Boro Nut

We understand it all too well. It's a pity the Pope doesn't. Only infallible sometimes = erm.... No. It's fallible or infallible all the way down I'm afraid. No inbetweenies.

There's a reason why they call it papal bull.

Boro Nut

aa5874

This is most interesting. I don't think there is any intermediate state between real and unreal, unless you believe in the Jesus of the NT.

Solo

He is from God and he is going to send some albino after you if you don't stop your blasphemies.

Jiri

mountainman

You state a good case but without a summation.
What follows?

spin

But then, it's not evidence, it's data.

Would you care to elucidate?

When you are in no position to know what you know in any tangible sense, I can't see your attempted escape is convincing.

Plausibility is the food for lots of animals. A lot of fiction is built upon it. Tom Clunky. The Da Vinci Crud. Being plausible, or fitting, is not a sufficient criterion for anything other than feeling like you've got something under your control. The world unfortunately is provisional. There are lots of things you'll never get under your control, yet you'll still need to handle some of it.

You nonchalantly trotted out the purple passages in Tacitus and Josephus, as though we hadn't had any discussion about their veracity. You seem to ignore the old dictum of whoever controls the present controls the past. A historian has to interact with the sources in an effort to know them enough to use them wisely. You have little opportunity to interact with the gospels because of the nature of them as sources and your inability to know for sure which piece represents which writer; you can't establish any reality for the central figures in the works.

Frameworks and fits are not sufficient. I'll match your framework and fit with those of a non-existent non-mythical Jesus and I don't think you'll have any way of logically choosing between the two for accountability.

It's better to "sit on" data that can't be meaningfully dealt with. It means that you neither accept or reject it, so it can be used if its status changes.

What would you like to do with them?

Vaguely. Would you like to see an allusion to Jesus's death in Petronius? How would you test the possibility? Ask him?


spin

spin

It's a matter of evidence to me. There is not enough to conclude that there was, or was not, a man behind the Jesus tradition. If I neither accept nor reject Jesus's reality, I'm in a position to know what to do with the data if its status changes with new information. (If I can't get beyond this position with the knowledge we have, then I can't see how others can either, meaning to me all the constructs built upon the religion are without tangible basis.)


spin

spin

The mythical case is built on the notion that the followers of the religion knew Jesus as the Greeks knew Dionysus or the Cilicians knew Mithras. This Jesus was not a type who interacted in this world, unlike Mark's Jesus, Lucian's Alexander or Tertullian's Ebion.

The historical case for Jesus presented here has had nothing to do with evidence that Jesus existed, but with what believers believed of Jesus. What they believed doesn't suggest that he was seen as a mythical or non-worldly entity. That doesn't get us any closer to a real Jesus, but it doesn't help the mythical case either. Jesus didn't seem mythical to his believers.

At the same time vast conspiracies are not the fertilizer for religions. When, for example, Constantine opened the flood gates to christianity, it was more out of necessity than out of manipulation. The Mithras/Sol Invictus cause was lost in comparison. We have religion dictating rather than dictators. Constantine just wanted to be in control of it.

Fiction as raw material for a religion doesn't work. People don't believe in what they know to be fiction.

Tertullian obviously didn't believe that Ebion was fiction. However, at some stage before his time a non-existent Ebion came into existence and I think it was through speculation that it happened. It's the trajectory of such a jump that interests me with regard to the Jesus religion. What does the speculation of a Mithras, who had been and was coming back at the eschaton, combined with a Jewish messiah produce? (Mithras after all was very popular in Paul's Cilicia at the time of Pompey.)

I don't propose this as the explanation, but as -- to me -- a better fit.


spin

aa5874

I also move with the data, but I have not seen any data to move my position.

Chris Weimer

Luckily for you, I never said anything about plausibility. That's your own term you introduced. I said probability. Plenty is plausible, not so much probable.

There was never a convincing case for forgery in Tacitus.

Again, rubbish. Just because you can't doesn't mean others can't and haven't.

Try me.

Status changes all the time? So what? If tomorrow we discover a document of the Flavians admitting their guilt to the creation of the gospels, than Joe Atwill is right, and we switch positions. Until then, I'm where the evidence took me. I don't care that you're not there, but you have an incredibly difficult time imagining that anyone can be somewhere where you cannot be. Get over it.

From your response, I can't tell if you have a clue about what I mentioned.

Hardly. Get up to date, spin. The Petronian Question is quite larger than a mere possible allusion to Jesus' death.

spin

Fitting is about plausibility.

Given that you're convinced, you're right.

You mean you've got more than what you've shown on this forum?

Let's see the unexpergated framework and fit that I need to mathc.

Nowhere.

If you had something to justify your position, then you haven't shown it.

From your response I haven't got a clue why you are so aggressive.

If you want to say something, please do. Don't just allude to your knowledge. I cannot read your mind, so if you would like to say something about the relevance of cargo cults, feel free to be clear.

You did notice the operative word, Chris, "vaguely".

Be constructive: help me get up to date with what about it is "quite larger". Once you've done that, you might be able to show what the precise relationship between the two corpuses is.


spin