spin

Occam's Razor is a best fit argument, which I've already conceded! Best explanations don't reflect anything but their ability to explain best. Being the best explanation doesn't make the explanation correct.


spin

Tangent

Unlike the HJ position tho, someone DOES have evidence your cat exists (you).

Now say there were stories of an unknown and unowned cat being loose in the neighbourhood. The stories you've heard about the "cat" seem to be unrelated stories referencing different, similar looking cats that belong to your neighbours.

Would you say the "evidence" points towards the existence of this unknown, unowned cat that shares the properties of all of the neighbourhood cats or against it?

Gamera

Given the various texts, particularly the Pauline texts in relationship to the 4 gospels, I would say the evidence is strong that there was a man called Jesus, who preached a doctrine more or less paraphrased in the gospels, and that his followers believed that he rose from the dead.

We have more textual evidence of that than we do of Socrates and his views, and I'm pretty sure Socrates existed and said more or less what Plato said he said (though clearly less tendentiously).

I don't quite know what you mean by claiming the parables are ahistorical. The parables are spoken by Jesus and are a teaching tool. Nobody claims (not even Jesus) that the parables are meant as factual accounts of anything. Perhaps you're saying that Jesus didn't relate the parables and they were added later? There is no evidence of that one way or another.

Gamera

It would but we have multiple texts relating to Jesus, apparently by multiple authors, and apparently over a long time period.

The volume of the mss equal to or exceed the historical evidence for classic period personages like Socrates. If we are going to question the historicity of Jesus, the corrolary is that we must do the same with Socrates and most other well-known figures of that time. There is very little historical evidence of any historical personage until the early modern period.

Tangent

It's a good thing I didn't build my entire belief structure around the idea that Socrates existed!

We'll let you have Socrates if we can have Jesus. vv

Socrates or Homer... oh wait.

Gamera

Well the evidence for the existence of any historical personage is always a text. That's what it means to exist in history -- to be written about. History is historiography.

So we have texts about Jesus and thus he an historical personage.

The issue is the "reliability" of those texts, i.e., what is their agenda (since all texts have agendas) and does that particular agenda cast doubt on our view of that historical personage.

I don't think the Christian scriptures are any less reliable in that sense than any other texts we have from that period, many of which were clearly infected with obvious political agendas. At the very least, the Christian texts -- being written by people who were on the "outs" of the Roman Empire -- don't have an obvious political agenda in the service of the powers that be. If anything, they have a subversive agenda. How that affects one's view of their reliability depends on how one evaluates subversive vs compliant agendas. I tend to give more weight to the former. Texts in the service of political powers that be are highly suspect in my view.

Gamera

You've changed the subject. The issue here is the historicity of Jesus as disclosed in the mss we have. The question of whether to accept Jesus as a divine being is not of course subject to verification, historical or otherwise, by its very terms.

gstafleu

No, I can stop feeding your cat. Which I already did, because I didn't. Which would no doubt tick off your cat mightily

if it knew about it, which it doesn't (because I have no evidence it does), so I'm safe.

On a more serious note, I have evidence that your cat exists the moment you claim it does. Why? Because I have no reason to doubt your word on the matter. We do have reason to doubt the Bible's word for Jesus' existence though.

There are a couple of related reasons for that. First, we know there is a lot of what I'll politely call "fiction" in the bible. I imagine if the two of us sat down with a bible and a highlighter and highlighted everything that we both agreed was "fiction," we would end up with a pretty yellow bible. That gives me increased reason to doubt the bible's word on anything. As a consequence, if I see the bible stating Jesus existed but the evidence would otherwise lead me to agnosticism, in case of the bible I'll lean towards fiction. In other words, given the mass of "fiction" why take the unsubstantiated remnant as anything else?

This is related to a more thorny issue: you cannot trust religious people to be objective when it comes to their religion. Not only that, you can often trust them to do what would in other contents be called "lying" about it. Now you may want to point out that nobody is objective, everybody has rose colored glasses about at least some subjects, etc. True, but religion is an extra special case of this. Why? Because religion defines ones view of life, the universe and everything in a way that nothing else comes close to.

In Misquoting Jesus Ehrman points out numerous instances where scribes "misscribed" something in such a way that the result better reflected their religious believes. I don't think these scribes were consciously "fibbing." Rather I think it came completely naturally to them, they just couldn't conceive of things being different. They made the edit like you or I would correct a spelling mistake. Do you think that e.g. Paul could even conceive of Christ not dying on the cross (however and where ever he may have thought that took place)?

So your catanalogy doesn't work. BTW, the Dutch word for "purr" is "spin." I just thought I'd throw that in.

Gerard Stafleu

aa5874

That statement is not always valid. There can be physical evidence, either through archaelogical findings or from other institutions that store artifacts from the past. One example is the pyramids in Egypt and South America.

This statement can be a fallacy. Jesus can only be deemed to be an historical personage with credible and corroborated text.

Again, you have it upside down. The 'reliability' of those texts determines whether the contents can be taken seriously and if any person mentioned can be regarded as historic.

Another unconfirmed speculative statement. The people who were on the 'outs' of the Roman Empire have not been identified as writers of the Christian texts.

The Christian texts were in the hands of the political powers that be, see Eusebius and Constantine, the primary suspects.

Gamera

[QUOTE=aa5874;3945276]Pyramids are buildings, not evidence of a person and not history. They tell us nothing in themselves about their meaning. No meaning can be transfered to the next generation without writing. History begins with the invention of writing. You're confusion "events" with history -- the writing about events so that later generations have knowledge about them.