LegionOnomaMoi

Perhaps you are comparing modern historiography to ancient and expecting to much. If we were to analyze all ancient accounts that contain information about mythical creatures, from Julius Caesars Gallic Wars and the comment on unicorns to Diogenes Laertius and the many myths/legends he tells about various philosphers and conclude that because these contain mythic elements, or are even full of mythic elements, they are therefore not intend to and do not report historical information, we would be left with no historical accounts. One requires a much better system for determining what the purposes behind a work in the ancient world was, and what the probability is that the work contains a good deal of history, or some history, or likely none.




When the chapter is entitled "Preliminaries" and is full of things to which the instructor may direct her or his students during the course, as needed, if the instructor so desires. It is like an appendix, only filled with things the students may already know or may not, and may need as a refresher or just for a certain chapter (for example, logical notation is necessary for complex proofs, especially if the instructor requires students to use symbolic notation rather than words in said proofs). As appendices are usually (and this holds true for this book) for material which holds additional information beyond what the book is intended for (such as additional proofs, more complicated information, extended explanations, etc.), and this chapter is for material which is in general simpler or prerequisite, it is placed first.

It doesn't, actually. It has multiple meanings. For example, as a subscript in a series or used as superscript to mean an exponent. By contrast, different notation is typically used to refer to the empty set, or the set which contains


Let me quote more fully:

"The opposite of [There exists x for which P(x) is true] is [For all x, P(x) is not true] (0.2.3)...These rules may seem reasonable and simple. Clearly the opposite of the (false) statement, "All rational numbers equal 1," is the statement, "There exists a rational number that does not equal one."
However, by the same rules, the statement, "All eleven-legged alligators are orange with blue spots" is true, since if it were false, then there would exist a eleven-legged alligator that is not orange with blue spots. The statement "all eleven-legged alligators are black with white stripes" is equally true."

On the side of the page, where the authors make a great many amusing, clever, and/or helpful points, they write "Statements that to the ordinary mortal are false or meaningless are thus accepted as true by mathematicians; if you object, the mathematician will retort, 'find me a counterexample.'"


Hence the importance of distinguishing ontological truths and simple logical validity or even soundness.

LegionOnomaMoi

I think you need to re-read Plutarch and what he is saying here.

aa5874

Please, tells us of your FAVORITE Math book with the 11 LEGGED PURPLE CROCODILES.

LegionOnomaMoi

Sure. What would you like to know?

ApostateAbe

You know about all of those mythicist authors who assert false or unevidenced claims about prior myths of godmen who had almost everything in common with the character of Jesus in the gospels. If the evidence was there, then that is what would falsify the historical Jesus.

You know those mythicists authors who misquote early Christians writers and they make false claims about how gnostics believed in a merely mythical Jesus, and they claim that such a merely mythical Jesus is plainly seen in the writings of Paul. If so, that would also falsify the historical Jesus.

Not that "falsification" is the best way to think about this stuff. It should be about choosing the theory that explains the evidence best.

Toto

How so? There are a lot of prior figures with some features in common with the gospel Jesus, but historicists can dismiss those features as legendary accretions faster than you can say "virgin birth."

Again - why? You don't need to misquote early Christians to find some who thought that Jesus was only the appearance of flesh, and Paul can be read as based on a vision of a mythical Christ - but that's like water off a duck's back to any historicist.

Their historical Jesus was born and lived in obscurity, died without many noticing, then his followers were inspired somehow to turn him into a Jewish-Hellenistic hero with mythical features, and some of them lost any interest in the actual Jesus in favor of their creation.

There's no way to falsify that.

That would involve admitting that the evidence is not conclusive.

gurugeorge

"Fraud" isn't necessarily the right word to use. To show fraud you'd have to also show that the authors knowingly believed myth Jesus didn't exist and didn't do the things the writers ascribed to him.

But that would be difficult to show, especially since it looks like some of them did believe he existed.

And this is likely to be true even if they made stuff up about him.

In those days the category of evidence-based history wasn't very distinct, or wasn't very distinct to most people - in those days, if you were inspired to think that something was true (e.g. something you "saw" in a dream or a vision), that was ok, and others might well accept it at face value.

I guess you could call it fraud hyperbolically, but let's bear in mind that's not strictly accurate without further evidence to prove fraud.

That's why "fiction" isn't quite the right category either. Fiction was fiction, but this kind of inspired pseudo-history and pseudo-biography was another thing.

aa5874

What you say is erroneous. We have the writings of Philo, Josephus, Suetonius and Tacitus and many more.

