tanya

My apologies. Yes, it was unclear.

I hope this will be better.

I cited Mark 1:1 from Codex Sinaiticus, to highlight the fact that some folks in ancient times, felt that just two initials were sufficient to specify a person, i.e. they did not need to even spell out his name. These nomina sacra have been issues of debate here, in the past, as one learns using the search engine of the forum, but, I have no desire to revisit those issues, I was simply trying to illustrate an example, from ancient times, where people were quite content to signal a particular individual, simply by reference to a pair of initials alone.

You had offered an opinion that writing "Jesus" alone, was insufficient to distinguish WHICH Jesus we were discussing, so I thought it might be constructive to highlight an instance where folks a couple of millenia ago, felt confident enough about audience comprehension of the issues under discussion, that they did not even bother to write out Jesus the annointed, and instead simply wrote I X, with a couple of lines over the two letters....

J-D

I see no reason to think that they did expect the two initials, by themselves, to be enough to specify their meaning, but even if they did it doesn't necessarily follow that they were correct.

The rules of this board prevent two users from having the same screen-name, so on this board two initials are sufficient to specify me. More generally, however, the question 'which JD are you talking about?' is a completely legitimate one, and 'everybody knows which JD we're talking about' is not an adequate answer: the fact that the question is being posed makes it clear that is not so. mountainman may know (although, in fact, I doubt this) which 'Jesus' 'a's talking about, and maybe some other posters also know which 'Jesus' mountainman is talking about (although it's also possible that they only mistakenly think they know), but I genuinely do not know which 'Jesus' mountainman is talking about, and there's no way for me to know if mountainman continues to insist on refusing to explain.

tanya

Thanks, J-D. Yes, I can appreciate that sometimes we can be sloppy in our presentations, and I am grateful to you for your precision...

I hope you will not find it improper etiquette, for me to reply to your point, above.

Mountainman, referring to "Jesus", is discussing the same person, EXACTLY the same person, referred to in Codex Sinaiticus Mark 1:1. That is, to write, I X, with two superscript bars above the I and X. That person, iesous the anointed, is the same person, described by Mountainman, as "Jesus".

J-D

That's no answer at all. I've already pointed out that two initials are not sufficient to define the meaning of a reference unambiguously. The citation of a verse from a codex is only sufficient if there's already an established unambiguous meaning for the term as used in that verse, and there isn't. Just as I don't know what mountainman means by 'Jesus', I don't know what the verse you cite means by those two initials.

mountainman

The second part of this statement is clearly false because I have provided at least one statement and context by which Jesus is to be specified. We start with the general claim that any given manuscript from antiquity must have had an author, in exactly the same general manner that we have discussed the Pauline letters. The general principle (which you yourself have pointed out quite clearly) is that one of the hypotheses which may be drawn from historical authorship scenario, is that the author of a manuscript (e.g. letter) may be considered to be a real historical person. Among the evidence for the existence of Jesus is that tendered in the 4th century by the church historian Eusebius, who asserts in his history that he had found "in the archives" a letter authored by Jesus and sent to King Agbar of Edessa.

If we provisionally accept this evidence as evidence for the existence of an historical author called Jesus in the same manner that that we may do for Paul, then we have uniquely specified a hypothetically historical figure called Jesus. Corroborative statements supporting the existence of this same hypothetically historical figure called Jesus are to be found all throughout:

1) the "Church History"
2) the new testament literature (e.g. Codex Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, etc)
3) the (ancient and modern) scholarly treatments of the above.

Jesus is the one hypothetically historical figure referenced in the above sources.

mountainman

The nonoccurence of events is said to provide negative evidence

The argument that the understanding of negative evidence is not only relevant, but also quite instrumental, in the understanding of the history of christian origins relies on the fact that at least some of the events described within the context of christian origins did not in fact occur, and that at least some of the people described within the context of christian origins did not in fact exist in history.

Happy Saturnalia to all!

J-D

The problem is not that you have failed to give at least one specification; the problem is that you have failed to give exactly one specification. Instead, you have given several different specifications, and refused to commit yourself definitely to discussing just one at a time. What results is repeated instances of the fallacy of equivocation.I don't have a problem with that, subject to the qualification that by 'an author' (itself, like all expressions of the form 'an X' or 'a Y', potentially ambiguous) what is meant is 'at least one author' (multiple authorship being a common enough phenomenon).

The inclusion of the qualification 'from antiquity' is unnecessary (since the same is true of all manuscripts from all periods) but does no harm.I don't know why you call it a 'hypothesis'. If you want to leave open the possibility that there might be a manuscript without any author, I would like to know why. Do you seriously consider that to be a possibility?If we do that, then we are making a mistake. The text known as 'the letter to Abgar' must have been composed by somebody, but so far I have seen no reason to suppose that the name of that author was 'Jesus'. On this point, I have seen no reason to accept Eusebius's say-so, incorrect attributions of authorship being common enough, and no evidence having been presented to justify accepting an attribution by Eusebius in this instance.To adopt as our definition of 'Jesus' the specification 'the author of the letter to Abgar' strikes me as aberrant. It's quite clearly not what most people ever mean by 'Jesus', since most people have never even heard of 'the letter to Abgar', and if we need a term to refer to the author of the letter to Abgar, it seems clearer to me simply to use that description.

