PoodleLovinPessimist

I'm reading this thread with great interest. But it seems to have gone off track. In the OP, Stevewe asserts that:

But the thread seems to have gone astray.

I have a couple of questions for Stevewe which might help focus the discussion:

Even if we do limit the concept of "historical validity" to "independent corroborative accounts", perhaps Stevewe could provide us with a comprehensive list of these accounts for both Julius Ceasar and for Jesus Christ?

Why is the determination of "historical validity" limited to the number or quality of "independent corroborative accounts"? Why are items such as archeological evidence excluded? There have been some tantalizing hints in the disucssion, but I haven't seen this question tackled head-on.

funinspace

There are many far more talented people here who are/will cover the literary landscape. I am touching more on just the logical end of the issue. Who said they believed Caesar's war writings verbatim? Sounds like your putting words in peoples postings here. Not all say Jesus didn't' exist; some just say who knows; some say there probably was such a person, but was probably just a heretical Jewish sage. What most non-theists here would agree on is that at least the divine portion is fabrication. If there is a document that speaks of a thousand people at some event with Caesar around, does that mean this shows a thousand witnesses for his existence? Or does it mean that the author of the documents attests for his existence? Should we also believe in Enki, because we can't prove it false? Or the lock ness monster?

Again, your conflating the existence of the man for his purported divine nature. You may be right that few question his mere existence. However, only a small portion of today's humanity/historians could be said to think him divine. And wouldn't you agree that this is more the point. If he's just a man that existed, is it relevant to ones worldview? People here don't debunk the existence of Mohammad, who is attestable, but the divine guidance he claimed. Do you accept his claims at face value, until it's proven beyond all doubt that it is false. Most here apply the same standards whether it's Mohammad/Allah, Joseph Smith, Buddhism, Hinduism, et.al. I suggest that it is the typical Xian that refuses to apply consistent standards to their faith that they apply to other faiths.

And this is a very small minority opinion. So what? We have a xian person around here that quotes "scholars" that he thinks has proved that God built the Great Pyramid as a sign to humanity. Should we believe him as well, because he can site a "scholar" that has a PHD?

Sven

Of course we should believe him! His evidence is IRREFUTABLE!
[/derail]

Lugubert

Stevewe asked "Find me some historians who doubt the existence of Christ." Well, they are there, if you look for them. I am now reading a book by Prof. Alvar Ellegård, Jesus : one hundred years before Christ. His theory is that Christianity evolved from the Jewish essenes, of Qumran fame. They revered a "Teacher of Righteousness". Trapped between orthodox Judaism and Gnosticism, they expanded on Paul's teachings (which mention no real facts of the life of Jesus) and invented the Jesus of the Gospels to make the Teacher more real.

Prof. Ellegård refers to lots of scholars. You might, for example, have a look at http://www.impactpress.com/articles/...sus120101.html.

A rather unique view is referred to on http://www.jesusisbuddha.com/larsa.html.

Vorkosigan

Ellegard is a stylistics expert, not a historian. Steve has yet to supply us with even one professional historian outside of NT studies who has studied the Gospels and concluded they are historically sound. There are a couple (Michael Grant wrote a popular book, but it is full of unwarranted methodological applications; Colin Hemer has written on Acts, but his positions appear to be largely dictated by confessional circumstances. Perhaps Robin Lane Fox might qualify, but he has not written a full-blown study.) Outside of NT studies the work just hasn't been done, and inside NT studies it is largely methodologically unsound.

As for Stevewe's claims about Thiede, Sigrid Peterson offers another view of the so-called Magdalen Papyrus.

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~petersig/...xt.final.reply

"Thiede's 1995 article suggests a lowered date for {P}64 -- P. Magdalen Gr.
17 -- by arguments which are methodologically unsound. His further
argument that there are <italics>nomina sacra</> used in place of
<gr>IHSOUS</> and <gr>KURIE</> is an extremely flimsy one. These fragments
of papyrus do not witness directly to the reconstructions with
recognizable inked letters on physical papyrus. The layout of visible
letters in one case supports Thiede's (and Roberts's) observation that the
text contains Greek letters which represent the numeral 12, rather than
the Greek word for 12. In the other cases, other plausible reconstructions
of the lines are also possible. In the absence of more data, such as the
Barcelona fragments might provide, these fragments do not provide any
firm evidence for the existence of <i>nomina sacra</> in either
Roberts's date of ca. 200, or Thiede's 1st century dating."

Hope this helps.

Lugubert

Vorkosigan,

I agree that Prof. Ellegård is not primarily labelled as a historian. I was surprised to see your "stylistics expert". His main fame is as a professor of English, but he has a very profound expertise in the Classical languages and writings, among many other things, so I regard him as fully competent to draw inferences out of texts in Latin and Greek.

Apart from that, I agree with you in, for example "Steve has yet to supply us with even one professional historian outside of NT studies who has studied the Gospels and concluded they are historically sound."

Vorkosigan

It is true that Ellegard is a professor of English, but his main expertise is stylistics, the use of statistical methods to analyze authorial style. In that field he is a giant. At least as I understand it.

He may be fully qualified to discuss Greco-Roman lit and usage, but historical methodology is another thing entirely. I am not sure his historical analysis of the Christian documents is correct. For example, you can do what he did, and see the terminology as an evolution over time. Or, you can look at the terminology and conclude that the differences in usage reflect different communities coexisting, each with particular usages. It isn't clear that Ellegard's historical conclusions are supported by his analysis. But I would welcome an exposition that proved me wrong!

I think Steve came here and got a real bad shock. There are just too many Christians who haven't a clue what the scholars actually say, and swallow claims from their pastors and cheap apologetics texts uncritically. A good mind is...............

Vorkosigan

spin

Umm, that should be stylometry. Stylistics is the study of different styles of writing, the use of registers, jargons, dialects and not normally seen as related to statistics.


spin

Lugubert

Fortunately, Ellegård's reasoning in his Jesus book is not based on stylometry. He was a pioneer in Sweden in using computers for linguistics, but this is an area where I think that he was too optimistic. In the sixties, many humanists thought that everything could be solved by methods of natural science. Ellegård made a few useful points, but this is the field where I have most objections to his methods.

I won't go into detail regarding the quoted book, as his conclusions coincide with what I think is the majority view on this thread: the Gospels were invented to "prove" the earthly existence of a mythical Messiah, and there is no proof that Rabbi J. Josephson ever existed.

[rant]One indication of Ellegård's wide scholarship is that he was selected to build the very first course of General Linguistics at the U of Gothenburg. It was a great success; at least half a dozen of the first some twenty pupils now are professors in Linguistics or modern languages. One of them, a then student at the U of Technology, got into an even more qualified profession: technical translations.[/rant]

Vorkosigan

You're right, my bad.

Vorksigan