Steven Carr

And any account of the life of the second gunman who fired at JFK and Connolly must be corroborated by a source external of the conspiracy theorists.

A maxim which would be scoffed at and ridiculed by Biblical scholars...

bacht

To be fair there isn't a lot for scholars to work with. The hypothesis that Jesus was a real person isn't unreasonable on the face of it. But it's not the only starting point.

Either way it looks like a conspiracy theory: either there was a real Jewish guy who started the whole thing but got buried under later theology, or there never was a real guy but he was invented later.

Vinnie

Source criticism generally comes before reconstruction. There are many who find indications of reliability in some early Christian writings and I doubt any competant historian would actually reconstruct much from them. There is some stuff we can know, the rest is suspended judgment.

Vinnie

I think I have a better understanding of what the gospel material is and isn't than you and I have no bias towards or against it. Again you offer caricature. I don't use "the gospels". I would use tradition embedded within them, especially before the passion narrative where it is easily taken out as discrete units, found independently in other streams of thought. I would also use a host of other material. That there was not a Jesus behind all this material when complexed and showing how much material is attributed to him is plain silly. The best way to account for the data occurring so far and so wide is by an actual ministry with some oral preaching by his immediate followers. Not invention by Mark in the 70's that spread all over the empire in an unprecedented time period. There are whole streams of Jesus though both in common and not found in Mark independently in the Christian corpus.

Vinnie

Steven Carr

Where is this 'host' that is 'so far and so wide', which had 'spread all over the empire' by ,say, 70 AD?

I'm a bit confused what you mean.

bacht

This is religion. We don't know about Buddha either (or Moses)

I didn't think we had enough evidence to determine how rapidly Christianity spread in the early centuries.

Roger Pearse

It is important, I agree, not to try to speak with authority on matters about which one knows nothing. I try not to, myself.

Indeed so: I believe that texts were transmitted from antiquity, that history is possible to do in a scholarly manner, and that personal bias should be avoided where possible, and that no-one is well-served by obscurantism or getting the plain facts wrong.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

driver8

This is in my opinion an unfortunate fallacy. Personal bias cannot and should not be avoided. Personal bias is nothing more than the accumulation of experience and knowledge applied to the subject at hand. We all have a bias. Its the quality of the arguments that is relevant.

My own personal bias of chemistry, physics, and engineering tells me that man created god, that any concept of god is a more complex solution than the problem it purports to solve, and that any and all god concepts are unsupported by any credible data. If you can supply counter arguments to these issues, I will adjust my personal bias to account for the possibility of a god. Until then, my bias will guide me towards trying to understand this issue absent a divine influence.

lpetrich

Roger Pearse, why don't you provide us with some details?

Otherwise, your claims will be dismissed as unsupported.

To continue with that metaphor, they also seem reluctant to check out the methods of builders of similar sorts of structures.

Check out what the Church of Scientology says about Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, and compare it to what those outside of it say. The CoS makes LRH seem like a great scientific genius and adventurer and benefactor and all-around hero, while outside sources make LRH seem VERY different.

The difficulty with Jesus Christ is like the difficulty that we would have with the origins of Scientology if we had no outside accounts of LRH. Especially if it was some centuries in the future and the CoS version got stories like how some psychiatrists had tried to kill LRH when he was a baby.

:notworthy:

spin

No teddy bear for that little shot in the dark.

I should spell them out for you. Your motivation is consistently apologetic in nature, often manifested in half-arsed putdowns couched in such general terms that you don't say anything clear enough to show that you know what you are talking about, but clear enough to show your bias. Case in point is the initial quote of your in this post. It claims that you know something about historical methodology though you consistently show you don't.

Vague enough to say nothing much.

Vague enough to say nothing much.

Which you've shown you're not able to live up to.

You could be right here.


spin