Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Gamera · 01-22-2007, 12:04 PM

Quote:

What a body of evidence proves is not simply a function of the quantity of that evidence

That's the point. As many posts have shown in this thread the Alexander evidence is easily deconstructed and found to be no more persuasive in kind than the Jesus evidence.

Nobody generally bothers to deconstruct the evidence, since nobody cares about the historicity of Alexander that much. But if push comes to shove, applying the standard used to question Jesus historicity, Alexander is effaced from history.

Julian · 01-22-2007, 12:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gamera

I think spin got this thread a little off topic with his usual personal attacks and the odd issue about some text info in the quote function that sometimes gets into my posts by mistake. I was unaware that the forum rules required good looking posts. I have to check that out. I'm amazed the moderators would worry about something so inconsequential, and even post insulting comments about it. Geesh.

You can tell by the normal color and lack of official signature that I was posting as a normal user. The parenthetical comment was just that. I also said that I was sure that I had missed the real reason for why you left the quote in there so I am not sure why you felt insulted. I also didn't comment on spin so I am not sure why you are telling me all that stuff about him. Amaleq gave you a concrete reason for why it mattered so I am not sure why your post comes across as whiny and petulant.

Julian

Gamera · 01-22-2007, 12:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

I am not talking about a lag between a founder's purported lifetime and the religion's earliest writings. I am talking about a lag between a religion's documented existence and references within that relilgion's documents to the founder. The oldest known Jewish documents are the books of Moses, in which the authors very explicitly attributed Judaism's fundamentals to a founder who was very obviously a man of this world. The earliest Christian writings do not do anything like that. The documents attributing Christianity's founding to a man called Jesus do not appear until many years after the first documents, in which a man calling himself Paul says he learned the religion's fundamentals by direct revelation from God.

I find this a perplexing claim. Most Buddhist mss are very late (800 CE, though a few fragments are from around 100 BC -100 CE, as I recall). So applying your standard, we know nothing of what Buddha taught. I have no problem with this, as long as you're consistent.

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But neither am I disputing what you now say I am disputing, and so you are continuing to infest this discussion with irrelevancies. What I am disputing is the conventional interpretation -- conventional among both believers and most secularists -- of the earliest known elements of Christianity. And by earliest known elements, I mean the earliest known Christian writings -- those that have survived from the first and second centuries.

To claim that the earliest known elements are utterly unrelated to the source is I think a remarkable claim that requires some evidence. Generally, the presumption is that intellectual history has some continuity and its deveopment is tracable through time. I take it you claim otherwise, meaning you've not only challenged Jesus history, but also the continuity of western history. That's a thread in itself.

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I do dispute your apparent assumption that Christianity in its earliest form must necessarily have been the same as what later became orthodox Christianity. That has nothing to do, though, with the issue of whether we can infer anything about the religion's origins from its later development.

I'm making no such assumption. I'm claiming that Christianity is a coherent intellectual history in which elements discernable at any given time can be more or less traced to elements prior to that time. The elements change, but it is the very tracing of the changes that allows us to derive the earlier element from the later elements. I think this is a fairly standard historical claim, and your claim of radical historical discontinuity is the remarkable claim.

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Sure, but you are assuming that the source shared certain characteristics with what it change into. That assumption will constrain any reconstruction of the evolutionary track. Without that assumption, other reconstructions, which may posit more substantial changes, might be more plausible.

Sources tend to share elements with what they evolve into in intellectual history. That's what makes them "sources" as opposed to unrelated antecedants. The evolution may be convoluted and surprising, but hardly incoherent. Again, you're claim to the contrary seems remarkable. Even poststructuralists like myself view historical discontinuity in a more nuanced way.

Gamera · 01-22-2007, 12:22 PM

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Hmmm . . . you "sense" it. Well, I sense the contrary, but lemme see if I can do a little better than tell you what I sense. Lemme see if I can apply some logic to the quotations.

Besides not sensing Paul's plain meaning, I think you lack a sense of litotes.

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I asked for an explicit attribution, by Paul, to Jesus of one of his teachings. There is, in this quotation, no attribution of any teaching to anybody. It is a teaching, but Paul attributes it to nobody -- not to himself, not to Jesus, not to God, not to anybody.

That is not an attribution to Jesus. If you are going to argue that in Paul's mind, Jesus and God were one and the same and therefore logically equivalent, then you are assuming your conclusion and thus arguing in a circle.

1. A revelation of Jesus is not the same as a teaching by Jesus.

2. So far as we can tell from Paul's own writings, he never encountered Jesus during the latter's lifetime. Therefore, he could have known nothing about his teachings except by word of mouth from people who had encountered him during his ministry. But Paul is here denying having learned anything about Jesus by that means.

I'm at a loss to determine what Paul you are talking about. The Paul of the espistles, which is the only Paul I'm interested in, insisted he got his gospel directly from the resurrected Jesus. He points out in Galatians that he preached that gospel, and that it was accepted (more or less) by Peter and James or other pillars of the church, whoever they may have been. We have plenty of later authors that evidence Paul's evangelistic efforts, in which he seems to have been preaching the gospel as we know it (authors closer in time to Paul than any writer commenting on Alexander the Great, by the way). Indeed, Crossant and Miller argue cogently that the synoptics, being written later than Paul's epistles, we influence by Paul, and are the result of Paul's teachings about Jesus (which they trenchantly call into question as to their historical accuracy).

Now, if you're discounting these texts, let us know. In which case, we are talking about another Paul, which I find not very interesting.

Juma · 01-22-2007, 01:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gamera

That's the point. As many posts have shown in this thread the Alexander evidence is easily deconstructed and found to be no more persuasive in kind than the Jesus evidence.

Lot of words an no substance....

I cant find anything that comes near a deconstruction of the evidence of Alexander. Could you please show where to find them?

Gamera · 01-22-2007, 05:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Juma

Lot of words an no substance....

I cant find anything that comes near a deconstruction of the evidence of Alexander. Could you please show where to find them?

Sure, Toto mentioned that Alexander's enemies wrote about him. I pointed out that the extant mss are hundreds of years after the event and so much less persuasive as textual evidence than the Christian texts are of Jesus.

Then sombody raised the coin issue. Ynquirer and others deconstructed that and showed there is no there there. Spin sputtered about it, but failed to reply cogently to their analysis.

Somebody claimed that the evidence of Alexander's empire proves his historicity. I pointed out that evidence of Christianity bears the same probative value to the historicity of Jesus.

Further several people have pointed out the miraculous stories surrounding Alexander, in particular his divine birth, placing him smack dab in the mythic conundrum that the detractor's of Jesus' historicity claim.

Soooooo, where's the beef? The burden in on you to provide evidence of Alexander's historicity. Up to now, nobody has come forth with any evidence that is qualitatively more probative than what we have concerning Jesus (and in the textual realm, Alexander's historicity is even more tenuous than Jesus').

My point (and the point of this thread I take it) is not that Alexander didn't exist. I think he did. It's just that those who argue against Jesus' historicity are stuck with effacing Alexander from history using their standard of evidence. And of course that causes a great deal of anxiety to them, because the absurd result undermines their methodology.

spin · 01-22-2007, 06:28 PM

Gamera, I challenge you to a formal debate on the non-existence of Alexander. I'll take the position that he existed. Get ynquirer to help you.

If you take up the challenge you will have to deal with the coins. Then you'll see what other evidence there is.

Doug Shaver · 01-23-2007, 07:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gamera

As many posts have shown in this thread the Alexander evidence is easily deconstructed and found to be no more persuasive in kind than the Jesus evidence.

Perhaps you consider those posts to have presented cogent enough arguments to have laid the issue to rest. I do not.

Doug Shaver · 01-23-2007, 07:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gamera

So applying your standard, we know nothing of what Buddha taught.

Quite possibly so. I have undertaken no study of Buddhism's origins, and so I have no idea how well the extant evidence supports whatever the prevailing opinion happens to be.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gamera

To claim that the earliest known elements are utterly unrelated to the source is I think a remarkable claim that requires some evidence.

If I ever make such a claim, I'll be more than happy to provide the evidence.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gamera

I'm claiming that Christianity is a coherent intellectual history in which elements discernable at any given time can be more or less traced to elements prior to that time. The elements change, but it is the very tracing of the changes that allows us to derive the earlier element from the later elements.

I don't know what you mean by "coherent," and I won't try to guess.

I don't think there were any discontinuities in the evolution of Christian thinking. I do think some very large changes occurred within it during the first and second centuries of the Common Era, and that most (but not quite all) of whatever documentary evidence for those changes might have produced by witnesses to them did not survive.

Malachi151 · 01-23-2007, 08:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spin

Gamera, I challenge you to a formal debate on the non-existence of Alexander. I'll take the position that he existed. Get ynquirer to help you.

If you take up the challenge you will have to deal with the coins. Then you'll see what other evidence there is.

Don't forget that they recently just found the tomb of Phillip.

Edit, my bad, seems that is has problems:

http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/macedon/

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01-22-2007, 06:28 PM	#157
spin Contributor Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: nowhere Posts: 15,747	Gamera, I challenge you to a formal debate on the non-existence of Alexander. I'll take the position that he existed. Get ynquirer to help you. If you take up the challenge you will have to deal with the coins. Then you'll see what other evidence there is.

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