makerowner

You've got this all backwards. "Nazareth never existed" is not a positive claim, just as "leprechauns don't exist" is not; "Nazareth did exist" and "leprechauns exist" are the positive claims, and as such have the burden of proof. We don't just accept any claim of the existence of first-century towns until it can be disproved; we withhold our assent to claims of existence until they can be proven. spamandham raised a question that you never addressed:

Disproving the existence of a town will almost always involve an argument from silence, eg. the lack of archaeological evidence on the claimed site for the town, the lack of mention in contemporary records, etc. What kind of positive evidence would disprove the existence of a town? Someone writing "Oh and by the way, there's no town called Nazareth"?


You've also misunderstood what an argument from ignorance is. From your own cited definitions (emphasis added throughout):

(I disagree with the second definition BTW; as I explained above, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but not proof of it. That there is no evidence for the existence of leprechauns is evidence for [not proof of] their non-existence.)
In any case, the bolded sections are the important ones. An argument from ignorance is when a simple lack of information is used as "proof" of a claim, eg. "I've never seen a shark, therefore they don't exist." As another poster mentioned, this is a deductive fallacy, but is a key part of inductive reasoning. We can say for example "Loch Ness has been thoroughly searched, and no evidence for a monster residing therein has been found. Therefore, the alleged monster is unlikely to exist."

Solitary Man

Saying that the gospel writers invented the town is a positive claim, however.

FathomFFI

Correct you are, and I accept that correction. But then they are making a negative claim and using arguments from silence to support it.


And why not? If all arguments of silence were to be valid, then I could equally make the statement of, "If Nazareth did not exist, yet the Christians and their beliefs were numerous as hell according to ancient records, then why is there not a single ancient record of anyone disputing the Christian record of the existence of Nazareth?"


Your example is not making a negative claim, however. It is not the same as the negative claim of jesusneverexisted.com where they attempt to qualify their negative claim through many fallicious arguments of silence and ignorance.

spamandham

...an argument from silence counts as circumstantial evidence, particularly if it's unexpected. An argument from silence is the only argument available when arguing that something doesn't (or didn't) exist. Do you disagree?

I already mentioned the transliteration error from Nazarite to Nazorean. This is the fact upon which the remainder of the argument rests.

You seem to be starting from the assumption that since the Gospels mention Nazareth, that the existence of Nazareth is thus so well established that to refute it requires mountains of evidence.

The gospels are impossible at face value. So it is reasonable to question any statement made within in them.

There is no reason to even suspect they are independent. Modern scholarship completely discounts that idea. John is a much later work based on the earlier Gospels.

...the positive claim is that Nazareth existed in the first century. It is that particular claim the jesusneverexisted refutes.

spamandham

Ok, so we have a late 3rd/early fourth century inscription making claims about things ~200 years earlier. ...and that refutes the idea that Nazareth was effectively created by the Gospels in what way?

Antipope Innocent II

Why would someone check out an amateur book by a piano teacher who describes himself as "a spiritual seeker" and not simply see what actual archaeologists have to say about the matter?

You'd think that if the piano-teaching non-archaeologist had a decent case, there would be at least some notes of doubt and caution in the archaeological literature regarding Nazareth being inhabited in the First Century. After all, much of the archaeology done in Israel is done by Jews from Jewish institutions, and they wouldn't have a problem with at least noting some doubt about Nazareth's First Century status. But in all of the scholarly material I've been able to find on the subject there is not so much of a whisper of doubt about this: all archaeologists are agreed that Nazareth was inhabited in the First Century.

Leaving aside Bagatti (who was a Franciscan archaeologist, not a Jesuit BTW) there are a number of Israeli and Jewish archaeologists who have no problems with the idea that Nazareth was inhabited throughout the First Century. They include:

Gal, Z. Lower Galilee During the Iron Age (American Schools of Oriental Research, Eisenbrauns, 1992)

Yavor, Z. 1998 “Nazareth,” ESI 18. Pp. 32 (English), 48 (Hebrew)

Feig, N. 1990 “Burial Caves at Nazareth,” ‘Atiqot 10 (Hebrew series). Pp. 67-79 (Hebrew).

Dr Richard Freund, director of the Maurice Greenberg Centre for Judaic Studies, is currently undertaking a dig of a First Century site in Nazareth sponsored by the Israeli Antiquities Authority. During a debate with a "Nazareth Sceptic" Jesus Myther last year I took the liberty of e-mailing Dr Freund to ask him if he'd ever heard of any scepticism from actual archeologists about Nazareth being inhabited in the First Century. He replied that he hadn't and that the whole idea was "absolutely absurd".

