. To quote him as an authority is thus indicative of the very Formalized Gullibility I just mentioned. And Berdyaev’s entire position quoted is an illustration of the very Reverse Incredulity I just mentioned. It is then deployed by Sheffield in a
Fallacy of Special Pleading, asserting without demonstration that somehow the Jews are a special race, that the laws of physics and history operate differently for them, and in result their authors are uniquely infallible among the entire human race. If that sounds a bit like master race theory, you would not be far of the mark.
None of that is true, of course. It’s simply a misrepresentation of historical and scientific facts. There is nothing pertinently unique or unusual about the history of the Jews or Judaism, and Jewish authors—particularly in antiquity—were just as prone to error, deception, gullibility, propaganda, and motivated reasoning as any other human beings, who all then had the same emotional needs and goals, and the same educations and methods of composing stories. If you want comparable examples of small religious sects surviving centuries of persecution and thriving in a worldwide diaspora, look to the Sikhs or the Romani.[
9] Many of the oldest religions still practiced today have faced threats and persecution and yet remain—and most of them are as old or older than Judaism.[
10] Even most
extinct religions lasted longer than Judaism can yet claim (e.g. the core pantheons of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and possibly Mycenae). And many ethnicities remain of equal antiquity. The Greeks still exist, even as a nation; China has been unified for thousands of years; the Hindus are more ancient than all, and have been invaded endlessly, yet today outnumber Jews ninety times over. Oppression Olympics also gets you nowhere. The Holocaust is not the only mass ethnic genocide a people has survived in human history.[
11] In fact, there has almost never been a recorded successful genocide of any ethnic or tribal group numbering over a hundred thousand in all of human history. So, far from it being “odd” that the Jews could survive such things, it actually would have been really strange if they
didn’t, when it has historically been the usual thing to occur.
The more so as the Jews are a People of the Book, and the primary killers of peoples over the last 1500 years have been Christians and Muslims, who actually consistently and substantially favored Jews over pagans for that very reason, despite suppressing and persecuting both. Thus we have an obvious, ordinary, non-divine and entirely socio-political explanation of the Jews’ superior place in Western history in respect to their “pagan” counterparts, yet far inferior place to their consistent dominators and suppressors, the other Peoples of That Same Book. The more so as the Jews’ own hostility to apostasy and polytheism, and concentration on strong family and community cooperation (precisely
because, as it was in reaction to, their persecution), is structurally known to ensure longer survival-times than other religions in comparable environments. Indeed these are not unusual features
for a reason, as they happen to have led to the world dominance of all like-minded religions, namely Christianity and Islam—which are both, essentially, just the most successful sects of Judaism.[
12] Indeed, after the Jewish War, Jews also found a focus, just as Confucians did, on
education as a principal driver of survival and success, thus also explaining their common longevity and prominence.[
13] No miraculous causes required. Ordinary causes fully account for everything.
There is nothing special or unexpected about any of this.
It is of course already a non sequitur to reason “the Jews are special, therefore all their stories are true.” But not even the premise is correct in this case; much less the conclusion. It might sound emotionally appealing, but rationally, there is no argument here: no evidence for the conclusion; no accurate grasp of causal reality; no logically valid inference from anything demonstrably true. This is apologetics. Not history.
A Proper Foundation of Prior Probability
In contrast, contemporary historical methodology is based on
logic and
evidence, and lessons long learned from what happens when we skirt or shirk either or both. In
Proving History I outline the four stages, twelve axioms, and twelve rules of procedure all professional history is now based on.[
14] They encapsulate
informed critical analysis (not gullible naivety),
evidence-based reasoning (not credulous or incredulous assertions), and
simple and obvious rules of logic (such as that weak evidence cannot trump strong; generalizations follow only from the presentation of many particular examples; possible does not mean probable; contexts matter; and so on). And yet I did not list there one of the governing conclusions of rational, objective historical analysis today—because it is not an axiom but a long-demonstrated
conclusion: natural-cause theories are far more likely than supernatural-cause theories. Hence I discuss that methodological principle in a later section of the book.[
15] Quite simply, contrary to Jonathan Sheffield’s assertion that this is a “presupposition,” it is a thoroughly evidence-based
fact.[
16]
It is not logically impossible to overturn this conclusion, but doing so would require a world-shattering scale of evidence that simply has never existed. Ordinary causal models always fully account for observed facts, and do so on a vast foundation of well-confirmed precedents and background facts; supernatural causal models have no such foundation—at all, much less on such a scale of empirical confirmation. God is literally the least likely explanation of anything.[
17] To establish it therefore requires an extraordinary scale of evidence.[
18] Yet Sheffield has failed to present even
ordinary evidence. “Evidence” is any indisputable fact whose existence increases the probability of a conclusion.
Sufficient evidence is any collection of such facts whose existence increases the probability of a conclusion above 50% and ideally as near to 100% as one can get.[
19] Sheffield presents not even a single item of
evidence by this measure—and I do mean not even
mere evidence, much less sufficient evidence. If there is a natural explanation of some fact, an explanation ubiquitously attested and confirmed to exist throughout human history, especially in comparable contexts, and no like evidence of a supernatural explanation, then it is logically necessarily the case that the natural explanation is almost certainly going to be correct; and therefore the supernatural explanation, not.
