dust1n
Zindīq
It is a rather easy target when any direction you turn in America, you are literally facing a majority that do, in fact, believe the Bible to be more literal.
By the way, nice to see you again.
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How would an Historical JC be Defined?
- Thread starter Jonathan Hoffman
- Start date
It is a rather easy target when any direction you turn in America, you are literally facing a majority that do, in fact, believe the Bible to be more literal.
By the way, nice to see you again.
dust1n
Zindīq
oldbadger
Skanky Old Mongrel!
Hi.....
Excuse me highlighting your post.
How about you show me how your belief works? OK?
You have shown us that you do believe in the existence and exploits of Judas of Galilee. You have mentioned him on several threads.
Please show me how you believe that Judas of Galilee, (also Judas son of Esekias?) existed and lead a revolution against Rome. Then we can move this forward.
I look forward to reading your evidence.
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
I do know the difference between a dissertation committee and a graduate program, and Carrier simply did not get any of his degrees in Classics. That he had a major interest in Classics does not detract from his training as a historian. My own education and training in linguistics went well beyond the topic of my dissertation and its defense before a committee.
Your back-of-envelope analysis of Columbia's Ancient History Department strikes me as absurd, and it isn't my place to try to rebut such nonsense. I'll only comment that this kind of attack on people's credentials is very commonplace in the historicism debate precisely because there is so little substance to the evidential argument. I don't defend Carrier's pettiness in his attacks on Ehrman, but I do understand why he went a little ballistic at Ehrman's utter misrepresentation of his expertise. Ehrman himself has admitted that he got the facts wrong. He did not persist in trying to paint Carrier as a classicist.
Not actually true, but I do think his CV reflects his youth and his eclectic interests. I stand by my point that his reputation makes him virtually unemployable in any major university, although I could easily see him as a faculty member in such a university.
Look, I think you've gotten way too caught up in the credentials debate that tends to overwhelm and obfuscate the main question here. It isn't a question of who has the biggest CV. If the greatest, most important historian that ever lived believes that Jesus existed, that is not a good argument to support the claim that he did. It still comes down to the case that supports the claim. At this point in time, I have seen enough of the argument to say that I lean towards mythicism. I believe it is possible that a man called "Yeshua" existed and was executed by the Romans under Pontius Pilate and that this event led to the Christian movement. However, it seems at least equally plausible that the basic story simply emerged out of other popular stories and legends that existed about a generation (20 years) after Jesus died. There is a pattern of embellishment that leads to more and more specific details as you get further away in time from it, just as the legend of Gilgamesh among Akkadians was far richer and more elaborate than that of the Sumerian "Bilgamesh" that preceded it. For all we know, Bilgamesh may have been based on some kind of historical character.
In the end, the historicity debate becomes fairly uninteresting when you consider that the details of the truth underlying it have become so obscured by time that we have no way to distinguish the real from the apocryphal. In that case, the person never existed for all practical purposes, and the myth becomes the reality. Archeologists might still turn up some solid evidence, or reasonable corroboration of, the existence of HJ. Until that happens, the debate becomes academic in more ways than one.
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Jonathan Hoffman
Active Member
I prefer to use the term 'hypothesis' rather than 'belief', and this thought arises from words of Josephus who writes of these people. I have also read 2 of Daniel Unterbrink's books (Judas the Galilean and New Testament Lies) on the topic though I do not agree with all of his views.
oldbadger
Skanky Old Mongrel!
Thanks for your post.
Good! And so.... a proposed explanation, based on limited evidence....... is acceptable to you?
OK. I like your use of the word hypothesis; I might adopt it myself!
I have a hypothesis that Jesus existed. Ready?
1. Brief mentions by Josephus, which scholars accept,even though they know that these same 'mentions' have been mucked about with.
2. Compilations of oral traditions about Jesus, gathered together into GMark, even though I accept that they have been mucked about with.
3. The inclusion in GMark of actions and sayings of Jesus which are clearly unhelpful to Christianity suggest strongly that they are unlikely to be fabrications, and therefore worthy of consideration.
Enough for me to consider that such explanations, based on limited evidence, are worthy of further and continued investigation. There are many more references to Jesus in other compilations, I believe, but I want to simply stick with the above.
