Kapyong

Gday,

How could anyone give a 'complete list'?

The reason is essentially the same for all - the evidence is poor, and heavily mythologized.

Here are some examples :
* Lao Tzu
* Zoroaster
* Krishna
* Buddha
* Pythagoras
* Solon
* Socrates

All of whom have been doubted to exist.


Apart from the more obvious examples such as :
Moses, Solomon, Robin Hood, King Arthur, William Tell, Don Juan (Casteneda's.)

K.

spin

Coming from someone whose knowledge of history is the history channel. You need to read what historians are actually doing in peer reviewed journals for the last 40 or 50 years to see what you sadly label "hard-hat empiricism".


spin

spin

No Robots doesn't understand what you are intimating. If someone has said a sentence, no matter what, no matter in what context, the words have to endure the literal decontextualized significance he imputes to them. It's hermeneutics gone feral.


spin

Toto

He does not ignore them, he disagrees.

Doug Shaver

No, not at all.

I don't see why. If the concepts were written about, then somebody had to be thinking of them. What we have are some documents alleging that the first person to think of them happened have been a philosopher by the name of Leucippus. In the absence of any contrary evidence, we might as well take the word of whoever wrote those documents, but it is not prima facie improbable that the true originator of atomism was somebody we've never heard of.

If there were no evidence contrary to the gospel stories of Christianity's origins, then it could be argued that we might as well suppose that the central figure of those stories really existed. But we do have contrary evidence, some of it in Christian writings that predate the earliest gospel by at least several decades.

Doug Shaver

It's a mighty big leap for anyone in the academic mainstream, even on the liberal side. Maybe it had to start with somebody who had no reputation to lose.

No Robots

It is quite clear that Hoffmann vacillates on the question of mythicism, leaning toward it previously, and more recently leaning away from it.

Toto

I have been following this since I listened to Hoffman's first lecture at the Center for Inquiry on the Jesus Project, and it was clear then that he followed the liberal consensus that 1) the gospels and the character of Jesus described there were myth in the best sense of the word BUT 2) there was still a historic person that you can call Jesus who inspired the myth, even if you can't discover much about him.

If there is any secular. non-apologetic academic consensus, I think this sums it up. But note that part 1 is based on research and academic scholarship, while 2) is a mostly unexamined proposition.

No Robots

I agree. And it is a neat summation at that.

Again, I agree. However, you think that the academic world neglects to question the first part of proposition 2, ie. that "a historic person that you can call Jesus who inspired the myth", whereas my quarrel with academe is on the second part, ie. that "you can't discover much about him." I would say that there have been a few good examinations of proposition 2, most of them from Jewish scholars, and these all assert the historicity of Christ and the richness and essential accuracy of his portrayal in the Gospels.

show_no_mercy

There is something wrong with this statement.