Doug Shaver

I'm taking a class in historiography now, with four textbooks. None of them says that.

thedistillers

Is Lowder a historian?

Anyway, the quote doesn't support your position.

I think that the New Testament does provide prima facie evidence for the historicity of Jesus.

Of course it does. He doesn't say anything about the prima facie truth value of the NT. He merely mentions that the NT counts as prima facie evidence for Jesus. That's entirely different.

Attacking the intelligence of people who disagree with you is not going to work here.

hatsoff

Lowder is wrong. It's not that we should deny the existence of a first-century Jewish religious teacher named Jesus, but the reasoning he provides is erroneously applied. We appeal to the best explanation for the data, not simply swallow what ancient writers tell us. We should believe that Jesus existed, because his existence explains the evidence with maximum parsimony.

The argument about prima facie assumptions, if I may be so bold to say so, is actually flawed in multiple ways. It has already been pointed out that historians are not so naive as to simply accept ancient texts as reliable accounts by default, as it were. But let's say for a moment that the Christian apologists are correct, insofar as historians are accused of exercising a double standard between early Christian literature and other sources from antiquity. What then? Well, in such a case, it is by no means given that we should open ourselves to the truth of supernatural reports. Rather, we might just have to be more skeptical when it comes to non-Christian texts!

Toto

It is not Lowder's stated view that all (allegedly) historical documents must be accepted as prima facie evidence, just that in this particular case, the gospels are prima facie evidence of the existence of a Jesus character. He was working from the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but the existence of a wandering Jewish prophet who was crucified is not extraordinary, so even a minimal amount of evidence, such as the gospels, should suffice for the claim that he existed.

Note that Lowder is not a historian, professional or otherwise, nor is he a NT scholar or a specialist in the gospels.

Ben C Smith

Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources (or via: amazon.co.uk), pages 43-44:

In order for a source to be used as evidence in a historical argument, certain basic matters about its form and content must be settled.

First, it must be (or must be made) comprehensible at the most basic level of language, handwriting, and vocabulary. ....

Second, the source must be carefully located in place and time: when was it composed, where, in what country or city, in what social setting, by which individual? Are these apparent "facts" of composition correct?—that is, is the date indicated, let us say, in a letter written from the front by Dwight Eisenhower to his wife Mamie the date it was actually written? Is the place indicated within the source the actual place of composition? If the document does not itself provide such evidence—or if there is any reason to doubt the ostensible evidence—is there internal evidence that can be used to determine a probable date, or a time period within which the document was created? Can we tell from the content of the document itself or its relationship to other similar documents where it was composed?

Third, the source must be checked for authenticity. Is it what it purports to be, let us say an agreement for the transfer of land from a secular lord to the church or—to mention one of the famous cases of forgery from recent history—the personal diary of Adolph Hitler? Can we tell from the handwriting, the rhetoric, anachronisms of content, from the ink or the watermark or the quality of the parchment—or from the typeface or the electronic coding of the tape—that the document was not composed where it presents itself as having been composed? Is it, perhaps, a forgery from the period, a forgery from a later period, or simply a case of mislabeling by archivists?

Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History (or via: amazon.co.uk), page 150:

The historian, however, is prosecutor, attorney for the defense, judge, and jury all in one. But as judge he rules out no evidence whatever if it is relevant. To him any single detail of testimony is credible — even if it is contained in a document obtained by force or fraud, or is otherwise impeachable, or is based on hearsay evidence, or is from an interested witness — provided it can pass four tests:

(1) Was the ultimate source of the detail (the primary witness) able to tell the truth?

(2) Was the primary witness willing to tell the truth?

(3) Is the primary witness accurately reported with regard to the detail under examination?

(4) Is there any independent corroboration of the detail under examination?

Any detail (regardless of what the source or who the author) that passes all four tests is credible historical evidence. It will bear repetition that the primary witness and the detail are now the subjects of examination, not the source as a whole.

Ben.

John W. Loftus

Listen, there are many ways to disconfirm a text found in an archaeological site, or in the annals of some ancient library, or in other texts handed down through the centuries. If anyone reads what I wrote I am not referring to any specific line that might say, "I, Xerxes, am God." My skeptical control beliefs cause me to reject such a claim outright. But if instead we found a note that said "This is the spot I, Pirate Joe, buried my treasure." Then we would quite naturally dig deeper in hopes of finding it. Wouldn't you? If we didn't find it then we would conjecture other hypotheses about the note we found. If we found a tombstone with someone's name on it buried in rubble we would assume it marked the grave of that person. And so forth, and so on. We would definitely seek to test that text wherever we can, but if testing is not available to us for some reason, and/or if what it says does not go against what we think is possible due to our skeptical control beliefs, then we would have a prima facia reason to believe it, until such time as we can test it.

There is much more to be written about this and I don't have the space to do so here. But I don't disagree with what Ben just posted above at all.

Jeffrey Gibson

We do? What are they? And more importantly, were they recognized by first century historians as of the same genre as bioi or historia or acta?

Jeffrey

aa5874

Now, when was Homer's Achilles tested or believed to be prima facie evidence for Achilles?

It is the description of characters, events, places and dialogue in a text that in general makes one consider if it is credible if there are no corroborative source.

To ignore some information in a text just for the sake of believing it is credible when the text cannot be tested is just naive or dishonest.

Achilles was described as the offspring of a sea-goddess, this information is absolutely critical is believing or claiming that Achilles was a myth.

Now, if some-one can produce a tombstone for Jesus or some credible note, and it can be tested and confirmed to be from Jesus of Nazareth, then the text about Jesus being the offspring of the Holy Ghost can be rejected. Otherwise, the description of Jesus stands as written in the text, from conception to ascension.

mountainman

Dear John, thedistillers and Doug,

The original definition cannot be accepted because of the known evidence of the existence of forged documents. John's original definition is incapable of detecting forgeries. As a constructive step towards improving John's definition here is a more appropriate description of the relationship between historians and what they can or cannot say about the evidence at their disposal:

The quotation goes on to point out that in the case of forgery, all bets are off.


Best wishes,


Pete

Sheshonq

Yes.

Yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernaean_Hydra

An irrelevant question, for at least two reasons:

1. Your list of additional criteria is not present in Loftus' test as presented above - and my response was targeted at Loftus' metric;

2. You have not demonstrated that acceptance by 1st century historians guarantees reliability or factuality of the account. Good luck with that, by the way.