What do you think? I must go.....!
Jonathan Hoffman
Active Member
Limited evidence is all we have of those days since so many docs have been suppressed or lost. But there is no evidence of a miracle-working JC.
fallingblood
Agnostic Theist
It is perfectly fine that not everyone agrees on a certain approach to history. However, there are certain approaches that do eliminate the entire discipline of history. If we use the Federal Rules of Evidence, which was designed for trials, most of history has to be thrown out. If we have to rule out religious texts, that wipes out much of history as well, since religion and politics were greatly intertwined. If have to rule out works that are contained in some sort of collection that also contains religious works, even more history is thrown out.
If we can't have records that are contradictory (as in two works that contradict each other), what really is left after the above has also been taken out?
Whether or not empiricism is followed, or some other discipline of history is followed is not necessarily important. However, when one wants to just throw that all out, apply rules that do not belong to history in anyway (but were created for courts), then there really is no use in trying to study history because pretty much all history, if not all of it, can't be accepted.
... or, for that matter, a miracle working Judaic God.
fallingblood
Agnostic Theist
First, I just want to point out that your article is nearly a decade old. Trends do shift in that time. More so, the ABC poll that was cited is different from nearly every other poll. For instance, Gallup has done a study since around 1976 and has shown that those who take the Bible literally is about 30%, and that hasn't really fluctuated too much. More so, the ABC poll that was cited in your article did not talk about whether or not the entire Bible was literally true, but just certain stories.
Even then though, the ABC poll is flawed as it only gives two options for answers. Either they see the story as word for word true, or as a lesson. What about those who see the story as being based on a true story, but not word for word true? The ABC poll simply did not give enough options, and that would have skewed the results. To be fair, this is also a problem in the Gallup poll, and in fact most polls on the subject.
Most Americans are not Biblical literalists, and there is no reason they should be considering that the official stance of at least the mainstream denominations is that the Bible is not word for word, literally true.
The studies I used.
Gallup 2011
ABC Poll
I do not understand if you really don't know this or you are refusing to look or what, but I don't get it. You seem to think that this difference matters. That there is a distinction between someone who gets a degree in "ancient history" that makes them a historian vs. a classicist. Did you read Sources of the Jesus Tradition, a volume to which Carrier contributed? I assume you are quite familiar with how edited volumes like this usually include a segment on the contributors. Here's Carrier's description:
"Richard C. Carrier (PhD, Columbia) is a classical historian and the author of Not the Impossible Faith. He contributes regularly to professional and popular journals on the subject of historiography and the philosophy of religion."
YOU ARE WRONG. I do not know how else to say it. You presumably think Standford is a reasonably good school?
Ancient History at Stanford
"We suggest that ancient history is not a distinct discipline: it is an area of research that can contribute to many different disciplines, from literary criticism to economics. Ancient history at Stanford is based in the Classics department, but the ancient historians play leading roles in the Social Science History Institute and Archaeology Center. They collaborate also regularly with colleagues in the departments of Anthropological Sciences, Cultural and Social Anthropology, Economics, History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology, the Schools of Earth Sciences and Law, and the Hoover Institution. 

A broad range of research and teaching goes on at Stanford, but we are particularly strong in ancient economic and social history and social science methods."
How about Upenn?
"The Department of Classical Studies is the administrative home of the Graduate Group in Ancient History"
Or turning it around, let's look at Oxford's classics department where we find
"DPhil (PhD) in Ancient History
The Sub-Faculty has about 20 permanent members, and covers every aspect of Greek and Roman History from Archaic Greece to the Later Roman Empire. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, Oxford’s Classics Faculty presented the largest number of academics in UK Classics (71), of whom 70% were assessed at either 4* or 3*, the highest proportion in UK Classics. The faculty also received the top rating of 24 in the last Quality Assurance Exercise (2000)."
Your distinction is completely inaccurate and it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of who studies ancient history. Maybe it's because interdepartmental programs were not around as much when you were a professor, and this this kind of thing wasn't around:
It doesn't because classicists are historians. That's it.
