Johnny Skeptic

Do you wish to start a new thread at the Abrahamic Religions forum or not?

Regarding "some poor Palestinian 'schmuck' who got done up right proper for having a big mouth," you have not reasonably established what Jesus said, and just as important, where he got his information from. That is why I asked you to start a new thread. Apparently, you know that you would have difficulty providing reasonable evidence regarding those issues.

GakuseiDon

Thanks for the links, Toto.

gurugeorge

In effect, Zindler is pretty close to positively disproving the gospel Jesus, albeit only insofar as he's connected with Nazareth and other places that didn't exist.

i.e. those portions of the story we know and love that are connected with places that didn't exist, likely didn't happen. The supposed entity in those portions of the story, likely didn't exist.

I think it's a sound argument, so far as I can tell.

But it really stops you in your tracks to think that lots of those placenames didn't exist at the supposed time of the supposed Jesus.

And it's also strong evidence that helps point to how Christianity really formed - i.e. surely, the absence of these places must push the dating towards the later end for the gospels? The absence of the places makes the author of those texts, whoever they were, and for whatever reason they wrote them, somewhat ignorant of the real circumstances in the region at the time of the supposed Jesus.

There's still wiggle room for the committed HJ-er of course - but it must be for a much thinner and difficult historical Jesus, it pushes the HJ to be someone whose real sayings and doings were forgotten about very quickly, such that words could be put in his mouth with impunity.

While on the contrary the mythicist perspective is strengthened by such a finding. An entity that hasn't in fact had much concrete biography attached to it up to that point, because it was more of a vague, mystical idea in its earliest stages, and only gradually accreted a fairly fixed and moderately complex story, fits the fictive nature of later texts better.

Toto

Hi Johnny, nice to see you again. But I think we all know the issues with proving the authenticity of the Bible, and it's not going to do anyone any good to try to force No Robots to defend the accuracy of the gospels. It would be like watching an unstoppable force crashing into an immovable object, again and again.

No Robots is not your typical fundamentalist in any case, and only wants to defend the teachings of Jesus, not inerrancy in general.

The topic of this thread is Robert Price's interview with Frank Zindler.

hjalti

I don't know why the non-existence of Nazareth would be that important. I mean, it's not that clear that "Nazarenos" had originally anything to do with Nazareth.

GakuseiDon

Yay! Scrappy Doo has returned, fighting the good fight! Good to see you back, Johnny!

It does sound like a mythicist's wet dream, doesn't it? I'm always suspicious of things that sound too good to be true. Since some of those places appeared to have existed by the end of the Second Century, I'd be interested in how that situation came about. Did the Gospel writers influence the names of towns-to-be? Or were they deliberately choosing names of towns that had just come into existence?

If mythicism ever becomes mainstream, how these places popped up will certainly make for an interesting scholarly debate, at least for those whose interest lays beyond gainsaying the Gospels.

Johnny Skeptic

Thanks to Toto and GakuseiDon for the welcome back.

Steven Carr

But they placed Jesus in Bethlehem,and historical scholars are perfectly happy to accept that that never happened.

So why should they be fazed if the Gospels placed Jesus in another town that turned out not to be associated with him?

Steve Weiss

What constitutes proof of: walking on water, virgin birth, resurrection, a worldwide flood and a boat full of world-wide species, talking animals, etc.? Can you differentiate between the possible and the impossible? Is it more rational to believe in these impossibilities or to conclude that they never happened?

Steven Carr

And what evidence could falsify the historical Jesus hypothesis?

If we found early Christians denying that Jesus had appeared in the flesh, would that count as evidence against an historical Jesus?