Roger Pearse

I agree. But wishful thinking is a powerful thing, for those who don't have much self-scepticism.

Cheerful Charlie

This is the way Roger does these things and has been for years, What you see is what you get.

All of them.
No ending to Mark, thus all made up their own resurrection stories, naturally no two 'facts' agree.There was known details about the early life of Christ. Matthew and Luke made up lies to fill that gap. Too bad they are utterly incompatible tall tales. No gospel writer had any compunction about changing stories taken from Mark for their own purposes.
Lies about miracle working powers, John 14:12-14, Mark 11 et al.
Wheeeeee! So many lies! What were the names of his apostles and how did he come by them. More contradictory tall tales. Jesus is God?Trinitarianism. Later, verses were added to the gospels where there was no evidence for that. The tale of the woman taken in adultery is not in the early copies of John and in some manuscripts was added to Matthew.
The tale in Luke of Peter running to the tomb after the 5 or more women told them of the empty tomb was a later addition, not in early manuscripts. And so on and so on.

Where did I say that? I do in fact think Jesus existed and was historical. Just that the tall tales of the gospels are a pack of lies. We can know little about Jesus except he was but one of many alleged messiahs of that age, and he came from Galilee, and was executed by crucifiction, exact reasons unknown. He preached the coming of judgement day and new heavenly order to come on us in that time, that generation, in the life time of the high priest at Jerusaelm. That did not in fact, happen.

Anything much more is conjecture.

CC

Cheerful Charlie

Again. Did any ancient Christian visit Jerusalem, and write down hist houghts on what he had seen and heard from the life of Jesus so many, many years ago? If not, WWI veterans 109 years old are irrelevant to the truth of the gospels.

Why do all these gosples contradict each other so wildly?

CC

Sauron

Let me get to the point of this quickly: I didn't see the original statement that you made. When you didn't answer my question the first time, it looked like you were ducking it. Thanks for re-posting that statement.

I'm satisfied that you provided a metric. Apologies for the confusion.

:redface:

aa5874

I believe the other posters probably have you on ignore. It is likely that they don't buy your line of thinking.

jjramsey

Actually, in Samuel Sandmel's article "Parallelomania," his opening example is that of a French book that purported parallels between the epistle to the Romans and the Book of Wisdom, and then goes on to define parallelomania as "that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction." There is nothing about parallelomania that confines it to comparisons between the Bible and Hellenistic literature, and Sandmel himself goes on to discuss "the areas of rabbinic literature and the gospels, Philo and Paul, and the Dead Sea Scrolls and the NT."

Gamera

The same methodology historians use to determine the historicity of any purported historical event:

(1) The existence of texts that narrate the events.
(2) The purported temporal proximity of those texts to the events narrated.
(3) The temporal proximity of the mss of those texts to the events narrated.
(4) The genre of those texts and the biases of the authors.
(5) The consistency of the historical matrix in those texts with anxillary texts.
(6) The consistency of those texts with archeological evidence.
(7) The consistency of subsequent historical events to the events narrated.

Applying these criteria it appears that what we mean by "historicity" includes one Jesus Christ being crucified under the rule of one Pontius Pilate.

Now, perhaps our standards and methodologies are flawed. In which case, do you have some other methodology and standards you want to propose? If so, do so, so that we can apply them to what we mean by historicity to see if your methodology and standards are useful, or if they essentially efface history as we know it. I fear the latter is the case.

Toto

Well, no. Applying those criteria, we have texts, but they were written well after the events described; the genre is unique, but the texts are not presented as neutral histories; the biases of the authors shriek to high heaven; the texts have no historical matrix to fit into; there is no supporting archeological evidence, and subsequent historical events do not flow from the events narrated. (There is no record of a Christian church until well after the time described in these documents.)

You can only accept these as history if you ignore most of the common sense criteria that anyone would use to judge historical accuracy.

Sauron

Any historical event?

Mere existence of texts does not demonstrate historicity. Nor does a lack of texts invalidate a historical event, if other lines of evidence exist instead;

this is not a valid criterion. Nobody uses the alleged temporal proximity. The only thing that (sometimes) counts is the demonstrated temporal proximity.

OK.

*If* the auxiliary texts used for comparison are themselves of good reliability.

You left out:

1. consilience with other lines of non-mss evidence, including (but not limited to) archaeology, as you mention above;

2. consilience with what we know about the natural world (i.e., any manuscript describing centaurs is rejected, no matter how close in time it was written to the alleged event);

3. Internal consistency of the text and freedom from manufacture, editing, or redaction.

Chris Weimer

Apologies quite accepted. Accidents happen. :wave: