jjramsey

And I was pointing out that your refusal to make use of the NT is illegitimate.

It is also irrational to grossly misread a post as you have done. I pointed out that real persons have had myths about them in order to show that you are wrong in saying that the NT must be wholly mythical simply because it contains legendary material.

I suggest that you read through Fallacyfiles.org before you bother posting again. Start with the article on straw man arguments.

achristianbeliever

I don't quite get this. Ok for the sake of this thread I can say all the miracle stories in the Bible are complete myths and still hold on to the position that there was a character who existed named Jesus that the Biblical stories are based on. If I believe all of that then couldn't I say that I believe that Christianity is based on a myth? Or does believing Christianity is a myth depend solely on believing the character of Jesus in the Bible is not based on a real individual?

Irrelevant. Why if I believe Buddha is a historical figure does that mean I have to convert to Buddhism? I do believe Buddha was a real person so I don't get your point. All I was doing was comparing Jesus and Buddha and if the guy I was talking to believed Buddha was historical then by comparison he should believe Jesus is historical. Believing Jesus is historical and converting to Christianity doesn't have to be the same thing.

Ok give me an example of this. This isn't really doing anything to answer my post. All I'm asking is how do you go about deciding whether any person is historical or not. Not just Jesus. I repeat do not just use Jesus as the only example. I'm talking about anyone.

Thaattt some guy lived and influenced a few people and was crucified and died. Your point?

I believe Buddha was historical so you clearly missed the point.

Then give me an example of what extra-biblical evidence would be needed as the minimal requirement for Jesus to be historical. Just be warned once you have done this I'm gonna use this same criteria on other historical figures of the past. Probably at least one from each century.

So? I can for the sake of this thread believe there were no miracles and still hold on to every position I've stated in this thread so far.

Let me guess Josephus, Tacitus, early church fathers, etc. is not what you are looking for. So I need you to help me to help you. Please follow this criteria:

Just give me an example of evidence used to prove the historicity of any figure. NOT JUST JESUS!

I'll help you out. Which of these figures do you consider historical and why?
-Muhammad
-Alexander the Great
-Buddha
-Julius Caesar
-Jesus
-Zeus
-Zoroaster
-Socrates
-other_____________

You don't even have to pick them all. Maybe four would be nice. But please don't just say why Jesus is not historical and what he doesn't have.

dongiovanni1976x

That is a rather myopic methodology for approaching an historical subject. All sources should be analyzed on the merits that they have something to tell us about the past. Paul's agenda doesn't even need to get in the way to see that he mentions Jesus' brother James as a real person, and that Josephus independently attests this as well as Q (Mark). This is enough to establish personhood in antiquity.

The past cannot be empirically proved it can only be constructed. The HJ takes less lego pieces to do so. Mind you this is just to establish that Jesus was a person but not that he was a god or did this or that (that can be a different thread)...all we are talking about is that a real man named Jesus had a brother named James and that three independent sources from antiquity left a literary record of this fact.

aa5874

It is not possible to use the writings of the so-called Paul to verify the historicity of Jesus. Paul is not known, give me extra-biblical evidence for the historicity of Paul. Does Josephus or Tacitus mention Paul. Was Paul really blinded by Jesus, how did this happen? How did Jesus talk to Paul from heaven? Is Paul your extra-biblical evidence of the historicity of Jesus?

dongiovanni1976x

Why would the veracity of Paul's vision on the road to Damascus be a factor as to whether Paul was a real person who wrote to Chrisitan communities around the Mediterranean?
Do you realize that if you applied this kind of scrutiny to many other ancient writers they would literally disappear from the past. There are US civil war soldiers that all we have are their letters without a last name and we cannot confirm their existence independently from the letter but what REASONABLE reason would we have to question such a thing? You have your work cut out for you if you need to assume Paul is mythical too in order for your MJ position to hold water.

Sparrow

No. It seems to me that one could believe in a religion that had purely mythical origins as easily as one founded by a human. It also seems possible that one could disbelieve in a religion while believing either possibility for an origin. That’s four broad possibilities. Christianity could be based on purely mythical origins (Paul’s hallucination for example) that was later connected to a real individual. We don’t know for sure.

You’re right, they don’t. But don’t many Christians cite the incredibly unique stories of Jesus as the reason to believe and practice Christianity?

And I’m saying that all I’ll declare is a likelihood, based on the evidence. You seem to be asking as if this is a black and white question. It’s not. There are characters in historical documents for which we can’t be sure either way. Jesus is one of them

Simply that if we found a newspaper from 30CE with Jesus obituary in it that would not make him the son of a god and the savior of mankind.

