Gamera

[QUOTE=aa5874;3945276]

The agenda of a text is always at issue. Corroborative -- that I don't know. What is there to corroborate -- all we know of any historical person is the texts about them

You seem to want to pull yourself up by the bootstraps. We only know somebody is an historical figure by texts. There is no other way to know. That's what it means to exist historically -- to be written about in a text. Now, what the agenda of that text is, is a separate matter.

Given that they were authoring texts for a despised and persecuted religion that was completely at odds with Roman values and Roman political power, I don't think this is very speculative at all. The politics of the NT seem at the very least, not very conducive to Roman Emperor worship.

Well, so were the Roman and Greek texts, which passed through the hands of Christian clerics for a millenium. Nonetheless, the christian scriptures simply have an agenda that is noticably distinct from Josephus or Tacitus or others who were apologists for Roman power.

aa5874

[QUOTE=Gamera;3945310] I hope you realise people build buildings, There are civilisations that do not have any written language, are you claiming that these people have no history?

You must remember that written language evolved. The African slaves of the Caribbean survived for hundreds of years without a written language and they have history.

Your statement is fallacy.

History can be obtained through oral communication, culture and artifacts.

Gamera

[QUOTE=aa5874;3945347]
Again, you're conflating "events" with "history". Events happen. History is written. There is no history without writing. Unless an "event' is preserved in a text (of some kind), it isn't passed on to the next generation and hence doesn't exist historically. Most events don't get written down and hence don't exist historically. What I had for lunch today is an event. It has no historical existence unless at some point I record it.

History begins with the invention of writing. Before then there were only events, that passed away and had no meaning across generational lines.

Doug Shaver

I implied nothing to the contrary.

aa5874

[QUOTE=Gamera;3945369] Absolute nonsense! You have no idea of history. And, using your definition of history, then the gospels are not historic, since as some say, they were compiled from hearsay.

Civilisations, without a written language, have a history. You are confused, there is a difference between history and a history book.

Malachi151

This looks like a tricky semantic issue.

We can construct a history based on artifacts, but there is no history without the writing of it. I would agree, though, that anything that gives a narrative account is history, thus is can be an oral history, or history recorded in artworks such as murals.

aa5874

History is not text. Text is used to record history. If we use Gamera's definition of history, then an illiterate person has no history and cannot know any history.

The recording of history is done through different means. It can be retained by memory, through culture, written text, videos, artifacts, oral recordings and any other means that is recoverable.

rlogan

How are you getting this from Pauline texts?

Could you please cite specifically where you are deriving this from?


It seems too that you are gutting a good 80% or more out of the gospels as unreliable. I don't wish to put words in your mouth there, but if all there is to historicity is the partial sentence description above - you are mostly mythicist.

No Robots

Is that like being a little bit pregnant?

You might want to start with Birger Gerhardsson, particularly his The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition (or via: amazon.co.uk).

Didymus

Heh, heh. But I'm not one of those people. Aside from the simple fact of an unjust crucifixion, I think the gospel writers' Jesus narratives were entirely fictitious, and that Paul's sketchy description (a Jew, son of a woman, crucified, believed to have been seen after his death) pretty well covers everything that was known about Jesus by his near-contemporaries.

I subscribe to an even more severely diminished version than the Jesus Seminar folks. And you are certainly right; I suppose such a methodology can be criticized as reductionist, but the only alternatives seem to be to either a) take the HJ approach and accept a lot of exceedingly weak evidence and non-evidence that's presented as evidence, e.g., the gospels, or, b) accept a highly dubious hypothesis that can only be supported by reading into Paul's epistles an entire quasi-Christian cosmology that's never directly attested to either by Paul or by other writers of his period - or explicitly rejected by the Christians who came after him. To those alternatives, I'll take reductionism any time.

(Curious question: If such a minimalist hypothesis "doesn't count" as HJ, then what does it count as? Seem like MJ is the view that Paul believed in a non-earthly, non-human Jesus, ala Doherty. Well, my Jesus might be awfully enigmatic, but he was a human being, and thus "historical." Where do you draw the line?)

Skimpy? There's plenty of evidence confirming Herod, Pilate and Caiphas; Josephus talks about John the Baptist; there was a Temple; Galilee was/is a region, and so on. That's the sort of contextual material I was referring to. I suppose I really should have said "roughly correct." From the POV of the gospel writers, those stories took place long ago and far away. They seem to have had only an approximate understanding of the history and geography of Judea and Galilee.

(2) There is a better explanation in the form of Doherty's and Price's work.

Better than what? Better than "the gospels are (accurate, exaggerated, mythicized) biographical accounts of a holy man of Galilee"? Well of course, but that's not saying much.

Eh? Nicely put, but not adverse to anything I've said. In fact, I've made the same point less eloquently many times myself. You're not talking to Josh McDowell here!

Didymus