Fantastic and I couldn't care less because you seem to misunderstand what I am saying. I am not saying he isn't a historian. I am not saying his background in classics makes him less than a historian. I am saying that he his a historian because he's a classicist, and the only reason his degree is different is because you don't seem to understand why I made my
It was not an attempt to say the history department was in anyway poor. It's a great program. It's a great program because it is an interdepartmental one. It's supposed to help a perceived problem with the way the social sciences have developed methods that ancient historians (classicists, biblical scholars, near eastern specialists, etc.) are not trained enough in.
It is, however, new. And for Carrier, it didn't work. His historiographical method is misusing Bayes' theorem because apparently his study of epistemology gave him just enough knowledge to abuse math, but that is not a reflection on the program or his degree so far as I am aware.
And maybe it's because I have a degree in classical languages and I had to take the required senior seminar where each class is taught by a different professor with a different specialty so that seniors in the classics department knew more about the breadth of the field and how it relates to others that enables me to know a bit more about how this works, or maybe it's just having read a lot of who writes about ancient history, while focusing now on one of the most interdisciplinary fields there is (and thus understanding how departmental divides have increasingly become arbitrary thanks to interdepartmental programs).
NOBODY IS ATTACKING HIS CREDENTIALS. You just don't know what the **** you are talking about. So before you keep on with this "he's still a historian" ******** have a look around at actual ******* history departments and maybe some actual historical scholars of the ancient world and see what their degrees are before you tell thousands and thousands of PhDs who make up historians of the ancient world that they aren't historians because their PhD doesn't have the word "history" in it.
No, you don't.
From Brown University:
"A great legacy of the Greco-Roman period is the extraordinarily rich supply of important literary texts (“the classics”
. Consequently, from its modern beginning in the 19th Century, the historical study of antiquity has been dominated by philology. From nearly that same beginning, however, a few scholars have approached the study of ancient history through methodologies of the social sciences (e.g., Max Weber) or ancillary fields such as archaeology, epigraphy, and numismatics (e.g., Theodore Mommsen, Michael Rostovtzeff). Inevitably, historians schooled in one area have tended to emphasize that approach over the others, producing a natural bias that still divides the discipline. Ancient historians trained in classics departments are often perceived as too philological and unfamiliar with methodologies used in history and other social sciences. Those trained in history departments, on the other hand, are often suspected of being deficient in the classical languages and thus unable to appreciate the nuances of ancient textual sources and culture. Whatever the foundations of such judgments, they discourage desirable syntheses and keep young ancient historians from fully exploiting available career opportunities. After two centuries, therefore, it seems appropriate to combine the three approaches of philology, historical methodologies, and ancillary disciplines into a single program of training in ancient history."I assume you are familiar with JSTOR. If you go to their database, and click on "advanced search", you can see a list of fields. Click on the "classical studies" link to open it and find the journals JSTOR has listed as "classical studies" journals. Do the same for "history". Then just do few searches for articles (I'd limit it from those after 1990) for things like "Caesar", "Josephus", and other terms relating to history of antiquity. And when you have a clue what kind of people are producing research and what their degrees are, then talk to me about how Ehrman "did not persist in trying to paint Carrier as a classicist". Alternately, I will cite for you any technical literature, from a journal, a monograph series, a volume, etc., on ancient history (and on historiography, the philosophy of historiography, the philosophy of history) for you, both to give you an idea on who does historical research of the ancient world and what their degrees are.
Because until you have a ******* clue what you are talking about, you will it seems persist with this absolutely convoluted nonsense about "classicists" which you apparently don't know anything about, and even though you admit you don't know these fields, you feel fine with your sweeping dismissal of almost all literature on the history of the ancient world that exists because you can't be bothered to find out what "classicists" are or who studies "ancient history" before you make your sweeping generalizations.
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Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
Legion, this exchange has gone way off-topic and it is getting way too personal for me to continue it. I respect your right to your own opinions about Carrier, his qualifications, and the Columbia Ancient History Department. I simply do not share them, and I do not think that any of this has much to do with how a historical JC would be defined. Nor do I much care to get into a debate with you over Carrier's, Ehrman's, your, or my credentials as a scholar or understanding of the various academic disciplines. Ehrman himself has acknowledged that he erred in calling Carrier a Classicist, yet you seem determined to label him such regardless of what is on his degree certificates. Fine with me. Let's focus on something that might be more relevant to the thread topic.