So the consensus amongst the (non-Christian) professional archaeologists is quite clear: Nazareth existed in the First Century. Where did the idea that it wasn't come from? From a biologist (Frank Zindler) and a piano teacher (Rene Salm); neither of whom have any archaeological training or qualifications.

So who am I going to be inclined to believe: all of the archaeologists who have actually surveyed the literature or dug on the site or these two complete amateurs? I'll go with the scholars thanks.

Especially when the amateurs have ideological biases that immediately make their nitpicking around the edges of real archaeologists' work highly suspect: Zindler is a Jesus Myther and Salm has his own kooky theory about Jesus coming from India. When kooky Creationists poach out of field and try to critique research by professionals in disciplines like paleontology and biology, motivated by their own ideological biases, we rightly deride them. Yet here we have two totally unqualified dabblers doing the same thing in the field of archaeology and we're somehow meant to take them seriously?

Give me a break.

FathomFFI

This has already been explained, but I will do it again. The argument from silence (also called argumentum ad silentio in Latin) is generally a conclusion based on silence or lack of contrary evidence. In the field of classical studies, it often refers to the deduction from the lack of references to a subject in the available writings of an author to the conclusion that he was ignorant of it. When used as a logical proof in pure reasoning, the argument is classed among the fallacies, but an argument from silence can be a valid and convincing form of abductive reasoning.

Abduction, or inference to the best explanation, is a method of reasoning in which one chooses the hypothesis that would, if true, best explain the relevant evidence. Abductive reasoning starts from a set of accepted facts and infers their most likely, or best, explanations. The term abduction is also sometimes used to just mean the generation of hypotheses to explain observations or conclusions, but the former definition is more common both in philosophy and computing.

Now let me demonstrate in the context of this discussion: We'll begin with a fact, and watch how it develops. Let's put all of jesusneverexisted.com's arguments into a nice neat nutsheel.

Fact: There is no known non-Christian literary or archeological evidence of the existence of Nazareth during the time of Jesus.

Question: Does this mean that Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus?
Answer: No, but we assert Nazareth did not exist based upon our findings.

In the demonstration above, jesusneverexisted.com has reached a conclusion based on a lack of evidence. Based on their findings, they affirm that Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus.

But did they use intellectual honesty to arrive at their conclusion? Did they use deductive of abductive reasoning effectively to arrive at their conclusion? Did they consider all the evidence?

Firstly, they excluded the synoptic and Johnanie gospel accounts as records. They attempted to use the reasoning that the gospel records have been mistranslated and that the word translated to Nazareth was actually a title known as Nazarene or Nazarite.

This argument falls flat when we look at gospel verses were the name of Nazareth is not mentioned with the name of Jesus, such as in John 1.46 and Matt 4.13.

So then they argue that the Gospel accounts all come from the same source, therefore the writers merely wrote down hearsay and tradition.

ALERT! POSITIVE CLAIM! PROVE IT!

And that's the end of their argument right there. Hell, the best scholars on the planet can only speculate about there being a same source for the Gospels, and virtually none of them agree that the GOJ used the same source as the synoptics.

This means that, to be fair, the synoptics can all be viewed as a single source, and the GOJ can be viewed as an independant source.

That does not explain the seperate mentioning of Nazareth as a town when gospel verses are not saying "Jesus of Nazareth."

No, it requires far better arguments for a certainty. I'm not even slightly convinced.

That's a rational argument, but now we must prove that everything in them is not true.

That's not true. The Gospel of John is easily distinguished from the three Synoptic Gospels, which share a considerable amount of text. John omits about 90% of the material in the synoptics. The synoptics describe much more of Jesus' life, miracles, parables, and exorcisms. However, the materials unique to John are notable, especially in their effect on modern Christianity.

Many scholars today believe that parts of John represent an independent historical tradition from the synoptics, while other parts represent later traditions.

And their arguments are considerably less than convincing.

FathomFFI

And that's that. I'm glad to see somebody else here actually doing the research. I've been arguing method instead of the scholars. Their arguments are just too unconvincing for me to swallow.

:thumbs:

FathomFFI

Go grab your bible, sit it on a chair, and tell it to create something. You are trying to convince me that life imitated art. I find that illogical for 1st century people.

The point is, it is non-Christian evidence which shows a Jewish settlement, not a Christian settlement. It is illogical that a Christian creation would be settled by Jews.

Why wouldn't it be settled by the Christians in AD 135?

Antipope Innocent II

Yup. The question to ask anyone who has bought the piano teacher and the biologist's line of crap is "Can you show me an archaeologist who agrees with them?"

When the answer to that question is "No", the debate ends right there. What bothers me is supposedly rational, "free thinking" atheists who rightly condemn amateur Creationist dabblers, but warmly embrace amateur loons like Salm. :huh: