J-D

I know, but that doesn't mean they understood what aa5874 said. It only means they think they did. On several occasions I have seen people react with enthusiastic endorsements of what they think aa5874 has stated, only for aa5874 to react with violent denunciations of their posts.

J-D

If somebody asked 'what descriptions of Pontius Pilate are given in the NT Canon?', there would be no need to refer to anything except the NT Canon for an answer. If somebody asked 'what descriptions of Gabriel are given in the NT Canon?', there would be no need to refer to anything except the NT Canon for an answer. And if somebody asked 'what descriptions of Jesus are given in the NT Canon?', there would be no need to refer to anything except the NT Canon for an answer. But obviously the question posed by Diogenes the Cynic is not 'what descriptions of Jesus are given in the NT Canon?'. It is a different question.

J-D

Whether that's so or not, it doesn't mean there is a NEED for aa5874 to post here. There is no NEED for you to profit.Diogenes the Cynic was trying to find out what other people meant. If you want to find out what other people mean, asking them looks like a fairly obvious method. If those other people aren't willing to answer questions about what they mean, that's bad luck for Diogenes the Cynic, but I don't see how Diogenes the Cynic can be held responsible or at fault.

aa5874

Diogenes the Cynic made a most blatant and contradictory statement that I have seen probably in my entire life so far.

Examine this Obvious Contradiction

Now look at the QUESTIONS in his OWN POLL. Every one single is related to Jesus of the Gospels.

How is it even possible that Diogenes the Cynic has become so blinded that he cannot even see that his OWN Poll show that he is Asking 20 Questions directly related to the Gospel Jesus???

Something has gone wrong on BC&H. I can't even trust what people write about their own thread.

I am terrified at the level to which people here will go to defend the illogical HJ position.

We at BC&H DESERVE Better.

J-D

You did quote Doug Shaver's words accurately, and at the same time you did misrepresent Doug Shaver. There is no contradiction. It's fairly easy to quote people accurately and misrepresent them at the same time. You've just done it again, by deleting the contextual information in Doug Shaver's post which gives an indication of the nature of the misrepresentation.

Here's another example of using accurate quotations to misrepresent somebody.If you check, you will find those quotations are word-for-word accurate. Do they accurately represent you?

Diogenes the Cynic asked the question, 'What do people mean when they use the term "historical Jesus"?' Doug Shaver answered the question by explaining what he would mean if he used the term 'historical Jesus'. You misrepresented Doug Shaver's position by misunderstanding it as saying that the existence of the 'historical Jesus' had been proved.

Explaining the definition of a term is not equivalent to asserting that anything really matches that definition.

J-D

There is no contradiction. You have misunderstood.

The two questions 'What do people mean when they use the term "historical Jesus"?' and 'What do people mean when they use the term "Jesus of the Gospels"?' are not equivalent. Diogenes the Cynic was looking for answers to the first, not the second.

tanya

Thank you J-D. I appreciate your input.

I sincerely write, that I hope, when all of this "he said, she said" stuff is concluded, you will comment on the questions raised, instead of going on and on about this meaningless insulting.

Now, if you would have been correct, in what you had written, then, it would have been appropriate for me to APOLOGIZE to Doug.

Unfortunately, it is tanya, not Doug, whose writing has been misrepresented:

I did not write, as you have stated, J-D.

Let's look again:
No sir.

That's not accurate.

Please go back and reread the posts.

Here's what I wrote:
Here's what Doug claimed to have checked:
Now, J-D, how did I misrepresent Doug?

YOU, J-D, misrepresented me, claiming that I had asked Doug something which I did NOT ask him:

Read it again J-D. I did not ask Doug "what he would mean if he used the term "historical Jesus". I repeated the question which appears at the top of Diogenes list of parameters, as you can confirm by looking up, to the top of this page, where the poll is printed. Doug ignored my question, quoting Diogenes' text at the top of the poll, and instead, answered something else, this after protesting vigorously, on another thread, that he was an expert in Logic 101. That he may have been. I wouldn't know. He is not an expert in reading. Apparently you too, J-D, need some assistance in that regard.
You are the one who has misunderstood.

READ IT AGAIN, a little bit more slowly. Take in a deep breath...

Here, I will print it again for your benefit:
I wrote out several questions, thus far ignored, by Diogenes, Doug, and now you.

Please stop with the (incorrect!) nit picking, and focus on the issues. Address the substance, not the fluff....(you err about the fluff, anyway.)

J-D

You do? Please help me find some way that I can believe that.I don't know what you mean by 'insulting'. It is not an insult to describe something as a misrepresentation of somebody's position. I am also not completely clear on which questions it is that you want me to answer.I've told you that already.Yes, when I referred there to 'the question', I was referring to the question originally posed by Diogenes the Cynic, not to any question you might have asked, as is contextually evident from the full text of the post in which I made the statement you quote.You didn't. But Diogenes the Cynic did, and that was the question Doug Shaver was answering.That's exactly my point. Doug Shaver was not answering your question. Doug Shaver was answering Diogenes the Cynic's question.Now those I am inclined to think are fairly regarded as insults.What Diogenes the Cynic meant by that question was equivalent to 'What do people mean when they use the term "historical Jesus?", exactly as I said. I read what Diogenes the Cynic wrote and I understood it.I'm still not clear what the questions are that you want me to answer.I can, however, give my personal answer to the question originally posed by Diogenes the Cynic, which is that I never use the term 'historical Jesus'.

Doug Shaver

No, they are not. I explained what I was referring to with the words "those things." I was not referring to the quotations. I was referring to your interpretations of the quotations.

Yes. It is trivially easy to do that. It was something I always had to be careful to avoid doing when I was a newspaper reporter.

I will stop complaining when you stop attributing statements to me that I did not make.

Rick Sumner

Which of the following is required for an historical Alice in Wonderland:

Fondness for Nonsense Verse
Poor grammar
Sloppy knowledge of geography
Shaking cats in her sleep
Older Sister
Owns a Cat...
...named Dinah

Some of these things are even true of the real Alice Liddell. But none of them are historical questions, because they have no historical basis. All I'm asking is if art imitated life, and then offering speculative possibilities where it might have. That's not history.

In similar fashion, it is not an historical question to ask if it is required for an historical Jesus to, for example, cause a disturbance at the temple. There is no historical basis for the question, there is only a story of it happening.

And this is the difference between the question you claim to be asking, and the question you actually did ask.

It is a valid (though unanswerable) historical question to ask if Christianity could have started with a cult of personality. Because it is grounded in the known--it can be (to steal spin's term--yes spin, you were right) tethered to known reality.

It is neither valid nor answerable historical question to ask if the temple incident is a requisite for an historical Jesus. It's just speculation.you can't ground it in anything more than a story of it happening, a story that lacks any grounding.

On the question of existence:

My fault for using sloppy terms. I'll try again.

Real people lived in a real past, in real places doing real things at real times. Those are not history. That is gone.

History is created in the present. The aim of the historian is to create a history that closely approximates the past reality, but with the provisos that all conclusions are provisional, and all reconstructions only approximations.

So when I say that an historical Jesus cannot exist, I do not mean exist in any tangible sense. I mean that a meaningful creation that approximates reality cannot exist, because we do not have the prerequisites to create one. I'm not saying that there was (or was not) a real person, I'm saying that what survives is too far removed from that for it to matter.

So it isn't sensible to ask me to define what I'm saying doesn't exist--the very reason I say it doesn't exist is that it can't be defined.