skepticdude

Why? Do i also need to "show" that friends who lie all the time probably shouldn't be trusted?

So what? the COE was never set forth to vanquish uncertainty, but only to help, in conjunction with other criteria, to help a historian form a probability judgment.

skepticdude

I developed that argument further a little later, you can sometimes have been justified to hold a viewpoint that is later shown to be false.

Investigators are immediately suspicious when woman is murdered and they find out her husband stands to gain 2 million in insurance because of it.

According to your logic, such investigators are stupid, because being a beneficiary doesn't automatically mean one has murdered the person who was insured.

Where did I say you said this? I didn't, I was showing how YOUR LOGIC LEADS to such absurd reasoning. None of the other criteria of historicity historians use leads to confirmed assured results, what's to stop you from dispensing with those other subjective rules too?

Don't confuse yourself. I'm expecting you shortly to deny the usefulness of the criteria of embarrassment because it doesn't supply you with a videotape of events from the first century.

It has proven true in my life many times. I have met plenty of people who admitted embarrassing things which I was able to verify through police records or background searches or talks with relatives/friends, etc. This shows the embarrassing stuff has more liklihood of being correct.

I have never met anybody who made false embarrassing claims about themselves. I therefore have the perfect right to believe that people are more likely to be telling the truth when they admit something embarrassing to themselves or their cause, and less likely to be telling the truth if they never admit embarrassing things.

How much trust do you put in the kind of person that never admits to their limtations/faults/shortcomings/failures, or other embarrassing facts, even when they have opportunity to do so?

aa5874

But, if they told you lies that were embarrassing you would believe. Some people may have used that technique, they may have lied and said embarrassing about what others did to them and may have become very rich and have literally destroyed others with embarrassing lies that were believed to be true.

Well, name one instance where it has helped a historian when the veracity was uncertain.

You just can't.

skepticdude

But since nobody, except you, has claimed that the critiera of embarrassment "resolves" anything, nobody will find your statement of the obvious to call for discussion. Do you know any historian who thinks he possesses "facts" after he applies the criteria of embarrassment to an ancient story? I don't, and I'd never go looking for one, since nobody ever claimed that application of this criteria yielded facts in the first place.

skepticdude

That's fair enough, but the gospels seem to go far enough to call for blind faith, which would be perfect to place in the mouth of Jesus if the story his promoters told wasn't true at all:

"Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed." (John 20:29)

I believe there was a historical Jesus, whose life was embellished.

skepticdude

You said application of the criteria of embarrassment to a false rape statement would make the statement true "without a doubt".

That is false, since you have already been told, several times, that the criteria of embarrassment, indeed no historical criteria, can produce a certain conclusion about the truth or lack thereof in any testimony, and you have also been told, several times, that criteria can be defeated if other evidence is more weighty and calls for a different conclusion. The only idiot who saddles historical critiera with the job of producing certain results is you. Everybody else already knew historiography didn't do that.

False, his own statement deliberately left the door open to the possibility that he was an asshole. Applying the criteria of embarrassment here would only yield the tentative conclusion that he is an asshole toward YOU. So what?

Well next time try paying attention instead of disguising your fuck up with a lame attempt at wit.

skepticdude

Where did I say I assume this? I said IF one assume Markan priority...what part of IF don't you understand?

I didn't say there was no resurrection narrative in Mark 16. I said there was no resurrection APPEARANCE-narrative. That is correct. Our canonical text of Mark today does not include any stories about Jesus appearing to anybody. An angel saying Jesus is risen is not an appearence narrative. The other three canonical gospels have stories of Jesus appearing TO other people, and so they have appearence narratives.

Pay attention.

aa5874

This is getting real embarrassing, but I wont apply the criterion of embarrassment to your statement.

You really do not have anything to contribute.

skepticdude

Not at all, the criteria of embarrassment was never declared by historians to be the end-all-be-all of truth-discovery you fallaciously keep insisting it is. Your entire argument against the COE is a strawman.

Nobody ever said all embarrassing statements are absolute indicators of truth, and Abe already told you that this criteria could be trumped, since of course, someone COULD concievably tell an embarrassing story that was false.


Most of the Jesus-Seminar scholars are to some degree skeptical of the historical trustworthiness of the bible, and they use the criteria of embarrassment all the time to help them with regard to scripture text the veracity of which they regard as uncertain. What, you didn't know that?

skepticdude

nn