Nah mate, for example the gospels say some of the disciples CHICKENED and ran off when Jesus was crucified, for fear of getting collared by the Romans.
If they'd wanted to present themselves in a better light they'd have edited that bit out when they penned the gospels, but the fact they left it in proves once again that nobody tried to pretty up the Bible, and it's therefore come down to us over the centuries with nothing added, nothing taken away..
Nah mate, for example the gospels say some of the disciples CHICKENED and ran off when Jesus was crucified, for fear of getting collared by the Romans.
If they'd wanted to present themselves in a better light they'd have edited that bit out when they penned the gospels, but the fact they left it in proves once again that nobody tried to pretty up the Bible, and it's therefore come down to us over the centuries with nothing added, nothing taken away..
Nah........ ! :no:
Look, I know that there are lots of negative reports in, say, G-Mark... which help me to believe that there is much truth in it, but it (and the others!) did get fiddled with by evangelists who were prepared to 'tinker' with bits and pieces.
Which is why folks like you sneak off and hide if you get asked questions about variations and differences in reports. It's no good wanging goals into the back of the other side's net if you're going to play ***** down at your own goal mouth.
Now.... which nativity story do you like best? Luke's or Mat's?
With the most generous appraisal every line in all manuscripts that mention Jesus are evidence of his existence. There are some ~7,000 manuscripts of the Greek NT alone (i.e., not counting Latin, Gothic, Syriac, Coptic, Old Church Slavonic, etc.).
What counts (and how) as historical evidence depends in part on the explanatory model itself. Consider the historical issue most analogous with the "quest for the historical Jesus", i.e., the "Socratic problem." First, the main "problem" that is posed by (or makes up) the Socratic problem is some 300+ years of various historians/scholars arguing over which depiction of Socrates (in particular Xenophon's, Plato's, & Aristotle's) we should consider reliable or most reliable. For every argument scholars from at least as far back as Garnier's (1768) Caractére de la Philosophie de Socrate" to Burnet & Taylor (20th century) whatever sources were argued to be reliable were so by criticizing every other source.
In fact, as the famous scholar of Plato A. E. Taylor wrote in 1932 (whilst criticizing Xenophon as a reliable source), "[t]his explains why there was a tendency among the foremost scholars of the present century to complete skepticism about the very possibility of any knowledge of the 'historical Socrates' (Socrates, p. 17, emphasis added). Such skepticism remained in the 21st century in e.g., Dorion's 2009 paper "Xenophon's Socrates" in which he writes:
"But the Socratic question, as it was debated from the time of Schleiermacher to the beginning of the twentieth century, is not only an unsolvable problemas is shown by the lack of any agreementbut also a pseudo-problem. If the logoi Sōkratikoi are works of fictions, allowing their authors considerable scope for invention not only in the setting but also in the ideas expressed by the characters including Socrates, then it seems hopeless to try to reconstruct the thought of the historical Socrates on the basis of the logoi Sōkratikoi"
Second, there is the way that evidence was weighed by skeptical historians regarding Socrates (mostly in the late 19th and early 20th century, corresponding, ironically, with a similar skepticism and feelings of hopelessness in historical Jesus scholarship). The influence of a small set of classical authors (in particular Thucydides) had so influenced Western historiography that the great founders of early modern historical scholarship (e.g., Gibbon, von Ranke, Michelet, etc.) continued to not only write in grand narrative styles but to recognize as historical sources and even evidence only those writings by authors who wrote "history" as defined by Thucydides and those that followed him. They weighed heavily those sources which fit clearly into "historiography" based on a totally inadequate classification system (hence a major argument in favor of Xenophon's Socrates was the mere fact that he had written "history", even though his Sokratikoi logoi were didn't fit into this genre).
