Jesus or Christ Myth Theory

[steeltoes]

and furthermore...

Davis suggests that the idea of testing the "rather fragile historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth," or even working out what kind of historical research might be appropriate, is controversial among New Testament scholars.

 

[joelr]

The majority viewpoint among scholars is that Jesus existed



Bart Ehrman has claimed that Jesus certainly existed, and that "virtually every competent scholar" agrees with him


Richard A. Burridge has stated that he does not know of any "respectable critical scholar" who still argues that there never was a Jesus at all.


Classical historian Michael Grant said that, in recent years, "no serious scholar" has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus.[5][7][8]


Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed, and most biblical scholars and classical historians see the theories of his non-existence as effectively refuted.

I can't post links but these quotes are untrue.
Just go to D.M. Murdock's site, she has a forum and takes on any debates.
Speaking over 12 languages and working in Egypt and several other countries she has put together enough source material to back up the myth theory.

Plus written several books. But most of the basic information is free on the site. For example you can see information directly from hieroglyphics that is NOT on wiki.

This work was started by an Egyptologist in the 1890's but it was too hostile an environment to pursue. Christians wouldn't put up with it.

 

[outhouse]

.
Just go to D.M. Murdock's site, .

:biglaugh:


Why would anyone want to eat that trash


She is the biggest waist of time and nothing but perversion of history.


I debate with her and her minions, they are all pathetic :yes:

 

[outhouse]

it was too hostile an environment to pursue. Christians wouldn't put up with it.

She has as much credibility as vomit.

No one with any credibility puts up with her trash.


All historians/scholars for the most part are embarrassed at the pseudohistory she promotes through severe ignorance.

 

[Bunyip]

Thanks, but I don't use Wikipedia to understand logic, formal systems, inference, etc. I use it the way most do: when I don't know much about something, I go to Wikipedia. If you'd like to engage in a discussion about inference, fallacies, argumentation, cognition, the philosophy of logic, and related topics I'd be delighted. Referring me to a site designed to be at best just simplistic enough for those who don't know what they are talking about to learn valuable information isn't exactly helpful. There are dozens of popular sources you could have referenced:

Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions. HarperCollins.

Brandom, R., & Brandom, R. (2009). Articulating reasons: An introduction to inferentialism. Harvard University Press.

Correia, V. (2011). Biases and fallacies: The role of motivated irrationality in fallacious reasoning. Cogency, 3(1), 107-126.

Cox, R. T. (1961). The Algebra of Probable Inference. Johns Hopkins Press.
T
Gilovich, T. (2008). How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. Simon and Schuster.

Hansen, H. V. (2002). The Straw Thing of Fallacy Theory: The Standard Definition of 'Fallacy'. Argumentation, 16(2), 133-155.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1994). Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds. Wiley.

Pirie, M. (2006). How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic. Continuum.

Schlkopf, B., Luo, Z., & Vovk, V. (2013). Empirical Inference: Festschrift in Honor of Vladimir N. Vapnik. Springer.

Tittle, P. (2011). Critical Thinking: An Appeal to Reason. Routledge.


and on, and on, and on. I have to keep up on this mostly because I have to teach undergraduates formal logic, statistical inference, research on the ways in which humans tend to fail consistently when it comes to reasoning, logic, inference, and "rationality" (demonstrated by research in the cognitive sciences), epistemic modality, the logic and algebra of experimental design, etc. For most, it isn't exactly intuitive, but I'd like to think I can teach well enough to get most of the essential concepts across.


Let's imagine that I don't do this for a living and you are capable of supporting your points with more than references an elementary school child is capable of using. Can you then support anything you've asserted using specialist literature? Or are you limited to references to wiki pages you can't really relate well to your argument?

Sheesh buddy - you could whine at an Olympic level. Those two wiki pages adequately explain the two simple concepts you are clearly not familiar with, and which are relevant to this case. Stop complaining and educate yourself. And I beg you, stop posting long lists of utterly irrelevant references.

You haven't demonstrated any scholarly ineptitude. You've failed to address scholarship entirely. Your apparent lack of familiarity with formal logic and related topics is mostly secondary and largely irrelevant. After all, it doesn't take Gödel to make the leap from claims about what historian think to citing historians rather than wiki pages.




