LegionOnomaMoi

"Am I that transparent?" he asked seriously.


You have to be careful with tossing our that first-person plural pronoun. As for what I'm attempting to do with my responses to you, it's really quite juvenile, but it's so hard to resist. It's not just that your ideas are so bizarre. Plenty of people (even those with doctorates) have wayyyy out their ideas. But your use of colored text, seemingly random all-caps for emphasis, and general inability to respond to, understand, or address others' posts just makes it so hard to resist sarcastic and/sardonic responses to what you write.


Let's do lunch.

Wow. It's almost like our evidence for Paul's letters is...well, better than or equal to every single other author who wrote letters in Greek or Latin or any other language before the fall of Rome.

Quite true. That's why I prefer well-reasoned analyses.

Never underestimate the importance of vitamin D.

mountainman

How probabilistically certain are you that an Historical Jesus existed?

100%

55%

42%

?

Earl Doherty seems to be arguing for 0%

mountainman

But the HJers are moonlighting.

LegionOnomaMoi

The post had nothing to do with the probability of a historical Jesus. Merely the aa5874's capacity to under stand logic or probability in general.

As for your question, I don't think precise percentages are useful here. That's why we have fuzzy logic. It is unfortunate that Carrier, in various papers and his new book, applies bayesian reasoning and classical logic, but his "values" for his equation are really what one finds in fuzzy set theory/fuzzy logic, and therefore many of the "rules" which hold true for the classical logic theory Carrier adopts do not hold true for his application.

In any event, I would say that given the evidence we have and the various explanations of it (from Reimarus zu Doherty), I can't find an explanation which seems likely and which doesn't involve a historical Jesus whose activities in some way begin Christianity.

aa5874

Again, don't you understand that it is CLEAR that you have NO evidence whatsoever for early Pauline writings Before c 70 CE??

The Pauline writings are the very WORSE attested sources perhaps of all antiquity. Only fictitious characters, forgeries or sources of fiction ATTEST that Paul wrote letters before c 70 CE.

1. The Pauline writer did NOT state when he wrote his letters.

2. The author of Acts did NOT claim at all that Saul/Paul wrote letters to Churches.

3. Letters to place Paul before 70 CE have been deduced to be forgeries.

4. Apologetic sources claimed Paul wrote his letters AFTER Revelation by John.

5. Apologetic sources claimed Paul was ALIVE AFTER gLuke was composed.

6. Apologetic sources did NOT acknowledge Paul as an early evangelist and did NOT acknowledge that he wrote letters.

7. The so-called conversion of Saul/Paul in Acts is Fiction.

8. The supposed earliest source to mention Paul and that he wrote a letter is an ANONYMOUS letter Falsely attributed to a character that did NOT ever exist callled Clement of Rome.

9. No Pauline letter has been found and dated to the 1st century and before c 70 CE.

10. The Pauline writers made KNOWN false claims.

11. None of Paul's acquaintances have ever been located in the 1st century.

12. The writings of supposed contemporaries of Paul, like the author of Acts, Barnabas and Peter, have NOT been found and dated to the 1st century.

13. No Canonised gospel author Copied a single verse from the Pauline letters.

Let us do History.

Paul is a fictitious 1st century character. The Pauline writings are Anti-Marcionite texts written sometime AFTER the mid 2nd century EXACTLY as the DATED EVIDENCE suggest.

The Pauline writer claimed Jesus was RAISED from the dead in virtually ALL LETTERS to Churches and also that WITHOUT the Resurrection there would be NO FAITH and No SALVATION.

Paul was an ANTI-MARCIONITE. Paul most likely existed during or AFTER Marcion.

LegionOnomaMoi

I just realized something problematic (well, something else problematic) with the above. I've already commented on the fact (and quoted other to that effect) that the word order had nothing to do whether or not the "relative" has been mentioned: when Josephus uses patronymics, it doesn't matter how famous the relative is or whether or not they were already mentioned, it's almost always some form of "X, the son of Y", where the son is named first. I've also said that only holds true with patronymics, while when we find "by name X" the reverse is true. Josephus has some kind of reference modifier (e.g., "a young man of the Tribe of Benjamin" or "there was a young nobleman of King Benhadad" and so on) followed by "whose name was X" or "by name X" (sometimes even when the reference modifier is a kinship identifier, as in AJ 20.200).

However, after a my brief search through Jewish Wars to find the the counter-examples to Spin's "rule" (in which a famililal relation who has never been mentioned before or after is placed before the person identified when Josephus also used something like "by name X"), I wondered if a more in-depth search might turn up more, so I started looking through Antiquities and I realized quite quickly something that I should have realized long ago.

Spin asserts that when we find "inversion" it's when the relative has already been mentioned or is famous. Well, great, only this Josephus account of goddamn Jewish friggin' history, so almost everybody named in the entire fucking text is famous. It's like saying "we only find inversions when the relative has a Jewish or Greek name". I can't believe I didn't realize how bullshit that comment was until now.

spin

Still whinging and still empty-handed.

:hysterical:

LegionOnomaMoi

So the lack of any defense (apart from rhetoric) for your little "markedness" gaffe, not to mention the the counter-examples to your claim about Josephus using "whose name was X" for people whose "famliy connections he does not supply" is just me empty-handed. Well, if I had a long tradition of making baseless claims about linguistics and then somebody showed up who actually knew the subject, I'd probably rely on emoticons for arguments too.

EarlDoherty

In other words, the niggling little "problem," which those defending the authenticity of the reference to Jesus called Christ in Ant. 20 like to blow up out of all proportion, with the mythicist proposal that "brother of Jesus" could be authentic to Jo but refers to the subsequently clarified "Jesus, son of Damneus", should not be a problem at all, since even though it comes after the first introduction of this Jesus, we shouldn't be discouraged by that, since "we simply too often do not find what we would 'expect' when it comes to Josephus' methods of referring to individuals."

Thanks for that.

Earl Doherty

LegionOnomaMoi

Yes, it's certainly possible that Josephus' tendency towards irregular methods of referring to people would account for Jesus being identified later as the son of Damneus, even though that would be particularlly irregular. However, if you accept that argument, than you need a better one for supposing this is an alteration. As I said in another thread, not only do we have the many, many, ways in which christians referred to Jesus, we have an excellent population of scribal alterations to Jesus' name to use as to predict the probability that a scribe would alter a passage to say "called Christ", which is not only not a christian way of referring to Jesus, in the one passage in the whole NT where this phrase isn't placed on the lips of someone else (Matt 1:16) we have multiple textual variants altering so that it no longer reads "called christ" but "Jesus the Christ" or "the one called christ" (no Jesus) and similar changes.