gurugeorge

I'm obviously not making myself clear. It's not a question of accuracy, it's a question of: in what context should we view the texts we have?

Let's start from the top. (I'm sure I'm probably reinventing the wheel here and there are accepted terms in various scholarly fields for what I'm pointing out here, but never mind.)

A piece of writing can be evidence, let's say, "directly" or "indirectly".

It's evidence of x directly if it directly attempts to prove x's existence. A purported eyewitness account is a direct kind of evidence.

But a piece of writing can be indirect evidence of something too. Say, scholars look at a purported eyewitness account and find that while entity x couldn't possibly have existed (so it's not direct evidence of x), nevertheless some kind of evidence of something can be rescued from the text - say, evidence of y. But that doesn't mean, for example, if the original account was a purported eyewitness account of x, and it's now found to be indirect evidence of y, that it's an eyewitness account of y.

It lost its claim to be an eyewitness account (direct evidence) when people realised x didn't or couldn't possibly have existed; whatever character it has as evidence is no longer derived from its on-the-face-claim to be evidence.

So there's no "percentage" involved, as in your above argument, at all. If the NT Canon can be shown to have some evidence of a real person in it somewhere, that's not by virtue of it being a smaller percentage of the original eyewitness proof it was originally supposed to be. It's by virtue of scholars reading between the lines, digging deep into the text, etc. and precisely ignoring the on-the-face-of-it claim to be eyewitness evidence. In order to extract your y from the NT Canon (some real, living person), you'd need to have independent evidence of the existence of y, then you could say "aha, this bit here is obviously (indirect) evidence of y".

So as I said above, it's a question of: in what context should we view the texts we have? As direct evidence (weaker or stronger) of an entity that needs to be proved, or just as texts which might or might not be indirect evidence of an entity we have good independent reasons to think existed?

spin

I think it is more that Roger is attempting to get away with both misrepresenting you and insulting you:

Of course, gurugeorge never made any direct claims on the issue. Asking whether the texts are what some people make them out to be is a totally reasonable action.

If there is any way to say that they are "eyewitness accounts or biographies", then that would be useful to know, for it would influence the way we analyse them. If they are demonstrably not, then we would treat them differently.

As someone else said,

I'm sorry to tell you this,... but I think that the dichotomy which obviously has impressed you would strike most people as deeply obtuse. Life isn't like that. Honestly it isn't.

Still missing the point, Roger shoots at a straw man. He seems to be committed to the notion that a text must be, to some degree, "eyewitness accounts or biographies". This is his assumption and apparently, and flagrantly, based on no evidence whatsoever. Is Roger deliberately changing the subject by talking about the possibility of the texts being 100% wrong or does he just not understand the issues involved?

Fortunately gurugeorge didn't.

I do agree with this.


spin

Roger Pearse

I'm not at all certain I understand you, since you clearly have ideas in mind which I don't.

Isn't the qualification to be an eye-witness account much simpler than this, tho? -- simply that the author saw what he talks about? Whether he talks about it correctly is a separate issue, surely?

But it all sounds rather as if we are attempting to remove eye-witness status from any text of whose content we disapprove? That won't do, of course.

But I'm probably completely misunderstanding.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Magdlyn

Perpetua?

http://earlychristianwritings.com/te...tullian24.html

Jeffrey Gibson

May be??? I suggest that until you know for certain whether NT scholars do what you allege they do (does Dom Crossan unquestiionably accept the canon when he's doing his HJ work?? Did the JS?) you back off from using, as you do, your postulates as solid and sound foundations for the reconstructions of history that put forward as worthy of consideration.

The problem I see is that you haven't provided any reasons for why "how a thing is presented" stands as evidence that it it should not be taken as evidence for Y, let alone that people are wrong to take it as evidence for Y when that is exactly, as you yourself admit, what the authors of text A were presenting text A as being. The "truth" of Y may have been "discovered" by scholars showing that X (which is, as you admit, a misunderstanding of what text A is evidence of) is not the case, but the truth of Y is not dependent on or created by such discoveries, as you seem to think.

There is no O CE. And where does Ehrman say anything that would support your belief?

