ApostateAbe

The main difference on that point of course would be the literacy and technology of the two societies. It is unlikely that nobody talked about Jesus. If they didn't, we wouldn't know it. They didn't have blogs or news cameras. Hardly anyone wrote anything in that time and place, all writing except stone carving was highly biodegradable, and hardly any writing was ever copied and saved.

Toto

Unless, as Bart Ehrman contends, the gospels are unreliable historical documents. Even some historicists believe that Jesus never intended to start a new religion or even a new faction.

Uh, no. Buddha and Pythagoras are shadowy religious figures who might or might not be historical, and the earliest evidence of Alexander is that he was a human military leader from Macedonia. While we have no surviving first hand accounts, we do have second hand accounts based on first hand accounts by those who fought with Alexander. This is distinctly different from Jesus, where the earliest accounts describe a spiritual being, and later accounts add more and more historical details.

The following details are ALL missing from Paul. Mark can only be described as early by twisting the meaning of that term.


Plausibility is not proof. There are no standard methods of inference that apply here.

If there are not two or more Jesus's, then who was Paul talking about when he wrote against those who preach another Jesus?

Toto

This is disproven by the literature that has survived from this period.

ApostateAbe

The historical documents are unreliable. It does not follow that we know nothing about Jesus. One way or the other, we use the historical evidences to make inferences. You were with me on that point, or at least I thought you were. I wonder what changed, if anything.

ApostateAbe

We can spend more time on this, because it is an essential point. How many first-hand written accounts can you count that coincide with the time and region of the alleged Jesus of Nazareth? I can count only one: the writings of Philo of Alexandria. Those are the only extant writings from the time and place. So, I would like to know what other writings you have in mind.

Toto

It does not directly follow that we know nothing about Jesus. But there is no reliable way to extract any information from those unreliable documents. The efforts to do so have all collapsed upon themselves.

Toto

That's too far off topic for this thread, and we've had this discussion before. There is Rembsberg's list. There are the various studies of literacy in Palestine - I think the book Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (or via: amazon.co.uk) (on google books) was discussed here recently.

You can only contend that no one would have written about Jesus by redefining him as the sort of insignificant person that no one would have written about, leaving the question of how he or his followers became so influential.

I hope I don't spend the holidays reading your repetition of your talking points. Have a merry Xmas. :wave:

ApostateAbe

OK, I am not sure what standard of decision-making you use to decide the efforts have "collapsed upon themselves," but the inferences seem rather straightforward. We accept hypotheses if the hypotheses strongly expect the evidences and the evidences expect strongly expect the hypotheses. The primary hypothesis that fulfills these two criteria is the hypothesis of Jesus as I have described. If you are depending on the methods and authority of Bart Ehrman, then I think there is nothing wrong with that: his three criteria are contextual credibility, dissimilarity and independent attestation. In other words, you accept the claims that are seemingly historically plausible, seemingly dissimilar to Christian interests, and seemingly attested by many independent sources. Again, this leads to the model of historical human cult founder Jesus as I have described. Bart Ehrman obviously doesn't think that nothing can be known about the historical Jesus. He wrote a book about the life and teachings of the historical Jesus. Modern scholarship is certainly diverse in their opinions, but I think that is expected merely from the modern ideological importance of the historical Jesus, not from the evidence itself. We see similar things happening with the Prophet Mohamed.

ApostateAbe

OK, great, I will have the last word. My contention was that "hardly any writing was ever copied and saved." Your claim was that my contention "is disproven by the literature that has survived from this period." I think your claim is preposterous, and I think you should know better by now.

The Remsburg list contains every extant author within about one or two centuries of Jesus in the entire Roman empire. That would include millions of people, but we have only 42 authors.

According to the census of Augustus in AD 14, there were 4,937,000 people in the empire. Let's say that we limit ourselves to 100 years and a generation lasts 25 years, to be generous. So, we quadruple this number, and we have 20,000,000 people. Out of 20 million people, the writings of only 42 authors remain with us.

42/20,000,000 = 1/476,000

Out of every 476,000 people, only one person wrote something whose writings remain. This is a vanishingly small amount of extant writings.

But, I actually specified the "time and place" of Jesus. I know this is ambiguous, and we can get a good idea of our historical expectations if we choose what "time" and "place" we are talking about. If we are very specific with the time and place like I was, then we drastically diminish the number of extant authors, and we are down to only one: again, Philo of Alexandria. If we are generous with our time and place, like you are, then we have a social context of millions of people. One way or the other, it is problematic for your position.

Toto

Yes, I infer that the stories about Jesus were constructed well after he might have lived, based on midrash of the Hebrew Scriptures and other literary sources.
Not this again. You invented this test. i don't think anyone else follows it.

I read Bart Ehrman's bio of Jesus. He never actually addressed the question of historicity - that's waiting for his new book to be published in March 2012. He declined to join the Jesus Project. His criteria just do not stand up as critieria for historicity - contextual credibility is a feature of a lot of fiction, dissimilarity includes the thoroughly discredited criterion of embarrassment, and there are no independent attestations.

But I'm not going to go through all this again. Life is just too short.

Take care.