aa5874

No-one in antiquity used Tactitus Annals to claim HJ of Nazareth did exist. Remarkably, Tacitus Annals was used ONLY to claim there were people called Christians during the time of Nero.

Even Eusebius, when attempting to show Jesus of the NT did exist ONLY USED the FORGERIES in Josephus NOT Tacitus Annals.

jakejonesiv

Hi Archibald,

I have a question concerning Tacitus Annals 15:44. Why do no 2nd and 3rd century Christians ever refer to this passsage? Just when is the earliest external confirmation of this passage to Tacitus by name? Would you be suprised to learn that it is in the Middle Ages?

Jake

gurugeorge

That position isn't necessary to the MJ idea - in fact I'm not sure any of the various MJ positions hold to that.

What Christians obviously believed in was a literal and historical divine being with some human aspect.

The problem is that people have believed in the historical and literal existence of all sorts of divine beings throughout history, some of them with human or human-seeming aspects.

With some of those myths, there may have been real people at the root of the myth, with others not (they came about through other means - visions, chinese whispers, urban legends, or just sheerly made up). What the historical Jesus proponent has to do is show that in this case, with this myth, there was a human being at the root of the myth.

That's the actual historical Jesus problem.

What most HJ people are doing is something else - they're just stripping the myth of the supernatural bits and imagining that, well, there must have been a man there. But that move is not legitimate, there's no logic there, no "must" about it. It would only be compelling if we had other reasons (reasons derived from outside the cultic texts) to think there was a man (who subsequently became mythologized).

Or to put it another way, the "historical evidentiariness" so to speak (or "aboutness" or intentionality, in philosophical terms), of the Christian corpus is about a god-man, part divine, part human. That's what Christian texts purport to be evidence of, on the face of it.

That "historical evidentiariness" or intentionality does not automatically translate to a hypothesized human being behind the myth.

Once the raison d'etre of the Christian cult texts in proving a god-man goes, ONE IS NO LONGER IN A POSITION TO TAKE IT FOR GRANTED THAT THERE'S ANYTHING HISTORICAL ABOUT THEM AT ALL, including the human-looking bits.

That has to be thought about and discovered separately - the provenance, form, nature, authorship, etc., has to be thought afresh.

dog-on

So then, for the purposes of HJ, we could say that the closest thing we have to a bedrock fact would then be the reference by Tacitus and would use that reference as the basis upon which to build the case?

jakejonesiv

Hello aa5874,


Who in Antiquity attributed the text of Annals 15:44 to Tacitus? I mean, if they do not mention it, how can they "ONLY claim there were people called Christians during the time of Nero." AFAIK, they made no claims whastover based on this passage in Tacitus.

Please get your FACTS straight.


Jake

archibald

Under no circumstances.

The Tacitus reference, of itself, is not strong enough to build anything off.

1.Read it.
2. Look into it (What jake is suggesting, and what i will do later, though in all honesty, at some point it may be better to start a special thread, I wonder?) Maybe not necessary. Maybe we can do Tacitus at least to some extent, here.
3. Set it aside, temporarily, without using it to come to a strong position either way.

Teatime here. And I am chef.

Toto

This is not a strawman. It is the central problem in historical Jesus studies. Bart Ehrman spends time explaining how the gospels are not reliable sources of history, and then he explains the methods his colleagues use to extract history from these unreliable documents - but if you follow this scholarship to its roots, you will find that there is as assumption at its core, that there was a historical Jesus and that there is some history in the gospels. The basis for this assumption is that these scholars can't figure out how Christianity could have started without an individual like Jesus who inspired followers to continue his teaching. [This is probably one of the more logical arguments for a historical Jesus, although it has its flaws.]

You will find that the historical Jesus guild has invented its own methodology for extracting information from ancient religious texts. No other ancient historians use this explicit methodology - looking for "embarrassment" or "dissimilarity" in order to extract a historic core from obviously religious documents, when there is no other evidence for historicity. When Richard Carrier, whose field is ancient history, started to look into historical Jesus studies, he was somewhat appalled by the quality of the work, from the point of view of historical validity.

We are in different time zones, so I am just catching up here - but I don't think you or anyone else has been able to support this.

Several people have asserted that of course, the gospels were meant to contain history. That's not at all obvious, and contradicts the plain meaning.

Iskander

Name dropping gets up people's noses


"Since there is no observable divine hand in nature as a causal process, it is reasonable to conclude that there is no divine hand. After all, that there are no blue monkeys flying out my butt is sufficient reason to believe that there are no such creatures, and so it is with anything else" (Sense and Goodness Without God, p. 273. Emphasis n blue added).
http://subversivethinking.blogspot.c...ys-flying.html


Carrier’s speaking butt disqualifies him as a serious argument

Toto

This is completely off topic, and it references a blog that is based on an outright (deliberate?) misunderstanding of a casual comment in Carrier's book.

aa5874

Well, your knowledge of the FACTS may be limited, AFAIK.