aa5874

And all things considered non-existent have no evidence for their existence.

Existence cannot be argued with no evidence of existence, only the argument for non-existence is boosted with lack of evidence of existence.

And what is even more damaging to the HJ case is the evidence that have survived.

The surviving evidence even from the supposed contemporaries of Jesus claimed he was the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God, who was God and created the heavens and earth, walked on water, transfigured, resurrected and ascended through the clouds.

The surviving evidence coupled with the lack of historical corroborative sources have destroyed the HJ.

Amaleq13

As a blanket statement, that is simply false. Absence of evidence is sometimes evidence of absence. Arguments from silence are only as strong as the amount of available evidence combined with the likelihood that a given claim would obtain support from that evidence. Lots of evidence and a strong likelihood that a claim would obtain support from that evidence, if it were true, results in a relatively strong argument from silence against the claim. Limited evidence or no good reason to expect much support from that evidence even if the claim is true creates a relatively weak argument from silence.

If a claim is unlikely to obtain support from the available evidence for either of those reasons, an argument from silence should not be considered persuasive.

If it is known that the total body of evidence is limited, it is not logical to draw conclusions based on the lack of specifically supportive evidence.

IIUC, that is Roger's point. This particular argument from silence is simply too weak due to the general lack of available evidence to be considered persuasive.

Zaphod

Disagree. Absence of evidence is indeed evidence, good, bad, indifferent, persuasive or not. And that was not Roger's point - he was talking about "proof", not evidence.

And I was drawing no conclusions - I was making the case that in the absence of evidence - whether there ever was missing evidence or not - the default position must be that the Historical Jesus can not be assumed. It must be assumed that the Historical Jesus did not exist, until such time as evidence is produced. This is the opposite of Roger's position, if I understand him correctly.

Additionally, we have evidence to the contrary that the Historical Jesus existed, in the form of references supporting the Mythical Jesus hypothesis. And therefore, it is Roger's position which is drawing conclusions despite a lack of evidence.

And I just can't see how the complete silence on the historical Jesus - including specifics of his large chunks of his life missing from the Bible itself - can be construed as all that weak. No one wrote about him or any crowds, or followers for decades. Not a scrap of anything exists, not a relic, a carving, a coin anywhere. This of a man who supposedly performed real miracles, spoke to huge crowds, had an entourage, acted scurrilously at the Temple.. .Can it be that the proof reference used by the HJ promoters is false on the subject? Imagine that!

Meanwhile, we have how many hundreds of pages of historical testimony from the historians of the time? How trivial were the matters Philo, for example, wrote about? (Not a rhetorical question - I would like to know!)

What minutiae has been described in the surviving texts of the relevant historians of the era? Why would we not expect to hear anything corroborating the apologetic accounts of the HJ?

Plus, we know that the Church destroyed untold numbers of documents it considered heresy. How many of them described a non Historical Jesus? Lack of evidence cuts both ways.

Why, IYO, would the proper default position not be that the HJ must be assumed non existent until the first shred of evidence rears its ugly head?

Roger Pearse

That all seems right to me. In our own times, silence can be damning, as we all know -- because we know so much about what is going on. But it doesn't work in ancient times.

Bang on the nail.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

andrewcriddle

Philo provides little historical information (in the sense of evidence about the current events of his day) and a good part of the evidence that he does provides deals with events outside Palestine. (Philo lived in Egypt.)

Philo doesn't for example mention John the Baptist or many of the other figures mentioned by Josephus in book 18 of the Antiquities. One would not expect him to mention Jesus.

Andrew Criddle

Amaleq13

You appear to still be confused on the concept. Do some googling on logical fallacies. Arguments from silence are inherently problematic and only sometimes provide a logical basis for a conclusion. The current context is simply not one of those times because of the general lack of available evidence.

Roger disagrees so you should probably reread his posts as well.

There is no such thing as a "default position" except neutrality. Anything else is just being intellectually lazy.

Ted Hoffman

He is talking about evidence, not argumentation. You are saying that that evidence may be used fallaciously to attempt to prove something (argumentation), which is another matter altogether. He is talking about alcohol and car keys. You are telling him drunk driving is dangerous.

Roger Pearse

Agree entirely.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Solo

I don't know what the must in the above proposition is supposed to accomplish but if it is to declare taboo on thinking it will not work.

The bottom line is that the gospels assert Jesus of Nazareth was a historical personality and even though he is portrayed in them as a godhead with the obvious intent to promote the aims of a new religious movement, his existence is nonetheless placed within a historical setting near to the time of the writers. That many of the events in the gospels are simply not ponderable as historical occurences, and many others are construed as fulfilment of OT prophecies, does not in a sober, rational assessment make it logically necessary to postulate Jesus as a wholly fictitious character. Nor does the fact that Jesus is not attested to by contemporary historians lessen the probability he existed, only that he was a recognized personage of his own time. It is clear also that the later TF forgeries aimed to correct that perceived omission by the author, not to fabricate the bare fact of Jesus living and dying in the time frame where he was placed by the gospels. No one in the antiquity disputed the fact, even though some of the commentators reasoned that Christ was not altogether material. But the ideas of docetism are much more elegantly explained by neurophysiology and psychology than by postulates of non-existence.

So, again the bottom line is that we do not have to assume anything with respect to the historicity of Jesus. He is asserted to have lived in a certain time frame by a movement created in his name and if people wish to dispute that historical datum they need to produce a convincing proof that he just could not have been there.

References ? The problem the mythicist faces is that there are no references to something that does not exist. There are only inferences. G.A.Wells showed on the earliest NT texts that the later gospel compositions do not track back to the earliest traditions. He reasoned that it was because that Jesus did not exist. He then changed his position and admitted that the Q figure originated with an obscure historical figure. He realized that his inferences did not work with certain strata of the gospel materials.

Wells continues to maintain that Paul's Christ was completely unrelated to the Q figure.

I think you are being just a tad too disingenuous. There is very little evidence of Jesus, historically speaking, and what is, derives from the people that came after him and believed all sorts of things about him and their own mystical relation to him. There is no evidence that there were people in that time who denied Jesus once walked and talked on the earth. Again, bottom line.

What is important in all of this ? I think 3 things:

1) Neither side can claim a conclusive, positive proof that Jesus either existed or did not exist unless new archeological facts emerge.

2) In the absence of such evidence there will be shameless bluster, chest beating and nonsense spouted on both sides.

3) Neither 1) or 2) are all that important, if one has enough insight into one's own self to conclude that tolerance is called for in questions which are not resolvable by rational discussion.

Jiri

dog-on

The only one that even comes close to the Dragnet standard is Luke. As a matter of fact, Mark makes no such assertion, neither do his compadres Mat and Juan.