Toto

This implies that there is a mainstream. How is it defined? Who is mainstream? How does the mainstream validate its own conclusions?

Part of the strategy of evangelicals appears to be to capture the mainstream. Should this be taken into account?

Steven Carr

Is there another first-century person whose oral remarks were recorded accurately for posterity?

andrewcriddle

IIUC McKnight is suggesting that there are bits which are very likely to go back to Jesus and other bits that may or may-not go back to Jesus but we can't tell one way or the other. Unfortunately it is the latter bits, (the ones where we can't tell), that are. for a follower of Jesus, the really interesting ones.

Andrew Criddle

spamandham

Why would we expect rigorous adherence to scientific principles from historians? History is an art, not a science.

Steven Carr

So you can just make up stuff.....

dog-on

And they do.

spamandham

Of course. I think that's obvious. How many 'groundbreaking' historical Jesus theories are there? Hundreds? Thousands?

If historians applied scientific principles, there wouldn't be *any* HJ theories, because it's obvious to a skeptical mind that the evidence is too poor to do anything more than speculate.

The historians who do apply scientific principles don't waste their time trying to reconstruct the past from such abysmal evidence, but instead, try to say whatever can be said about the evidence - performing textual analysis to determine the odds that an author of one text is the same as another, etc.

mountainman

If historians applied scientific principles they divide the theory space of "Early Christianity" into two separate segments - one for the books of the new testament canon (+ LXX) and one for the "non canonical" books.

And they would investigate each segment separately.

Or finding conjectural reasons why the 4th century C14 datings on the "Gnostic Gospels" indicate that these Gnostic authors were writing nothing which was new at all ---- that the Gnostics were just copyists of texts which were written and argued about centuries earlier!

Again we can thank the careful documentation standards of the most pious Christian Heresiologists of that period.

Whats the use of the C14 citations?
They serve no purpose to history at the moment.
Why? Everyone believes/follows Eusebius and not the Gnostic C14.

Toto

C14 is off topic unless you want to show that any given manuscript is the original. Otherwise, no one uses C14 to date the composition of a text.

mountainman

C14 provides a boundary chronology for originality. Yes the text of any given physical manuscript could have been desmodromically copied by faithful and unthinking scribes for centuries prior to further publication. But common sense suggests that this is not always the case.

Of course not! It is traditional in BC&H to rely on Eusebius, the Gnostic Hersiologist, for this task. Eusebius still saves Jesus!