You support your view of what historians think by asserting that's what they think, then you address historical methods via reference of logical inferences that apply to all of historiography and thus couldn't matter less, and finally reinforce your inability to support your claims about historians' views on this issue by citing Wikipedia. I am confident you have more you can offer if you would simply spend some time actually trying to defend your position rather than deflect.

Wow mate, you sure are a gasbag. A rambling blowhard - if you really do teach, I pity your poor students. Cut out all the whining, irrelevant references and citations and just rrad what I am saying more carefully.

You keep demanding that I support claims I have not made and positions I do not jold. Get over yourself a little - the bulk of your endless posts is just personal digs and posturing.

Clearly you do not in fact know what inferences to the best evidence and abducitve thinking mean. Look them up. Abductive reasoning is not like other forms of logical argumentation - it does not supply conclusions.

 

[Bunyip]

:thud:

Historicity of Jesus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The majority viewpoint among scholars is that Jesus existed



Bart Ehrman has claimed that Jesus certainly existed, and that "virtually every competent scholar" agrees with him


Richard A. Burridge has stated that he does not know of any "respectable critical scholar" who still argues that there never was a Jesus at all.
3

Classical historian Michael Grant said that, in recent years, "no serious scholar" has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus.[5][7][8]


Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed, and most biblical scholars and classical historians see the theories of his non-existence as effectively refuted.

Your point? For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert, I could post as many citations to support or deny anything. 'Theories of his non-existence' ROLFMAO.

Sure buddy, no serious scholars doubt the historicity of Jesus - except for all of the ones that doubt the historicity of Jesus.

Here's how you guys seem to think debate works:

H: No serious scholars doubt the historicity of Jesus.
M: That's not true, there are many.

H: Hah! You don't know what you are talking about - bet you can't name any?
M: Sure I can, Richard Carrier.

H: Hah! He doesn't count, he's an idiot! You are talking out of your ****, bet you can't name a single one!
M: Ok, here is a list of 10 scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus.........

H Hah! Those guys are all nobodies!


So there are no scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus, except for all of the scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus - but they don't count because no serious scholar doubts the historicity of Jesus, therefore any scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus are by definition not serious scholars.

 

[steeltoes]

Historicity of Jesus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The majority viewpoint among scholars is that Jesus existed



Bart Ehrman has claimed that Jesus certainly existed, and that "virtually every competent scholar" agrees with him


Richard A. Burridge has stated that he does not know of any "respectable critical scholar" who still argues that there never was a Jesus at all.


Classical historian Michael Grant said that, in recent years, "no serious scholar" has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus.[5][7][8]


Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed, and most biblical scholars and classical historians see the theories of his non-existence as effectively refuted.

Thou protest too much.

 

[steeltoes]

:thud:

Your point? For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert, I could post as many citations to support or deny anything. 'Theories of his non-existence' ROLFMAO.

Sure buddy, no serious scholars doubt the historicity of Jesus - except for all of the ones that doubt the historicity of Jesus.

Here's how you guys seem to think debate works:

H: No serious scholars doubt the historicity of Jesus.
M: That's not true, there are many.

H: Hah! You don't know what you are talking about - bet you can't name any?
M: Sure I can, Richard Carrier.

H: Hah! He doesn't count, he's an idiot! You are talking out of your ****, bet you can't name a single one!
M: Ok, here is a list of 10 scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus.........

H Hah! Those guys are all nobodies!


So there are no scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus, except for all of the scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus - but they don't count because no serious scholar doubts the historicity of Jesus, therefore any scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus are by definition not serious scholars.

This sort of logic works for them, anyone that believes is credible. Whatever floats their boat.

 

[Bunyip]

This sort of logic works for them, anyone that believes is credible. Whatever floats their boat.

Have you noticed though that this seems to be the entirety of the case being presented by those defending a historical Jesus?

Basically denying that anybody doubts historicity and dismissing ad hoc any examples of those who do. The 'shut up! You are an idiot!' approach. Denial and bluster and nothing more.
I get the feeling that they actually believe that attacking this 'mythicist' position somehow magically shores up the case for a historical Jesus.

 

[steeltoes]

Have you noticed though that this seems to be the entirety of the case being presented by those defending a historical Jesus?

Basically denying that anybody doubts historicity and dismissing ad hoc any examples of those who do. The 'shut up! You are an idiot!' approach. Denial and bluster and nothing more.
I get the feeling that they actually believe that attacking this 'mythicist' position somehow magically shores up the case for a historical Jesus.

Denial and bluster sums it up.

Scholars of the third quest for an historical Jesus actually had to invent criteria in order to produce desired results. The criterion of embarrassment is essentially an appeal to ignorance, I don't know how they could have written this if it wasn't true, they couldn't possibly have made this **** up. This is their go to argument for the baptism and crucifixion that scholars believe to be historical.

 

[Bunyip]

The case for the historicity of Intergallactic Space Penguins.


1. No serious scholars have ever found concrete evidence of the non-existence of IGSP.
2. No serious scholar has ever attempted to prove the universal non-existence of IGSP.
3. No IGSP mythicist has published a better explanation for the evidence.
4. Shut up! You don't know what your talking about.
5. Every single sholar on earth thinks that proving the universal non-existence of IGSP is impossible

6. Therefore IGSP are real.
7. See 4.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Sheesh buddy - you could whine at an Olympic level.

Wow mate, you sure are a gasbag. A rambling blowhard

That is just a particularly childish ad hominem attack. Why not respond with a reasoned argument instead of the schoolyard taunts?

Hm.

Ignoring this blatant hypocrisy, let's start with these "simple concepts" you misuse:

When a person mistakes a guess drawn from abductive reasoning for an actual firm conclusion as you are doing - that is a fallacy called 'affirming the consequent'.

This is a decent enough simple explanation of the fallacy. However, as you subsequently misuse it and fail to realize how your explication of it defeats your entire argument, it's worth going over in somewhat greater detail. I'll restrict myself to sources for amateurs:

"To those who confuse hopelessly the order of horses and carts, affirming the consequent is a fallacy which comes naturally...In an 'if... then' construction, the 'if part is the antecedent, and the 'then' part is the consequent. It is all right to affirm the antecedent in order to prove the consequent, but not vice versa.

If I drop an egg, it breaks. I dropped the egg, so it broke.

(This is perfectly valid. It is an argument called the modus ponens which we probably use every day of our lives. Compare it with the following version.)

If I drop an egg, it breaks. This egg is broken, so I must have dropped

This is the fallacy of affirming the consequent...Affirming the consequent is fallacious because an event can be produced by different causes"
Pirie, M. (2006). How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic. Continuum.

The fallacy is very much related to equating correlation with causation and inferring from "if x then y" that "if y then x". Importantly, while it is absolutely not true that "if x then y" entails "if y then x", it does entail that "if y then x" is necessarily more likely. To illustrate, consider the following:

1) All Romanists (a type of classical historian) are historians
2) X is an historian.
~ 3) Therefore, X is a Romanist

This is an example of the type of fallacy you mentioned. What is essential to understand is that it is fallacious in the classical (and formal) sense, not a reasoning failure per se. While there are plenty of historians who are not Romanists, the ratio of Romanists to historians is far greater than people to historians. Put another way, consider a probability space of all persons. The region which represents all historians is a tiny fraction of the total space. However, the region of Romanists is not only entirely contained within the space of historians, but is relatively very large compared to the tiny space occupied by all historians within the space of all persons.

This is why abductive reasoning is vital to the sciences and elsewhere in academia (and in life) :

"The general purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of the field of abduction...we motivate our study via several examples that show that this type of reasoning pervades common sense reasoning as well as scientific inquiry."

Aliseda, A. (2006). Abductive Reasoning: Logical Investigations into Discovery and Explanation (Synthese Library, Vol. 330). Springer.

"Abduction, or inference to the best explanation, is a form of inference that goes from data describing something to a hypothesis that best explains or accounts for the data. Thus abduction is a kind of theory-forming or interpretive inference."

from the intro to Josephson & Josephson (1996). Abductive Inference: Computation, Philosophy, Technology. Cambridge University Press.

