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Old 05-30-2007, 04:17 PM   #41
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Originally Posted by Roger Pearse
I would have thought that anyone who goes down that route to defend their position has lost the argument right there, since it seems to me that any argument on any topic has to be based on data, and not on manufacturing an absence of it.
exactly, thus to back up your position, you should have provided data, but you hadn't any.
telling someone their wrong, is infantile if you provide no evidence to back up your claim.
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Old 05-30-2007, 05:19 PM   #42
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accepting that Plato wrote what scribe n says does not require a unique highly unprobable unexplained darkness to engulf the world that is only mentioned in connection with the crucifiction of Jesus.

Boss to employee N: how was your morning.
Employee N: fine
Boss: Oh because Stan your neighbor said he was late because a gas main broke in your neighborhood and everyone was evacuated early in the morning.
Stan: Oh yeah I forgot all about that.

We don't accept these stories as historical fact for the same reason we don't think Zues went around raping women disquised as a bull even though his actions were recorded just as frequently as Plato and Jesus.
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Old 05-30-2007, 09:18 PM   #43
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I've been trying to familiarize myself with any and all accounts of Jesus. I am familiar with Josephus's very minor mention of him in the Antiquities. I have also read that this is an unreliable source because it is a forgery. I am looking for source data on that claim.

I am wondering about the quality of the accounts of other contemporary historians.

1) What is/are the discussions/positions that support the veracity of any of the accounts?
2) What discussions/positions provide for the criticism of the inferiority of any of the accounts?

I submit the following persons, and I would be interested in reading about more people if I am forgetting someone.

Celsus
Origen
Tacitus
Josephus
Philo
Celsus and Origen lived long after Jesus and had only second hand reports.
Other critics were Emperor Jullian, Prophyry, Lucian, but were likewise writing long after Jesus was dead. And of course there were swarms of Gnostics. Marcion, Valentius and others. Philo wrote nothing about him, Suetonius like Tacitus mentions Christians but knows little about them.

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Old 05-30-2007, 09:19 PM   #44
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Originally Posted by DCHindley;

I'm not sure why Philo was on this list. He flourished roughly in Jesus' time and a little later, and says nothing about him, but why should he? Unless something affected Alexandrian Jews, he couldn't have cared less I don't think.
I added Philo because I had read that he would lived at the time that a purported HJ would have lived. I didn't attribute Philo's lack of discussion of a HJ to being because he cared less or more. That would imply selective chronicling.
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Old 05-30-2007, 09:26 PM   #45
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Well, with respect to the OP and the post from Pavlos, it appears that the authors of the 'darkness story,' in the synoptics, did not write about an historical event ...
Well, why not? (in the vein of Mr. Pearse)

I might write it appears they did write about a historical event, for people who speak of eclipses generally don't make such up for a lark.

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Perhaps, the authors thought they made a wise decision to include such an incredible event.
However, such an obvious event everyone would notice would not be good to invent! Let's say we read that there was darkness over the land for an hour when WWII ended. Would this be a good invention now? Well, no, for it would have been noticed if it happened, and would discredit my testimony if it didn't, and this could be easily verified.

The fact(!) that we have independent reference to such darkness is indeed strong evidence of the authenticity of the gospel account.

Its not the darkness that bothers me. Its all those saints who came alive and got out of their graves and wandered around Jerusalem that nobody else noticed. We only have evidence some Christian writer wrote about what somebody else supposedly had written about. We have no idea how trustworthy either of these guys were, but when looking at tall tales of the Bible, I don't hold ancient Christians writers in very high regard as to honesty and competence.

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Old 05-30-2007, 11:43 PM   #46
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Pearse
I would have thought that anyone who goes down that route to defend their position has lost the argument right there, since it seems to me that any argument on any topic has to be based on data, and not on manufacturing an absence of it.
exactly, thus to back up your position, you should have provided data, but you hadn't any.
telling someone their wrong, is infantile if you provide no evidence to back up your claim.
Which claim would that be? You seem unable to engage with anything I wrote other than to make vague demands.

All the best,

Roger Pearse
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Old 05-31-2007, 12:11 AM   #47
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exactly, thus to back up your position, you should have provided data, but you hadn't any.
telling someone their wrong, is infantile if you provide no evidence to back up your claim.
Which claim would that be? You seem unable to engage with anything I wrote other than to make vague demands.