Jonathan Hoffman
Active Member
Agreed.
outhouse
Atheistically
There is evidence, some better then others.
The people we both deal with in the other forum are the vast minority, and they not only have no credibility but they are outnumbered.
Carrier and Price and Earl each make a case, but they are really easily refutable they are so weak.
dust1n
Zindīq
Okay, I agree, that is fair. Good post.
dust1n
Zindīq
So if you ask people if they take the Bible literally, more people will say no, but if you ask about certain creationist stories, more people will say yes.
Here is a gallup poll where %46 of Americans believe in "Creationism" as opposed to "evolution."
Gallup Poll: 46% of Americans Are Creationists
Here's some more confusion towards it:
"The vast majority of Americans believe that God performs miracles, according to a recent poll conducted for Newsweek magazine.
Eighty-four percent of Americans said God performs miracles, and 77% said they believe God or the saints heal or cure sick people who medical doctors have said had no chance to survive, the poll said. A 79% majority said they believe the miracles detailed in the Bible actually occurred. Nearly half said they have personally experienced or seen a miracle, while about two-thirds said they have prayed for a miracle.
An overwhelming number of Christians, 90%, said they believe in miracles, compared with 46% of non-Christians.
Eighty-seven percent of respondents said they think followers of other faiths can receive miracles."
Most Believe in Miracles, Poll Finds - Los Angeles Times
And yes, I know my articles is 13 years old.
Either something is literal or it isn't. If I ask, do you believe this is literal, what other would it mean then, yes, I believe the words are literal...?
Things have certainly changed then further in the past, I would definitely agree with that.
Ok. Forget Carrier (although, for the record, I want to be clear that I both respect the history department in general as being among the best in the world and fully agree that Carrier is a fully qualified historian).
What I REALLY care about his how you are describing classicists. And as classicists are probably the largest group of historians of antiquity, and as this is relevant for how an historical Jesus would be defined, this is important to communicate (without letting the fact that I am extremely upset prevent me from polite discourse, as being upset is no excuse for my being rude, and I apologize).
As I said initially, it is impossible to address the question about how historical questions are answered if one does not understand who is doing historical research and why. Understanding how historians answer questions about Jesus means knowing where to look for expert information.
Classicists can be many things, but as with any academic discipline there are ways of determining what classicists are likely to produce and what they are not. One way to observe this is to check classics societies such as the APA (Carrier belongs to the APA) and look at their research page, particularly the section "APA Statement on Research":
1. Classical Studies Today
"Modern research in classical studies focuses on the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, both in their own right and within the much broader context of the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, Middle East and Western Europe. Both the historical impact of these civilizations and their continuing relevance and value in the modern world are of central interest. While 'classical' education was once based almost exclusively on the study of texts inherited from the ancient world, today's research is done from many diverse points of view and uses a vast range of texts and material remains which continue to increase as the ancient world continues to be rediscovered. In addition to scholarship based directly on traditional philological, textual, and historical methodologies, modern research considers also the political, social and economic structures, science and technology, religions and philosophies, and creative and performing arts of the ancient world. The field of classical studies is by its very nature interdisciplinary, and was the first interdisciplinary field in the Humanities.
This wider range of materials and approaches allows modern classical scholars to generate new editions and new understandings of even the most familiar authors and events. Classicists also have ongoing interactions with many other modern disciplines (most of which have their own roots in Greek and Roman thought), and with broader theoretical developments within and beyond the humanities. Through their historical depth and interdisciplinary breadth classical studies contribute vitally to our understanding of today's world in areas such as literature, government and law, ideologies, religions and their conflicts, trade, international relations, and multiculturalism."
There is much more, but as I provided a link I would only to note the following from the page:
Specializations may be in language, literature, history, archaeology, material culture, art, philosophy, science, religion, economic, political or social structures, or in technical areas such as archaeological fieldwork, epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), papyrology and paleography (the study of ancient and medieval texts and documents), and numismatics (the study of coins).
Please check out this site to classics and why so much of ancient historical research is the work of classicists.
Another way to check out who does what occurred to me when the topic of CV's came up.
