mountainman

Hundreds of thousands of eyewitnesses generated an oral tradition that is still read today?

Where did you pick up this bullshit outhouse?

South Park?

Or is it something else that you are deducing from the storybooks in the new and strange testament.







εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

I think so.





εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

The historical core is hypothetical.

It has not yet been directly detected due to lack of evidence.





εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

That Eusebius is untrustworthy is another starting point.

How many forgeries are required before trust is lost?

7?




εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Tenorikuma

So Marcion, who gives us perhaps our earliest glimpse of the "historical" Jesus, believed in Jesus as a celestial being who descended directly to earth as an adult, with no birth or parents, and then ascended back to Heaven upon his death.

A few decades later, Matthew and Luke add virgin birth stories (all the hip demigods had them), inventing plot elements and characters (including Jesus' parents) out of stories from Josephus and Exodus.

What part of this could possibly be historical?

Stringbean

That's it in a nut shell. In order to believe in this jesus you have to believe in the supernatural, take that away and what do you have?

andrewcriddle

Unless you are claiming that the Gospels imply that Jesus was crucified on a t shaped cross, I'm not sure why this is relevant.

Andrew Criddle

spin

The reason why I have you on ignore, outhouse, is that over the whole time you've been a member of this forum you have asserted your claim of plenty of evidence, yet you have failed consistently to provide any. In fact I don't recall you purveying any evidence when talking about Jesus. When pressed for evidence, you don't provide any, but seek recourse in authority. The guidelines of the forum expressly state:

[T2]"1. EVIDENCE: a) Posters should attempt to conform to standard scholarly methodologies. This means not only that claims made should always be supported in some evidential fashion (i.e., argumentation by assertion and by appeal to authority are not acceptable), but that analysis of texts should always be grounded in the awareness of their historical and cultural contexts."[/T2]
The bolded part is expressly of interest to you here. You are responsible for supplying evidence for your claims when asked. If you cannot do so, you need either to go and find some or stop making unfounded claims.

So please, instead of claiming that you have plenty of evidence and never showing any, be good and supply the evidence. Otherwise you will be in violation of the forum guidelines, as you seem to me to be now.

And do you not see the contradiction in terms in the statement concerning "oral traditions still read today"? Either they are oral traditions or they are written traditions. Oral traditions may in fact be transformed into written traditions, but that is rather hard to demonstrate and you are not capable of demonstrating the claim anyway. This is another of your arguments by assertion and of no value, even if supported by authorities. Nevertheless, oral traditions don't get read, not even today. (They get listened to, otherwise they are not oral traditions.)

And please, "in front of hundreds of thousands of people" is just plain silly.

Jaybees

Since Palestine had been virtually crawling with prophets, wonder workers, humans taken up to Heaven in fiery chariots and otherwise, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if there wasn't a host of them walking around preaching in that benighted land sometime around the time of Tiberius. There might very well have been one or more named Jesus, or Lem, or Izzy, or Hekeziah, or whatever.

Does it really make any difference if any of them existed?

ApostateAbe

We have met halfway. Maybe it would help if I explain what I mean by "biographical" and we can come to a full agreement. Ancient Grecco-Roman biographies were often written many generations after the facts, were sourced primarily from myths, and contained impossible claims about the life in question. They were hardly like biographies written today. The quintessential Grecco-Roman biographer was Plutarch, who wrote in his biography of Alexander the Great that the man was fathered by Zeus. Does it make more sense, then, that the gospels were likewise biographical?