Originally Posted by mountainman

According to the iterative process I have diagramized, exploring the positive historicity hypothesis implies setting the hypothesis that "Jesus existed in history" as provisionally true, and then examining all other evidence, and all other hypotheses about all other evidence using this hypothesis. Exploring the negative historicity hypothesis implies setting the hypothesis that "Jesus did not exist in history" as provisionally true, and then examining all other evidence, and all other hypotheses about all other evidence using this hypothesis.

Originally Posted by mountainman

The intended meaning was to be able to uniquely specify your own preferred formulation of your own hypothesis (related to whether Paul is to be considered a genuine and authentic historical character) in a manner which is explicit when set alongside other competing hypotheses of other posters, theorists and investigators.

Originally Posted by Toto

..... The surviving evidence relating to Christian origins is pathetically sparse. That is why the methodology for evaluating it looms so large.....

Originally Posted by sulla1 at historum

A fascinating question, Jack; thanks for asking

History's method is quasi-scientific; more exactly, it is as scientific (rigorous) as it can possibly be, given its particular circumstances.

Given that strict scientific methodology (i.e. up to double blind controlled trials plus metanalyses) is inherently impossible for History, the postulates of the historical hypotheses (often miscalled "theories") are subject to what is often called "mental experiements", in a nutshell rigorously controlled "what-if" speculation.

The traditional scientific methodology is reversed in one critical point; the results of the "mental experiment" (i.e. the present conditions of the issue at hand) are known in advance; it is the "methodology" of such process which is trying to be logically induced from such results.

In fact, the results are essentially the only potentially truly objective part of the process; ergo, extreme rigor is required for recording such results.

The process as a whole is superficially similar to pure philosophical research, given the ostensible relevance of logical reasoning (actually shared by any scientific discipline).

The critical difference is that, contrary to pure philosophical research and analogous to any scientific discipline, the method of History is restricted by the regular rules of evidence; the core falsifiable criteria of Popper are required too.

Even if in principle any past may be considered "History" in practice it is regularly restricted fundamentally to the study of the recorded (basically written) development of humankind; ergo, it is no surprise that the History method so often tends to overlap with the methodology of several other Humanities, notably anthropology and sociology.

For example, there are myriad hypotheses on the Fall of the Roman Empire.

All of them naturally begin from the easily verifiable hard fact that the Roman Empire doesb't survive to this day... or mostly, because some institutions like the Catholic and Orthodox churches ostensibly evolved directly form remnants of such empire. Such survival (i.e. one of the objective results of the process) even if limited, couldn't be ignored for any valid hypotheses on this process.

Besides, even the most superficial review will show how problematic the lack of consensus on the very definition of the studied results of this process may be, i.e. the "Fall"; some authors are ostensibly talking about the fall of the city of Rome, some others about the political conquest of the Roman empire by alien invaders, some other of the social collapse of the Western half of the empire, some others about the end of the Classical civilization as a whole, and so on.

More explicitly related to the "mental experiments" of the methodology of historical research, plenty of the purported explanations on why the Western Roman Empire "fell" are plainly unviable, simply because they fail to explain why did the Eastern side survived to the same process; the evidence of such survival (the results of such process) is still relevant and verifiable to this very day.

Hope this stuff may be helpful

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

I didn't say you were ignoring evidence.

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

I think it more likely that Paul really existed than that he did not exist. That hypothesis, in my judgment, underlies the most parsimonious accounting of all the extant evidence relevant to the provenance of the documents generally referred to as the Pauline Corpus.