achristianbeliever

Then you clearly have misunderstood my point. For the purposes of this thread I'm finding the miraculous aspects of the Bible irrelevant. And I'm showing this by showing how other ancient documents include miraculous elements and yet we don't throw them all completely away. We merely look at the non-miraculous parts of it.

But there is a problem. You haven't specified the minimalist requirements. If your requirement is that we have to know the exact date that Jesus was born for example then your right Jesus fails. What may be my minimalist requirement may not be yours. I could give you the minimalist requirements in my list that convinces me but I doubt it will convince you so what would be the point?

So this is why I ask give a minimalist criteria for any historical figure and an example of who meets the bare minimum of this criteria according to you. I don't know why this is such a horrible request.

irrelevant to my point. For the purposes of this thread I'm assuming the miraculous parts didn't happen. I'm just showing how just because a historical document contains miraculous elements doesn't mean we throw the whole thing away. I gave this by showing an example of documents that contain miraculous points and yet we still consider the non-miraculous elements of them accurate.

I am showing Josephus and Tacitus to explain how your examination of the Bible is faulty as I explained above. And there are plenty of non-miraculous elements to the Bible. Someone named Jesus crucified, buried in a tomb, body went missing and his followers merely believed he rose from the dead.

mythical? News to me. I was merely showing how you were wrong that all founders of religions wrote documents. Buddha didn't.

But its proof you don't have to have written documents to be considered historical.

Irrelevant and you totally missed the point I made. Your obviously not taking this seriously.

jgibson000

Nit pick: "are" crap. Plural subjects demand a plural verb. And how can questions about anything be "crap"?

JG

EarlOfLade

Which other ancient documents containing miracle claims do your refer to, because I don't "believe" in any ancient documents containing miracle claims.

I personally consider any other ancient text containing miracle claims as another piece of fiction.

achristianbeliever

I already did mention other ancient documents.

Seutonius: Twelve Ceasars
Tacitus with his stuff on Vespasian
Josephus has some miracle claims

Now if you want to eliminate all these texts be my guest its not like I can stop you. But these are important writings in our understanding of the 1st century. If you eliminate an entire book because it contains miraculous elements your gonna have a much harder time knowing anything that happened in the 1st century. So I'm asking do you reject the writings of Seutonius, Tacitus and Josephus as total works of fiction? If your answer is yes then ok I understand your rejection of the Bible even if I disagree with it. If your answer is no then how can you not consider them as total works of fiction but do so with the Bible when they contain miraculous elements just at the Bible does?

EarlOfLade

So, just because someone outside the bible claim miracles, I should be convinced that they happened?

I see them as historical documents that may or may not contain actual events. In order to get a complete picture of the area, you would have to use historical documents from the area, historical documents from outside the area from people who were known to trade with the people in Middle East but not be part of their belief system, archeological finds etc.

If you can provide us with documents that support the bible but was written by societies outside the Middle East and Rome, we can start talking about supportive material for your claims. I have seen no such material, have you?

Can you for instance point me to Egyptian history, documents and archeological finds supporting the idea of a large jewish population and their exodus from Egypt?

aa5874

You boggle my mind. Thanks for your history lesson. You are the greatest spin doctor in history.

achristianbeliever

Holy smokes you still aren't getting my point.

What? Nooooooooooo. I'll try to explain again. For the purposes of this thread I am dismissing any miraculous claim either in the Bible or outside of the Bible as fictional. My question is on the non-miraculous elements of those documents. I'm trying to show that just because documents of ancient history contain miraculous claims doesn't mean the non-miraculous elements should be dismissed as well. I showed this by showing how many documents besides the Bible are regarded as historical despite having miraculous claims in them. In other words dismiss the miraculous and you still can use documents like Seutonius, Josephus, Tacitus and the BIBLE. Dismissing the miraculous does not mean dismiss the entire document and you haven't shown why we should.

Ok. Give me a minimalist example of this so I can compare the existence of Jesus to this minimalist example.

You need to explain better than this of what you are asking in regards to showing the existence of any historical figure.

Irrelevant. I can dismiss the entire Hebrews in Egypt story and still regard Jesus as a historical figure. We are talking about the existence of Jesus as a historical figure here.

dongiovanni1976x

What was spun here?

EarlOfLade

I do


Because such non-christian documents contains claims about miracles make me (and many others) consider their importance with that in mind. Since there is no way of verifying many of the issues, you have to consider them in light of the miraculous claims they contain and have that in mind when you evaluate other parts of it. How do you know what is real or what is fiction when it comes to the rest?

dongiovanni1976x

First of all we do not "know" what is real and what is fiction; Historians simply attempt to piece together what is "most likely the case" given what evidence they have to work with. So when Suetonius tells us in a report on Augustus' funeral (14 C.E.) that, We should treat the report with some skepticism as such an event is highly improbable given the supernatural nature of the report and the fact that the events are separated by almost a century.

But simply because miraculous claims such as this are the "least likely phenomena of all possible phenomena" by definition, (i.e. its unlikeliness is what classifies it as miraculous) does not mean that we throw out everything that Suetonius reports to us. When we compare Suetonius with Tacitus and Josephus and find simularities in their reports which are indepepndently complimented by archaeology or other sources, our ability as historians to recreate the past is strengthened.

As far as the historical reliability for Jesus goes we can start with Paul.

Paul is a contemporary of Jesus, though he never met him in person he claims that he knows of Jesus' brother (Gal 1:19) and for us to have a written testimony of such a claim is an historical source. To have Josephus, an independent Jewish source corroborate this by recounting that, Since, Mr. Doherty, has said in this forum that “Paul had nothing to do with the Galilean scene that produced Q...I’m quite prepared to suggest that, although he didn’t regard his story as historical per se, Mark may have regarded (mistakenly) his Jesus figure as representing someone who had been” then we can assume that GMark, who allegedly used Q, should be considered an independent source from Paul (GMatthew and GLuke/Acts not withstanding) This admission means that Mr. Doherty agrees that GMark is likely independent of Paul, which further means that in chapter 6 verse 3, when James is mentioned by Mark we can tie this to Paul and Josephus for a total of three independent sources Mark 6:3, Galatians 1:19 and Antiquities 20.9.1 supporting the HJ position.
This is demonstratable without even making the appeal to Tacitus (and supported archaeological evidence of the Plaque of Pontius Pilate and Alexamenos Graffiti) Seutonius’ Chrestus or the almost universally recognized interpolation of TF by Josephus.

Therefore, for all intents and purposes with regard to how historians approach figures from antiquity, it is quite obvious why there is a near universal consensus that Jesus was an actual figure in history who was: born of a woman (Gal 4:4, Rom 1:3); was born as a Jew (Gal 4:4); that he had brothers (1 Cor 9:5), one of whom was named James (Gal 1:19, Mark 6:3, plus in Josephus Antiquities 20.9.1, he was thought by some people to be the messiah); that he ministered among the Jews (Rom 15:7); that he had twelve disciples (1 Cor 15:5); that he instituted the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor 11:23-25); possibly that he was betrayed (1 Cor 11:23, assuming that the Greek term here means “betrayed” rather than “handed over” to death by God); and that he was crucified (1 Cor 2:2, “executed by Pontius Pilate under Tiberius" in the Annals 15.44; Alexamenos Graffiti(? perhaps))

You cannot get much more evidence for this in antiquity from someone who was reportedly a criminal, who never wrote anything himself and was not wealthy enough to have momuments built in his honor or held any public position.