Bede

Well, necessary or not, I rather think we are stuck with it. The thing is I think that what HJ studies can show us is extremely modest and Fredriksen is as guilty as anyone else of trying to take it too far. We can know nothing about the kind of guy HJ was, just a few things he did and a few things that happened to him. Often we are just left shrugging our shoulders and unable to progress any further.

I'd suggest a thread at ebla rather than here although I don't know I'll have much to add.

B

Toto

Bede, what fun are you? You can't stake out a position like that and then say it's not worth it and walk away as if you had proven something.

In reply to your last post, you notice the vast difference that modern armament makes in the empowerment of the lone nut. You will also notice that those were cases of a lone gunman committing a crime, not a lone nut with a whip clearing out a shopping mall and not getting arrested.

And you haven't explained the multiple attestation, or how that overrides the implausibility of the story or how it is missing from the earliest sources.

But if you don't want to talk about it, there's nothing I can do.

Toto

On the subject of the title of this thread, is ancient history ultimately subjective?

I don't think that subjective is quite the right word. Your taste in food or music is subjective - no one can criticize you if you pick peach ice cream instead of chocolate cake. (Well, they can, but there is no basis for it. It is all a matter of taste.)

In the case of history, in theory we might discover enough hard evidence so that all reasonable people would have to agree that X event happened or not. But this is rarely the case in ancient history. The evidence is usually indeterminate, indecisive, and/or probably corrupted.

Does this mean that you are free to believe anything you want? I think that where the evidence is equivocal, you are free to put forth one hypothesis or another, and reasonable minds might differ on how probable these hypotheses are, but the only valid stance is agnosticism. I think that this is how much of modern scholarship actually works, which is why you do not see scholars writing books about proving that Jesus existed or not, and why you do see scholars arguing about the text, since the text is the only real artifact that we have.

Vorkosigan

The event is a clear fiction. The space involved was enormous, and heavily guarded. There is simply no way that you can walk into a place like that and create a disturbance with only 12 people without it being quickly put down.

Yes, a quote from the OT. This points up the clear fictionality of the incident -- it is based on that quote.

Error on both counts. The Temple incident is attested only in one set of documents, the canonical gospels, which are all familiar with each other. Mark follows a pattern of creation of the events of Jesus' life out of the OT. The putative oldest layer, Paul, makes no mention of this event. Nor does Josephus.

Reminscent, of course, of the attack on Amos by Amaziah, priest under Jeroboam.

We have a single attestation of an event invented out of the OT. John reminds us that this story is not historical because he had no qualms about shifting it to a different point in Jesus' career, thus destroying Mark's whole story.

How? Explain, please. In what belief system? Connected to what prior literary documents? Symbols also have their own rules and logic, Bede.

The guard was both outnumbered and outranked by the conspirators. And the assassination took place in the Curia of Pompey. Where were the guards?

Do you know any reason to doubt that this event happened? Does it appear in religious writings clearly based on prior religious writings? Barbarians defeated Roman armies on numerous occasions, so clearly there is nothing impossible about it. Further, there were later invasions of Germany by Rome -- including one in which they revisited the area, and Arminius did not "wipe out" the force, he simply destroyed it as an organized military force, killing most of its troops. But there were survivors.

In other words, each time you attempt to compare the mythicist exegesis with other takes on history, you fail miserably.

Vorkosigan

Amaleq13

I don't see why moderator status is relevant.

This is a bit of an exaggeration but I assumed the confidence with which you made your assertion indicated you would have ready answers to the most obvious objections. I'm really disappointed that you completely ignored the ones I consider most problematic for your assertion (ie the missing charge combined with false charges in all versions of the trial). I was looking forward to a rational attempt to address these clearly legitimate issues.

No, you have two possibly independent accounts but they completely disagree with regard to the timing. That really doesn't qualify as "multiple attestation", since they really aren't telling the same story.

GakuseiDon

Slightly OT, but I thought it was a given (i.e. non-controversial) that some of the gospels were arranged topically rather than chronologically? Or is this just an assumption made by apologists?

Vorkosigan

I don't think this is correct. First, Jesus Mythicism is not an "extreme." It is not unusual for historians to argue that religious figures are mythological -- see debates over Confucius, Buddha, Lao-tze, etc. There is nothing extreme methdologically or scholarly; it is only socially radical. Fundamentalism has been common throughout history and is not some divergent extreme from mythicism.

Vorkosigan

Steven Carr

John 2 gives a very clear chronologial reference to when Jesus cleansed the Temple.

This dating is the sort of hard historical information that apologists ignore. They insist the date in John 2 for the cleansing of the Temple is wrong and that it took place years later.

Vorkosigan

Wholly incorrect. The idea that some aspects of the gospels are built out of the OT is widely accepted among NT scholars. The mythicist just asks why NT scholars appear to stop when applying this to certain areas of the gospels, for example, the Temple Trashing and the Crucifixion.

No. If the criteria is sometimes useful but sometimes fails, it may be useful provided one can understand why it succeeds or fails.

Vorkosigan

spin

Bollocks, Rick.

1. The writers of the scrolls were working well before the first century. Pesher Habakkuk carbon-dates to the first century BCE.

2. When those who wrote the scrolls were the temple priesthood -- you know, "sons of Zadok", "sons of Aaron" and "sons of Levi" -- how can they be called a "sect"??

3. The scrolls were stuck in the caves in the first century BCE and they were never reclaimed (despite Schiffman's book). Tell me where there are any allusions to anyone after Aemilius Scaurus. [Omit one long diatribe from me]

Explanatory power is what good novels have.


spin

(I'm plowing through Jodi Magness's facile stupidy aka "The Archaeology of Qumran and the DSS". What a waste of an education. A distinguished professor, indeed.)