spin

Though you'll keep thinking historicist shit smells better than the mythicist variety, while the fact that it's shit will not be deemed worth worrying about.

That wouldn't be another bait and switch would it.

Apparently not well. Studying things doesn't say what the purpose is. With an object such as "Greece and Rome" you admit that your simplification unifies at least two separate generic issues, two separate cultures. And saying that history "involves (among many other things) literature, anthropology, etc" misses the issue that these things are not the aim of history, but are, as I pointed out, the evidence used by the historian to do her/his analysis. History will call on any pursuit that can provide evidence in reconstructing the past, but it is that analysis of the past that is the aim, not the evidence. You are trying to mystify both classics and history in order to drag this poor comparison out, argument for argument's sake.

You don't need to back a horse in the historicity race, unless Jesus is too important to you such that he has to, or can't, exist. After reading historicists' and mythicists' analyses of King Arthur, I feel quite comfortable with the fence-sitting of Ronald Hutton in his essay, "The early Arthur: history and myth", in the Cambridge Companion to Arthurian Legend, (eds) Archibald & Putter, (2009). It would be more wholesome to see a few more in the historical analysis of Jesus.

LegionOnomaMoi

No I'll keep evaluating historical accounts in the way they should, and not worry about your imaginary hegemony.


Just an illustration of how pointless bringing up Einstein here is.


Unless of course the two can't be seperated (aims and evidence) as some philosophers of historiography would argue. In any event, exactly what "trying to reconstruct the past means", despite your claim about its simplicity, has been the subject of debate since Thucydides. I can simplify it even more: history is about the past. None of this is relevant to the original context in which you brought up how "simple" history is:You went from this to talking about classics as a "hybrid discipline" which includes history (a bit self-defeating). If you want to assert that the concept of history is relatively simple, fine. But asserting that academia is compartmentalized in the way you suggest merely reflects a lack of awareness of the extent to which different fields overlap and different specialists interact.

I read his paper "Arthur and the Academics". If memory serves, we have basically two documents which might refer to someone behind the Arthurian legend and are around the right period. If you think that's comparable, then you must find fences very comfortable. And why not? It's so much easier to try and poke holes in another's argument than to attempt your own reconstruction. However, while we can do this for everybody from Arthur and Homer to Socrates, Jesus, and just about anybody else, history is about trying to get off that fence, one side or the other, if at all possible. But it sure is more comfortable up there.

spin

I haven't seen you evaluating any historical accounts.

Doh! It was a formulation of Occam's razor. And you had a go at the messenger, as if it mattered. You're incorrigible.

But then you change the particular meaning of history.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

You're just protracting a theoretical complaint.

I can see you rise up, thinking you've got all the numbers on your card. The dull shifting of burden is what is welling up from the depths. We can hear the bleat of "best explanation" for another ontology that has no epistemology. Of course your shit doesn't smell. But it's your shit that you have to worry about, not that of others. We are interested in what happened, not the most attractive story.

I'm comfortable with the fact that you have no way at all to extract history from a tradition whose origins you have no documentation for. You cannot look at any particular item and say that it is veracious, even though it might be. You have no position other than inside the tradition. That's why the Hittite texts are significant for the foundations of the Trojan context, for the little they supply. They are not from within the tradition. Otherwise there would be no insight at all into the Homeric tradition. When a datum of reality becomes incorporated in a tradition it stops being reality and becomes just an element of that tradition. In the end you are left with a tradition from which you might be able to reject the outlandish until you're left with the plausible and then you're stuck. Plausibility is not a sufficient criterion for reality--stories are frequently filled with plausibility.

EarlDoherty

My point in pointing out that Michael Grant is (actually, was) not a New Testament scholar was to make it clear, as my subsequent comments showed, that he did not do any research on his own into the question of Jesus' existence nor did he move in circles where he might have been exposed to such research or opinion. On this question Grant simply relied on some NT scholars who were making the same claims, although even those NT scholars had not themselves researched and published material "demolishing" mythicism, but were relying on others before them. One huge echo chamber, with Michael Grant standing outside and hearing the echoes through the windows.

And I'm happy to learn that I'm being mentioned without concern for my credentials or lack of them. The dismissal part is natural.

Earl Doherty