aa5874

You have confirmed my assertion, you have no evidence to support historicity, just possibilties. There are many, many possibilities between truth and fiction, so you can choose the one you like the best.


This is incredible. Are you implying that there is only one road to Damascus from any direction and that I can look at a map of Damascus and see where the conversion of Saul/Paul occured?

The road to Damascus is as arbitrary as the road to New York.

Instead of proof, I get more BS.

spamandham

Congratulations on discovering that I have nothing to support the HJ position. I suppose that's why I don't promote it!


You are free to continue making an ass of yourself. Please don't let me interfere in that process.

aa5874

That's right, you are PJ, the possible, plausible and probable Jesus, you only promote possibilities.




Please don't let me interfere with the process.

spamandham

No I'm not. Although I do think it's possible there was a historical character who acted as the spark behind the Jesus character, I think the preponderance of evidence suggests Jesus is a fictional construct.

aa5874

Let me not interfere with the process.

krosero

Rlogan, you're clearly slapping down a straw man here. I can't imagine Roger or anyone else believing that a "shopping list" (whatever that phrase means in the first century) would be just as likely to survive as Antiquities. Anyone who can believe that knows less than nothing about the subject, and Roger knows something about manuscript traditions.

There is no need to impute intellectual dishonesty upon such a simple question. And no question could be more relevant to your opening post. Don put forward the opinion of Richard Carrier, to the effect that we should not expect to have anything written down about Christ. I don't suppose you regard Richard as capable of confusing a shopping list with Antiquities, yet as far as I can see you have offered nothing concrete with which to counter Richard's opinion.

You did answer honestly that you did not know what records were extant. That's to your credit and there's nothing wrong with that answer.

However, I was interested in getting some replies to Don's questions about scribal records for John the Baptist and Bar Kochba. Analogies with other figures are extremely helpful because they give us some hope of comparing against an objective standard -- i.e., "this was recorded, why not this?" -- rather than depending merely on subjective opinions, e.g., "I have to believe that scribes would have written this down".

You reply to Roger, correctly, that incentives matter: texts stand a higher chance of being preserved for the next generation if they're perceived as valuable. Well certainly there were those with an incentive to record the Baptist. There were Jewish scribes contemporary with the Baptist. Can you provide a scribal note about the Baptist?

The Second Jewish Revolt surely was an event of singular importance in which, to use a little hyperbole, stunning things happened -- things that would have impacted far more people in deeper ways than any itinerant miracle-worker could have done. Do you have some record of a scribe recording some events in the Revolt, or something about Bar Kochba? I'm asking the question blind; I have not checked to see what the records are, and I'm not presuming that you can't find anything; I'm just asking a very relevant question. I trust that you won't call it intellectually dishonest and that you'll simply give an honest reply.

Another question. You will brook no effort to try to read the subtext of the Gospels for clues and instead you hammer home the point that the text itself cannot be literally true, so let's go with what the text literally says. It says that the scribes were put-down, defeated, confounded. Insulted, you might say. In their midst they saw a deceiver: one who made false prophecies and worked his exorcisms by way of Satan. All negative things: hardly the sort of stuff that a Jewish scribe would run home and record (as if to put down in writing how they were beaten in debate), still less the kind of stuff that the Jewish community would want to keep around for posterity (as if to say, "Look at the disgraceful kind of men our society produces"). Why would Jewish scribes, if they recorded the doings of a man they considered a magician and deceiver, work especially hard to preserve those records?

The Gospels, taken literally, present a picture in which scribes and Pharisees did not want to record Jesus' actions for posterity; they just wanted to condemn the actions and do away with him.

Yet you insist that the Gospels present a picture in which the scribes must have been genuinely amazed at the miracles. Where is that in the Gospels? Where are Scribes "expressly mentioned observing with amazement Jesus healing the sick amongst multitudes"? Where in the Gospels is there a statement about the incentive that scribes had to write down accounts of their personal encounters with Jesus and pass them along to the next generation?

I don't know why you insist on beating the literal text of the Gospels. It seems to have something to do with your belief that those who don't take the Gospels literally are hypocrites when they reject Jesus mythicism. But it has been centuries now that skeptics, scholars, and Christians have believed that at least some things in the NT are not literally true. (Just as it has been centuries since people started recognizing that the Testimonium Flavianum could have been tampered with; I don't know of any Christian who holds that text to be completely authentic, which is why it surprises me that you should tell Rob117 that he "admits" that the text has been tampered with. Who does not admit that?)

Taking the NT skeptically does not make you a mythicist; it makes you a skeptical historian (whether amateur or professional). "Jesus mythicist" means someone who believes that Jesus himself, right down to his basic existence, is a myth. It does not mean anyone who recognizes the existence of the mythical genre in the Bible.

Kevin Rosero

spamandham

If allowing for mere possibility is your criteria for calling someone a PJ, then I'd say anyone who is not a damned fool is a PJ by such an absurdly lenient construction.

Malachi151

Right, but the issue is that "Jesus existed" has become the default assumption, like "the world is flat", and so, historicists don't have much work to do, all they have to do is keep the status quo, they don't have to prove anything as far as society is concerned.

We understand the folly of this, but that doesn't matter. As far as society is concerned, Jesus existed, unless we can prove otherwise. Society and scholarship has put the burden of proof on the mythicist claim.

That's just something that we have to accept.