To deny this is simply not rational.
So, what ubiquitously common natural explanation exists for Josephus alone adding the same mythical feature to
two legends about Great Rulers being cowed by Books of His Own Precious Religion? That he’s inventing propaganda for his religion and his people. He’s inventing a myth (or drawing on an unidentified source who did), a practice so common in ancient religion that it has been documented to be the
typical practice in religious literature in antiquity,[
20] and thus always
the most likely thing happening, absent any evidence to the contrary. We cannot conclude he “had sources,” because he mentions none, and we have no evidence of any (much less credible or reliable ones), and he has an established reputation for making things up like this, particularly in twos (indeed, Josephus, and Jewish authors generally, were prone to fabricating legends about Alexander or conflating different historical periods in assembling narratives).[
21] And quite importantly, all other versions of these stories lack this added feature that Sheffield is appealing to. Even the Talmudic Rabbis themselves had never heard of either Josephan legend—yet they retell the Alexander legend; and somehow, no Rabbi contributing to the Talmud for centuries had ever heard of the Book of Daniel being involved. That does not bode well for the story being true. And we certainly have no contemporaries mentioning so remarkable a fact. We only have one, single, demonstrably untrustworthy source: Josephus. In the modern study of ancient history, tall tales like this are never believed without far better evidence than “Josephus told a tale.” It does not matter how many “just so” stories you fabricate to “explain away” why you have no evidence;
you still end up with no evidence. And no evidence, means no conclusion. You’re done. And that’s that.
To deny this is simply not rational.
And that’s all Sheffield has. A lone, unsourced, implausible legend in a known Jewish propagandist, of documented unreliability on just such matters, composed centuries after any pertinent facts. No rational historian would ever believe such a thing. Because we know how the world works. To “forget” how the world works, and conveniently only at just this moment, when Sheffield needs to be hopelessly gullible, right then, presto, we get Formalized Gullibility. Not a valid historical method. This isn’t how history works. Sheffield does this a lot, such as citing
other centuries-old gullible Christian apologists as his authorities (like William Whiston), as if they are at all reliable, when in fact history evolved far superior and more critical methodologies since then because we now well know those guys had no valid methods of historical reasoning and came up with all manner of naive, pious claptrap, instead of anything resembling an objective, reliable method of assessing evidence. Likewise Sheffield relies on Werner Keller, in a blatant work of obsolete Christian Bible-thumping apologetics from the 1960s, rather than any actual peer reviewed historical works in venues devoted to objective rather than obsequious standards; much less any of more recent time. I cited quite a lot of real history on this subject, actual peer reviewed works by actual contemporary, competent, professional historians, much of it current.
Sheffield has cited none. That’s the difference between doing apologetics, and doing history. I am a historian. I do history.
Select Failures of Fact and Logic
That’s really all there should be to say. Because there is no other evidence in Sheffield’s argument, just naive assertions of Reverse Incredulity and Formalized Gullibility. But I do want to focus on a few more examples of what I mean. Although I don’t have space or time to correct every error and questionable statement he makes; there are simply too many.
For example, Sheffield gullibly asserts that pre-Hellenic Jerusalem had a population of 120,000 inhabitants, even though that is literally, physically impossible. Even after the introduction of the Roman aqueduct, which was many centuries later, Jerusalem never had a sufficient water supply for more than a few tens of thousands to inhabit it (and remember animals had to drink as well as people).[
22] In the age of Alexander, it could not have housed even 10,000 persons; and that’s a stretch—modern skilled estimates put the number at no more than 6,000. Even in the early modern era, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Jerusalem could only maintain a population of barely 15,000.[
23] But it was worse then—even
before the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in the 6th century and took most of its population into exile in Babylon. But certainly after that, by the time Alexander arrived in the 4th century, it’s doubtful even a few thousand remained there. At its height in that period, the entire population
of Judea cannot have been more than 50,000, given archaeologically confirmed limitations of agricultural capacity and development at the time. The region simply could not feed more than that (and again, remember, animals had to eat, too); and we cannot confirm production was even at capacity at the time, so fifty thousand is
an upper limit—and that’s for the whole region, not just the city. So, no, there were not “120,000” people in Jerusalem when Alexander visited the area. There were not even half that many
Judeans (most of whom, by far, would be women and children, and slaves; few at best would be capable fighters; and many weren’t Jews).[
24] Sheffield is just gullibly believing whatever ancient authors
said, and not examining that critically, like a historian is supposed to do. He seems not even aware that historians of antiquity today know numbers cited by historians then were typically ten times or more exaggerated from actual, and often outright baseless, and thus are never used as credible data anymore.[
25]
It would be arduous to correct every such gullible misstatement in Sheffield’s piece. So please don’t take my silence for endorsement. There’s a lot wrong there. But here I’ll just focus on those claims that are the most empirically relevant to Sheffield’s case. That won’t include, for example, Sheffield’s apparent conflation of “Marx’s economic materialism” with contemporary historical naturalism (there are no Marxist historians anymore; naturalism is not Marxism, and dialectical materialism is as silly and outdated in historical studies now as Sheffield’s dialectical supernaturalism). Or his confusing a comedian (Mark Twain) for a historian. And I won’t delve further into Sheffield’s quoting of a racist eugenicist’s unscientific argument that Jews are genetically superior in intelligence to other races (and not merely because, obviously, that claim is scientifically false).[