So what? Take two if you like. It’s not like it’s gonna cause me to lose eternal life or anything. Is it? You know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I’ve noticed that some Christians seem to be able to hold cognitively dissonant views simultaneously. I was hoping you weren’t one of them.

No thanks. What would turn the tide for most of us is evidence contemporary with the purported life of Jesus (so like prior to 50CE) from someone reliably able to testify to events in his life and surrounding his death, where the document has not been preserved solely by those with a vested interest in the story being true.

Proof is for mathematics. As for your list, they could all be pure fiction and it would not matter one whit.

achristianbeliever

Don't see anything here to disagree with so far.

But that's not what I'm trying to accomplish in this thread. For the purposes of this thread I don't care whether the miracle parts of the Bible are true or not.

Give me an example of another of these characters in historical documents for which we can't be sure either way. Will you do that please?

So all historical characters who don't have an obituary from the period of their death is not considered historical?

Huh? I don't even get this. Whether or not you get eternal life is irrelevant to anything I've said. This thread is only about the existence of historical figures not about the miracle parts of them. As such the existence of a historical figure even Jesus is not an extraordinary claim.

I wasn't aware people were not allowed to look at their beliefs in different ways depending on the circumstances or the questions being asked.

Your absolutely right 100%. There is no document confirming the life of Jesus by someone who didn't have a vested interest in his life being true. But I find that an unacceptable criteria for two reasons.

1. This criteria would also cause many other people from history to be non-historical.
2. Why should I believe it wasn't a criteria merely made for the sole purpose of making sure it was a criteria Jesus couldn't fulfill? If I try hard enough I could create a criteria that you cannot fulfill to make sure you don't exist.
This is why I ask for examples of people from the first few centuries who succeed in this criteria.

You need to show your criteria was not created just for Jesus. Otherwise your criteria non-respectable.

Then your opinion on whether Jesus existed or not doesn't matter one whit either.

RUmike

aa5874 is completely unable to look at the gospel texts without an a priori bias against them. His reasoning and logic are beyond childish, which, if applied to other ancient texts, would render virtually all history obsolete and the historical existence of many persons false. He is so vehemently against the idea of a Jesus at the heart of the Christian religion that no one can take him seriously without questioning motives. He will no doubt respond to this post with a rant about how ghosts can't give birth to ghosts, or how spirits never caused people to have disease or illness. Unfortunately he will probably never realize that his arguments in a historical context are comparable to, if not weaker than, the Christian apologist's arguments in favor of such things.

Sparrow

Well the issue is whether or not the text of 'Paul's' writings are something more like a journal or something more like a novel. The texts were clearly written, but by whom? How many people? When? The scholarly consensus is that some of the Pauline corpus is not from the hand of Paul. That might have an impact on its veracity. We accept as likely that which fits together and makes sense. We reject as unlikely that which doesn't fit or doesn't make sense.

As far as the Civil War soldiers, we only grant them what the letters actually evidence - that they were human, fought in the war, etc. If one of the letters claimed that he had been captured by the other side, tortured, executed and then rose from the dead three days later we might question the authenticity further mightn't we? There's no reason not to believe in things which we have abundant evidence are possible, such as your Civil War soldier. Can you point to some letters home written by first century messiah wannabes?

And from your earlier post:
Except that Q is postulated, not extant and was not Mark's source. The Josephus mentions are questionable. Paul mentions James as 'Brother of the Lord', I think, which may not mean exactly what we read into it with later knowledge and biases. While I have said many times that I lean to the mythicist side, I really don't think we can know for sure without some new evidence.

dongiovanni1976x

Do you contest that Galatians was penned by Paul? As an historian, knowing the likelyhood of someone raising from the dead is the least of all possibilities, if a cult started from this letter where the person "rose from the dead" then we could rationalize how such a claim came to be but that would not mean that we would assume that this person was never real.


In a world where no more than 10 percent of the population was literate and so far removed from our own I think that would be difficult.

Mark is a source, I only said Q in relation to a citation from Earl Doherty who tied it to Mark in order to show that Mark was NOT copy from Paul.
I am not talking about the Flavian Testimony but the refence to James which is widely accepted. I get the feeling that if there was another source the same would be said of it that it is "questionable". Remember all we are trying to establish was whether James had a brother named Jesus.

Paul believed that Jesus was the Lord so that is not unusual to have him say such a thing...again, all we are examining is whether it is credible to assert that James had a brother and given that we have 3 independent sources that corroborate each other- and mind you this is in ANTIQUITY- we can conclude with a high degree of certainty that such a person did exist. As to what he did or said- hell that is another story for another thread.