Dr. John Marincola would be pretty high on the list among newer scholars for anyone wishing not just to know about ancient history, but specifically ancient historians and their works, methods, etc., as one can observe from his CV. He has not only written several scholarly volumes and papers on Greco-Roman historians and Greco-Roman historiography, but was for example one of the editors of a 2-volume Oxford Companion (A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography) as well as the The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus. Like Carrier, he is a member of APA and the Association of Ancient Historians, although many more as well. And he has a long list of Talks.
We can also look at where classicists become professors and what they become professors of. I have already noted that the four history professors at Columbia are all classicists, but this is not an unusual post for a classics professor.
Dr. Mary T Boatwright is a professor of history at Duke University, and a classicist. She too has an impressive list of historical research and again like Carrier is a member of the APA and the Association of Ancient Historians (among other societies).
At the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, we find Professor Roger Bagnell: "Before joining the NYU faculty in 2007, Bagnall was Jay Professor of Greek and Latin and Professor of History at Columbia University, where he had taught for 33 years. During that time he served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Chair of the Department of Classics"
The Camden Professor of Ancient History "is the oldest Professorship in History in England". Currently, it is held by Dr. Nicholas Purcell, a classicist.
A previous holder of this position is Sir Fergus Graham Burtholme Millar, a classicist and "among the most influential ancient historians of the 20th century."
While the Camdon professorship is the oldest, the Wykeham Professorship of Ancient History is more about Greek. Dr. Robert C. T. Parker "has been Wykeham Professor of Ancient (Greek) History since 1996". He too is a classicist.
Dr. Robin Osborne is the current Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge and is a classicist.
Dr. Edward Harris is Professor of Ancient History in the dept. of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University.
Also, we can look at a CV of a classicists and see what other academic positions they may have held in addition to any current ones. For example, classicist Dr. Brent Shaw is currently the Director of Princeton's "Program in the Ancient World", but his page & CV tell us he has held positions such as "Director of the Graduate Group in Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania" and before Princeton and Upenn he was a Full Professor of History at the University of Lethbridge. His earliest position was a Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Birmingham.
I think it is fair to say that there is a great deal of support for the idea that classicists are historians without having to actually count PhDs and academic works. They hold many of the most respected professorships in ancient history in the most respected universities in the entire world. Looking at any of the names I have mentioned we can see a vast list of publications on ancient history. And going to the classics departments some belong to we can see far more.
What reason, then, is there to think that a classicist has less claim to the title "historian" than someone who has a degree with that word? Unless someone can produce a good argument, then perhaps we can agree that most history PhDs have little to no ability to talk about the ancient world (because that is not their subject), that their are some who can because they have a degree in ancient history, and that most Greco-Roman historical research is produced by classicists.
If we can agree on this, then we can look at Biblical Studies.
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You are quite correct and that is something that I should have brought up earlier. The main reason I was disappointed with Carrier's book is my own fault: I didn't realize it wasn't actually on the historical Jesus. I had waited for years for him to come out with his book on the subject, and sort of assumed that as this was the book it was the "whole" book. Actually, it is only part 1. It is not on the historical Jesus, but on historiography (the writing of history) and empirical methods historians should/could/might use (for Carrier, it's must use, and to some extent I agree). History as a discipline is traditionally placed among the humanities, but as social sciences (plural) began to emerge, the idea that history could be a "science" too came with it. Carrier is not the first to bring up Bayes' Theorem when it comes to history, as it is in e.g., Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography by Aviezer Tucker (the same guy who was the editor of the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy volume A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography). He is a big fan of the empirical approach, and I am far more in agreement with him than Carrier as his use of Bayes' is quite different.
I am also not a fan of those who subscribe to e.g., theories of Foucault and Derrida and the various incarnations of the deconsctructionalists who would take any historical text and turn it into whatever they wanted by reading into it. This is something all historians have to be on guard about, but some believe it is a valid historical method (or rather, that historiography is basically fiction so there is no valid method).