Also, unless you are going to insist that it's possible for a text to exist without an author, we know that there was an author of 'the letter to Abgar'. The authorship of that text is a reasonable subject of historical inquiry for those who may be interested (it doesn't much interest me), but the serious historical question about the authorship is not 'did the author really exist?'No, they aren't. The New Testament does not in any way corroborate the hypothesis that somebody wrote a letter to Abgar. The only way you can make the New Testament into evidence relevant to the existence of an author of a letter to Abgar is by equivocating the meaning of the term 'Jesus', at one point having it mean 'the author of the letter to Abgar' and at another point having it mean something else.That can only be the case if in fact those sources do refer to just one historical figure--but that point is emphatically not established.

mountainman

References to a person, historical or otherwise, called "jesus" occurs 983 times in 942 verses in the KJV according the Blueletter Bible

Most analysts consider that these 983 references to Jesus are 983 references to the one Jesus, not 983 references to 983 different Jesi. When Eusebius named Jesus as the author of the Agbar Letter, he was referring to the same Jesus he had earlier made reference to in his history.

J-D

Jesi? What the hell are Jesi? Can you try to stick to one language at a time, please?

If you want to stipulate that you are using the term 'Jesus' to mean an individual of whom every one of those references in the New Testament is a true statement, and stick to that definition, then, necessarily, any reason to reject the truth of any one of those statements is also a reason to reject the view that there was a 'Jesus' as so defined. But it's clear to me that many people use the term differently, in such a way that rejection of some of those statements is compatible with continuing to assert the existence of a 'Jesus'.

Some people may perhaps find it instructive to compare with another example, Alexander the Great. In the case of Alexander the Great, as I understand it, there is a significant amount of information about Alexander the Great which is accepted by historians as established historical fact: for example, that he was the acknowledged heir apparent to the throne of Philip II of Macedon and served as an officer in his army and as regent during some of his absences from the kingdom; that he succeeded to the throne on Philip's death, suppressed anti-Macedonian Greek risings, and was recognised as leader of a Greek alliance for the invasion of the Persian Empire; that he defeated the armies of the Persian Empire in a series of battles and claimed to succeed the Achaemenid dynasty as King of Kings; that he died at Babylon on a date which according to modern calendrical conventions fell in the year designated 323 BCE. If these and other statements are accepted as established historical facts, they form a description which can be used as a definition of what is meant by 'Alexander the Great', a description which one and only one historical figure matches. Given that definition, it becomes possible to say meaningfully that other recorded statements whose accuracy is not equally accepted are nevertheless statements about 'Alexander the Great', as so defined, and to discuss whether they are true of him. Given that definition, for example, it is meaningful to say it is to him that allegations of death by poisoning refer, whether they are true or not (and therefore to discuss whether they might be true), and likewise meaningful to say that legends of divine or magical paternity refer to him, even though (if we adhere to naturalism) they can't be true.

But in the context of a discussion where the accuracy of every single recorded statement naming 'Alexander the Great' was disputed, that would no longer be the case. The supernatural legends about Alexander the Great can legitimately be described as being about him and also as being false about him only on the basis of consensus about the truth of a core of statements about him which uniquely identify him.

Now in this discussion, as far as I know, there are no statements about 'Jesus' for which there is no challenge to their historical truth. In the context of a discussion like that, there is not a sufficient agreed description to provide a definition for what the term 'Jesus' means, and that means that any questions which are framed as if 'Jesus' is a meaningful term suffer referential failure and so cannot be meaningfully answered. In that kind of discussion, any questions have to be framed in a different way if they're going to make sense at all.

mountainman

These 983 stubs of reference still remain in the evidence, and they all point to one figure who either existed in history or did not.

One reason for this is that many people simply assume Jesus must have been an historical figure, and continue to assert this hypothesis until it is disproven.


The hypothesis "Alexander the Great existed in history" and the hypothesis "Alexander the Great did not exist in history" are thus both entertainable according to your above scenarios. Ditto for Jesus.



In the case that we are assuming as provisionally true the hypothesis that Jesus existed there is not necessarily any referential failure between the hypothetical existence of Jesus and the 983 references which provide the description of Jesus in the NT. (We can add more refences from the "Fathers").

In the case that we are assuming as provisionally true the hypothesis that Jesus did not exist in history, there is also not necessarily any referential failure because we may be seeking to explain the 983 NT references and the "Church Fathers xxxx references" on the basis that they are at least in part if not in whole negative evidence - events which did not happen in history, and people who did not exist in history.