Doug Shaver

No. Belief in a historical person requires evidence, but no evidence can be evaluated until the historical person is defined.

The existence of a warlord named Arthur who fought a battle at Badon Hill seems pretty secure. The evidence is good enough for that. Whether that man was the historical King Arthur depends entirely on one's definition of "historical King Arthur."

Doug Shaver

We cannot. Without a clear definition accepted by all participants, discussion is pointless.

It may be noted, though, that one way to guarantee that you apparently win an argument is by defining key terms so as to accommodate all the evidence that is already on the table.

Doug Shaver

Since I'm not a Christian, I couldn't care less what is relevant for Christians.

Doug Shaver

No, it does not mean anything like that.

I don't. I have said how I define "historical Jesus." I believe the evidence is against his actual existence.

Sure, just as soon as you explain how my doing so would have any relevance to the present discussion.

spin

That's not a particularly convincing job of cleaning up your own mess: special pleading and argument from silence, wrapped around assertions.

Given that history is a best only partially able to reclaim shreds of the past, you are left with the epistemological problem of not being able to know who else in the gospels was real and who wasn't.

The writer was involved in the events he writes about. He is not just supposedly a witness. He wrote before the Jewish War, for the Jerusalem of Gal 2 has no problem with Jews in the city.

Yup:

:deadhorse:

tanya

Diogenes has a poll, designed to reveal which criteria one should select, in order to "qualify" someone "as a historical Jesus".

Several members of the forum have endeavored to explain why such a poll is futile, yet, you have identified a couple of Diogenes' parameters as meaningful evidence of the historicity of Jesus of Capernaum.

So, I repeat, do you find the existence of enormous stone temples, meaningful evidence of the historicity of Hercules?

If you do not regard those temples, Doug, as meaningful evidence of the historicity of Hercules, then, if you were to excavate a temple, somewhere, say, 2nd century, like those of Hercules, impressive, reflecting a significant investment of both time and wealth, but, dedicated, not to Hercules, but rather, to Jesus of Capernaum, would you then decline to identify those temples as evidence of Jesus' historicity?

spin

Evaluate the people named in the inscriptions of the fire brigades in Ostia Antica. They are just names, but they undoubtedly existed. There are thousands of such inscriptions that necessitate the existence of people, rendering them historical even though we know fuck all about them.

Nobody of the ilk of those asked to choose components of a historical Jesus would know anything about a battle at Badon Hill. They'd just know about round tables, gallant knights, unfaithful wives and swords in lakes.

If there is a Jesus behind the gospels, then there is no way for a reader to decide from the gospels what the characteristics of the person were, what he did. It would all have been mingled with dross in the evolution of tradition. We just see the round table and the sword in the stone.

Rick Sumner

A five minute walk through any cemetery in the world will show you why this is false.

steve_bnk

According to the Oxford commentray, it was common for someone to write in the name ofa suoperior.

tanya

spin, I am laughing, watching, mesmerized by that figure of tanya beating on the dead horse. Hurrah. Great fun!!!

Obviously, for any text, coin, temple, pottery, we don't KNOW, 100% what is the truth. We will always have that dilemma, posed for us by the famous philosopher, ZhuangZi: are we the butterfly floating above us, gazing down in disbelief, rather than the person lying down in the boat looking up at the summer sky admiring the beauty of nature?

So, no, we cannot say FOR SURE, that Jesus is a myth. I cannot say FOR SURE, that there was a lone gunman in Dallas, Texas. I am not 100% sure that the World Trade Center was not rigged with explosives by the NSA.

In the case of ancient documents, there are always two huge problems: verifying authenticity of authorship, and establishing absence of interpolation, prior to the documents' recopying. We can only do our best, with what we have available. We may never know the real truth, about anything.

So, Shakespeare had lived in Italy, then?

Galatia? You mean in Central Anatolia? Near the headwaters of Tigris/Euphrates?

Are you sure? Seems to me, that you wrote something, spin, I read it in the archives from a couple years ago, about a town downriver from Galatia, in Syria, if memory serves me right, third century, no problem with the Jews living in that town, with its synagogue and art work therein....Can you make art, spin, if the Roman army is killing the Jews?

So, what are you writing here, spin? Are you suggesting that in the time of the three Roman Jewish wars, there was persecution of the Jews, but that after 135 CE, no more persecution, hence, art could flourish, and that, since it obviously did flourish, that therefore, Paul must have written to a (Jewish?) congregation in Galatia before the three wars?

I am skeptical of that time line. I am persuaded that Paul's Jews in Galatia were not persecuted, because diaspora Jews prospered once the conflict had resolved, as shown by the famous Synagogue's artwork. No. Paul wrote AFTER that conflict had concluded, i.e. post 135 CE, in my opinion.

The point though, is very simple. No one knows the dates of publication. That was your contention for the gospels, and I agree. This uncertainty is also applicable, in my opinion, to the epistles.