Mountain Man

None. It's all heresay. Not one of the writers ever met jesus and wrote at least 30 years after the alleged incidents. Stories change after just a few people, imagine what changes there would be after 30 years!

Mountain Man

Nothing there that's contemporary. Not one of them offers any proof. You are right to be skeptical.None of them can be taken as true. All are based on stories they heard from someone else.The standard is BCE for Before Common Era, and CE for Common Era.Don't worry about it. I go by content, and intent, not spelling. I dun't spell so good meself.

Mountain Man

Nothing since he can claim anything he wants. What he fails to do is back up his claims.Ah, I see you're reduced to ad hominems. I guess that's becaue you don't have anything to back up your claims so you have to attack the person. Then present it. Some writer claiming to be repeating eyewitness accounts is not reliable and therefore no good. Keep trying, and keep playing the games. Maybe someday you just might stumble on the truth.

Chris Weimer

1. Since Paul is only saying that he is relaying eyewitness testimony, technically that isn't actual eyewitness testimony. However, this is only modern standards and yes that would be fair to imbue upon them. In any case, this presents a problem - how much of Paul can go to credible witnesses and how much of Paul goes to mere imagintion.

2. Pseudonyms are a way of keeping your identity secret. Many of us here adopt pseudonyms for fear that our personal lives may be endangered if our identities are known. Some people just like using a certain handle which they generally have kept across board. When I first signed up to the internet community, I was known as "cweb255" just because it was what I used everywhere. Even now where I need a username for something I'm prone to use that name. Think of how you use jgibson000 instead of Jeffrey Gibson. It becomes habit, does it not? I also, though, tend to agree that it is sort of annoying when engaging in discussions. I guess that's why we have those lists which require full name and academic institution, no?

No, you're entirely correct. But from what I've read of their underlying methodologies, I disagree with the premise. Furthermore, I don't think a large assembly voting really is the best way to decide things. Almost an appeal to the majority.

I'll look into it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you respond first?

Seriously though, I've debated Michael before, but many of his discussions are generally out of my interest. To be truthful, the entire quest for the historical Jesus is generally out of my main interest. I consider it a side project, something interesting to pursue apart from my serious academic interests. Matthean theology interests me far more.

Chris

Chris Weimer

Just because that the gospellers weren't eyewitnesses doesn't mean that none of the events ultimately go back eyewitnesses. The gospels betray many secrets that if you're not careful you may miss them.

Amaleq13

Are you sure this isn't edited by Chilton? That's the only one I could find at Amazon when I was going to make your reference a link. The Craig Evans books I found did not appear to be relevant.

Here's the Chilton link:

Authenticating the Words of Jesus & Authenticating the Activities of Jesus

mikem

I'm currently debating Amaleq13 on another thread that relates to the accuracy of the gospels - it's called that actually . You may be interested. And please, please tell me, what's a DIGNIST?

jgibson000

They are edited by Evans & Chilton. See:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...ternetinfidels

That link sends me to a strange page.

Jeffrey

Doug Shaver

I think it depends for starters on how strictly one defines "evidence." Some people seem to more or less equate it with proof.

As I understand it, evidence for some proposition P is just a fact or set of facts F that could be logically explained by supposing P to be true. We call the evidence strong or weak (or good or poor) according to our perception of the likelihood that P could be false notwithstanding F. If we think it very unlikely, then the evidence is strong. Otherwise it is not.

Four books reporting the trial and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, were written, at the latest, sometime during the second century CE. That is a fact not in dispute. A possible explanation for that fact is that they record oral traditions about the actual trial and crucifixion of a Galilean preacher named Jesus. Therefore, the books are evidence that Jesus was tried and crucified.

The question then becomes whether that evidence is sufficient to justify a belief that the trial and execution really occurred. It probably would be, if it were the only evidence we needed to concern ourselves with, but it is not. There are many other facts pertaining to Christianity's origins, and any proposed explanation must account somehow for all of the pertinent facts, not just some of them. Some of us think that when all the facts are considered, the best explanation includes a supposition that there was no trial or crucifixion because there was no Jesus. We think that some of the other evidence provides a stronger argument against Jesus' existence than the gospels provide for his existence.
It eventually gets down to parsimony. Take everything we know for sure or with reasonable confidence about Christians during the first and second centuries. (That is not as much as most Christians think, but it is not the empty set, either.) Many possible explanations can be conjured up, and the facts will be evidence for all of them. And, every one of them will include a batch of assumptions, and so we try to put Occam's razor to work.

A simplistic take on parsimony calls for preferring the explanation with the fewest assumptions. I defy anyone to actually enumerate all the assumptions of mythicists and historicists and declare who makes fewer. But I think there should be a place in our evaluations for the plausibility of our assumptions. Five assumptions that are easy to believe might be more justified than one that that seems highly improbable.

However, I digress. The real debate over Christian origins is not whether there is evidence for one or another particular claim. There is evidence for all of them. The real debate is over which claim or set of claims the evidence shows to be most probably true.

Doug Shaver

I can't disagree with you there, but it seems to me that Christians are the ones being apodictic about eyewitnesses to Jesus. On the basis of no strong evidence at all, they treat every assertion by a gospel author as if it necessarily came from an eyewitness.

You mean this?

To exactly what is the author claiming to have been an eyewitness? No matter who actually wrote the book, he could not possibly have witnessed every event in it. The usual apologist claim is that Luke is here stating that everything he is about to write comes from eyewitness sources. But that is not what he says. He does not give a clear answer to the question "eyewitnesses to what?" and I think it reasonable to be suspicious of any writer who touches on such a vital point so cryptically.

I don't remember Paul's reporting that anybody witnessed one thing that Jesus did during his natural lifetime. He attests to a few hundred people having had visions of the risen Christ. That is all.

We don't have Papias's testimony. We have Irenaeus and Eusebius quoting stuff out of a book written by someone whose name was Papias and about whom virtually nothing else is known. According to Eusebius, Papias did not claim to have known any eyewitnesses to Jesus. What he claimed was to have known some people who had known some of Jesus' disciples. This does not in any sense confirm the eyewitness authorship or eyewitness basis of any extant document. Papias referred to writings that someone attributed to Matthew and an acquaintance of Peter named Mark. He does not claim to have seen those documents or to have otherwise confirmed either their existence or their authorship.

Assigning them to any genre presumes a judgment about their authors' intentions, and those intentions would have determined their research and composition methods. The question of genre cannot be settled while the question of research methodology is still at issue.

The provenance of the gospels is one, and only one, of all the questions related to the origins of a religion called Christianity. We need a set of answers that are consistent not only with one another but also with everything else we think we know about human beings. The most parsimonious answers, in my judgment, effectively rule out the occurrence of any events for the gospel writers or their sources to have witnessed.