Doug Shaver

It's doing not so bad in Southern California, too.

Gregg

LOL such humility!

Well, Don, you can count me among the 1 percent who HAVE read Doherty's thesis in depth. I've read every article on the site and all of the responses to readers as well, and have also bought and read the book.

Of course, what you probably mean by "in depth" is that some of us probably haven't checked for misspellings or other small errors that in your view topple the entire edifice of mythicism. Or we haven't demanded that Doherty produce a multitude of examples of pagans and Christians writing with consistent, exacting precision about the nature and structure of the heavens.

Heck, using your standards, I can prove that Christianity doesn't exist! Christians sure as heck don't seem to agree on exactly what heaven and hell are like, what angels and demons are like, what the structure of the heavenly court is like, and so on.

LoungeHead

It might be something to do with his liberal distribution of free wine.
I thought JC was an archetype for the ideal man. And worship of his character takes presidence over the archetype ever existing in reality; hence the notion follow in his foot steps. Christians aim to be like Christ, but can never completely achieve his divinity of character due to original sin. Therefore, the stories of his earthly existence are less important.

GakuseiDon

I don't doubt that there are plenty of supporters who have read Doherty, but there don't appear to be many who have looked into his arguments in any depth. At least, I haven't come across any reviews other than Carrier's. Can you point me to reviews where Doherty's claims have actually been looked into?

I'm not aware of doing that myself. Any examples?

Well, you've read Doherty's criticism of me, at least. But where have I demanded "multitude of examples of pagans and Christians writing with consistent, exacting precision about the nature and structure of the heavens"? Some examples, please?

So, if someone made a claim about what Christians believed about the structure of the heavenly court and someone else said "Hey, that's not what they believed!", can you:
1. suggest a good method to evaluate whether that claim can be confirmed?
2. suggest a good method to evaluate whether that claim can be refuted?

Or do we just throw our hands up in the air and say that we can't guess what people believed in those days, but it sounds good so let's go with it anyway?

Gamera

Neither do any classic historical texts, if you bother to scrutinize them the way you want to scrutinize the NT texts

spin

You've already failed at this sad backdoor approach to bolstering your sagging texts. You won't defend your unknowledgeable views with regard to the evidence for Alexander, but you are coming back with the same apparently unjustified views of historical evidence. Your texts don't pass close scrutiny therefore you will claim that no texts pass such scrutiny. Here's a test case: scrutinize the Res Gestae of Augustus and use it to justify your claims. Do you have problems with the existence of Augustus? Do you want to know what he looked like at various times in his life? Do you have doubts about the deeds of his life? Do you want to visit his house on the Palatine to make sure it's real?

If you are happy with his existence and his own account of his deeds, Tacitus and Suetonius also deal with Augustus, providing a lot more information. We know who these writers were and how they got their information. We know when and where they wrote. We can even divine their biases. Their information accords with most if not all the physical evidence from the period that they deal with. But please go ahead and fault them regarding their information about Augustus. Make my day.

The only complaint that I understand that you can bring against them is based on the lack of manuscript tradition, which is understandable. It's not like hordes of people had a vested interest in maintaining them. However, you know that a certain degree of quality of the witness can be determined through corroboration of the knowledge they profess to provide. Such corroboration can be gained from a comparison of the content of the texts with the physical evidence from the period, which includes coins, monuments and inscriptions. Widespread corroboration leads to passing the scrutiny test.


spin

Roger Pearse

Is the Res Gestae a literary or epigrapiphic text? The discussion here is literary texts, surely?

(Stuff about Augustus based on non-literary sources snipped)

Again this seems irrelevant to the point made. I would only comment that if we reject every figure not evidenced in this manner, then surely the ancient world consisted only of emperors and the like. This seems absurd to me.

The NT is the best attested text of antiquity so far as manuscript tradition is concerned. The arguments deployed to argue that we do not possess it now would certainly dispose of any other text from antiquity transmitted in the same manner.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

LGM

I'm not sure what an "epigrapiphic" text is, but surely the discussion here is about ancient documents that contain some allegedly historical claims.

The Res Gestae of Agustus, and the gospel of John, both fit that broad category, whether they are written on parchment or chisled in stone.

Like other physical evidence that supports his existence and what he looked like, etc.?

The ancient world consisted of lots of ordinary people and emperors alike. Just not too many supernatural, miracle-working god-men who raised people from the dead, raised himself from the dead, and flew off into outerspace. What's absurd is assuming the mythical hagiography of the NT gospels are any more historical then Homer's tales or the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Yep. Keep copying a myth, or an allegory, or a fictionalized hagiography over and over again, and what do you get?

What will the Book of Mormon be 1800 years from now?

Is anyone arguing we don't possess some reasonably close copy of an ancient text known as the "gospel of John"?

That's not in dispute. The authors, their sources, their agenda and whether or not the text represents any historical facts, is what is in dispute.

spin

Leaving aside your special pleading over the medium of the literature...

Snipping this means that you are not doing your job, but shaping data.

One goes from the known to the less known. That is how it is done. The Res Gestae leads us to Tacitus and Suetonius as my post showed. If you cannot deal with the Res Gestae than how can you hope to deal with Tacitus and Suetonius? Texts are not written in a vacuum and we must use the physical evidence to elucidate the literary and vice versa.

When dealing with history one talks about what one can. Those others aren't history.

You are keeping to this sham, which incidentally is deceptive. The tradition may be better, but then there was never any discussion of that. Christians were the main keepers of culture for several centuries and our heritage is from the whim of those christians. This explains why the manuscript tradition of christian sources is as it is. Manuscript tradition is a red herring. It in no way reflects anything directly about history. If there were a marvelous transmission history for Petronius's Satyricon, does that help us with any history (of the sort that interests all of us here) whatsoever?

You are correct if one had to rely solely on manuscript tradition. As you know he who controls the present controls the past. Burning the works of Porphyry helps to make the manuscript tradition the way it is, or simply finding a text not of sufficient interest to copy.

However, out topic is history. Of course I can produce numerous texts that have better claims than the christian texts. Many of the non-biblical, non-apocryphal Dead Sea Scrolls were written close to the time of copying. The works of Philodemus are supposed to have come from the very philosopher's library. All the administrative texts found at Oxyrhynchus are autographs, as are the bar-Kochba letters and the documents from Wadi ed-Daliyeh. We are fortunate to have these texts. They would certainly have gone the way that many texts did that were not considered worth passing down to the culture-keepers' heirs.

An argument based solely on manuscript transmission is rather flimsy in its ability to provide much about history. It just says that a text was well-kept.

History is not solely based on literary texts as you are well aware. In doing history we must consider all those other sources of information. In fact, literary works without those other sources are not of that much value as historical sources, are they?


spin

Gregg

Hey Brooke, are you still out there? We need you to contribute to the discussion!

I chose not to be offended by the hand-waving dismissal above. There are plenty of very good reasons to doubt the historicity of ANY element of the gospel accounts with the exception of the fact that people like Herod and Pilate existed, some of the towns and locations were real, etc. Most works of historical or contemporary fiction mention real people and places. It's your claim that really needs defending. When Jesus' entire ministry is patterned after the 5 books of the Torah, and virtually every element of his crucifixion is drawn from Scripture, and those who supposedly spread his message have nothing to say about the man or his life and ministry, it makes perfect sense to wonder if any of it actually happened.