Finally, most of the fields which have since contributed to the study of history (including and perhaps especially ancient history) didn't exist until fairly recently, including anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, economics, sociology, orality, communication, etc. Thus the ways in which register, genre, and other influences which dictate much of the structure of a text such that the fact that our sources for Socrates were repeatedly dismissed as Dichtung or poetic/literary creations rather than "history" was simply mischaracterization and misunderstanding. Even within history "proper", it was realized that history relied on myth as its template & basis and that even historians wishing as much as possible to distinguish their accounts from mythology often did so by rationalizing it.
Like the dismissal of both Xenophon and Plato as reliable sources by different scholars over the centuries, so too did various biases result in the stagnation and despair to conclude anything more than that Jesus existed and a few other bare facts. In particular, Schweitzer destroyed the foundations for the 19th century approach (the "liberal lives" of Jesus) and Bultmann relied on then-current folkloric models of oral traditions and a thoroughly textual/literary approach even to the transmission of oral history/tradition. He tried to "peel" back the "layers" behind our texts to uncover a "Palestinian" core he believed historical without realizing that his method was outdated even then.
Thus Bultmann weighted heavily those sources within which his methods (however problematic) could detect some "original" core, because the basis for his model included (incorrect) beliefs that:
1) The Jesus tradition was freely adapted and added to by individual communities just the way it was believed German folk tales were then believed to have been adapted/adopted since the studies by Grimm (i.e., as a model or understanding orality in 1st Century Palestine, Bultmann used folkloric transmission among German communities of the modern era; this is in sharp contrast to a far superior approach which was Gerhardsson's use of rabbinic transmission as a model).
2) That his imagined communities showed no interest in a historical Jesus, which was partly based on the problems genre posed before it existed as it does within historical, linguistic, social science, an other areas of scholarship today. It was also partly a failure to realize that this was in rather apparent contradiction with what Bultmann and the form-critics very approach.
3) An interest more in the movement and its various communities than the figure behind them
etc.
The one thing that Bultmann, Schweiter, Taylor, Dorion, and other radical skeptics regarding our evidence for either the historical Jesus of the historical Socrates all shared is that so vital yet so completely missed by virtually every single person who has written that we have good, or really any, reason to believe that Jesus never existed: that however legendary, corrupted, mythic, etc., our sources for Jesus or Socrates may be, we can't explain them without an historical figure at their core. This is true more for Jesus than Socrates, as the "movement" Socrates established wasn't really a movement but an influence. The Jesus tradition which appears suddenly in a 1st century Jewish context and relies fundamentally on a Jewish matrix yet which quickly became to radical for other Jewish sects/movements and both alien as well as persecuted in its gentile environment.
It is easy to explain away evidence and I have done this for clearly historical figures like Julius Caesar just as most mythicists do. However, to dismiss Paul because he e.g., didn't know Jesus of the gospels because they are clearly biased, written by anonymous persons, etc., is fundamentally at odds with the methods used by historians. The goal isn't to explain why x evidence can't be counted as support for y claim, but what x is evidence of. Thus, for example, if the author of Mark wasn't writing about an historical Jewish prophet/messianic figure who had lived very recently and whom he placed in a very specific temporal, spatial, and socio-cultural context, what was he writing and why? How do we explain both Paul (a source independent of the gospels as the one author who almost certainly knew him disagrees at times with what Paul writes), the use of Mark by Matthew and Luke, and the Johannine corpus?
The totality of the extant data on the issue may be memorized in a matter of moments
The totality begins with understanding the socio-cultural, religious, an economic situation in and around Jesus' time and for both Judaism as well as the wide Hellenistic/Romanist world. It is impossible to evaluate any of our texts without such knowledge and even with it there is much more required. For example, why do we find authors writing in Greek transliterating Aramaic and then translating it? Why does extensive analysis of kinship terms in letters during the Hellenistic era indicate clearly that Paul knew Jesus' brother an wasn't using the term adelphos metaphorically in Galatians? What is the basis for supposing a "Q" source exists and is this basis sound? If so, what was the nature of such a source and where did it come from without any historical figure? Why do we have clear evidence of a religious movement rather than the cultic practice that defined "religion" (to the extent that term applies) across the Roman empire and beyond (with the exception of the Jewish matrix whence this movement originated)? Movements are started by persons, and if you remove Jesus as origin of the movement there is no explanation for its clear existence.
