dog-on

Ah, but there are a good number of "Scholars" in the legit music field that would say John Cage is simply noise.

I suppose physicists would tend not to say the same regarding QM... but then again, I don't know for that certain.

Gamera

A fail to see how any of these "problems" in any way lessen the purported historicity of the content of these text any more than any other texts from antiquity.

Indeed, the problems are unique because we have multiple texts relatively close in time covering the same or similar events. This is rather unique in ancient historiography.

If we had only one gospel coving the biography of Jesus (which is typical of biography in antiquity), the "problems" wouldn't exist, and we could file the book next to all the other biographies from antiquity.

In short, the "problems" arise because we have more and better mss than is typical of historical texts of that period, not because of some deficiency. I wish we had 4 accounts of Agricola, with which we could calibrate the propaganda of Tacitus.