No Robots

The postulate for there being a human Jesus is not contradicted by the evidence. All arguments against there being a human Jesus are contradicted by the evidence.

spin

The ability to make plausible postulates is the food of the apologist. It does not make a sufficient condition for saying anything substantive.

You seem not to make a distinction between data and evidence.


spin

mountainman

This sounds like an academic phrase for blind faith.
Surely this is completely unscholarly and unscientific.




Pete

mountainman

A Summary of Postulates floating around BC&H

1) Epicenter: the existence of an HJ is viewed as an unexamined postulate.
2) Source Language: that the New Testament was written in Greek
3) Apostlic lineage: that apostle Paul wrote something preserved to us
4) Transmission: that the critical Westcott-Hort transmission is correct
5) Eusebius: that the historiology written c.314 is true and correct.

In fact, one could make the comment that all the first four
postulates are implicitly bound up in the fifth postulate.
Would anyone like to argue the case that any of the first
four postulates are in fact independent of the fifth?




Pete Brown
Statement of the Eusebian Fiction Postulate

mountainman

Axioms are generally reserved for mathematics and geometry.
Disciplines in which the fundamental hypotheses are able to
be unihibitively imaginative. In such disciplines there is no
requirement that anything constructed (from axioms) matches
anything in the external world.

In the more down-to-earth disciplines, such as science and
history, the word "postulate" or "hypothesis" is used. In such
disciplines, postulates are never "unexamined", although this
does not mean evidence has to be forthcoming to support a
postulate, it doesnt. It (being examined) means that the
postulate must be consistent with whatever evidence is available.

On the basis that you dont have axioms in a theory of history,
but rather have hypotheses, and on the basis that hypotheses
are never unexamined assumptions, I disagree with the above,
namely, that the HJ is as unexamined axiom.

If you tell me however, that is precisely the definition of HJ in
accordance to the discipline of biblical history, then this will
tell me a great deal about the practice of biblical history, as
a particular and distinct version of the study of history.

I take it that its just a matter of "politeness" to
call it "unexamined".



Pete