We can compare Suetonius "Lives of the Twelve Caesars" to any Jesus story and see that the Jesus stories are Myth Fables.

Examine Life of Tiberius by Suetonius--The birth of Tiberius

Now, Examine gMatthew--The birth of Jesus.
The Jesus stories are like Joseph Smith's Bible--unsuspecting people were duped.

ApostateAbe

The principle of falsification addresses potential evidences, regardless of what arguments or evidences are actually on the table. For example, Acharya S has claimed that very many mythical gods, including the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, had a helluva lot of things in common with Jesus, including crucifixion, twelve disciples, virgin birth, baptism and resurrection. If that were true, then the theory that Jesus was merely mythical would be very strong, and the historical Jesus would be effectively falsified. The argument would of course be stronger still if the evidence predates the first century.

But of course evidence like that doesn't have to exist in order for the position of a mythical Jesus to be generally accepted by reasonable people as probable. A lesser potential falsification would be that the early Christian writings shows mythical progression from God to man, rather than from man to God. Suppose Paul and the gospels of Mark and Q portrayed Jesus as God, with little or no humanity to be seen, and the derivative gospels of Matthew and Luke portrayed Jesus as purely man. If not falsify the historical Jesus, it would lend credibility to the theory that Jesus was merely myth, and it would have a place at the scholarly table. Critical scholars would generally accept it, and so would all of us.

LegionOnomaMoi

If you could read or write, you were not "most people" but belonged to an educated minority.

That's true. People certainly claimed, both before and after the gospels were written, to have seen visions of deities or whatever, and were believed by others. However, asserting that one saw, for example, Dionysus in a vision is not the same as asserting that he walked around preaching to people about 40 years ago, in a particular geographic region, while people there were people still living who were there at the time.

Additinionally, from the evidence we have, it seems that people did indeed distinguish eyewitness testimony from non-eyewitness testimony, and likewise distinguished "visions" from "actual events." This includes Christians (which is why the author of Luke goes out of his way to assert that his writings are from eye-witness investigations). The claim of Paul to have seen Jesus through revelation, a claim repeated over the centuries and into our own time, is not the same as claiming that he did actually walk on Earth. And that is what Paul and the gospel authors (among others) were saying.

This kind of claim, that a person really did live and walk around with followers, is a quite different kind of claim. Hundreds of years before the first century, people were doubting the texts which served not only as the foundation for histories from Herodotus onwards, but also as a sort of "bible" for the Greeks (the Homeric epics). There is a marked trend from Herodotus onwards for historians to attempt to recover myths about individuals said to live hundreds and hundreds of years earlier by "rationalizing" these myths (Romulus and Remus weren't actually raised by wolves, but rather this particular myth developed because of X or Y). They also included notes of doubt about accounts and held more believable accounts by those who had seen the events in question. What we don't see, apart from the gospels, are accounts which are close enough to ancient biographies that numerous people have argued this is the genre to which they belong in which a person is said not to have worked wonders in some bygone age in some half-mythical region, but a couple of generations ago in nearby regions (places which were under control of the Romans, not far in some land barely known or heard of). Certainly, we have examples of legends growing around people whose historicity is difficult to establish, or at least questionable (e.g., Pythagoras or Apollonius of Tyana, who both probably lived, but our sources are quite late and full of mythic elements), but with all of these the following hold true:
1) Most historians think the individuals in question did exist and were historical people
2) Our sources are seperated by a century or more from the individual in question. For example, with Pythagoras we have a handful of scant references (none of which we can trace to a clear source) followed by full biographies written some 6-7 centuries after Pythagoras was said to have lived.

By contrast, what we have with Jesus are, it appears, a number of accounts of his ministry beginning around 40 years after the time it occured. The first of these is as long as just about any biography we have from the ancient world, although it is much more poorly written than most and far more mythical/legendary than most as well. But neither this nor the subsequent accounts claim to be based on visions. And the length of time between them and the person they are about is comparatively short. Far, far, shorter than between clearly mythical persons and our earliest accounts of their actions, and far shorter than most references to likely historical people about whom myths and legends grew around.

All "biographies" in the ancient world were more akin to today's novels than to today's biographies. The closest to the gospels are those like Philostratus', while other historians were much more skeptical. But history in those days was still about telling stories. The main difference between history and myth was not the narrative or the presence of fantastical elements, but that histories and historians wanted (whatever other goals they may have had as well) to tell a story about what they believed actually happened.