Now let's examine how you misrepresented historical methods, logic, and fallacies:

Historians catalogue and interpret the data, the historicity of Jesus (or any other character) is what is called an 'inference to the best explanation'', which is a guess, a tentative conclusion of what that particular researcher believes to be the most likely explanation.

1) Necessarily, this describes all historiography and therefore couldn't matter less when it comes to Jesus. If this is what historians do, then it is what historians always do and your argument is amounts to a criticism of the entirety of historical study.

2) "Inference to the best explanation" is the central component of all research in every field from Indo-European linguistics to particle physics. To the extent deductive reasoning is applicable outside of formal systems, it is necessarily limited as it relies on "axioms" that are based upon AND used as the foundations for perceptual and cognitive frameworks.

This is called ABDUCTIVE REASONING, and it gives only a best guess, not an actual conclusion or proof.

3) Ignoring the ridiculous claim that "conclusions" are somehow strictly defined by inference rules, it couldn't matter less if such reasoning isn't "proof". Proof is almost entirely limited to mathematics. It is colloquially used to mean something like "very likely true", but as any such definition is subjective, fuzzy, and useless for scholars we not only recognize that research isn't about proving anything but also recognize the vital importance of probabilistic reasoning and inductive (as well as abductive) reasoning.

When a person mistakes a guess drawn from abductive reasoning for an actual firm conclusion as you are doing

4) Here again you confuse "guess" with abductive reasoning. All inferences can be baseless, deductive or not. In general, people who haven't received some education or haven't studied logic make fairly consistent errors when it comes to formal (logical) inference. Good researchers (including historians), rely on non-deductive reasoning and methods have been developed for centuries in order to support conclusions that do not require axiomatic systems (or proof) in order to reach sound, supported conclusions. Recent years have paired abduction with computational theory, cognitive science, the philosophy of logic, and more.

You, however, seem stuck on an incredibly shallow understanding of logical inference, its place in research, the nature of both fallacies and formal reasoning, and why your criticisms are prima facie nonsensical. Either historians rely on a method you claim can yield only guesses, in which case all historical research is subject to the same flaw, or there is something about historical Jesus studies that makes this field different, in which case the only support you have offered is your claims about what evidence historians have without citing any historians or historical research and failing to address those I have.

stop posting long lists of utterly irrelevant references.

Have you read them? If not, how do you know they are irrelevant? You have repeatedly requested I check out a few online pages and ignored both my quotations from and citations of actual scholarship. Then you assert these are irrelevant? Curious.

You keep demanding that I support claims I have not made and positions I do not jold.

abductive reasoning does NOT provide a conclusion. To imagine it does is fallacious.

This is wrong.

Now that is just nonsense - there is a far greater body of evidence for many other historical figures, at the very least for every single historical figure that unlike Jesus we have contemporary evidence for.

This is misleading, as I meant historical figures from ancient history, but also simply wrong as we have contemporaneous sources for Jesus.

there is barely a shred of evidence for the life of Jesus.

This is fantastically wrong.

You've made some very clear and clearly incorrect statements. What exactly am I not understanding about your argument(s)?

Clearly you do not in fact know what inferences to the best evidence and abducitve thinking mean

Abductive reasoning is not like other forms of logical argumentation

"A hundred years ago, Charles Sanders Peirce [1931-1958] coined the concept of abduction in order to illustrate that the process of scientific discovery is not irrational and that a methodology of discovery is possible. Peirce interpreted abduction essentially as an “inferential” creative process of generating a new “explanatory” hypothesis....Abduction is the process of inferring certain facts and/or laws and hypotheses that render some sentences plausible, that explain (and also sometimes discover) some (eventually new) phenomenon or observation; it is the process of reasoning in which explanatory hypotheses are formed and evaluated."

Magnani, L. (2009). Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning (Cognitive Systems Monographs, Vol. 3).

I eagerly await how you will ignore, twist, and otherwise evade admission that despite your faith in your understanding of Wikipedia pages, your understanding of inference and formal reasoning in research in general and historical Jesus research in particular is simply without support, as is your understanding of our evidence for Jesus' historicity.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

The case for the historicity of Intergallactic Space Penguins.


1. No serious scholars have ever found concrete evidence of the non-existence of IGSP.

Almost all serious scholars have found our evidence for Jesus' historicity to be "concrete". You are equating "proving" a negative or "evidence of absence" for confirmation. Your analogy is flawed: noting that specialists in X field find evidence of Y is not analogous to noting that no specialists in X field haven't found evidence of Y. This is pretty basic.

2. No serious scholar has ever attempted to prove the universal non-existence of IGSP.

Same logical flaw. The issue is what and why serious scholars have attempted to show/demonstrate.

3. No IGSP mythicist has published a better explanation for the evidence.

A better explanation for non-existence? You realize that mythicists attempt to demonstrate non-existence by explaining way/interpreting/ignoring evidence, while historians (including the two or three who may count as mythicists) simply explain the evidence, right?

6. Therefore IGSP are real.

If we use mythicist reasoning, sure.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Scholars of the third quest for an historical Jesus actually had to invent criteria in order to produce desired results.

Historians all do this. So do scientists. The question is whether or not there is a good reason to support them. For example:

The criterion of embarrassment is essentially an appeal to ignorance

Actually, those like Carrier who criticize it appeal to our ignorance, while those who think the criterion is sound as a method of weighing evidence appeal to our knowledge (the more devastating criticism is that, given whatever we consider to be embarrassing ended up in the historical record and given that this criterion is useful only insofar as embarrassing evidence tends to be erased from the historical record, then the logic of the method supports the conclusion that for any remaining evidence we have at least some independent reason for supposing it to be not embarrassing based on the logic of the criterion itself).

However, historical evidence isn't as static as one might suppose. The theological nuances, Christological disputes, determinations of what was orthodoxy vs. heresy, etc., occurred over time. We can sometimes see how early sources contained what was edited out of later sources that relied upon these early sources. Furthermore, no criterion by itself is sufficient: we can only suppose what is embarrassing if and when we can understand the dynamics of early Christianity and the production of early Christian sources sufficiently. This is why those who have used this criterion (including historians whose research has nothing to do with the historical Jesus) never do so first or independently.

This is their go to argument for the baptism and crucifixion that scholars believe to be historical.

I assume you mean baptism by John, which many scholars take to be an indication not that Jesus was baptized by John so much as that Jesus was a disciple of John. This one is a stretch, IMO. That an execution intended to be humiliating and known to be considered humiliating wouldn't be central to a created myth for a figure central to the worldview of a persecuted movement is pretty good evidence. Still, it is only evidence in the context of both our sources in general and our general explanation for them. Historians do not simply treat this or that text, some particular find, or any piece of evidence singularly. For any given passage in the gospels, sources on Jewish movements, archaeological evidence of first century Roman and Jewish socioeconomic & cultural dynamics, etc., we can find many explanations that are all equally flawed, baseless, and ludicrous when considered in conjunction with our total evidence. Even scholars like Price admit that any conclusion that Jesus wasn't historical faces serious challenges that do not easily fit into any coherent explanation for all our evidence. Price, for example, suggests in one of his few contributions to a scholarly work that we "leapfrog" over the Josephus debate and that, although there is no evidence for the "brothers of the lord" group he concludes must exist in order to explain why James wasn't actually biologically related to Jesus, his conclusion that such an explanation is warranted is based solely on his reading of the evidence (and its dismissal).

The difference between those like Price and virtually all other scholars in relevant fields is that he has no criteria other than to explain evidence away. Carrier does the same, but makes his ahistorical analysis seem more impressive by misusing Bayesian analysis and his own sources.

Historical Jesus research pretty much began with explanations, based upon our sources, for why the Jesus of Christianity didn't exist. Like historiography in general, both good and bad research since Chubbs & Reimarus have consisted of attempts to develop a coherent narrative both consistent with all our evidence and superior to any other explanations. That's history: explaining our sources, not arguing why other explanations are unfounded by explaining away evidence piece-by-piece.

 

[Muffled]

All without a shred of evidence for anything divine.

The joys of mythology. People who make unsubstantiated claims

I believe my claims are substantiated and you can try to deceive people into thinking otherwise but you just make things up as you go.