26]
The Sennacherib Two Step
I will focus on more directly pertinent failures, like Sheffield’s strange obsession with Sennacherib’s failing to “take” Jerusalem 2,700 years ago—as if some force-field existed there that, for some inexplicable reason,
wasn’t there when Nebuchadnezzar sacked and depopulated the city just a hundred years later (he easily captured it,
twice).[
27] I mean, which is it? The Jews were invulnerable to conquerors? Or they easily fell to one in the same century? History attests the latter. So nothing can be made of the former. In
actual fact the ancient Jews lost nearly every war they ever fought with anyone other than themselves, and rarely enjoyed self-rule; you have to dig all the way back to Sennacherib to find even a single beg-off from an invader. Other than that, and one successful rebellion against a weakened Greek overlord in a war the Book of Daniel was obviously forged to promote,[
28] the Jews’ national fate was fairly consistently downhill from day one, until thousands of years ago they lost so catastrophically in their second attempt at a rebellion that their entire nation was dissolved, Jerusalem was left uninhabited by Jews for hundreds of years, and has not been fully reclaimed by them since, even despite massive modern military funding by Western Christian Imperialists seeking to realize prophecy. Still they fail. This is not an impressive record. When it comes to world claimants to Sheffield-style divine stewardship, China and India should be over a barrel with laughter here.
This is an example of arguing by Omission of Evidence, producing another, and rather straightforward, fallacy of special pleading, “arguing from the exceptions,” and ignoring the rule. When we put all that evidence back in that Sheffield left out, his entire argument is refuted. That’s typical of Christian apologetics…which is how we know it’s not history. The actual fact is, the Jews usually lost wars, and have rarely been on the successful side of history, and have been outshined, and longer, by other world ethnostates. So in no way can one stalled siege before all of that evince anything militarily remarkable about them. Even what you can praise of Israel today (moral failures aside), was in significant part realized, bought and paid for by apocalyptic Christian nationalists, either directly (in continual American cash aid) or indirectly (in lobbying for war reparations against Germany), which hardly requires a miracle to explain.[
29] When massive, morally ambiguous empires are
trying to make Biblical prophecies happen, you can no longer claim miracles are afoot. Because when people actively try to make a prophecy happen by ordinary means, you are no longer talking about a miracle, but a policy.[
30]
It’s only the worse that in pursuing this nonsensical argument, Sheffield deploys yet more Formalized Gullibility and Reverse Incredulity, actually believing a mythological story about angels slaying 185,000 Assyrians.[
31] The precedents of science and history make
that literally the least likely explanation of that story. Trust me. Odds are that’s just made up. To look at that and say, “Well, Jewish myth says angels did it. So it must have been angels!” is literally to surrender all knowledge and reason and act like a total rube. When Medieval historians report poison-breathing dragons attacked an army, “Oh, it must really have been dragons!” is not a rational response to the text.[
32] The odds are vastly higher they just made that up. Rational people go with the odds. And here we know where the odds go: we have a second story in the same text that provides a much more plausible reason Sennacherib withdrew. Jerusalem paid him a shitfuckton of money to, stripping even God’s temple to cover the cost.[
33] The story then goes on to relate Sennacherib immediately besieging Jerusalem and asking them why they think they can make war on him; but this contradicts the fact that we were just told they
didn’t claim they could make war on him but instead paid him to leave. The story at this point even has Sennacherib’s commander ask the Jerusalemites to just surrender and they’ll be left alone.[
34] Which is literally what we had just been told they did. The final redactors of this book have thus clearly swapped the order of events, in order to set up their fabricated legend of a miracle. Dicking with chronology to paint fancier pictures of what actually happened is what ancient mythographers and revisionist propagandists often did. But angels ravaging armies, that’s simply not a thing. Show me any evidence that ever happens, ever—apart from “a myth said it did.” Until you can do that, it’s simply no more plausible than “ancient Jews invented laser guns.” Not likely. Rational people go with the odds.
I won’t bother addressing Sheffield’s selected straw man, a pop-market collection of contrafactual essays that claims Sennacherib’s army must have been stricken by a plague. That’s a silly theory I don’t find much in actual peer reviewed literature. So it doesn’t matter if Sheffield is accurately portraying the theory. It’s simply not what most historians propose happened, another example of “omitting evidence,” in this case producing a classic example of a
Straw Man Fallacy—choose the lamest argument to rebut, ignore every good one; claim victory. Real historians don’t need rhetorical tricks like this to reach a conclusion. Because they know you can’t reach a real conclusion this way. In reality, it is literally, physically impossible for an army of such a size to have existed in one place then. There wasn’t water supply enough to maintain more than several thousand outside the city.[
35] Once again Sheffield just gullibly believes a mythological number that isn’t even possibly true. By contrast, the alternative version of events we find in the Bible is confirmed by Sennacherib himself, who records the massive tribute they paid him to leave.[
36] This is a first-hand, autograph source, a public state record, which actually
agrees remarkably well with the
same account in the Bible. That trumps unsourced propagandistic mythologies. Especially ones that contain the same exact story—and just “tack on” a mythical one, to assuage the embarrassment.[
37] The simple fact is, it costs less to take such a windfall in tribute than continue an at-that-point needless siege—freeing up troops to fight on other fronts, and even funding their deployment. The rest the Jews just made up to save face. No further explanation is necessary.
