No Robots

There is no conflict between the narrative tradition that Christ lived and the hard evidence.

spin

True, but that's because there is no hard evidence, which means you have no raw material for history whatsoever.


spin

No Robots

We have the textual evidence, which is more than sufficient here.

spin

Rubbish. You don't know when the texts were written. You know next to nothing about their origins. Therefore you have nothing to do history with.


spin

No Robots

We know a considerable amount about the literary context in which they took form.

spin

We need -- before anything else -- to anchor the texts in time, in order to try to derive historically useful data from them.


spin

eheffa

Yes, textual evidence like the Gospel of John. Written likely 90+ C.E. (90 to 115CE?) by someone passing himself off as the John the Disciple.

So we have an unknown author writing some 70+ years after the purported events pretending to be a first person witness to the events he documents. Someone pretending to be someone he isn't: i.e. an imposter.

But we are told by the orthodox faithful that this writing is the inerrant Word of God; full of reliable biographical details about this Messiah figure.

Yes, with textual evidence like this who needs hard facts? :huh:


-evan

Roger Pearse

Similar arguments at all the other ancient literary texts would dispose of nearly all that we know about antiquity, however. This argument thus amounts to obscurantism.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Huon

Two cutting edges argument : so, we know nearly nothing for certain about antiquity ?

Except some coins from some emperors, some statues, some inscriptions carved on some stones, some monuments still extant, some relatively recent testimonies (dated) about ancient monuments which have disappeared now...

Roger Pearse

That is why I noted that the argument to which I replied involved obscurantism -- it does indeed lead uneducated people (I don't mean *you*) to statements like this; that we don't know what we in fact do know. That's why we mustn't go there.

Surely any form of argument must be wrong if it involves trashing the classical heritage, the rediscovery of which sparked the renaissance (the "rebirth") and so created modern times.

All the best,

Roger Pearse