The list goes on and on.
though even a casual perusal the hot air wasted in discussion of this depauperate record could consume several human lifetimes.
It has. Like Socrates, scholars have been analyzing our sources from an historical-critical perspective since the 1700s. Most believe there is much historical data on Jesus in our sources. Then there are those who dismiss ~300 years of scholarship as "hot air" without being familiar with any of it.
Yes. Why is it that it is those who haven't done any research who make up almost all of those who think we don't have adequate evidence to conclude Jesus existed? And why are those most critical of our evidence and of historical Jesus scholarship those who aren't familiar with either?
Nah mate, for example the gospels say some of the disciples CHICKENED and ran off when Jesus was crucified, for fear of getting collared by the Romans.
If they'd wanted to present themselves in a better light they'd have edited that bit out when they penned the gospels, but the fact they left it in proves once again that nobody tried to pretty up the Bible, and it's therefore come down to us over the centuries with nothing added, nothing taken away..
Fundies hate my guts mate!
For example when I sometimes try to log back into their forums to continue punching their lights out, messages like this come up- "Your account has been disabled,
Please do not make any attempt to participate further in any of our Communities"
And a fundy called "Reverend Eric Potts" once said to me "you disgust me".
Mind you, it turned out Potts is not a real Reverend at all, he's just a jumped-up "Assistant Methodist Minister", he's probably the caretaker of their local meeting hall and they bestowed that lofty title on him to keep him sweet so he'll go on slopping out their latrines..
Fundies hate my guts mate!
For example when I sometimes try to log back into their forums to continue punching their lights out, messages like this come up- "Your account has been disabled,
Please do not make any attempt to participate further in any of our Communities"
And a fundy called "Reverend Eric Potts" once said to me "you disgust me".
Mind you, it turned out he's not a real Reverend at all, he's just a jumped-up "Assistiant Methodist Minister", he's probably the caretaker of their local meeting hall and they bestowed that lofty title on him to keep him sweet so he'll go on slopping out their latrines..
Shuttlecraft....... you disgust me! signed:- the Very Reverend OldBadger.
(..... if you check me out, you'll find that I'm the carpet cleaner down the local Sally Army and Kingdom Halls! :biglaugh
Now..... back to thread: Please humour me by telling me which nativity story you favour? Mat's or Luke's?
So you are "Waymarker" Here is a post from you from years back.....................
And I believe before that you had an account here under the name "Mick in England". And now you are back for the third time. You may have "grown", but you haven't changed much buddy.
Mate, you'd all be at the mercy of religious fundies and crackpots if it wasn't for me going around internet-land policing the forums..
Tell him Colonel-
"Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded so people can sleep easy in their beds at night.
You WANT Shuutlecraft on that wall, you NEED Shuttlecraft on that wall "
not certain whatsoever. nothing has been proven beyond doubt that Jesus actually existed. for me the OT and NT are merely fictional stories which are believed by many to be true.
religion, if not taken seriously can be a good thing. however, it can become tarnished by those who believe.
no offense meant to those who do believe.
I'd be interested to know why you do believe what you do as regards to Christianity as I know a teeny bit about it.
The historicity of Jesus is little more than a mix of faith and wishful thinking, we have shreds and fragments to indicate that one or more real historical individuals may have formed the basis of the Jesus story - but still have yet to identify a specific historical figure. We have no firm idea even for a date or place of birth, nothing to connect the infant with the man and barely a mention outside of the Christian tradition.
Sure, that Jesus was based upon a real historical person is indeed a reasonable explanation of the available evidence - but we are yet to find that person.
My intent for this thread was to explore the vast gulf between two claims that are so often equivocated disengenuously;
1. Most scholars agree that the inference to the best explanation is that Jesus was based upon a historical figure.
and
2. Most scholars agree that the historicity of Jesus has been established beyond reasonable doubt.
Agreeing that a figure is likely to be based upon a real person is VERY different to agreeing that the historicity of that person has been established.
The historicity of Jesus is little more than a mix of faith and wishful thinking, we have shreds and fragments to indicate that one or more real historical individuals may have formed the basis of the Jesus story - but still have yet to identify a specific historical figure. We have no firm idea even for a date or place of birth, nothing to connect the infant with the man and barely a mention outside of the Christian tradition.
Sure, that Jesus was based upon a real historical person is indeed a reasonable explanation of the available evidence - but we are yet to find that person.
My intent for this thread was to explore the vast gulf between two claims that are so often equivocated disengenuously;
1. Most scholars agree that the inference to the best explanation is that Jesus was based upon a historical figure.
and
2. Most scholars agree that the historicity of Jesus has been established beyond reasonable doubt.
Agreeing that a figure is likely to be based upon a real person is VERY different to agreeing that the historicity of that person has been established.
This viewpoint is off imo. Traditional Xianity is a religion, dude, not stories about a Rabbi. It looks like stories about a Rabbi to either a secular or non-Xian or even Xian researcher who is casually reading the texts and history, but that is the wrong approach.
It's no different from saying, 'I'm going to study Judaism, now, first thing, I have to prove the historicity of king David.'
This viewpoint is off imo. Traditional Xianity is a religion, dude, not stories about a Rabbi. It looks like stories about a Rabbi to either a secular or non-Xian or even Xian researcher who is casually reading the texts and history, but that is the wrong approach.
It's no different from saying, 'I'm going to study Judaism, now, first thing, I have to prove the historicity of king David.'
Sorry disciple, not sure what you are trying to say there. Personally I do not believe that the historicity of Jesus is particularly important to Christian faith. As to Judaism, I do not see Jewish theologians focussing a great deal on the historicity of David as is so popular with US Christian scholars.
Sorry disciple, not sure what you are trying to say there. Personally I do not believe that the historicity of Jesus is particularly important to Christian faith. As to Judaism, I do not see Jewish theologians focussing a great deal on the historicity of David as is so popular with US Christian scholars.
The implication of what I'm saying is that the approach to the texts will get goofed up if one reads them as 'real' writings vs. 'faith' or religious writings. The entire Scripture is religious, with inference to historical characters, however the 'historical' part of the narrative doesn't take precedence over the religious text, it never did. Xianity is not a religion from history, it is a religion told in a manner within the context of history, partly.
The implication of what I'm saying is that the approach to the texts wil get goofed up if one reads them as 'real' writings vs. 'faith' or religious writings. The entire Scripture is religious, with inference to historical characters, however the 'historical' part of the narrative doesn't take precedence over the religious text, it never did. Xianity is not a religion from history, it is a religion told in a manner within the context of history; partly.
Reading them as they are, rather than within the context of Christian faith is what historicity is all about. The historical part is the topic here, not the religious faith.
Reading them as they are, rather than within the context of Christian faith is what historicity is all about. The historical part is the topic here, not the religious faith.
Yeah I understand that, however the text isn't like this...
historical parts-->faith or religious parts added.
The religious ideas were already there when any Scripture was written. This means a portion of text that looks very religious in nature may actually be totally historically accurate, whereas a 'historical' looking portion can be total fiction (think early 'apologetics'etc.).
Yeah I understand that, however the text isn't like this...
historical parts-->faith or religious parts added.
The religious ideas were already there when any Scripture was written. This means a portion of text that looks very religious in nature may actually be totally historically accurate, whereas a 'historical' looking portion can be total fiction (think early 'apologetics'etc.).