 

[Muffled]

If you honestly believe that theories are less dependable than myth - you either do not know what 'theory' means in science - or are essentially nuts.

I believe I do know what theory means. It does not mean proven though some people like to think so. It means someone looked at the evidence and speculated on possible reasons for its existence.

I have looked at the birth rates and have come up with a theory that the US will be a Spanish speaking nation in 200 years.

Myths are not speculation they are historical accounts that can't be verified.

For instance one does not have to theorize that Odin existed because the mythical account says that he did. If one theorizes that Odin never existed the theory is less dependable because the record is that he did exist.

 

[Muffled]

It would be very nice if we had something written about Jesus during the time he was alive. But I don't think that is an absolute requirement in determining an individuals historicity.

I believe people are still writing about Abraham Lincoln. Shall we say that anyone wiriting about Neanderthals must be in error because the person wasn't there to witness that they really existed?

 

[Sapiens]

I believe people are still writing about Abraham Lincoln. Shall we say that anyone wiriting about Neanderthals must be in error because the person wasn't there to witness that they really existed?

Anyone writing about an individual Neanderthal must be in error, except when describing fossil finds.

 

[Bunyip]

Hm.

Ignoring this blatant hypocrisy, let's start with these "simple concepts" you misuse:


This is a decent enough simple explanation of the fallacy. However, as you subsequently misuse it and fail to realize how your explication of it defeats your entire argument, it's worth going over in somewhat greater detail. I'll restrict myself to sources for amateurs:

"To those who confuse hopelessly the order of horses and carts, affirming the consequent is a fallacy which comes naturally...In an 'if... then' construction, the 'if part is the antecedent, and the 'then' part is the consequent. It is all right to affirm the antecedent in order to prove the consequent, but not vice versa.

If I drop an egg, it breaks. I dropped the egg, so it broke.

(This is perfectly valid. It is an argument called the modus ponens which we probably use every day of our lives. Compare it with the following version.)

If I drop an egg, it breaks. This egg is broken, so I must have dropped

This is the fallacy of affirming the consequent...Affirming the consequent is fallacious because an event can be produced by different causes"
Pirie, M. (2006). How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic. Continuum.

The fallacy is very much related to equating correlation with causation and inferring from "if x then y" that "if y then x". Importantly, while it is absolutely not true that "if x then y" entails "if y then x", it does entail that "if y then x" is necessarily more likely. To illustrate, consider the following:

1) All Romanists (a type of classical historian) are historians
2) X is an historian.
~ 3) Therefore, X is a Romanist

This is an example of the type of fallacy you mentioned. What is essential to understand is that it is fallacious in the classical (and formal) sense, not a reasoning failure per se. While there are plenty of historians who are not Romanists, the ratio of Romanists to historians is far greater than people to historians. Put another way, consider a probability space of all persons. The region which represents all historians is a tiny fraction of the total space. However, the region of Romanists is not only entirely contained within the space of historians, but is relatively very large compared to the tiny space occupied by all historians within the space of all persons.

This is why abductive reasoning is vital to the sciences and elsewhere in academia (and in life) :

"The general purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of the field of abduction...we motivate our study via several examples that show that this type of reasoning pervades common sense reasoning as well as scientific inquiry."

Aliseda, A. (2006). Abductive Reasoning: Logical Investigations into Discovery and Explanation (Synthese Library, Vol. 330). Springer.

"Abduction, or inference to the best explanation, is a form of inference that goes from data describing something to a hypothesis that best explains or accounts for the data. Thus abduction is a kind of theory-forming or interpretive inference."

from the intro to Josephson & Josephson (1996). Abductive Inference: Computation, Philosophy, Technology. Cambridge University Press.

Now let's examine how you misrepresented historical methods, logic, and fallacies:



1) Necessarily, this describes all historiography and therefore couldn't matter less when it comes to Jesus. If this is what historians do, then it is what historians always do and your argument is amounts to a criticism of the entirety of historical study.

2) "Inference to the best explanation" is the central component of all research in every field from Indo-European linguistics to particle physics. To the extent deductive reasoning is applicable outside of formal systems, it is necessarily limited as it relies on "axioms" that are based upon AND used as the foundations for perceptual and cognitive frameworks.