In an odd and sadly ironic way, the end of empiricism (or at least of the 19th century positivism version) was partly the result of historians and partly the result of empirical historiography. A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (University of Chicago Press) and Historische Epistemologie: zur Einführung both go into this in different ways, but the end result is the same: by trying to turn everything into science during a time when physics, the oldest and most respected (or envied) science faced an epistemological crisis, and two world wars that weren't supposed to happen because social sciences were supposed to supply the answers to societies problems did happen, the shining beacon of pure empiricism darkened. First, the most empirical of sciences found itself for the first time not agreeing over the basic understanding of what it (physics) was. Second, historians of science began to look at whether or not scientific progress really happened as it was supposed to (steady progress rather than paradigm shifts), and this historical critique of empiricist methods left empirical historiography rather dead on arrival. Even worse, this opened the door for every brand of -isms (post-culturalism, neo-marxianism, radical feminism, etc.) to attack empiricism at all sides often from the vantage point of a combination of social, literary, and historical "theory".
The book you refer to is one of many responses to this approach to history. Tucker's is another, as is Telling the Truth about History and various other come-backs defending the ability of historians to use empirical methods to analyze evidence. This I support. Whether history should be thought of as a science is rather irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. That it should adhere to a justifiable epistemology does not require the status of "a science" but is necessary. Part of this is knowing the limits of what one can and cannot do. Social & Behavioral sciences have done a splendid job demonstrating how poorly sciences can perform, and we need not (as Carrier does) imitate them by adopting sophisticated statistical models that are at least applicable in the social and behavioral sciences (and are simply misused) but are not of any use when it comes to epistemic justification in historiography. Logic is required. Machine learning (which is basically what Carrier advocates) is not.
It is Tucker who states that the "first application of critical cognitive values in conjunction with new theories and methods to generate new knowledge of the past from present evidence was in biblical criticism". (p. 53).
This is not a biblical scholar speaking, but one who is writing a book defending empirical historiography. He goes on to state "Theories and methods that were developed in biblical criticism were exported to the analysis of ancient Greek and Latin texts." The origins of comparative linguistics and historical linguistics likewise owed a debt to biblical studies, and of course to classical philology. However, history in general and biblical studies in particular suffered as did all academia when radical challenges to epistemologies, empiricism, positivism, and the heart of academia were presented. Thankfully, I think we are in a position to move on.
Dirk Geeraerts is one of the key figures responsible for bringing different linguists together an constructing the framework of cognitive linguistics that I happen to think has the right idea. He is also an author of a paper in the volume Job 28: Cognition in Context. In fact, several recent dissertations and volumes have been devoted to incorporating cognitive science into biblical studies in various ways: Explaining Christian Origins and Early Judaism: Contributions from Cognitive and Social Science. Studies of orality, genre, sociology, and much more have become increasingly a part of biblical studies. Not all of it is any good, but then cognitive neuroscience hasn't exactly been all it's supposed to (a neuroscience study by Colin Firth? Really?).
We are dealing with the oldest critical historical approach that exists in academia. The first critical studies on the historical Jesus were published (contra Schweitzer) before Reimarus. He, Strauss, Frazer, Bauer, and others all brought up most of the arguments for mythicism over a century ago, and the case hasn't improved. It may be that there is virtually nothing we can say about Jesus as a historical person other than some bare facts. But that he existed? There is no empirical method that any historian can justify which would determine we cannot say that.
oldbadger
Skanky Old Mongrel!
Thanks for your reply.
Miracles? That's a separate subject imo.
I am sticking with 'historical Jesus'.
However, much to the amusement of some other members, I do have theories about many of Jesus's miracles, in that I believe that they were developed from facts. I believe that Jesus went out to the disciples' ship in that storm..... no trouble.
I would enlarge on this, but to subject certain other members to an excess of mirth might be bad for their digestion and general health!
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oldbadger
Skanky Old Mongrel!
Good post! I have little doubt that your 'Federal Rules' are similar to Judges' Rules in most countries. Therefore, 'Hearsay' evidence has almost no value, and the original witness has to be called. Ergo...... Not very much written history would have any value.
Having said that, archaeology and science have raced forward so quickly.... I understand that the skeleton of Richard 111 has recently been discovered, and proved from its dna. Specialists have thus been able to rebuild his likeness from the skull...... now that is an exciting development! I'll bet that modern archaeology will buttress historic Jesus, rather than undermine.
Bring it on!!