Tom Sawyer

Stories about Thor have remained around for at least a thousand years. I'm unsure of the etyology of them before that. Regardless of how the popularity of the stories of the two of them have waxed and waned over the years, after the first few generations have passed, the validity of the original origin of them becomes irrelevant because the people who are then contributing to their staying power no longer have the knowledge of those origins.

maryhelena

I would argue that importance depends upon context. No top dog here. Yes, when one needs a medical intervention, brain power is paramount. When one needs a hand to hold one does not consider what the content of the mind might be.

Perhaps that is the biggest lesson I learned from my late husband. He would always counter my arguments with - 'I need a hug not another god damn idea...'

Context matters....

Horatio Parker

Context is intelligibility.

Lugubert

You make me think of Thor Heyerdahl, who from ancient Norse writings deducted that the god Odin started his career as a king from southern contemporary Russia, and then moved north to settle in Scandinavia.

maryhelena

Yes, of course, one has to use ones mind to define a context.....The point I am trying to make is that we cannot separate mind from matter, consciousness from physicality. Thus, to say one is more important than the other is to disregard the reality of our nature - a nature that will assign value as a situation, or context, arises.

aa5874

It is most remarkable that you never really understood what is the meaning of the term "historical Jesus".

The 'historical Jesus' never meant that Jesus existed as a God, an angel, a demon, a Holy Spirit or Satan.

The 'historical Jesus' ALWAYS meant that Jesus existed as a human being with a human father.

A human Jesus, the Historical Jesus' has NO source, No evidence--Nothing. The 'historical Jesus' cannot be argued again.

Ehrman's 'Did Jesus Exist?' DESTROYED and OBLITERATED the human Jesus--the historical Jesus.

HJers are just like Creationists. One believe ADAM was human even though Created by God and the other Believe Jesus was Human even though it is claimed he was Reproduced by the Holy Ghost and Fathered by God in the Bible.

aa5874

This is most remarkable. You seem not to understand it was Christians or authors of the Jesus stories that claimed Jesus was the Son of a Ghost and FATHERED by God.

Christians BELIEVE the Son of the Ghost and the Son of the Myth God of the Jews did exist.

Who wrote Matthew 1.18, Luke 1 and John 3.16??? Christians BELIEVE them.

The NT is a compilation of Mythological stories of Jesus that Christians have BELIEVED is historically accurate for at least 1600 YEARS.

Adam

I'm not the one dismissing my opponent's case as 100% sure to be wrong. It is mythicists who say that there is no evidence for HJ. (True, there are "agnostics" like spin who deny certainty on either side.) I am saying that mythicists cannot legitimately claim there is no evidence for HJ in the light of the source documents I have presented that cannot bv dismissed a priori as false by their {mythicists') epistemology.

The above reply to Toto's #133 also serves as my reply to steve bnk's #128. (steve, when are you going to start showing you have read anything of mine--your responses should evince at least some research instead of reposting what you have said 10,000 times already?)

A case can be made for an epistemology that says, "We live in a natural world in which we cannot accept anything about the supernatural." We cannot legitimately accept that this is certain as a principle, however. A weaker statement more philosophically sound would be, "We as natural beings are incapable of dealing with the supernatural, so let's not assert anything about it." This would be on the atheist side of agnosticism, going somewhat beyond saying that we cannot know, to saying we can know that we should not say anything about the supernatural. Yet neither principle would entail that we not talk about anybody or anything that has had supernatural things said about it. We should not consider Alexander the Great? We should deny he existed? (Stories could have been made up generations later using the name of someone who was known to have lived.) What is the justification for refusing to consider the possibility that certain non-supernatural texts relate to events that really happened, merely on the grounds that some stories supposedly about that same person contain supernatural elements? Please state the epistemology that supports such a method.

Thus I am saying that people like spin can maintain their agnosticism between HJ and MJ, but I cannot see any justification for maintaining an MJ position that we can be certain that there is no evidence about Jesus. Personally I would go farther and say that HJ is true because I have presented seven or eight documents that could be regarded as eyewitness statements, so there is evidence for HJ. Certainly we have to sift through the evidence to see if any of it stands up as historical, but whatever is not larded with supernaturalism and seems to be presented as historical has to be given the benefit of the doubt. (As for the demand that the author must state himself, here again I refer to "Call me Ishmael" from the start of Moby Dick. Does that prove it not to be fiction? If I write a biography of some unverifiable experiences in my life, does that prove it's fiction if I fail to affix my name to the document?)

My above response to Toto's #133 also serves as my reply to steve bnk's #128. I don't need to respond to steve's apparent refusal to read anything of mine when he sends off once again a broadside like 10,000 others. He doesn't yet understand that I am a Christian? It's also in my "About me" and in my one blog here on FRDB.

steve_bnk

By defintion there is no supernatural. Anything that exists is part of the Universe, capital U.

For us on the rational science side theree must be demostrable proof. We do not accept subjective personal evidence of a deity or any other phenomena. I know a Christian who has never seen faith healing, but takes it on faith that the stories of modern miraculous cures he has heard of are true.

An old saying, 'In god we trust, all else bring data'.

Some accept the possibility of an HJ in some form, some do not. It all depends on how you approach it. That is the nature of subjective historical ineterpretion witrh no hard and fast evidence.

Can you articulate your beliefs?

You are still gneralizing. Make your cse, whatever that may be.

Adam

I need a response on your epistemology. "By definition" does not cut it. How do you, how does anyone, know there is no supernatural?

"Anything that exists is part of the Universe" is a better start, but it's still just a definition. Is something that does not exist part of the Universe? Batman does not exist, Batman is known to be made up. You would surely say, "God does not exist", but many others would say God does exist. We just get into semantics if we argue about whether a God who is part of the Universe made or shaped the rest of the Universe, or whether God by definition (probably yours) is outside the Universe (and hence does not exist). This is apparently just Monism, an ontology, but not an epistemology by which we can know what we know (or more to the point, "know what we don't know", better yet, "know that we know what is not true").