aa5874

Even the ill-educated knows that every-one does not agree on everything at all times.


All I demand is just credible information of an historical Jesus in the 1st century by contemporary extra-biblical historians. All the information I have seen so far are either interpolations or ambiguous.

Chris Weimer

Multiple attestation? Historical plausibility? Remnants of an older layer in gospels which weren't familiar with them?

aa5874

In the NT, demons, angels and gods are historically plausible and multiple attested.

Sauron

And those who refer to "wishful thinking" invariably make themselves scarce whenever evidence is requested.

This statement is nonsense. We have non-biblical (and non-manuscript) evidence to support the existence of many people. The claim that this "does not exist for anyone" is rather silly.

No, it's for the open minded crowd that hasn't assumed a priori that the gospels are true.

*note that I take no position on the HJ vs MJ issue. I'm just pointing out some rather obvious flaws in Roger's reasoning.

arricchio

Sounds like an interesting book.

I wondered when somone would get around to mentioning Walter J. Ong. Here's something from page 64 of his Orality and Literacy that might help the discussion:
Now, am I right in assuming that the term "historical tradition" is referring to some idea that there was once an oral tradition that was later textualized? And if so, the question becomes how accurately does the written text preserve the oral tradition. Right?

If that's the case, then I would argue that they can't and don't. As Ong points out in several places in his book, oral traditions, themselves, do not preserve oral traditions well. Nor are they aware that they don't. Here's why. Suppose you were a person living in an oral culture and you thought that your oral tradition accurately preserved a previous oral tradition. How would you know that? Without a written record or an audio recording, you would have nothing with which to compare a present-day recitation of the oral tradition with any made previously. You could only trust the word of the person doing the reciting, or the memories of the people listening, that he has done it correctly. Conversely, if you suspected that inaccuracies had crept into the oral tradition, how would you know that? How would you go about correcting them? What would you correct them by? Again, without a written record or an audio recording you would have no way of knowing that a current recitation of an oral tradition was inaccurate in its details. Even if you insisted that your own memory of a previous recitation was different from the current recitation, how would anyone else decide whether it was your memory or the recitation that was faulty? And if the young people prefer the most recent version to your older one, well....

So, if you were to write a text puporting to preserve an oral tradition accurately, how would you know that the oral tradition you are recording has accurately preserved itself? The answer is, you couldn't possibly. Especially since the tradition you are recording were likely several generations old by the time you started writing. What's more, when you claim to later generations, who have no memory of the oral traditions at all, that you recorded them accurately, assuming that such a thing is possible, what would they use to judge the accuracy of your claim?

The best way for oral cultures to preserve oral traditions is through memesis -by shaping language into ritualized recitations as in the Eucharist ritual, for example. But as Ong points out, even this fails. So here's the thing: If the New Testament text does not accurately record the oral formulae of the one ritual most sacred to Christianity - the one thing you'd think they'd be most likely to hold on to and get right - you have to wonder how accurate the rest of it is.

angelo

It has to be fictional. The Romans were renown for keeping meticulous records.
No where do they record Pilot trying in a court and sentencing a man named Jesus [Joshua] to death. The thing a lot of theist forget, to mention is that Pilot spoke Latin or Greek, Jesus spoke Aramic, so they needed an interpreter. Where is that mentioned? Secondly Pilot himself would not have interogated a prisoner, that would be done by his sub-servants. And if he did involve himself, then surely it would have been recorded, If people looked at the way things were done in those days, you could only reach one conclusion. The story of Jesus never happened, it is mere fiction. No different to the story of Robin Hood and other fables. :banghead:

jjramsey

Which is of no use if the bulk of the records are lost.

Cheerful Charlie

We do know that if Jesus existed,and I am very sure he did, most of what was written about him was nonsense. We can tell by the massive contradictions we find in the tall tales. The false prophecies, the false miracle working promises, the obvious lies.

The question is, why do people believe the obvious nonsense? Other than ignorance.

CC

Chris Weimer

Recording words and recording deeds are different entirely. Who said "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore." ?

I always learned that Nixon said this after losing to Kennedy in 1960. Even Wikipedia has that quote:

More on Google.

It never existed. The Dick was added into the oral tradition, as you can see here. The reason? There was a tendency for Nixon to not only refer to himself as Nixon, but also Dick Nixon. However, he didn't do so here. He only said "Nixon", and not "Dick Nixon".

It's absurd to think, however, that small variances mean that none of it happened.

arricchio

No, they’re not. Why should they be when they are both preserved through the same faulty medium – orality? Besides, as far as oral cultures go, this is a false distinction. As Walter Ong said, “Oral cultures know few statistics or facts that are divorced from human, or quasi-human activity.” (Orality and Literacy, pg. 43) [emphasis added]

David Hengige wrote an interesting article that appears in a book called Africa Speaks, edited by Joseph Miller. In that article, Hengige shows that in certain West African societies, the griot’s recitation of the geneologies of past kings will often omit entire dynasties. Not merely the names of the kings, but all their actions will be simply left out. Not because the griot has forgotten them, but because he realizes that those memories have now become “inconvenient”, in Hengige’s words, to the present ruling dynasty.

Your example doesn't equate and it isn’t the point. What you are referring to in your Nixon example is not an oral tradition from an oral culture. Don't you see? You have a text to compare the accuracy of the quote to, which itself appears in text. Oral cultures don't have that. When they recite their oral traditions, they have no way of backchecking them. Alterations can and do creep in – sometimes intentionally. As Ong, Hengige, and others point out, segments of an oral tradition within an oral culture can simply disappear from one recitation to the next depending on the “exigencies of the continuing present”.

It would be if you could be sure that only “small variations” occurred. But how can you be? When a book goes out of print, copies of it remain that someone could use to check the accuracy of your quotation from it. But when an oral tradition goes out, there is nothing left. It literally vanishes into thin air.

What do you know of the oral tradition that formed the text of the New Testament (assuming of course that it did)? The answer is, you can’t possibly know anything at all. It’s gone. So you have nothing on which to base a claim that only small variations occurred.

So again I ask, if the New Testament text does not even preserve the oral formulae of the one ritual most sacred to Christianity, how accurate can the rest of it be?