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05-30-2007, 04:17 PM | #41 | |
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telling someone their wrong, is infantile if you provide no evidence to back up your claim. |
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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. |
05-30-2007, 09:18 PM | #43 | |
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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. CC |
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05-30-2007, 09:19 PM | #44 | |
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05-30-2007, 09:26 PM | #45 | |||
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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. CC |
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05-30-2007, 11:43 PM | #46 | ||
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All the best, Roger Pearse |
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05-31-2007, 12:11 AM | #47 | ||
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05-31-2007, 06:53 AM | #48 | |
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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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05-31-2007, 08:42 AM | #49 | |
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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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05-31-2007, 09:45 AM | #50 | ||
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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:
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