Ben C Smith

Agreed.

Agreed.

Here is what GDon actually wrote:

I am continually baffled by your reading of GDon, Toto. You once even questioned whether he was being sincere about admiring James Randi, when it is as plain as day that GDon is at least the kind of person who might well admire a debunker like Randi. (I, too, like Randi, and have ever since I read about his exposing of Peter Popoff; indeed, I wish he would postpone his interest in psychics just long enough to go back to work on the likes of Benny Hinn.)

That GDon might respect Randi will come as a surprise only to someone who really wants to be surprised by such a thing; in this present case, that GDon might be trying to justify Christian apologetic claims will occur only to someone who is already hoping that this is what he is doing. To be more specific, GDon did not say that the mistake was understandable; what he said was that the Pilate-pilatus thesis was (mis)understood as something other than what it was.

Clearly, this is a nice piece of detective work, yet the following is all you can manage to say about it in your first response to GDon:

No, Toto, the question is whether you are serious in your seeming lack of intellectual curiosity. GDon covered himself; he wrote about what may have led to the error. Are you really missing the point of this exercise? Do you really think it irrelevant to try to trace the source of the error, however egregious? Really?

Because, if so, you have no business doing historical criticism of any kind. And, if not, then you are being disingenuous with GDon.

Kapyong gave a lengthy OP listing people who regarded Pilate as historical. You said it was good work. I agree; assuming most or all of its references are accurate, it is fine work, and it casts serious doubt on the (already extremely dubious) notion that most skeptics regarded Pilate purely as a mythical figure until the discovery of an inscription in the sixties.

Yet, when GDon gave what very well may be the source of the original error itself, all you could do was retort with an argument from personal incredulity. What gives?

(My own view, for the record, is that, if this is indeed the source of the errant claim, it is just as inexcusable as creationist quote-mining. If the error was made intentionally, then the originator was being dishonest and those who passed the claim on were being uncritical; if the error was made unintentionally, as in the scenario proposed by GDon, then the originator was being incompetent and those who passed the claim on were being uncritical. Neither scenario casts the claim in a good light.)

GDon, very fine work, despite its not being appreciated in quite as many quarters as it deserves.

Ben.

Clivedurdle

I would argue it is almost a certainty.

Remember the context - Stalin, North Korea, China, Russia, Cold War. Russia almost took Turkey and Greece in 1949.

McCarthyism, Godless Communists and in God we Trust on US money.

You can guarantee the Soviet Encyclopedia was widely available.

And interestingly, the resistance to mythicism may be more to do with its strong support by the godless commies than any real reasons and the Pilate never existed claim may be American propaganda.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kn2xs

America - Red or Dead

Steven Carr

I see.

This just repeats what was in the earlier thread on this subject, where claims that sceptics did not believe Pilate existed turned into no more than one nutcase from the 19th century.

Ben C Smith

Who was that nutcase?

Ben.

Steven Carr

Andrzej Niemojewski.

I was going by the title of the work, and his anti-Semitism...

Toto

Perhaps I do not understand GDon. He appears to be rational and well read, but he keeps coming to conclusions that do not seem to be justifiable. He has, after all, contributed a chapter to a book by JP Holding. He has argued very strenuously in favor of the idea that the lack of mention any details about a historical Jesus in the second century somehow excuses any mention of historical details in earlier works and proves that there was a historical Jesus. I cannot fathom this logic.

I do not see this as a nice piece of detective work. Detective work would involve actually finding that error in the Soviet Encyclopedia and tracing a copy of the Encyclopedia in question to a source where it might have been read by the sort of apologist under discussion here. Instead, GDon has floated a possibility that the Christian apologists were not lying because there was one such claim in an early edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and asked others to do the work of tracking down the evidence.

It's not just personal incredulity. It was a reaction to speculation piled on speculation coupled with a request for someone else to do the research. I'm glad you realize that this claim about skeptics doubting the historical Pilate is less than honest.

Toto

It seems that the GSE was not available in English in 1961 I can testify that Americans are notoriously monolingual, so even if the Russian version were available in 1961, I doubt that any of the American apologists under discussion here read it in the original Russian.

Will we now hear a claim that the claim of a mythical Pilate was based on a mistranslation from the Polish or Russian? If anyone wants to make this claim, please identify the translation. Otherwise we just have speculation piled on speculation, for no particular purpose.

GakuseiDon

Thanks, Roger and Ben. Actually, IIRC Andrew Criddle found Drews' comment, and I found the one that referred to Russian/"Eastern" sources.

"Proves that there was a historical Jesus"? I can't fathom that logic either. You have some bee in your bonnet about me and I have no idea why. I've said before that you seem to be debating some "Phantom GakuseiDon" that exists only in your own mind.

The ultimate crime. Imagine posting on an Internet forum asking for help with information! What was I thinking?

Anyway, true, I've floated the possibility based on the comments on the second link I provided in my last post, where the author writes (my bolding):
It suggests that he had read some 19th C work published or used in Russia (since the Soviet Union didn't even exist 20 years before Drews) which alluded to the idea. But then again, maybe the author simply misunderstood what was being claimed. He seems to have misunderstood Drews' point.

Kapyong

Gday all,

Thanks Toto, Ben.
I didn't realise there was an old thread on this.

My method was to do an exhaustive text search on all my books on disk for text "Pilate" - I then checked many of them, but not all. A crude method, but suitable for specific words.

I did even find one reference to the "Pilate of the ship", which makes up for all those "Pontius Pilot" references :-)

I think the conclusion is solid - there is no evidence of anyone ever claiming Pilate did not exist. Even if Roger pretends there is evidence "out there" but that the research has not yet been done - thanks mate :-(


K.

Ben C Smith

Guilty by association, then?

Case in point. What I cannot fathom is how you can have somehow missed the unbelievably numerous statements on his part that his work on the second century apologists does not prove there was an historical Jesus. This is exactly what I was talking about. You are not reading GDon.

Perhaps detective work is not the right term. Perhaps a nice hypothesis based on a nice piece of intuition.

He said it was a possibility. He used the term might. But where did he stress that the apologists were not lying? Where did you get that not lying was actually his point? If a mainstream scientist tracks down a creationist claim about Darwin and eyes and finds that it is based on a misunderstanding of two paragraphs in The Origin of Species, is the scientist arguing that the creationist is not lying? Rather, the scientist is arguing that the creationist claim is mistaken; whether the misunderstanding of Darwin was willful misrepresentation (in which case the creationist was indeed lying) or simple misreading (in which case the creationist was being incompetent) is quite beside the point; the scientist is probably simply tracking down the source of the error.

When you noticed that aa___ seemed to have misread the statement in Luke about John the baptist jumping in the womb, were you arguing that aa___ was not lying? Was that your point? Or were you just tracing the source of his or her weird comments?

GDon did not use the terms lie or lying in the post that you responded to; nor did he use any synonyms for lying. Why exactly are you assuming that not lying was his point?

Here is his request:

Is asking for help or information frowned upon on this forum?

You reacted badly to speculation that was explicitly identified as speculation (might)? And to asking whether anybody knew the online status of a couple of old books? Why did you do that?

It is less than competent, certainly; it may also be less than honest; but that is harder to judge. (It is not a lie if you really believe it; there is a difference between a lie and a delusion, though I readily admit that a delusion may well involve self-deception. We just need to be clear what kind of honesty we are talking about.)

Ben.