mountainman

Is that the same Thomas whom the author of the "Acts of Thomas" has Jesus sell as a slave in the market-place to an Indian merchant? The author actually mentions a bill-of-sale handed to the slave-master jesus. Now that bill-of-sale is a document which might exist somewhere, if we are to believe the author of the "Acts of Thomas".

And do Grant's criteria differ substantially from Carrier's five?



Best wishes,



Pete

Steven Carr

'Suetonius also mentions Nero’s persecution of Christians at Rome, but, as France notes, tells us nothing more than what we already know about this from Tacitus, and “nothing about Jesus himself” (p. 42).'

Gosh. France agrees with Wells on Suetonius as well!

Are you sure France demolished Wells?

'Pliny, as I have noted elsewhere (HEJ, p. 16), is equally unhelpful in the latter regard, as France (p. 43) agrees.'

Gosh. France agrees with Wells on Pliny as well!

Are you sure France demolished Wells?

thedistillers

I'd like to see NT Wright's massive evidence for the existence of Jesus, without him using empty sentences like "we have no more reason to doubt the existence of Jesus than doubting the existence of X", or "there is more evidence for Jesus than X".

So, he says the evidence is massive. Where is it? I'm not merely asking for evidence, I'm asking for the massive evidence he's referring to.

gregor

I wonder if Patriot Bible University has PhD programs that would fit his bill?

Yellum Notnef

[QUOTE=Steven Carr;5464059]Can someone please direct me towards whatever this is about?

badger3k

Is that the online school run out of someone's home? :wave:

I hear you can get a PhD for a few hundred bucks...

aa5874

I have read a book written in the 4th century that presented the MYTH, Jesus, to the world, it is called "Church History" by Eusebius.

Perhaps you need to read it and J P Holding, too.

Church History 1.1.8 Church History1. 2.1 Church History 1.2.3 Behold the MYTH, Jesus Christ.

Please tell J P Holding to shatter Eusebius who wrote the history of the MYTH.

JoeWallack

JW:
You remind me of Kevin Kline in the not classic, A Fish Called Wanda, constantly forgetting "the middle part". The context of O's article is a book titled "Shattering the Christ Myth" which implies a guaranty of evidence that Jesus existed. Historical methodology though must be used to support such a conclusion and historical methodology is based on Probability. O does just what you are doing above though. Something is determined to either be evidence or not evidence and if it is evidence than it supports a definite conclusion. After reading O's article where he asserts that based on Papias Jesus existed, I have no idea whether Jesus existed. The only thing I am certain of is that either O knows nothing about Historical Methodology or he has hidden such knowledge.

Regarding your point above that Eusebius' criticism of Irenaeus gives Eusebius credibility, sure, I agree. But it's a zero sum game Ted. If Eusebius gets credibility here than Irenaeus loses it (understand Dear Reader?). And who is really needed more?

O rightly makes a big deal about having a chain of witnesses from Papias to Jesus. The problem though is we don't have that. Why? Because we don't have extant Papias. There is a big difference in evidential value between having a first-hand statement and having a reference to it. Why is that? Because maybe:

1) It's not what the Reviewer thinks it is.

2) The Reviewer is not telling the truth.

The next broken link is Irenaeus' only reference to Papias' source is that it was John the Disciple which is impeached by Eusebius. The next break is a significant time lag between Irenaeus and Eusebius.

References to Papias are evidence of Jesus' existence but not proof of his existence. O has a number of other problems which doubt proof of existence which he does not deal with. Probably the biggest is the motive of orthodox Christianity to create a link back to supposed disciples and the opportunity to create support for it. Note how Papias is being stretched all over the place to support Christian Assertians. Per Irenaeus he was a hearer of John and per the Muratorian he knew 1 Peter. Quite a range. Doubt!



Joseph

PhilVaz

steven << Gosh. France agrees with Wells on Suetonius as well! Are you sure France demolished Wells? >>

BTW, Yes I am sure. Tacitus takes up 3 or 4 pages in France's book, Suetonius a page, Pliny the Younger a page, Josephus 8 pages. The R.T. France book The Evidence for Jesus is 190+ pages so obviously there is more to the book than the non-biblical references to Jesus. He doesn't concede everything to Wells, he simply agrees that Tacitus does not provide "independent testimony" and that Suetonius and Pliny the Younger give us no additional information about Jesus.