Smart money plays the odds. Angels don’t attack armies any more than dragons do. But despots fighting multi-front wars frequently leave cities alone that pay them handsomely to. We don’t need specific evidence of either sequence of events. Both perfectly fit the facts we have, and one of them is thousands of times more likely than the other on established precedents alone. This cannot be gainsaid without evidence. And Sheffield has none. By contrast, the Bible convicts itself: by giving two contradictory accounts of why Sennacherib left, one of them matching
both Sennacherib’s own account
and routinely evidenced patterns of historical causation, the other contradicting all other evidence
and common sense about reality. Notably, that latter, mythological account matches almost exactly material taken from
Isaiah 36-37, yet there not preceded or followed by the other, historically realistic account. In Isaiah we never hear about the payoff. We only hear the absurd myth. So now we know where the myth came from. Someone simply tacked this material into 2 Kings, right after the real story ended. Embarrassment solved. Propaganda, not history. When the later authors of
2 Chronicles 32 then used Kings as their source, they conveniently left out the historical part, and included only the myth. Rewriting history like this we know for a fact commonly occurs, unlike mass-murdering angels. Sheffield can present no evidence otherwise. So he has no empirical case to make that anything else happened than that.
The Cyrus-and-Alexander Two Step
I made all the following points already, with evidence and cited scholarship.[
38] So I’ll just summarize here and draw out the methodological and factual points that need emphasizing.
It is a fact that Cyrus granted all the same boons to numerous subject nations upon his accession that the Jews record receiving. And it is a fact that he himself tells us his political reasoning: to make them grateful and thus easier to govern and prosperous enough to tax, and to gain the favor (rather than the wrath) of their gods—which in the ancient world were often understood to mean the same thing. Politics and religion were typically identical: the politically expedient move was also by definition the move that pleased the gods, and vice versa. This leaves no further explanation necessary for why Cyrus granted these boons to the Jews. He granted them to everyone, for reasons he himself states, which are entirely causally plausible and sufficient reasons.
Ockham’s Razor says one must not multiply entities beyond necessity. And there is nothing needed here. The explanation is complete. And matches all extant evidence.
Sheffield’s desire that something else be true simply has no rational basis as history.
- Adding the implausible myth that Cyrus was persuaded to do this by being shown a flattering prophecy about him in a minor nation’s oracle violates Ockham’s Razor, because it adds causal elements beyond necessity.
- Worse even, as the needless epicycle that this theory adds to a sequence of events that already makes complete sense without it requires positing implausible, unevidenced supernatural causation, which the entire span of science and history itself proves is the least likely form of causation to even exist. It’s literally no more plausible than insisting the Jews persuaded Cyrus with mind-control crystals. Or claiming dragons killed your army.
- And even if it were a naturalistically plausible epicycle, its addition doesn’t even make sense, as there is no reason Cyrus would need that motivation, when he already had a fully explicated motivation, and did nothing differently toward the Jews than a dozen other subject nations, a detail which this myth does not explain. So this “addition” to the tale performs no recognizable causal function historically.
- Nor does the idea have any internal plausibility. Cyrus would have no more reason to believe some random book presented him than any other that con artists might try foisting on him to manipulate his behavior. In other words, Sheffield’s theory makes no sense in the context of human or political psychology. No one acts like that.
- And even more importantly, but exactly as we should expect given all the above, this has no support in any credible source. It appears only in a blatant myth reported or constructed by a Jewish propagandist six hundred years after the fact, which is absent from all other Jewish sources, and all other sources whatever—especially any contemporary or near to the events, the kind historians usually need for any extraordinary claim like this.
There is simply no rational reason to credit Josephus’s myth. It is explanatorily excessive and unnecessary, contradicts more direct and reliable evidence, requires implausible rather than well-established behavior, and wholly lacks evidential support. One cannot cite Josephus’s story as evidential support for Josephus’s story; it is the story itself that lacks any evidence or plausibility, and contradicts all known precedents of history and science. Rational historians simply don’t believe such things. Because there is literally no sound reason to.
Sheffield belabors word count with desperate attempts to explain all this away, but none of his explanations are logical. They all ignore or contradict actual political and psychological and contextual realities. More importantly,
none of them would matter even if they were sound. It does not matter how many “excuses” you invent for the total lack of evidence for your theory—at the end of the day, you still don’t have any evidence for your theory. And no evidence, no conclusion. That’s that.
It is simply not rational to deny this. Unrealistic miracle narratives simply always more likely have obvious, well-established explanations in mythmaking and propaganda. There is no getting around that. Until you can change the entire factual content of history to make miraculous causation an empirically verified option again. And Sheffield simply isn’t doing that here.
All the same goes for Josephus’s other,
suspiciously identical myth about Alexander. Only there it is even worse, as we have
other Jewish sources for the Alexander legend and
they all omit any mention of the Book of Daniel being involved. Which means they knew of no such thing. This supports the conclusion that Josephus made up both stories—the “Isaiah wowed Cyrus”
and the “Daniel wowed Alexander” tall tales. It does not matter how many “excuses” you pull out of your imagination to try and “explain away” this inconvenient fact:
you have no evidence that any of those explanations are true. And because that’s the case, this evidence still reduces the probability of the theory—by exactly as much as not having that evidence would have increased it. That is the impact and effect of inconvenient evidence. There is simply no logically possible way to escape inconvenient evidence with excuses you can’t empirically prove really hold. Because possibly is not probably, “made up excuses” make a theory
less probable than it already started.[
39]
As I wrote last time: Alexander the Great would never believe such a book wasn’t just faked to trick him into acquiescing—he was not that much of an idiot (and the Jewish elite surely had a good enough meta-cognition to know that, and thus would have known it foolish to even try such a silly thing)—nor would Alexander need such a bizarre form of persuasion, as all he sought from these cities was surrender, and that’s exactly what the Jews were already offering him. Ockham’s Razor thus eliminates these stories as implausible Jewish propaganda. The simplest explanation of why Alexander accepted the surrender of Judea, is that Judea simply surrendered. And the simplest explanation of why Alexander treated them well for surrendering, is that Alexander always treated cities that surrendered well; this was his military policy throughout his campaign, and it was a common and popular one for conquerors across history. It was a standard “carrot or stick, your call” strategy. Sheffield’s theory thus requires us to “forget” how human beings behave, credit wholly implausible behavior to Alexander, and all for no causal purpose—because we already have other accounts that fully explain his behavior, which match the way humans (particularly ancient, politically-savvy conquerors) actually behave. So we have no need of this implausible epicycle. It serves no function to explain anything. And that would be the case even if it consisted of known forms of causation. Sheffield makes his theory even less probable by requiring forms of causation never attested to actually exist or even be possible. No better than Jews with mind crystals. Dragons killed my army.
Dependence on a False Reality
In an attempt to avoid this inevitable logical outcome, Sheffield litters his essay with wildly false claims about reality, each of which exemplifying either Reverse Incredulity or Formalized Gullibility:
- “These two events [meaning the actions of Cyrus and Alexander] seem to blatantly deviate from the behavior of a conquering nation.” False. They are exactly in accord with typical behavior not only of ancient conquerors generally but of Cyrus and Alexander specifically. That is exactly how Alexander treated surrendering nations. That is exactly how Cyrus and Darius after him treated their subjects throughout their reign. It was not even out out of character for Sennacherib, or any warlord in history, to leave a city alone after such an extraordinarily generous payoff as even the Bible itself admits to giving him. There is simply nothing unusual here at all. So what we have here is Sheffield playing the Reverse Incredulity card, asserting surprise at what is in no way surprising. No rational historian reasons this way. It is a device only of apologetics; a product of cognitive dissonance.
- Sheffield litters his essay with citations of Josephus’s assertions of his own reliability, accuracy, and infallibility. Only a total rube believes things like that. This is Formalized Gullibility. No rational historian just “believes” someone when they insist they aren’t lying or mistaken. Historians need evidence that those assertions are true. And in the case of Josephus, as I demonstrated, ample evidence proves them false.[40] I cited numerous studies in the peer-reviewed literature making this point: Josephus simply isn’t that reliable. He often uses unreliable methods and unreliable sources, and lies whenever it is convenient, directly or by omission. We therefore cannot cite his insistence to the contrary as evidence to the contrary. Actual evidence proves the reverse. Historians follow the evidence. They thus abandoned Formalized Gullibility as a method a lifetime ago.
- “[We should expect] Arrian and Plutarch to discredit Josephus’s report [about Alexander? Cyrus?] given that they were historians serving in the time of Hadrian during a period that was particularly hostile to Jews.” False. Again, Reverse Incredulity: Sheffield is inexplicably “surprised” by no one caring what Josephus said about anything, much less deeply obscure trivia of no present importance. It’s already a non sequitur to go from “policy and fervor was unfavorable to the Jews” to “every Greek author should have systematically critiqued every story in all the works of Josephus no matter how trivial.” But it’s also demonstrably false that they would: because none did. Sheffield doesn’t seem to realize that the motive he just invented would have caused the same behavior no matter whether anything Josephus said was true or false (witness, the works by and against Celsus, Josephus’s against Apion, and so on: when people had such motive, they acted on it). So evidently, no such motive existed. No one cared what Josephus wrote. That’s not conjecture; it’s an empirically settled fact. One might still speculate “someone” cared and wrote against Josephus; but if so, clearly Medieval Christians didn’t preserve any, and we can’t argue from the content of documents we don’t have.
- It’s not even in evidence that Arrian or Plutarch had ever even read Josephus, or knew his works even existed, much less cared about anything in them enough to ever write about it, which exemplifies how Sheffield is just making all this up without evidence, violating a basic rule of Arguments from Silence (or AfS): that you need evidence for your conjectures about who knew which author and would have cared to rebut which claims in them.[41] Sheffield can’t even produce any evidence Plutarch would know how to refute Josephus, or know what to refute (how would Plutarch know anything about this legend? What sources does Sheffield need prove Plutarch had that would have corrected him? You can’t just make shit up). Meanwhile, in Arrian’s case, he explicitly tells us he would never do what Sheffield claims, because his explicitly stated method is to only use as sources the eyewitness accounts of three companions of Alexander.[42] He thus tells us he is ignoring all later sources about Alexander. This is an example of presenting evidence pertinent to Sheffield’s AfS. And it is exactly contrary to Sheffield’s AfS. Arrian no more mentions to correct the legends about Alexander in any other author, than in Josephus. And tells us why. Again, Omission of Evidence. Put the evidence back in that Sheffield left out, and his argument is refuted.
I give these as the most pertinent examples. I could list more. The point is methodological: what Sheffield is doing is not logical; history long ago abandoned these dubious ways of reasoning about history because they are proven to be unreliable. They don’t work. We needed better, more reliable methods. So we developed them. These methods are critical (no gullibility, no naivety, no irrational incredulity, no blind trust), evidence-based (no conjecture or assertion; it’s evidence or GTFO), and logical (no fallacies; no non sequiturs; no making stuff up from the armchair). Thus:
- You have to base generalizations about how political actors usually behaved by reference to actual evidence of how they actually behaved—both in general (throughout history) and, when you have it, in particular (the actual records of Alexander, Cyrus, and Sennacherib). You can’t just ignore all that, and then insist they’d have behaved exactly the contrary to how in fact history establishes they did.
- You can’t just “make shit up” (“Arrian would have rebutted an obscure story in an obscure book by an obscure author he had no stated interest in and whose existence we have no evidence he even had knowledge of”; “Plutarch would have had and thus mentioned reliable sources refuting an obscure story in an obscure book by an obscure author he had no stated interest in, the rebutting of which would have served no identifiable purpose Plutarch ever voiced”; “no one closer to these events reported them because they were jealous”; etc.).
- You can’t just say “Joe isn’t lying because he said he isn’t lying.” You would never be so gullible if it were any other situation; selectively choosing to be this astoundingly naive only when it suits your aims should clue you in that you aren’t thinking rationally, and may need to revisit whether you should continue believing anything you would so blatantly sacrifice all critical thought to maintain.
- And you can’t fail to check whether your assertions are false.[43] If Sheffield had operated like a rational and competent historian, he’d have researched whether Arrian would even have employed or discussed any source that wasn’t an eyewitness, much less Josephus. And he would thus have discovered his assertion about Arrian was false. This is how actual historical reasoning works. If you aren’t doing this, get out of the history business.
And, above all, you simply must stop omitting evidence from any analysis. If it’s pertinent—which means, if it will alter the concluding probability—you must take it into account. Period. Sheffield violates this principle both at the particular and the general level. At the particular level, many of his specific arguments omit key facts changing the entire equation (like the absence of the Book of Daniel in other Jewish accounts of the Alexander legend; or the vast cross-cultural evidence establishing the Jews
aren’t the only religious, national, or ethnic group to survive a long time through a lot of crises; or literally all the evidence I presented that Daniel is a forgery). At the general level, many of his arguments disregard a vast sea of background facts affecting the base rate of different known causes of the kinds of things he is trying to explain (vast evidence against supernatural causes having any observable base rate at all; vast evidence of mythmaking, propaganda, and revisionist history being ubiquitous and normal across all peoples and causes; vast evidence of how ancient conquerors, particularly the most successful of them, actually employed carrot-or-stick policies).
The most damning is Sheffield’s complete disregard of all the facts I adduced in the first place—all the internal and external evidence rightly convincing all mainstream scholars that Daniel is a forgery [
44]: it is not rational to ignore all of that, adduce no evidence against any of it, pretend all that evidence doesn’t exist, and then offer one, lone, frankly rather hare-brained assertion about Josephus’s supposed infallibility in recording an implausible legend about Alexander being shown “our” Book of Daniel, and then claim to have “overthrown” all that other,
actual evidence that that can’t have happened. This is not how logic works. If you have a feeble, gullible assertion about a single legend recorded by a late propagandist, then the enormous pile of
real evidence for Daniel being a forgery becomes evidence
against your assertions about that legend. Josephus’s tall tale is not only not believable for all the reasons I’ve already enumerated here, it is also not believable because
all of that actual, real evidence establishing our text of Daniel did not exist then. Strong evidence trumps weak. Not the other way around. That is an inviolable principle of the logic of evidence. To deny this is simply not rational. And to deny it through all these other illogical tactics, of omitting pertinent evidence at every turn, making assertions about how people do or don’t behave or what was or wasn’t the case that are contrary to all pertinent evidence, of riding on Formalized Gullibility and Reverse Incredulity, exactly the opposite of objective, coherent critical thought, only makes it more obvious to us that someone is defending a delusion. They are stuck in a hall of mirrors, and these are the tools they use to keep themselves trapped there. The rest of us found a way out of there long ago. It’s called critical reasoning.
