gdeering

Thank you both for an excellent example of faith-based reasoning and it's answer.

Gregg

kennethamy

Maybe Jesus was different man with the same name?

aa5874

Now if there is no evidence for Jesus of the NT how absurd is it to claim that some other Jesus existed of whom there is no evidence?

spamandham

You're welcome? Not sure what your commentary is about...

patcleaver

We have lots of evidence that Mark is fiction, and so is the rest of the NT.
see http://www.freeratio.org/vbb/archive.../t-233929.html
see http://www.freeratio.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=253959
I do not want to derail the thread, but do you want the list?

Ben C Smith

Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources, pages 74-75, after using an argument from silence in an example involving Israeli involvement in the 1982 attack on refugee camps in Beirut:

Of course, an argument from silence can serve as presumptive evidence of the "silenced" event only if, as in this case, the person suppressing the information was in a position to have the information, and was purposing to give a full account of the story from which he omitted the crucial information, and if there were no compelling reasons why he should have omitted the information (other than the wish to conceal). ....

Another difficulty with an "argument from silence" is that historians cannot assume—as nineteenth-century scholars such as Seignobos would have assumed—that an observer of a particular "fact" would have automatically recorded the fact. .... In addition, it is clear, silences can be inadvertently created when texts are partly obliterated, lost, or changed in unexpected ways. And, conversely, it is naive to assume that everything that a text reports was actually observed—much less that it occurred!

Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources, page 75:

Although historians must often reason from silences, they more commonly reason from positive evidence, and in their accounts they employ a number of logical processes.

Gilbert J. Garraghan, A Guide to Historical Method, page 162:

The argument from silence aims to prove the non-reality of an alleged fact from the circumstance that contemporary or later sources of information fail to say anything about it. It is sometimes misleadingly called the negative argument; but this can easily be taken to mean something false, namely, that the argument rests on an explicit denial of some fact.

Garraghan goes on to offer two conditions that an argument from silence must fulfill in order to be used in an historical argument:

1. The author withholding the alleged information was in a position to have that information.
2. The author withholding the alleged information would have certainly made mention of it had he or she known of it.

The argument from silence works best, of course, when the author in question was clearly trying to be exhaustive.

Ben.

Elijah

I haven't seen any actual evidence supporting the myth theory so if you have any to support it then yes I would like to see it. All I've seen is unsupported hypotheticals out of that camp.

aa5874

The myth theory cannot be based on actual evidence. If there was found actual evidence for Jesus existence, then it would be obvious that Jesus could not be considered a myth.

It is the failure[ of the the historicist to provide actual corroborative evidence that makes the mythist position extremely strong.

A belief that Iesus existed using all apologetic sources that are of unknown origin and full of implausibilities and chronological errors cannot be counted as credible evidence.

No one can tell if something exist before there is some evidence for it's existence. There are stories about Achilles but noevidence to support the stories, there are stories about Jesus and there is no evidence to support these stories.

Jesus and Achilles are myths.

Elijah

Obviously, evidence could be provided/found that supports the myth theory… it just hasn’t been as of yet. A lack of evidence doesn’t disprove the myth theory because no one can know for sure with the evidence we have now, any more than a lack of evidence for a historical Jesus proves the mythicist position.

It’s a failure of the mythicist to ask for evidence they know doesn’t and shouldn’t exist in order to avoid having to support their own theory.
Not “credible” as in being historically accurate sure, credible as being evidence of being historically existent is debatable.
The stories as in the miracles? Yea there is no evidence to support the miracles, but that evidence is a lack of miracles in reality now. That’s why I and most rational people don’t believe in them. But disbelieving in miracles because of a lack of evidence and disbelieving in a historical figure because a lack of evidence are completely different because we have no evidence of miracles what-so-ever and tons of evidence of different historical figures. So it’s easy to disqualify miracles as exaggerations but to say a historical character didn’t exist and was just fabricated off a myth needs some type of support.
The stores surrounding Jesus and Achilles are myth but the men who inspired them may have been historical.

aa5874

This is just absurd. All the information about Jesus is in the NT and the church writings. The authors have provided the information, anyone can read them and see that they are claiming that a god was on earth during the days of Tiberius.

This is just not plausible, it is fiction. The Jesus of the NT is a myth.

Now, if you fabricate your own Jesus which is not in the NT and in the church writings, then you can pursue your own futility.

The authors of the NT and the church writers have denied catergorically that Jesus was only a man, he was a god, the very first verse of gMark states that Jesus was the son of God and the last verses claim that he had risen from the dead.

Where did you get evidence from to think Jesus was only a man.

I only deal with evidence not imagination.The stories in the NT were regarded as true and plausible when they were written, that is exactly why these miraculous events are in the NT. People believed they were true even up to today.

BUT, now it is known that the authors wrote about events that did not occur, these events are bogus, yet Mary the mother of jesus witnessed these bogus events.
But, where is the evidence for your supposition? In you head, there is just no source to support your dreams.