A
angellous_evangellous
Guest
Once I stumped my toe on a dead cat.
Now that was just as relevant and useful as the previous post. Frubals!
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Once I stumped my toe on a dead cat.
Now that was just as relevant and useful as the previous post. Frubals!
The two source rule and its application was pointed out to me by a professional historian
are you a professional historian?
I assume that one would learn about this in a class in historical research methods at the undergraduate level, but I really don't know.
I deeply resent the implication that I made it up, especially when it seems far more likely that someone made up your Jesus.
First, other historians have argued, unlike Carrier, that this individual is the same one we know of as Dioscurides Phacus. Second, what sources does Carrier use here? Two: the Dictionary of Scientific Biography and The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Why? Because all the information we have on this individual is passing references in much later works.
This is also true of Carrier's sources for the first century individual Archigenes of Apamea, the abovementioned Rufus of Ephesus, Scribonius Largus, Claudius Agathinus, and every other first century person Carrier talks about.
It isn't applied anywhere. It's a fiction. It isn't a criterion for historians even when we move from antiquity to today.I expect that this rule was not applied to the historicity of Jesus
because in the past any competent scholar knew that Jesus would fail it
Once I stumped my toe on a dead cat.
Given that you are staff, I hate to think you are just trolling.
Perhaps leave the seemingly random sentences unposted.
Given that you are staff, I hate to think you are just trolling.
[youtube]K6cXSwrYNXI[/youtube]
12 string - YouTube
Why not take your own advice? Rather than posting gibberish.Perhaps say something useful.
Or you could just pretend to do so - I don't really care.
Just a second. You're applying a double standard here. What gives you the right to post something irrelevant and useless when I cannot?
Second point - I only made one post to prove a very important point, and I immediately made that point clear in case the reader missed it.
What are you struggling with there?
YES! And why is there no specific mention of the non-existence of Smurfs in ancient Palestine? Why are there no records of people refuting the Space Penguin invasion of 3BC?
Why do we find no records whatsoever of people refuting that Galilee was entirely made of marshmallows?
Gosh, your right - Jesus must be historical and so must be Smurfs and Space Penguins! Thank goodness at least we have you to teach us how to do history!
So let me understand your thinking here:
1. There are no contemporary records of Jesus.
2. However because there are no contemporary records specifically mentioning the non-existence of Jesus......
then 3. Therefore he must be real.
It is almost as awful as your usual demand that people must provide a satisfactory alternate explanation for evidence that does not even exist.
Think harder, and stop insulting other people's scholarship - yours is abominable.
Relevancy. Relevancy. Relevancy.
I repeated it three times just in case you miss it the first two.
Then there's:
Usefulness. Usefulness. Usefulness.
I can do that in Latin if you prefer.
My comment was pertinent and relevant, repeat the same mantra as often as you wish - it is a shamefully poor substitute for a rational response.
This thread discusses the Jesus myth theory, if you can not grasp the relevance of my comment thatis a failure on your part, not mine.
Like Sapiens said...... you might as well have fun with the myth.
It's difficult to pretend like I don't know what I'm talking about to participate in a discussion with people who know know nothing about the topic, and get farther away from the topic instead of closer by posting irrelevant and useless crap.
Keep it up - you might understand something by accident. Maybe.
Of course historians doubt his existence
There is more evidence for the historical figure of Jesus than for virtually anybody from antiquity. However, most don't know what the nature of such evidence is. They don't read Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or even the modern languages of historical scholarship (German, French, & Italian). They haven't studied textual criticism. They accept the categorization of "historiography" vs. "myth" (or novel, legend, narrative, etc.) based upon whether some Greek or Roman author is described as an historian regardless of the extent to which said author relies on myth and legend. They are unaware of the ways in which specialists determine whether a work from antiquity was likely written by whomever claimed it was let alone how many works (from personal letters to theological treatises) were written by anonymous authors who claimed to be some famous author.there is barely a shred of evidence for the life of Jesus.
As for Julius Ceaser there is a vast body of contemporary evidence.
it is a rational conclusion based upon the dearth of contemporary evidence.
e
Yet again you post childish bluster and personal insult. For someone who claims that it is difficult for you to pretend not to know what you are talking about - you sure are doing a good job of appearingto be clueless.
Can you actually engage intelligently on the point at hand?
What is it about the fact that the historicity of Jesus is an inference and not a conclusion that you are struggling with?
"But above all, if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria we should apply to the other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned.
Certainly, there are all those discrepancies between one Gospel and another. But we do not deny that an event ever took place just because pagan historians such as, for example, Livy and Polybius, happen to have described it in differing terms. That there was a growth of legend around Jesus cannot be denied, and it arose very quickly. But there had also been a rapid growth of legends round pagan figures like Alexander the Great; and yet nobody regards him as wholly mythical and fictitious.
