mountainman

Hypotheses about the authorship and almost universal appearance of the "nomina sacra" are not irrelevant to this discussion, because after all the name of Jesus (which has been discussed at length here) does not actually appear in the earliest Greek sources of the new testament. The name of Jesus is present in the EVIDENCE only as an ENCRYPTION or ABBREVIATION ("J_S").

Toto

You put the emphasis on the wrong words - the works of Josephus on one hand are contrasted with "other" (negative) evidence on the other hand.

But on reading this again, I think that Doherty is not using the term negative evidence in the sense as your other sources. He clearly means evidence pointing in the other direction.

It is clear that he does not assume that a forged passage by itself provides evidence in favor of the proposition that Jesus did not exist.

tanya

You are correct. I was mistaken.

Mountainman invoked an incorrect plural of an English word, Jesus, (incorrectly identified by me, as a Latin word-->daydreaming of Feliz Navidad, and surmising, incorrectly, that Spanish is derived from Latin, that the Latin is almost the same as the Spanish, whereas, in fact, the Latin is very similar to the Greek, and the English is close to Spanish, for this particular word, Jesus.)

Doug then berated Mountainman, for writing a grammatically incorrect plural of a proper name. I endeavored to get the focus back on the ancient texts' representation of Jesus, i.e. I X with a bar above the two letters, a Greek acronym, representing, ostensibly, Jesus Christ.

My intention was to elicit feedback on the proper method of indicating the plural of a Greek, proper name, represented as an acronym, or what Doug calls, "initialism", a term unknown to me, until today. Later I will endeavor to discover what meaning, if any this term conveys to the rest of planet earth.

I am keen to learn how one should write the plural of I C (with a bar above both letters), referring, in Codex Sinaiticus, to the character we call Jesus Christ, in English, e.g. Mark 1:1.

Somehow, writing "many I C's" doesn't seem appropriate...

Doug Shaver

The discussion going on, when Tanya made the comment to which I was responding, was (I thought) about the correct plural of the word "Jesus." Your hypotheses about the nomina sacra are entirely irrelevant to that discussion.

Doug Shaver

It should have been apparent to me that that was what you you trying to do. I didn't see that for some reason. I thought you were trying to establish a connection between "IX" and "Jesus" to shed light on how "Jesus" should be pluralized. I apologize for thinking you were so scatterbrained as to suppose there could be such a connection.

mountainman

Of course that is clear. But it only serves to highlight the pivotal nature of the proposition, or in keeping with this thread hypothesis, that Jesus did not exist or its antithesis that he did. Negative evidence is summarised as events that did not occur. It includes forgeries and fabrications.

The New Testament for example, according to a core principle of the historical method - "Any given source may be forged or corrupted. Strong indications of the originality of the source increase its reliability" - may be forged or corrupted.













Season's greetings to Clivedurdle's "Jesi"

Toto

I've tried to explain to you why negative evidence does not include forgeries or fabrications. No one else that you have found uses the term negative evidence to include forgeries or fabrications.

This statement says nothing of interest at this point in the debate. But that's true of this entire thread.

And this link will not work: searches are not saved.

J-D

Forgery does happen sometimes. In those cases where it does happen it is, by definition and obviously, an event that did occur, and so cannot be included in any category of events that did not occur. For example, Clifford Irving's forgery of an autobiography of Howard Hughes is an example of an event that did occur, not an example of an event that did not occur. Clifford Irving was convicted of fraud: I see no reason to describe the evidence on which he was convicted as 'negative evidence'.

mountainman

That Howard Hughes wrote in his own hand the introductory letters that Clifford Michael Irving used to convince his publisher into accepting a fake "autobiography" of reclusive businessman Howard Hughes in the early 1970s, are events that did not occur.

J-D

What you write does not in any way invalidate the earlier observation of mine to which you are ostensibly responding. I am aware of what did and what did not happen in the case under discussion, and it is not correct to say of it that forgery was an event that did not occur.