aa5874

So what about regions that were landlocked or had huge land mass of deserted areas? It is inconceivable that there were waterways within 75 miles of every populated area.

premjan

People just didn't live in very inconvenient areas.

DCHindley

Romans, and travelers, bought supplies from the locals in Roman controlled areas, and foraged for (ie.e, stole) it in enemy territory.

Merchants acquired that money back by importing luxuries the locals had never seen before, and selling them at premium prices.

Everyone wins.

DCH

aa5874

Eskimos don't know about that. They don't like it hot.

premjan

They didn't need to eat grains though.

aa5874

Are you implying that only people who live within 75 miles of a seaport eat enough grain?

gurugeorge

But your conjecture that the reason there are historical-seeming aspects in the texts is because they're traces of eyewitness-ness, is itself just as "ad hoc"!!!! Or do you not think so? If not, why not? Suppose a text is discovered tomorrow, that was buried in a jar in the desert 1500 years ago, that has a story about some fantastic, miracle-working entity, with placenames and events we know, does the sheer existence of otherwise verifiable placenemes, etc., mean we must believe the entity purported in the tale existed?

Surely not! Surely the idea that the purported entity had some kind of historical basis would require some kind of external corroboration - otherwise the whole thing is ambiguous. It could easily be pure fiction, for all we know - even though it has real placenames, etc.

Surely the existence of Nazarerth AT THAT TIME is still what needs to be verified, in its own right, in order to shore up the historical usefulness of references to Nazareth in the texts?

And you're opening up a can of worms here - because if Nazareth didn't exist at that time (and this is in principle verifiable archaeologically) then we know that at least one pseudo-historical reference was made up. So then we'd have: some stuff that was made up, plus some stuff that's in Josephus and Philo. It's not looking good

But you make a good point - are there any other examples you can think of, of non-P/J-accessible type historical references (that are independently verifiable by us now), in the texts?

This is circular - you are assuming what still needs to be demonstrated, i.e. that the writers were in fact people who didn't have access to Josephus and Philo (i.e. that they were "backwoods" honest-to-goodness eyewitness reporters with local knoweldge, or reporters of oral testimony of people who had local knowledge). If the gospels can be dated relatively late on philological grounds, then the authors could easily be people who had access to those writers. Especially if one thinks of Mark as post-135CE.

No, he's the "deity" who gives the "scribe" the "message". Now, if there were decent independent evidence that he existed, or (as I say in the other post) some kind of hint internal to the texts that he was a human being known by the verifiable founders (i.e. the Jerusalem people and Paul), then you could, indeed, push it back to Jesus being the "scribe" and God Himself being the "deity" giving Jesus the message. But what's the point of doing that, when there's no reason to think he existed, and you have a clear case of cult-genesis as you describe it with the Jerusalem people and Paul, with "Jesus" being the message-giving deity? When he's clearly a divinity from the first time we meet him in Paul, the earliest writing on the subject?


The only difference, the only point of uniqueness about Christianity, is that the "deity" giving the "scribe" the "message" is claiming, in his message, that he was recently on earth.

i.e., Paul (and presumably just before him, Cephas and the Jerusalem people) has a vision, in the vision the "Christ" entity says (something like): "Know that I was recently on the Earth, was crucified by the Romans and buried in obscurity, thereby I fooled the Archons, who were lying in wait for a kingly victor, and thereby I won a great victory over death, reversing the dispensation of my Father as outline in Genesis!" Or summat like that ...

This just seems to me to be a perfectly straightforward religious startup, and it's what's evidenced in the texts, it's what Paul says, it's the simplest way of reading 1Corinthians 15. Why prefer to go hunting for a human-being-Jesus, when the only Jesus you have in the earliest texts is clearly visionary?