The chapters in the France book are "Non-Christian Evidence" (40 pages), "Christian Evidence Outside the NT" (about 30 pages), "Evidence of the NT" (55 pages), "Evidence of Archaeology" (18 pages), and "Jesus in History" (10 pages). The main G.A. Wells arguments to fall is the supposed "silence of Paul" about Jesus and the unreliability of the NT. Not only France The Evidence for Jesus (1986) demolishes Wells, but also Habermas The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ (1996) demolishes Wells, and Boyd/Eddy The Jesus Legend (2007) demolishes both Wells and Doherty, and now J.P. Holding Shattering the Christ Myth also demolishes both Wells and Doherty (in my opinion). Remember G.A. Wells says he never held to the "mythicist position" in the first place! Although many scholars certainly have interpreted his first 2 or 3 books to teach just that.

As for Michael Grant's historical criterion, although he does not directly address Wells or his arguments, I find him more believable than Wells. Grant is certainly more credentialed to write as a historian on the topic: Michael Grant has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Professor of Humanity at Edinburgh Univ, and President and Vice-Chan of the Queen's Univ, Belfast. He holds Doctorates of Cambridge, Dublin, and Belfast. His books include The Twelve Caesars, The Army of the Caesars, The Annals of Imperial Rome, and Saint Paul. He is not a believer, but a skeptic.

Here is a summary from Grant's Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (or via: amazon.co.uk) (1977 edition is what I have, it is also available used in the 1995 edition).

"Yet one large, nagging doubt may well still be lodged in the minds of some of those who have read the foregoing chapters. It is this: what reason have we for supposing that the facts as narrated by the Gospels, and presented -- with such explanations as I have felt to be necessary -- in the course of this book, deserve any degree of belief whatsoever, from the standpoint of historical accuracy?....[this] will require some explanation and justification. In particular, [we] want to have some account of the principles that need to be followed, and the methods that need to be adopted, in deciding which portions of the Gospels can be accepted as historical fact as they stand, or accepted with due reservations or interpretations, or rejected altogether as fictitious inventions by the evangelists or their sources. To offer an adequate answer to these demands is a notoriously hard and challenging task -- as the discussions in the course of this book have already, surely, shown. But it must now, briefly, be attempted." (Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review, page 195-196)

In the next appendix (page 197ff) "Attitudes to the Evidence" some points from Grant are:

(A) there are three possible approaches: one can write as a believer, or as an unbeliever, or as Grant has attempted "as a student of history seeking...to employ methods that make belief or unbelief irrelevant."

(B) some partial measure of skepticism regarding the Gospel stories is inevitable, if historical standards are going to be applied; this started extremely early, and inside the Church itself as Origen (third century AD) conceded to his pagan opponents that some passages in the Gospels were by no means literal, and indeed absurd or impossible;

(C) this skeptical approach reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth; convincing refutations of this "Christ-myth" hypothesis can be made from an appeal to method (backgrounds in Judaism; similar criteria applied to other ancient writings containing historical material; pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned; etc);

(D) certainly there are discrepancies between one Gospel and another, and there was a growth of legend round Jesus, and it rose very quickly; but the same can be said for such figures as Alexander the Great yet nobody regards him as mythical and fictitious;

(E) modern critical methods fail to support the "Christ-myth" theory; it has again and again been answered by first-rate scholars; in recent years (1977) no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus (except G.A. Wells two 1970s books which he mentions in a footnote);

(F) the historian must first try to decide as best he can, what Jesus said and did, and to consider the significance of (including what Jesus himself attached to) those words and deeds;

(G) the view an historian should take is that everything the evangelists say must be assumed correct until it is proved wrong; the opposite view, that all contents of the Gospels must be assumed fictitious until they are proved genuine is too extreme a viewpoint and would not be applied in other fields; for example: when one builds up facts derived from accounts by pagan historians, judgment often has to be given not in the light of any external confirmation, but on the basis of historical deductions and arguments which attain nothing better than probability -- the same applies to the Gospels;

(H) other criterion he mentions are "multiple attestation"; or "attestation by multiple forms" (if a motif is presented more than once in different literary forms, it is more likely genuine); a rejection from the lifetime of Jesus of all material which seems to be derived from the days of the Christian Church as it existed after his death (although difficult to apply this correctly, it provides "our principal valid method of research"); and "form criticism" to eliminate from the Gospels the accretions that were introduced after Jesus' death; also to "look out for surprises" -- anything "really surprising" in the Gospels is quite likely to be authentic (i.e. that which clashes with what we should expect to find in something written after the time of Jesus);

There's more, but here is Grant's conclusion: "The consistency, therefore, of the [Jesus] tradition in their [the Gospels] pages suggests that the picture they present is largely authentic. By such methods information about Jesus can be derived from the Gospels. And that is what this book has tried to do." (page 204)

Phil P

Steven Carr

That's what I said above. France says the Gospels prove Jesus of Nazareth existed.