J-D

I have.

What I said was that if my guess about what you were suggesting was not correct, some clarification would be in order. What your post#63 provides in response is not clarification, but its exact opposite, obfuscation. The same is true of your subsequent posts.

Toto

Go back and read the conversation around the formation of the Jesus Project. There was a lot of talk about how the question of the historicity of Jesus was just not very interesting.

mountainman

My position is that it is standard and acceptable historical methodology to make up, to invent, or to "suppose" postulates (we may call them hypotheses) by using deductive and inductive reasoning based on the evidence items and the conceptual framework of each of the theorists.

I said nothing about making up stories. If I defy at all, I defy other people to objectively consider certain non-paradigm hypotheses, but it is not possible in the field of ancient history for any person to give a mathematically certain refutation of any theory (they can just say they think its unlikely) for I see that history is about relative possibilities and relative probabilities and not about certainty.

mountainman

The question of the historicity of Jesus was just not very interesting?
From rjosephhoffmann.wordpress:


My bolding.


Its a paraphrase of what I suggested above, that the HJ is in fact a hidden hypothetical conclusion in search of support.







Surely all this represents the reliquishment of postulates (or hypotheses) which had formerly been pervasive in the mix inside the "Black Box" referred to in the diagram.


Sooner or later we will arrive at the HJ postulate and try and reliquish it too. But what will we replace it with in order to understand the history of christian origins?

J-D

If you see that history is about relative probabilities, do you then also see that this necessarily entails a comparative evaluation of alternatives, and that if you 'suppose postulates' you must evaluate them in comparison with alternative postulates?

mountainman

Yes - continuously. One interesting aspect of this is the introduction of new evidence. When new evidence is discovered and examined (or even old evidence is re-examined and re-interpretted), part of the process is to create a brand new series of postulates to explain the item and its context to the rest of the evidence. In some extreme cases one evidence item might change an entire theoretical paradigm.

Doug Shaver

I don't know what process you're referring to, but in normal science, what one revises in the light of new evidence is theories, not postulates.

Not really. Have you actually read Kuhn?

mountainman

I am refering to the methodological processes utilized in the formulation of various theories in ancient history. When new evidence appears it does not appear replete with specific labels to authoritatively reveal to us what it is and how it fits in to our conceptual framework - we put the labels on the evidence items by creating postulates and hypotheses about the new item of evidence. The new postulates about the evidence (not the evidence itself) then ripple through the entire "Theory Generator", as I have attempted to schematize above.

Examples of "new evidence"

(1) The James Ossuary. (Postulates that have been made about this are .... 1P1, 1p2, 1p3, ..., 1pn)
(2) The Gospel of Judas. (Postulates that have been made about this are .... 2P1, 2p2, 2p3, ..., 2pn)
(3) The Dura-Europos-Yale "House Church". (Postulates that have been made about this are .... 3P1, 3p2, 3p3, ..., 3pn)
(4) The C14 results . (Postulates that have been made about this are .... 4P1, 4p2, 4p3, ..., 4pn)

etc
etc
etc



Yes. In science, perhaps one example might be Galileo's use of the telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter, as an extra bit of evidence not previously available. The postulate of heliocentricity had been in the world since at least perhaps Aristarchus, and was resurrected to better explain new evidence.

Doug Shaver

Coulda fooled me. I don't recognize anything he said in what you're saying.

mountainman

I have read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, if that's what you mean, however the OP here is about the theories of history not the history of theories in science. The evidence items lists are items of ancient historical evidence, the postulates items I have listed are postulates in the field of history, as are the theoretical conclusions.

For example above you state you have inferred Paul's historical existence (presumeably based on one or more evidence items). However my position is that what you have really done is to infer this based on one or more postulates that you consider to be true concerning this evidence, and not directly from the evidence item.