All the best,

Roger Pearse
typical, rotflmao.
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Old 05-31-2007, 06:53 AM   #48
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accepting that Plato wrote what scribe n says does not require a unique highly unprobable unexplained darkness to engulf the world ...
But the point at issue was broader than that, the question was, "How do we know we have a reliable account of what Thallus wrote?" So then the riposte about Plato's writings does apply.

And the darkness was not in fact associated only with the Jesus' death, the accounts in question make no mention of this, by all indications. The fact that we have some corroboration is a difficulty the skeptics continue to ignore, and content themselves with saying "Evidence? What evidence?" as if this was an argument.

"typical..." (pavlos)

'Tis, indeed...
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Old 05-31-2007, 08:42 AM   #49
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...the question was, "How do we know we have a reliable account of what Thallus wrote?"
All of our accounts of Thallus and his work are in quotation, as far as I know. So the question becomes:

1. Do ancient authors quote other ancient authors accurately?
2. Did Syncellus quote Eusebius (extant) and Africanus (not extant) accurately?
3. Did Africanus quote Thallus accurately?
4. Do our texts of all these authors represent them accurately?

While there are always points of detail, broadly the answers should be 'yes.

All the best,

Roger Pearse
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Old 05-31-2007, 09:45 AM   #50
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accepting that Plato wrote what scribe n says does not require a unique highly unprobable unexplained darkness to engulf the world ...
But the point at issue was broader than that, the question was, "How do we know we have a reliable account of what Thallus wrote?" So then the riposte about Plato's writings does apply.
If I understand your thinking at all here, certainly not. We are dealing with two separate issues: the preservation of manuscripts (as in the case of Plato) and the interpretation of manuscripts (Syncellus on Africanus on Thallus). The latter involves one writer reading a source saying what they think an earlier writer had written, whether the earlier text was clearly understood or not in its significance. This is why my reference to Origen's confusion over what Josephus said is important: it can show what happens in the mediation of the interpretative mind rather than the simple scribal process.

Please stop and think about this lee_merrill. This adds a layer of complexity into the process unavailable in the Plato situation. In the act of interpretation the writer may simply be wrong, as in the case of Origen, who apparently has confused Josephus with Hegesippus and doesn't represent much if anything about what Josephus actually wrote. This is not a matter of deliberate falsification on the part of Origen, but one error through confusion.

In the case of Syncellus using Africanus using Thallus, we have to trust the veracity of three writers (rather than one) -- beside the veracity of scribes (to do their job of copying the text). It needs one interpretative error in the transmission for the data to go wrong and, as noted with Origen, there is a liability that such interpretative errors happen. This is why going back to the "original" source is the most trustworthy approach in historical research to use literary evidence.

Did Thallus actually exist? Whiston, translating Josephus AJ 18.167, writes "Now there was one Thallus, a freed-man of Caesar, of whom he [Herod Agrippa] borrowed a million of drachmae". This is an error. The best texts we have of Josephus say "Now there was another [=allos], of Samaritan origin, a freedman of Caesar, of whom he [Herod Agrippa] borrowed a million of drachmae". Whoops, no Thallus! Yet the fact that our Thallus was Samaritan is frequently mentioned, though this error based on Josephus seems to have been the source. This is given here, not as an argument that Thallus was an invention, but to show the problem of interpretative use of sources.

The problems of simplistically trotting out Thallus are many. As a further example, there was a writer Thallus whose text seems to have ended at the 167th Olympiad (109BCE), the latest events mentioned usually being a good indication of when a text was written. Is this the bones of Thallus the Samaritan?

Did Thallus talk about some eclipse, which Julius Africanus took to have been the darkness at the time of Jesus's death? How could we know? We don't have Thallus to consult. We only have a reference in Syncellus about Julius Africanus telling us what Thallus is supposed to have said. Did Syncellus misunderstand Africanus? Again, how could we know? We don't have Julius Africanus. A double interpretative mediation puts any original material beyond our reach.

Quote:
Originally Posted by lee_merrill View Post
And the darkness was not in fact associated only with the Jesus' death, the accounts in question make no mention of this, by all indications. The fact that we have some corroboration is a difficulty the skeptics continue to ignore, and content themselves with saying "Evidence? What evidence?" as if this was an argument.
No, it's not an argument. It's a request for you to supply evidence. Without evidence you don't have an argument.


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