aa5874

Well, MY FRIEND, you have just EXPOSED yourself as an INVENTOR of the IMAGINARY.

You have NOT established that the Jesus story is history yet you state as fact Jesus did exist and had followers who called him a Messiah before he died when no such thing can be corroborated using any credible historical source.

You have PRESUMED your INVENTION into existence.

You are NOT really dealing with PARSIMONY.

You are dealing with the IMAGINARY.

HJ is the most PARSIMONIOUS EXPLANATION for your speculative IMAGINATION.

But, you WILL NEVER be able to IMAGINE SOURCES for HJ into existence.

You believe your own imaginative invention about DELUSIONS.

MYTH Jesus is the MOST PARSIMONIOUS EXPLANATION of the EXTANT SOURCES of Antiquity.

Toto

That's already three apparent degrees of separation. Does Polycarp even mention Judas?

But not the sayings of Jesus...

The death of Judas is so textually uncertain and encrusted by legend that it would be hard to use it as historical.

Roger Pearse has a blog post here on the death of Judas.

From Lake's Beginnings of Christianity (or via: amazon.co.uk), quoted on the blog

If so, Papias described Judas as living after the betrayal, and dying from a disease so terrible that his estate remained unoccupied. Among the symptoms mentioned was extreme swelling, so that a place where a wagon could pass was too narrow for him. This comparison gave rise to a secondary form of the story which represented Judas as crushed by a wagon. …

On the other hand, general probability would perhaps suggest that the shorter version is likely to be original If so, the gruesome details and the changed form of the longer version is due to a desire to pile up horrors and to make the death of Judas similar to that of other notoriously evil men, such as Herod the Great or Nadan in the story of Ahikar. To me this seems somewhat the more probable hypothesis. Whichever view be taken, Papias clearly represents a tradition different both from Matthew and from Acts.

Reliability of PapiasChris Zeichmann, who used to post here, has an article on Papias' description of Judas' death abstracted here.

GakuseiDon

If that's how many we have, then that's what we have. Two degrees would be better; one even more. Are three degrees too many? Two degrees? I don't know myself. How is this usually evaluated?

Best to keep two things clear:
1. The existence of Judas and the other apostles
2. Legendary stories about the apostles.

Papias knew people who knew the apostles. Papias knew a story about Judas' death. IF that represents the text of someone living in such early times, then it raises the probability about Judas and the apostles he mentions (and Jesus as well) as being actual people. Not to the point of certainty, but as it has been pointed out, little is certain when all we have are texts.

When certainty is not possible, then in a thread on the use of parsimony and Occam's razor, are we able to analyse these texts from that perspective?

Assuming Papias is genuine, are two degrees of separation enough to show that the apostles probably existed, and is three degrees of separation enough to show that Jesus probably existed? Do obviously legendary stories work against the probability of existence? If so, how much?

It might be a good idea to look at the existence of the apostles rather than Jesus, to see if we can get to "from these texts, we can say that X probably existed."

Doug Shaver

Not until you explain, without begging any questions, how you know that Jesus had any disciples.

Doug Shaver

I accept Paul's testimony that they existed. Paul doesn't say they were anybody's disciples.

Doug Shaver

I'm not up to speed on how historians usually calculate these things. However, what you're saying is, "It's not as good as we wish, but it's the best we have." From this, "It's good enough" does not follow.

aa5874

The HJ proposition can NOT ever be the most parsimonious because one must FIRST ASSUME that the JESUS stories contain the history of a man and then ASSUME the true history.

MJers have NO SUCH assumptions to make. Jesus was described as a Ghost Child or ACTED like a ghost when he walked on the sea and TRANSFIGURED.

Myth is the MOST parsimonious explanation with the LEAST assumptions.

HJ ALWAYS has at LEAST TWO MORE ASSUMPTIONS than MYTH Jesus.

GakuseiDon

Not good enough for certainty, I agree. If Papias claims he met people who knew the apostles who knew Jesus, what can we draw from that, assuming that the text can be verified (which it can't be for certain, of course)?

Vorkosigan

Never mind that as Spong demonstrated back in the 80s, Judas is a made-up character. So Papias is clearly full of shit, a later invention himself.

GakuseiDon

Leaving aside whether Papias was lying or even a made-up character himself, I think it is an interesting question: If we had a text where someone claimed that he had met people who knew some the apostles who knew Jesus, would that be enough to say that some of the apostles probably existed, and that Jesus probably existed?