ApostateAbe

I created a thread titled, "Jesus skepticism and 'postmodernism,'" and I accidentally put it in the Philosophy forum, and maybe that is the best place for it anyway, except that it was intended for the members of the BC&H. Here it is:

http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=286418

Toto

I think this is a dead end. Those you call "Jesus skeptics" are no more or less "post-modern" than Jesus historicists.

But you might want to read Alan Wolfe's The Opening of the Evangelical Mind to understand more about evangelical scholarship, and how evangelical Christians function in the modern university.

ApostateAbe

Cool, thanks, I will read it, and I am glad to know that you believe that neither side in the debate is any more postmodernist than the other. Do you agree with my general conclusion that postmodernism doesn't really have much of a place in matters of objective reality such as Christian history?

Toto

If you look at the field labled "New Testament Studies" you will find very few scholars who claim that they can discern objective reality. All they have are the texts, and they spend their time analyzing the texts without making any grandiose claims that they can discover accurate history from the texts.

So I don't know what you mean by objective reality.

ApostateAbe

OK, just to clarify, "objective reality" is the way things really were. If you were to travel backward through time with a time machine and interview people with a camera, you would reveal objective reality. Well, maybe that doesn't clarify things for you, though it seems clear enough in my mind. I disagree with you on the point that there are very few scholars who claim that they can discern objective reality, but I prefer not to argue about what scholars generally think. As always, I am simply glad to have your perspective.

Toto

OK, I know what you think you mean by objective reality, but I don't think any ancient historians are at all as confident as you about our ability to recover it.

mountainman

Another method involves FTL (faster than light) travel in which the events which were illuminated in the past are still travelling out into the universe in a "light cone". In theory, if you are able to overtake this light, and then aim a very powerful "Hubble telescope arrangement" back at the source of the events in the past, then you would be able to "see them re-enacted". The analogy is like overtaking the concentric waves on a pond. However my opinion at present is that if such "time travel" were possible, and someone decided to go back into antiquity to "Look for Jesus" they would not find him until the fourth century.

I think that it would be commendable for Christian explorers in time to want to go back to the first century and rescue Jesus from the cross. After all, if Jesus saved us, why cant we save Him. With a time machine perhaps we could rescue Jesus. Unfortunately, I think that these people - in such a scenario - wont find him at all in the first three centuries, because He was a Copy/Paste job and fabricated in an imperial scriptoria much later.


This may be related to the inconclusive nature of the "all the available evidence" and the fact that much of it is "ambiguous". Additionally, much of the evidence that has any direct bearing on the questions surrounding an historical Jesus and the manuscripts of "Early Christianity" have been held, very tightly and very despotically, in the clutching hypocritical hands of the various denominations of "Christian Churches".

I dont think that there would be too many ancient historians who would not perceive the real difficultly of recovering documents from the Vatican Archives for example. Recovering documents from the Vatican Archives may in fact assist ancient historians greatly in being able to reconstruct a picture of the first four centuries of "Early Christianity". But do you think the Vatican officials are going to permit this blatant act of academia? Of course not, since more than history is s stake. The "Church Business" is at stake and the Vatican is not going to jeapodise their ongoing revenues by admitting academic analysis of their manuscript archives.

darstec

Even then with the cameras you would not necessarily have objective reality. The picture would be open to interpretation. Think of how many movies we see an actor fall off a ten story building and it turns out the fall is ten inches.

A prime example is an event commemorated on May 4 at Kent State University something with which I was intimately acquainted. Research was completed by such an august organization as the FBI. But their report was nothing but a piece of rubbish. Why? Because they never interviewed the proper witnesses. Besides that eye witnesses are the least reliable part of any trial.

The best that could be said is that there are multiple and different objective realities in any given situation. A parallel to the bible is James Mitchner's book on the KSU massacre. It was as much fiction as his other fictions but he proffered it as non fiction.

ApostateAbe

I think I see what you mean. Do you think it is ever appropriate to judge one claim of objective reality as "superior" to another?

aa5874

It is completely and absolutely false that eye witnesses are the least reliable part of any trial. Such a statement is the probably the most ridiculous and illogical that I have seen.

I beg of you do not let a police officer be an eyewitness of things that may be wrong. You may not even survive.

When a police officer WITNESSES certain things people end up dead and there is not even a trial.