To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars'. In recent years, 'no serious scholars has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus'"
p. 200 of Grant, M. (1977). Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels. Scribner's.
"The question ‘Did Jesus exist?’ seemed likely to be of central importance to it, though professional scholars generally regard it as having been settled in serious scholarship long ago."
Casey, M. (2010). Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian's Account of his Life and Teaching. Continuum.
I could keep going forever quoting scholars in multiple fields over the last few decades to indicate not only that historians agree Jesus existed (and a few other facts about him, such as when he lived and that he was executed), but given how hard it is to find a single scholar with a relevant specialty who doubts Jesus existed, why not provide some evidence for the claim that "of course historians doubt" what Price, Carrier, and perhaps 1 or 2 other biblical scholars/historians/etc. doubt? That is, do you base your assessment on what historians do or don't think on what they actually think, or what you believe they should?
There is more evidence for the historical figure of Jesus than for virtually anybody from antiquity.
However, most don't know what the nature of such evidence is. They don't read Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or even the modern languages of historical scholarship (German, French, & Italian). They haven't studied textual criticism. They accept the categorization of "historiography" vs. "myth" (or novel, legend, narrative, etc.) based upon whether some Greek or Roman author is described as an historian regardless of the extent to which said author relies on myth and legend. They are unaware of the ways in which specialists determine whether a work from antiquity was likely written by whomever claimed it was let alone how many works (from personal letters to theological treatises) were written by anonymous authors who claimed to be some famous author.
It's hard to determine whether there exists a "shred of evidence" for any historical figure from the classical or medieval world vs. another if one isn't familiar with the nature of the evidence. For example, groundbreaking work in classical studies, NT studies, and historical Jesus studies (resulting in, among other things, peer-reviewed journals, novel methods used by other historians of ancient history, and new areas of research) has shown that the gospels belong to a kind of ancient biography such as those written by Philostratus, Diogenes Laertius, Seutonius, etc., but that this category (as well as the gospels' membership in it) is fuzzy enough such that classical historian Loveday Alexander has argued the author of Luke-Acts wrote something more akin to a technical treatise.
We have multiple works attributed to Caesar and contemporaries as well as near contemporaries. We don't have any of these works. What we have are copies of copies of copies that are almost all over 1,000 years older than the first manuscript witness (a papyri scrap from the gospel of John). These disagree, they all contain errors, and we are almost completely ignorant of what the original texts looked like compared to our knowledge of the original NT texts.
I could go on, and talk about the ways in which the general tendencies in antiquity to write texts in the name of another (famous) author or figure render irrelevant any attribution to Caesar or contemporary author any copies of texts we consider evidence for Caesar. I could add that any epigraphic, archaeological, autographic letters/documents, etc., that ARE contemporaneous can be compared for evidence of clearly mythical gods/heros. And I could continue to poke holes in our evidence for Caesar by exploiting individual problems with our sources, ignoring any holistic analysis of them, and ignoring the most important aspect of historiography: what the best explanation given the evidence is. But Caesar was a historical figure, and obviously so. He's one of the few for which we have more evidence than we have for Jesus. The point, though, is that the evidence for Caesar is excepted, in general, as uncritically by most as the evidence for Jesus is by those that believe the NT was inspired by god. When you accept that we have good sources for some historical figure from antiquity without being familiar with either the evidence for that figure or the nature of ancient historical evidence, comparisons are pointless.
Let's ignore, for the moment, the contemporary evidence that is accepted by historians, and instead apply the uncritical assessment for figures like Caesar, Nero, Socrates, Pythagoras, Cicero, Hippocrates, Augustus, etc. For Jesus, then, we have two disciples who wrote accounts of his mission. We have his twin brother writing about him. We have his brother James writing about him. We have his lead disciple Peter and his lead disciple's "secretary" (Mark) writing about him. And so on. Of course, this is mostly nonsense or worse. The account by his twin brother is not only written long after Jesus but attributed to a fiction. The various accounts by those like Peter or Mary are even later and clearly fictional (and, in fact, there is some disagreement as to who the Mary of the gnostic texts is). As for the only early sources, those that are biographical were almost certainly not written by the traditional authors but are rather anonymously written. The clearly contemporary sources-by Paul-contain little to know information about Jesus and it is highly likely that Paul never knew Jesus (only his followers and at least one family member).
As has been pointed out before Schweitzer and continually since, though, such problems and others exist for all evidence for all persons from antiquity. Almost always, we have far less evidence and it is far more problematic.
I understand that this is painful for you.
I am under no burden to prove to you that you're off topic. To do so, I would carry the thread more off topic than it already is. I can simply do what you did and point out that your post was useless and irrelevant. You merely said that our friend was committing a logical fallacy, but were too lazy or incompetent to do so. That might be why you chose not to quote him and just make the baseless comment.
I will continue to try and be clueless. I thought that I was failing at that, but I hardly think that you're a qualified judge.