Leaving aside the fact that you have misrepresented my point, how else would he have existed?

Are you actually saying we don't have such evidence? On your criteria, the noncanonical Gospels works qualify!

Jeffrey

Magdlyn

Jeffrey, would you mind fixing your quote tags? I am confused by your post in a couple places.

Jeffrey Gibson

Apologies. I'd be happy to fix them. But to make sure I got them, would you please tell me where you think they should be fixed?

Jeffrey

gurugeorge

But these "eyewitness accounts" are supposed to be (have been supposed to be, for centuries) eyewitness accounts of a God-man.

But they can't be eyewitness accounts of a God-man - not to anybody who claims to be rational nowadays. They're not extraordinary enough proof (Hume), and they're not corroborated by anything outside the cultic documents themselves (and if this God-man had lived, it's reasonable to assume he would have made a pretty big splash in history). Furthermore, the main "eyewitness accounts" seem not to be eyewitness accounts at all, but 3 books based more or less tightly or loosely on one book, which itself bears the hallmarks of a literary construction.

So, given that (which is a loose outline of what even many orthodox scholars will admit, so far as I can see), they can no longer be taken as evidence at all, they have no evidential character. They've lost their right to be called "eyewitness accounts", to be taken as direct evidence of anything. They are just cultic documents that speak of an entity that never existed (sc., a God-man).

They may be, and I'm sure they are, evidence in another sense - you can dig into them, see if there are perhaps any mentions that could be related to some obscure person who might, just possibly, have been the foundation of the legend. On the other hand they may be evidence of a cult that came to believe in the existence of a God-man, even though there was no real man at the root of it. Or they may be pure literary constructs or forgeries, or pure myth, or whatever. They can be indirect evidence of any number of possibilities like this.

But the way in which they are evidence in that sense is totally different from the way in which they seemed to be evidence at first sight (as eyewitness accounts).

And to get to them being indirect evidence of some man, you first have to find your man elsewhere in history, and then link this man (in whose existence you have independent reason to believe) to the cultic documents. Only then can you say "Aha, these books were supposed to be about a God-man, who didn't exist, but now we can understand that there was a long process of mythopeoia (or whatever), and this purported evidence of a God-man actually accreted round this fellow here."

But this is the very thing that hasn't been done at all in NT scholarship, so far as I can tell. NT scholars just blithely assume that the texts still bear the character of being somehow, eyewitness accounts of a man, in whose existence we have no independent reason whatsoever to believe.

See, what's actually happened is that, under the pressure of rationalism, Christian scholarship gracefully retreated from the bold "God-man" claim for the Christian cultic documents. But then there's this sleight of hand, which attempts to palm them off as still having the character of being evidence for someone.

No.

It just doesn't follow: if those cult documents are no longer evidence of a God-man (which is what they were supposed to be) then all we have are cult documents that could be any number of things - lies, fantasies, myth, mythopoeia surrounding some real man, etc., etc. And each position bears its own burden of proof, and has to be argued for.

What you don't get is a free pass to still treat them as directly evidentiary of somebody, once it's become clear that they aren't evidentiary of the entity they were originally supposed to be evidentiary of.

Jeffrey Gibson

Supposed by whom? 3rd century Christians? Their suppositions don't count. The only people whose suppositions we should be concerned with are those of the authors of NT texts, not those who have misunderstood the suppositions of the NT texts. And if, as you yourself have admitted is true, the suppositions of the authors of the NT texts were that the person about whom they wrote was a man, then the NT texts are certainly are evidentiary of somebody -- indeed a particular somebody -- since, as you yourself have admitted, evidence for the man Jesus and what he said and did during his life is exactly what the authors of the NT were intent to provide.

JG

Magdlyn

I disagree. There were other works that date from that time (acc to some scholars), such as GThomas. And some other gnostic gospels may be contemporaneous with John, and the Pastoral epistles, at least. Certainly 2 Peter and Jude warn strongly against "false teachings."

I don't think George "admitted" that at all. They seem to be hagiography, or religious drama (or even politics!), not "straight" history/biography at all.