ApostateAbe

It's cool, that argument has not been mentioned. A potential flaw seems to be that the defeat of Herod is not expected to correspond to the same time that JtB was executed. JtB founded a cult, and of course this cult held a persisting grudge against Herod after the killing of JtB. They would be expected to attribute all of the unfortunate things that happen to Herod to that evil decision.

jgoodguy

I agree. A good question is did aMark create this or included an existing tradition.

JonA

I do not think that discarding reports of supernatural events is the best approach. There are sometimes valid historical explanations to understanding the reports.

I think it better to say that an historian, by nature of their craft, discards supernatural explanations outright, while not discounting the possibility that folk believed they had experiences such as they describe.

Accounting for the biases can be difficult. As I've mentioned several times, there is no such thing as an unbiased historical document. Folk back then just didn't record what happened for the sake of posterity: they always had motives beyond telling what happened.

That said, I don't think we should discard anything in historical documents. Instead, we should put an explanation behind all of it. For a lot of it, the explanation will likely be 'fiction', but by using our toolbox we can sort through the fiction and see if there is anything in the content resembling reality.

Jon

aa5874

What you say cannot be true AT ALL about historians. Evidence cannot be discarded when it is the very evidence that PROVIDES the FACTS or the basis for any investigation.

Historians do not DISCARD information about Romulus and Remus, Achilles, Zeus, Apollo, Marcion's Phantom, Pilate, Tiberius, Jesus the Son of Ananus or Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

If one is investigating whether a character found in any ancient text was a figure of history then it must be OBVIOUS that it is the very written evidence of antiquity of the same character that MUST be analysed.

Even characters described as human may be myth so discarding only evidence that is clearly mythological cannot be acceptable at all.

An historian MUST use the available data in order to do any proper historical analysis.

The fact that Jesus was described as the Child of a Ghost that was RAISED from the dead by more than one author and by MULTIPLE Church writers is EXTREMELY SIGNIFICANT when John the Baptist was NOT described in a similar fashion.

It is extremely likely that Jesus of the NT was MYTH and John the Baptist was NOT based on the EXTANT EVIDENCE of antiquity.

The written MYTH EVIDENCE for Jesus cannot be discarded just as the written myth evidence for Romulus and Remus evidence cannot pushed aside.

jgoodguy

History being a naturalistic discipline rejects the supernatural. In short you cannot use supernatural explanations to make a conclusion. What a culture believed regarding the supernatural and the written record thereof is tangible/naturalistic evidence.

In short you cannot say that Yahweh had a son named Jesus who supernaturally became the Christ. You can use tangible records to show that was the belief for a society at a point in time and use the documentation for analysis on how the belief developed and if there was a HJ or JM at the beginning.

ApostateAbe

It seems like you agree with JonA. He is saying that history rejects supernatural explanations, but history does not reject explanations for supernatural claims in the texts. I agree with that, too. Everything should be best explained with a naturalistic model, even the supernatural textual claims (i.e. an explanation involving certain ancient myths).

aa5874

But, Jesus was NOT even claimed to have only twelve disciples. Jesus had at least 70 disciples and 12 apostles in gLuke 10.

And, again, Jesus was EXTREMELY popular in the NT. He had THOUSANDS of people following him on a daily basis.

And, "Paul" called Jesus the CHRIST over 300 times and claimed Jesus had a NAME above EVERY NAME in the Roman Empire, and that every KNEE should BOW Before Jesus and call him LORD.

Jesus Christ should have been the MOST SIGNIFICANT Jewish character of the 1st century BEFORE the Fall of the Temple.

A Messiah is the MOST EXPECTED Jew and the Romans HATED the Jewish Messiah.

We must FIND Jesus Christ if we have Jewish writers in the 1st century.

We have Philo and Josephus and we CAN'T find one thing about the Most Significant Jewish Messiah.

But, Josephus remembered a MAD MAN named Jesus who predicted calamities in Jerusalem but he FORGOT the Jewish Messiah with the same name who supposedly ACCURATELY PREDICTED the Fall of the Temple and should have Gospel written about during the time of Josephus.

Josephus and the Jews FOUGHT expecting a Messiah around 70 CE yet we have NOTHING about Jesus.

And, then we have Philo who wrote that the Emperor of Rome Gaius claimed that the Jews were the ONLY nation that did NOT worship him as a God yet in the Pauline writings "Paul" claimed EVERY knee should BOW before a Jew.

Why can't we anything credible on the MOST SIGNIFICANT Jew of the 1st century?

It is SIMPLE.

Jesus was a story written in the 2nd century.

Roman writers NOTICED the Jesus Christ story from the 2nd century and started to ARGUE and DEBATE the nature and origin of Jesus Christ.

JonA

Sounds about right.

aa5874

So it is the very same written evidence about the supernatural that you are calling "TANGIBLE RECORDS".

One can rather easily and reasonably show that the description of Jesus MATCHES other MYTH characters of antiquity and that Christians did WORSHIP a PHANTOM as the Son of a God and even a Christian writer claimed the Jesus story was NO different to the FABLES of the Greeks and Romans.

The description of Jesus by Christians and apologists is EXTREMELY CRIITICAL when one is considering whether Jesus was myth or just a man.

Christians and Apologetic sources claim Jesus was the Child of a GHOST.

I considered that Jesus was a GHOST story and that the Baptism story is MOST LIKELY FICTION.

Doug Shaver

That's my point. Of all the people whom Josephus mentions who he indicated were contemporary or nearly contemporary with him, there are only two whose existence is questioned by anybody, and they both have significant roles in the Christian gospels.