Peter Kirby

It's a perfectly adequate question.

You said, "Prove that any historical figure said anything recorded in their texts at all."

When it comes to identifying things Jesus said, I think Jesus is in a similar boat to Socrates, assuming that we go with the HJ model.

I can't be sure, historically, that Socrates said any of the particular individual statements attributed to him in the texts of Plato. I can just about be sure of his existence, given three independent contemporaries who referred to his life, but as to what he said, it is entirely covered in the mists of the highly literary dialogues.

Demonstrate one authentic saying of Socrates with historical method, and then I will take seriously the claim that we can know the words of one Jesus, who left no writings.

Clouseau

Which laws do you have in mind?

Riverwind

You have fallen into the trap of minimalists. By saying that things are so fuzzy, then we have no real and believable history, unless of course we take some things on faith. Asking such questions means that one has decided there is no such thing as history because we simply cannot prove anything about it.

Amaleq13

Things are fuzzy, amigo!!

Historians and other scholars relying on ancient text evidence are doing the best they can with what they've got but it seems ludicrous to suggest that the evidence is entirely reliable.

It seems to me that Peter is taking a realistic view of the evidence (e.g. messy, inconsistent, incomplete, passing through multiple hands with multiple agendas, etc.).

Riverwind

To a degree. By Peter's comments, one would think that they are so fuzzy that none of history can be known. I thought he once thought differently.

Give me a break. Many secular historians start with the assumption that the texts are false until proven true. They reject them and by default attempt to find layer upon layer of proto-texts underneath them, likely making ingenious but incorrect assumptions about the purity of texts. And this isn't just Biblical texts we're talking about.

I, personally, think the more rational approach is to accept a text at face value and attempt to understand why the things in that text were written.

I don't have a problem with a "realistic view" of what we have, but I think his case is overblown. You call the text of the Bible "messy, inconsistent, incomplete, etc.", but understand the textual transsmission quite well, I see that the majority of the texts have come down to us largely as they were. People tend to miss the forest for all the trees. In other words, they focus so much on insignificant variants in the text that they forget to take a step back and look at the coherent whole and that it has been preserved on the whole quite well.

Malachi151

What does that mean?

Is the writing an fiction or a history? It's like saying "Accept The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" at face value. What face value?

There is no "face value" to the text.

What you are saying is, "accept the later interpretation of the text by a specific sect of Christians at face value."

The "Gospel" of Mark does not claim to be a historical account of anything. Indeed the Gospel of Mark drops clues like nuclear bombs that it is a fiction as far as I'm concerned, not a fiction intended to deceive anyone, but simply a normal fictional story, just like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn".

Do we accept Ovid's Metamorphosis at "face value"? How so? I accept Metamorphosis at face value, which is that it is fiction.

Amaleq13

As I thought I made clear, I consider this to be just as foolish a position as the opposite.

I'm not sure what you mean by "face value" but I hope it isn't as naively uncritical as it sounds.

Riverwind

Huckleberry Finn is a bad example, in my opinion, for most intelligent people know that it is a work of fiction created by Mark Twain.

Most people, even today, understand many ancient authors were poets and wrote plays.

The difficulty comes in determining which works are intended to be historical texts. I believe that the Bible is one of those texts...it is both historical and theological in nature, and one must take this into account when analyzing it.

So, by face value, I mean that if a text makes historical claims one should accept them and look for any possible evidence of their truth. Why look for evidence of their non-truth? This makes little sense to me.

I happen to believe that there is at least a kernel of truth to Homer's works and possible explanations for things that seem to present difficulties to today's uber-skeptics.

I respectfully request that you pay attention to your wording. It is disingenuous to wholly reword what I said such that it is not what I said at all and then say "What you are saying is"...

I see no clues to fiction in Mark. In fact, it seems to invite readers to believe in its historical claims. This would have been an absurd fiction during the time period. Why would anyone have written such fiction so that it got passed along as truth?? This view of the gospels as fiction just seems utterly absurd to me.

Metamorphosis was poetry.

Amaleq13

I agree with the above if "accept them" is removed:

"If a text makes historical claims one should look for any possible evidence of their truth."

Shouldn't acceptance or rejection follow from consideration of the evidence?

Because only a fool ignores that people don't always tell the truth?

Peter Kirby

I am still waiting for the historical method by which we can determine that Socrates said any particular individual statement put on his lips by Plato.

How can asking this historical question imply that "there is no such thing as history"? :huh: