Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Gamera · 06-14-2006, 06:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RGD

An opinion is an opinion. As the responses to the OP make clear, there is no objective contemporary evidence to support this opinion.

Well there is evidence, namely subsequent texts, based on which one can make inferences. It is the same type of evidence whereby we know that Athens fought a war with Sparta. That's what I think you're missing.

Gamera · 06-14-2006, 06:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gamera

Well there is evidence, namely subsequent texts, based on which one can make inferences. It is the same type of evidence whereby we know that Athens fought a war with Sparta. That's what I think you're missing.

You've privileged certain texts as "historical" because the support your assumptions about history (Athens fought Sparta) but rejected other texts as nonhistorical because they contradict your assumptions about history (that Jesus walked the earth and founded a movement). You need to tell us the difference.

Gamera · 06-14-2006, 06:15 PM

[QUOTE=OldYgg]

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They can be evaluated for reliability - in context. Given that they are the only source on specific information regarding Jesus - it is not enough evidence to say he existed, that specific events happened to him or that he was a particularly nice guy - if he existed.

Of course.

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By your level of evidence - every religious text is true. Clearly you don't accept that - as you are not a member of the multitude of religious movements that have occurred in the past, you are a member of one of three religions that are players in the present.

Not at all. Most religious texts don't even purport to be historical. I think you're using the term "true" ambiguously. We're talking about apodictic truth, not spiritual truth, at least in regards to the historicity of Jesus.

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Given your need for level of evidence, there is no reason why you should not be a Mormon and believe in the Angel Moroni or that the Native Americans are the lost tribe of Jews.

Sure there is: the book of Mormon has all the earmarks of a forgery, linguistically, circumstantially and otherwise. It's even got the word steel in it at a time steel didn't exist.

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So, you need to confront something. You believe Jesus Existed and that the events in the bible really happened with some provision that there may have been human error in the reporting of individual facts. The New Testament is not different than Scientology with a single text detailing historical fact, Mormons with a single text detailing historical fact or the Bhagava Ghita, or the Quran. What you need to confront is 'Why don't you believe in any of these other religions, instead of Christianity, since they all have the same level of evidence as there is for Christianity?'

Sure there are differences. The NT has the benefit of being assembled and commented on by those near in time to its production. It isn't one single texts, but many, by many authors. That make the NT a poor candidate for a hoax, just as its unlikely that Socrates is a hoax, and the quality of evidence for Socrates is about the same as the quality of evidence for Jesus.

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The answer, more than likely is Cultural Georgraphy. That you were born and raised a Christian in a Christian society and that chances are given these circumstances, you will be a Christian.

I became a Christian late in life and was devout atheist in my youth. But that's a separate matter.

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Certainly, many members of the atheist community come from Christianity, and some small percentage of Christians convert to other religions. But in the main, the seeds are not falling far from the tree.

Well, historically this is false since Christianity began in Judea among a small sect of Jews and now here I am, a Christian in beautiful Palm Springs California.

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It would be different and we might accept a single source for the history of just about anything, if there were no other records surviving from that time. But this isn't true as I stated earlier in this thread. The death of an emporer shook the world - and there are lots of records about his death and the effect it had on his society. Given that the death of the son of god should be more important than the death of a terrestrial emprorer - there should be more, not less documentation about the death of Jesus.

I disagree with this. To all the world Jesus was a minor preacher from an unimportant Roman province. Hardly the stuff of contemporary writing, which as I've shown was very limited at the time anyway. There are very few contemporary writings of even the most important people of the time, much less of a deemed criminal who rubbed the Sanhedrin the wrong way. But that's easy to test -- cull the contemporary writings of the most important people of the era and see what you get. I'll tell you write now, even Emporers recieved very little contemporary mention. There simply wasn't an industry for producing contemporary texts, like Time Magazine at the time. Face it. The contemporary references to Julius Caesar can fit in a small folder.

cjack · 06-14-2006, 06:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gamera

Well it can fool people, but not for 2000 years.

Why not?

Is there some sort of time limit after which people collectively say "ah, this is fiction!"?

As for the events in the Gospels, it is fairly easy to imagine how fiction or fictionalized history could develop into what some consider unassailable truth over a period of time.

This thread clearly indicates that the contemporary, extra-Biblical evidence for the events surrounding Jesus' life is thin at best. The Biblical evidence was of course promoted by the early church, which didn't really gain serious power until it was lent considerable legitimacy by Constantine.

With the backing of an empire, and in an age prior to printing presses or widespread literacy, it isn't hard to see how fiction could be transformed into history in short order. Add to that a thousand years of near-complete dominance over the written word in the West by a church that frowned upon "alternate" histories or competing religions (to say the least) and the transformation of fiction to history to unassailable truth is complete.

I mean we had a millenium where it wasn't just unfashionable to question the historicity of Jesus, but downright unhealthy, if you take my meaning.

So I don't think it's that people have been "fooled" for 2,000 years into believing the historicity of Jesus by charlatans who knew "the truth" all along, but rather that people have simply had no other option than to accept the Gospel accounts at face value.

Clarice O'C · 06-14-2006, 06:34 PM

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Originally Posted by Gamera

No, the issue is what does the text mean to us. We can never know what some long dead person thought. It's hard to know what you thought yesterday. All we have is texts, not people's minds.

People's minds are where the ideas that make up the texts come from--adding our own thoughts change what the author was trying to say.

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Texts plus readers equal meaning. Authors aren't in the equation.

What the author says can have meaning for us. But we need to try to get at what the author meant.

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On the contrary it is naive to pretend we can know what an author thought. All we have is texts and we have to decide what they mean to us. Even the search for the author's intent is simply an exercise with a text and us, as readers. The author is always absent and cannot arbitrate our conclusions

Again, it's the author's thought that we are reading. We can discern intent, as well.

Etc., below.

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It's not a pretense. Meaning happens when readers read texts, not when long dead authors channel their intents to them. All we have is texts.

Yep, you've just invented an author to make the text meaningful. That's Foucault's point. We constantly invent the author by means of the text. Trust me, the guy who wrote the Gospel of Luke, is long dead. We can't ask him a thing. All we can do is read the text and decide what it means for us, even if that means producing an author we attribute intents to. All of that is our doing and has nothing to do with the long dead Luke.

Clarice O'C · 06-14-2006, 06:46 PM

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Originally Posted by Toto

I have never seen a resolution of this issue. If the docetists write that Jesus walked on water or through walls, and everyone knows that real people do not walk on water or through walls, does this mean that they thought that Jesus was real, but have embellished the story, or that they thought that Jesus was essentially a spirit?

I've read that in the Greek it was, "walked by or beside the sea" and not "walked on the sea."

Where in the gospels does it say that Jesus walked through walls? I don't recall this ... .

aa5874 · 06-14-2006, 06:53 PM

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Originally Posted by Gamera

Well it can fool people, but not for 2000 years. I doubt anybody will know who Hubbard is in 2000 years, and besides, Hubbard isn't writing a hoax, he's writing very strange cosmology.

With Smith, I grant you, it has all the earmarks of a hoax. But it's only been 150 years.

Therefore the Muslim religion , Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism are not hoaxes. Jesus is the child of a Ghost . No Ghost can have children. The entire life of Jesus , the child of a Ghost, is fictitious and no evidence can be found anywhere to verify this Ghost. Ghost can not perform miracles. The Christian Bible is blatant witchcraft.

TomboyMom · 06-14-2006, 07:54 PM

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Originally Posted by Gamera

Well it can fool people, but not for 2000 years.

How do you know?

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I doubt anybody will know who Hubbard is in 2000 years, and besides, Hubbard isn't writing a hoax, he's writing very strange cosmology.

With Smith, I grant you, it has all the earmarks of a hoax. But it's only been 150 years.

See into the future much?

TomboyMom · 06-14-2006, 07:58 PM

Gamera:
There are more than two options: hoax and truth. Chances are that reality is somewhere in between: some combination of grain of truth, exageration, distortion, gullibility, errors in transcription, political decisions about what to include, and on and on.

I'm certainly not arguing that the NT was intended as a hoax--that would require assuming too much; I don't think we can know that much about what was going on in that time and place. However, I would say that there is also not nearly enough evidence to support a belief that it is reliable or true.

Amaleq13 · 06-14-2006, 11:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gamera

The NT has the benefit of being assembled and commented on by those near in time to its production.

Being "assembled" on the basis of faith provides no "benefit" in terms of historical reliability and around a century later isn't terribly "near".

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06-14-2006, 07:58 PM	#489
TomboyMom Contributor Join Date: Jan 2003 Posts: 10,931	Gamera: There are more than two options: hoax and truth. Chances are that reality is somewhere in between: some combination of grain of truth, exageration, distortion, gullibility, errors in transcription, political decisions about what to include, and on and on. I'm certainly not arguing that the NT was intended as a hoax--that would require assuming too much; I don't think we can know that much about what was going on in that time and place. However, I would say that there is also not nearly enough evidence to support a belief that it is reliable or true.

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