spin

Assuming it's a kosher artifact, Tel Dan places BYTDWD on the same level as BYT)L, BYT$M$ and BYT(NT, ie towns with temples to a god. There might have been a bit more hope if it were BYT DWD.

You use the term "historicity" in a very different way from me. Historicity is about demonstrating evidence, something that is unavailable from tradition in general. Tradition is a wide cultural artifact, whereas records and propaganda are not. You have much better chances of evaluating records and propaganda for their source content than you do of traditions. Early traditions quite often refuse to give up their sources, making them virtually impossible as historical sources.

Obviously all tradition now, if you have to ask.

Which historians do you know of who have ventured into the process of separating out history from tradition? (And not on the subjective committed level as Jesus Seminar religious scholars.)

I see no reason why disputes haven't added to the traditions.

I come to a wall with Paul and his declaration of having got Jesus from a revelation. Oral memories aren't worth a pinch of codswallop if they post-date Paul.

Isn't this simple speculation?


spin

Celsus

Well, I suppose given that the period of the NT yields no artifacts (or hasn't yet). But do we conclude that none of the figures in Acts existed?
I don't think we are at that stage of parsing the histories as yet. But a number have been working on memory and oral tradition and trying to work out degrees of drift. I can't remember their names, but there's a number in the classical Greek studies. It obviously is very difficult even in areas that have a lot of texts (e.g. Greek) and would be even harder in areas with fewer texts (e.g. NT/early church manuscripts).

Yes, certainly. But the assumptions that the writers had no interest in historicity is as flawed as the assumption that the writers were writing objective histories, especially if we grant an environment of contested memory in which authors such as that of Acts were writing (as is internally described in Acts). And if they had some - any - interest at all in getting some facts in, is it still possible to pull them out?

I'm still a committed anti-realist when it comes to history

spin

That's the problem with such traditions. We usually can't conclude anything tangible about them. I can't conclude anything useful about what lies behind either the Arthurian or the Robin Hood traditions. We might peel back the layers of more obviously later additions, but that won't get us back to nothing, just to the point where we can't find criteria to allow us to peel any more.

It sounds all nice and reasonable, but at the same time totally lacking in falsifiability.

What gives you any reason to suspect any conscious effort at history? Don't you accept what has come before if you adhere to the tradition? Did Jerome do any history when he unwittingly carried on the sham existence of Ebion? You would have difficulty questioning his integrity or sincerity, but you must see that history wasn't a concern.

Now that would need unpacking.


spin

Solo

Oh, my friend, I am well aware I give the impression I waste time of people who feel abandoned and/or become hostile when others don't agree with them. You are wasting your time telling me that. :wave:

Jiri

spin

spin

Celsus

But you've still got delineation problems with this principle. Is Josephus history or tradition? What about Herodotus? Or Berrosos?

Actually it's falsifiable in principle, as in - if we were to find a competing text nearer to the date of the claims in which facts were adduced, then such claims are falsified. The only problem really is the paucity of the historical record - but if we did have the competing texts, they'd not need to resort to trying to track oral divergence in the first place - it only sets itself as a 'solution' because of the problem it faces, the real solution of that problem of course, would be to find more texts.
I suggest its a delineation problem rather than a specific problem with individuals - the only reason I bring up individual examples is to draw attention to the delineation problem in assessing historical and traditional texts.
Texts are only texts Frankly, I don't see any clear distinction between 'historical' and 'traditional' in ancient writing. Record-keeping maybe. But otherwise, it is all tradition. And to them it's all history as well. Yet hearsay is acknowledged as hearsay at times (I believe Josephus acknowledges hearsay sources, as does Pliny and I believe Herodotus as well), which means they are aware of a nascent standard in historiography between the supported, the believable and the unbelievable. Recovering that delineation is impossible, yet historians do it all the time. And if the object of history is not so much to recreate the real past but construct an explanatory framework for historical change, then the fact of merely reading texts isn't so frightening. The reason I raise these questions, of course, is to ask to what extent can we reconstruct histories at all given the criteria of the MJ methodology? My conclusion is we can't in general "really" NT scholarship has always been more lit crit than history, hence my lack of interest in it. But I want to ask if anyone in this field, having delved into the deepest questions and assumptions, comes out thinking they can recover history at all... Can lit crit recover history? It depends on your definition of history, right?

bacht

Sounds like you're working with the larger questions of "what is history?" and "did the ancients do real history?" I don't think any MJer would dispute that there's a difference between someone like Thucydides and the gospel authors. Josephus claims to be following in the footsteps of "real" historians, but of course we can dispute how true this is.

Text is only as useful as other sources of confirmation make it. The list of Israelite kings is confirmed in individual cases by foreigners and physical artifacts. But where is the non-Christian support for the gospel story? Are there Roman records that attest Jesus or Christians in the reigns of Tiberius or Caligula? Did anyone in the Jewish diaspora notice the development of Christianity in the 1st C? Are there anything but the vaguest allusions to Jesus in the Talmuds? Are there any Christian inscriptions anywhere before the mid-2nd C?

It's a similar problem in the church fathers and apologists: we usually only hear one side of the story, the orthodox condemnation of "heresy" which may be distorted and unbalanced. Marcion could've been the sweetest guy around, but the Christian record makes him out to be a monster.

Maybe the ancients always wrote polemic and propaganda, but if we have opposing screeds we might be able to piece together something useful (eg the book of Kings vs Assyrian court annals)

spamandham

I'll try not to veer too far off topic, since the thread is about Mark and Paul rather than Acts, but...

In the late second century, a veritable cottage industry of writing Acts-style documents was born. The noncanonical literature is filled with them. They are all clearly fictional propaganda in the ordinary sense of the word 'fiction'. Acts looks just like the others, and there is no known reason that it could not be from the same time period, even though it is traditionally dated much earlier (for what I consider extremely dubious reasons). Even if Acts had no miracles in it, it would be improper to conclude that it is an accurate record of anything real, based on the existence of these other documents.

JoeWallack

JW:
The only time Paul supposedly gives more than a few words that could be describing a HJ is here:

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php...Corinthians_11

JW:
It's clear that Paul's claimed source here is Revelation ("I received of the Lord"). Hence in Paul's exponentially most extended piece of information about HJ, his claimed source is Revelation. Just as bad (for HJ) is that the context is the practical problem of Christians eating the "good" stuff at communal meals before all the brothers have arrived and the Jesus story is just an anecdote to support a solution to a practical problem. It certainly looks like the flow here is Revelation to HJ. Since Paul has this relationship here, what is the extent of the relationship? Is it possible that all of Paul's claims of HJ have a source of Revelation?

Some people here have chosen Josephus as source for JtB as a comparison. So where exactly does Josephus ever claim that Revelation/dead JtB was a source for him?




Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

spamandham

It is difficult, but from what I can tell, I don't think the ancients made the kinds of distinctions between mythology, legend, metaphor, and reality that we make. A concept could transform back and forth between what we would call myth, then to metaphor, then to reality then back again, all within the same text.

There are people even today who don't make these distinctions, so I don't think it's much of a stretch to conclude that the way we think today is cultural rather than innate.