Conclusion
Any approach to history that presents itself as legitimate historical reasoning, but which employs none of the accredited methods of that field of knowledge but only invalidated and fallacious methods instead—the very methods the
real field of history abandoned and developed tools to avoid
for a reason—is pseudohistory. Sheffield’s entire case is therefore pseudohistory. It serves his apologetical aims—to produce an emotionally convincing reason to continue maintaining his false beliefs (in this case, in the complete authenticity of Daniel and Isaiah). But that is not a legitimate aim of history. It is not, in fact, doing history at all. I believe he is sincere. He probably just does not recognize the fact that such conveniently gerrymandered deployments of unwarranted gullibility and naivety, doubt and incredulity, and the ignoring of all the evidence against the conclusion thus produced, are simply not a credible way to reason or arrive at beliefs about the world. The evidence that Daniel was forged, even if partly in the very time of Alexander, is overwhelming. Sheffield has answered none of it. It is not logically valid to ignore all of that evidence, and then pretend one, single, dubious argument can overwhelm all of it in a single go. Nor is it logical to attempt a fallacy of special pleading by claiming Jews are more reliable reporters than everyone else of the same era, or indeed even magically infallible reporters; even at all, but especially when there is no evidence whatever that actually supports such a dubious claim, and ample evidence against it. And it is not logically valid to dismiss obvious facts and conclusions by appeals to an inappropriate gullibility or incredulity, least of all along exactly those lines needed to maintain one’s pre-existing belief. That is a dead clear sign that someone is defending a delusion, not discovering the truth. I can only hope that someday someone this trapped will find what we found, and discover how to escape.
-:-
Endnotes
[1] See the Hermeneia commentaries on
First Isaiah by by J.J.M. Roberts (Fortress, 2015) and
Deutero-Isaiah by Klaus Baltzer (Fortress, 2001); the
New Interpreter’s Bible Old Testament Survey sections on Isaiah; and Uwe Becker, “
The Book of Isaiah: Its Composition History,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Isaiah, ed. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer (Oxford University Press, 2020). See also P.A. Smith’s
Rhetoric and Redaction in Trito-Isaiah: The Structure, Growth and Authorship of Isaiah 56-66 (Brill, 1995).
[2] Richard Carrier,
“How We Know Daniel Is a Forgery” (9 May 2021) and see my related comment there at
2:08pm, July 19, 2021.
[3] For a general survey (and several examples) of this feature of apologetics, see Richard Carrier,
“Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: Ten Arguments for God Destroyed” (10 January 2017).
[4] Richard Carrier,
“Formalized Gullibility as a Modern Christian Methodology” (18 October 2020).
[5] Carrier, “
How We Know.”
[6] Richard Carrier,
“History Before 1950” (30 April 2007). Reproduced in Richard Carrier,
Hitler Homer Bible Christ (Philosophy Press, 2014), pp. 11-14.
[7] For a peer-reviewed survey of modern historical methods, a logical demonstration of their validity, and a bibliography of other peer-reviewed scholarship on historical methods, see Richard Carrier,
Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Prometheus, 2012) and
“Method, Logic & Philosophy of History: Main Bibliography” (April 2013).
[8] David Bonner Richardson,
Berdyaev’s Philosophy of History: An Existentialist Theory of Social Creativity and Eschatology (Springer 1968). See also
“Nikolai Berdyaev” at Wikipedia and
“Nikolai Berdyaev” at the New World Encyclopedia online for general introduction and biography.
[9] See Wikipedia articles on the
“History of Sikhism” and the
“History of the Romani people” .
[10] See Wikipedia articles on the “
History of Hinduism,” and “
Persecution of Hindus,” “
History of Buddhism,” and “
Persecution of Buddhists,” “
Zoroastrianism,” and “
Persecution of Zoroastrians,” “
History of Jainism,” “
History of Taoism,” and also “
Confucianism,” which was persecuted by the Qin dynasty, the Maoists, and others.
[11] See Wikipedia articles on “
Genocides in history,” “
List of genocides by death toll,” and “
Genocide of indigenous peoples.” Even the Maya and the Aztec Nahuas people are still around despite the collapse of their civilizations and numerous attempts to exterminate them (
“Maya peoples” and
“Nahuas”).
[12] On Islam as essentially a sect of Christianity, itself in turn (we all well know) a sect of Judaism, see Peter Lightheart, “
The Christian Origins of Islam,”
First Things (12-7-12); Richard Carrier,
“Did Muhammad Exist? (Why That Question Is Hard to Answer)” (1 October 2015); and Wikipedia, “
Comparison of Islamic and Jewish dietary laws.” On the inevitable causal dominance of repressive monotheistic religions in social systems, see Richard Carrier,
Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (AuthorHouse, 2005), IV.2.2, pp. 257-72; Jan Assman,
The Price of Monotheism (Stanford University Press, 2009); Daniel Dennett,
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking, 2006), Part II: “The Evolution of Religion”; Hector Avalos,
Fighting Words: The Origins Of Religious Violence (Prometheus, 2005); and Rodney Stark,
One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton University Press, 2001).