3) Ignoring the ridiculous claim that "conclusions" are somehow strictly defined by inference rules, it couldn't matter less if such reasoning isn't "proof". Proof is almost entirely limited to mathematics. It is colloquially used to mean something like "very likely true", but as any such definition is subjective, fuzzy, and useless for scholars we not only recognize that research isn't about proving anything but also recognize the vital importance of probabilistic reasoning and inductive (as well as abductive) reasoning.



4) Here again you confuse "guess" with abductive reasoning.

WOW! After all - why use 10 words, when you can use 400000?

I am not confusing "guess" with abductive reasoning - abductive reasoning IS GUESSING.


I keep falling asleep reading your endless, meandering and largely off topic dissertations.

So let's move to the principle flaw - you seem to think that there is in fact contemporary evidence of Jesus, and apparently quite a lot of it. So what is it?

All inferences can be baseless, deductive or not. In general, people who haven't received some education or haven't studied logic make fairly consistent errors when it comes to formal (logical) inference. Good researchers (including historians), rely on non-deductive reasoning and methods have been developed for centuries in order to support conclusions that do not require axiomatic systems (or proof) in order to reach sound, supported conclusions. Recent years have paired abduction with computational theory, cognitive science, the philosophy of logic, and more.

You, however, seem stuck on an incredibly shallow understanding of logical inference, its place in research, the nature of both fallacies and formal reasoning, and why your criticisms are prima facie nonsensical. Either historians rely on a method you claim can yield only guesses, in which case all historical research is subject to the same flaw, or there is something about historical Jesus studies that makes this field different, in which case the only support you have offered is your claims about what evidence historians have without citing any historians or historical research and failing to address those I have.





Have you read them? If not, how do you know they are irrelevant? You have repeatedly requested I check out a few online pages and ignored both my quotations from and citations of actual scholarship. Then you assert these are irrelevant? Curious.




This is wrong.



This is misleading, as I meant historical figures from ancient history, but also simply wrong as we have contemporaneous sources for Jesus.



This is fantastically wrong.

You've made some very clear and clearly incorrect statements. What exactly am I not understanding about your argument(s)?







"A hundred years ago, Charles Sanders Peirce [1931-1958] coined the concept of abduction in order to illustrate that the process of scientific discovery is not irrational and that a methodology of discovery is possible. Peirce interpreted abduction essentially as an “inferential” creative process of generating a new “explanatory” hypothesis....Abduction is the process of inferring certain facts and/or laws and hypotheses that render some sentences plausible, that explain (and also sometimes discover) some (eventually new) phenomenon or observation; it is the process of reasoning in which explanatory hypotheses are formed and evaluated."

Magnani, L. (2009). Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning (Cognitive Systems Monographs, Vol. 3).

I eagerly await how you will ignore, twist, and otherwise evade admission that despite your faith in your understanding of Wikipedia pages, your understanding of inference and formal reasoning in research in general and historical Jesus research in particular is simply without support, as is your understanding of our evidence for Jesus' historicity.

 

[Bunyip]

Almost all serious scholars have found our evidence for Jesus' historicity to be "concrete".

Nonsense, there is no contemporary evidence - and what evidence there is from a generation later is largely of unknown authorship.

You are equating "proving" a negative or "evidence of absence" for confirmation. Your analogy is flawed: noting that specialists in X field find evidence of Y is not analogous to noting that no specialists in X field haven't found evidence of Y. This is pretty basic.



Same logical flaw. The issue is what and why serious scholars have attempted to show/demonstrate.

A better explanation for non-existence? You realize that mythicists attempt to demonstrate non-existence by explaining way/interpreting/ignoring evidence, while historians (including the two or three who may count as mythicists) simply explain the evidence, right?

I am not a mythicist, 'mythicism' is a strawman. People who doubt the historicity of Jesus are not mythicists, and are unlikely to be stupid enough to 'attempt to demonstrate non-existence', mainly because that is ridiculous. I am not a mythicist, and have told you so.

Almost all of your accusations, responses, citations and dissertations address claims I have not made and positions I do not hold.

If we use mythicist reasoning, sure.