[13] Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, “
The Chosen Few: A New Explanation of Jewish Success,”
NPR (18 April 2013).
[14] Carrier,
Proving History, pp. 17-39.
[15] Carrier,
Proving History, pp. 114-17 (cf. “miracles,” index).
[16] Richard Carrier,
“Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them” (24 January 2020).
[17] Richard Carrier,
“The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism” (17 April 2018).
[18] Richard Carrier,
“William Lane Craig’s Duplicitous Denial That Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence” (28 February 2019).
[19] Richard Carrier,
“What Is Bayes’ Theorem & How Do You Use It?” (6 July 2017);
“If You Learn Nothing Else about Bayes’ Theorem, Let It Be This” (26 April 2014);
“Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning” (26 August 2020).
[20] See Richard Carrier,
On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield-Phoenix, 2014), Element 44, Chapter 5, pp. 214-22.
[21] “
Example 1: Josephus the Fabricator,” in Carrier, “
How We Know.” And for many other examples see the entry on
“Alexander the Great” in the
Jewish Encyclopedia online. For peer-reviewed scholarly discussion of Alexander’s interaction with the Judeans and myths thereof see bibliography in Carrier, Ibid., and Peter Schäfer,
The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World: The Jews of Palestine from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest, 2nd Edition (Routledge, 2003), pp. 1-6, and Seth Schwartz,
The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 30-35.
[22] Hershel Shanks, “
Ancient Jerusalem: The Village, the Town, the City,”
Biblical Archaeology Review (May/June 2016); summarizing: Hillel Geva, “
Jerusalem’s Population in Antiquity: A Minimalist View,”
Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University 41.2 (October 2014).
[23] See table at
the Jewish Virtual Library, from John Oesterreicher and Anne Sinai, eds.,
Jerusalem (John Day, 1974).
[24] C.C. McCown, “The Density of Population in Ancient Palestine,”
Journal of Biblical Literature 66.4 (December 1947), pp. 425-36.
[25] Magen Broshi, “
Estimating the Population of Ancient Jerusalem,”
Biblical Archaeology Review 4.2 (June 1978).
[26] Diane Paul, “Eugenics and the Left,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 45.4 (October-December, 1984), pp. 567-90.
[27] See Wikipedia’s articles on the
“Siege of Jerusalem (587 BC)” and the
“Siege of Jerusalem (597 BC)”. And lest you forget, also, the
“Sack of Jerusalem (925 BCE)” and the
“Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)”.
[28]
“How Did the Seleucid Empire Collapse?” DailyHistory.org and Wikipedia articles on the
“Syrian Wars” and
“Seleucid-Parthian Wars”. On the role of Daniel in taking advantages of the resulting weaknesses: Carrier, “
How We Know.”
[29] Wikipedia, “
Economy of Israel: After Independence,” “
Israel–United States relations,” “
Christian Zionism,” and “
United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine,” with Yaakov Ariel,
On Behalf of Israel: American Fundamentalist Attitudes Toward Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, 1865-1945 (Carlson, 1991).
[30] Richard Carrier,
“Newman on Prophecy as Miracle” (Secular Web 1998).
[31]
2 Kings 19:35-36.
[32] That tall tale is told in the 6th century
Life of Genovieve: Jo Ann McNamara and John Halborg, eds.,
Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Duke University Press, 1992), p. 34.
[33]
2 Kings 18:13-16.
[34]
2 Kings 18:17-37.
[35] John Bright,
A History of Israel (SCM, 1980), p. 200.
[36] Sennacherib Prism,
Column 3.
[37] Wikipedia likewise over-emphasizes the fringe plague theory in “
Assyrian siege of Jerusalem” but the peer reviewed literature of late has more plausible military-economic explanations, e.g. William Hallo, “
Jerusalem under Hezekiah: An Assyriological Perspective,” in
Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. L.I. Levine (New York, 1999), pp. 36-50; Peter Dubovský, “
Assyrian Downfall through Isaiah’s Eyes (2 Kings 15-23): The Historiography of Representation,”
Biblica 89.1 (2008), pp. 1-16; etc.
[38] In “
Example 1: Josephus the Fabricator,” in Carrier, “
How We Know.”
[39] See
“The Cost of Making Excuses” in Richard Carrier,
“Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: Ten Arguments for God Destroyed” (10 January 2017).
[40] In “
Example 1: Josephus the Fabricator,” in Carrier, “
How We Know.”
[41] On how to construct logically valid Arguments from Silence see Carrier,
Proving History, pp. 117-19 (and cf. index, “Arguments from Silence”).
[42] Carrier,
Historicity, pp. 22.
[43] This is so absolutely fundamental you simply must read my explication why: Richard Carrier,
“Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning” (26 August 2020).
[44] Once again and for the last time: Richard Carrier,
“How We Know Daniel Is a Forgery” (9 May 2021).
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