Transient

Since you quoted 2 people I am not sure who you are asking.
I agree - knowing whether merlin existed, Julius Caesar existed etc has almost no impact on my life at all.
If I was a historian or my work was related to history I guess it would but for me it does not.
I am not at all in the same league as Roger Pearse or any others here who investigate these matters. I am here just applying logic to what I glean from the research of others.
I was a christian for about 45 years or more, but now find almost no reason to accept what I was taught. I sort of wish it was true because it offers some hope for the future but a wish does not make something true.
In my opinion we will never really unravel what happened or didn't happen 2000 years ago - too much time has passed and too much has been destroyed.

Johnny Skeptic

I was addressing Roger Pearse. He sometimes makes the utterly absurd argument that if you cannot trust the Bible then you cannot trust anything else. Apparently Roger believes that there is not any difference between supernatural claims and ordinary secular claims, as long as the claims are in the Bible of course. I would not be surprised if Roger Pearse believes that if people believe that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river that they should also believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

It would be nice if Roger told us where his non-Biblical first and second century Christian sources got their information from regarding supernatural claims, but it is probable that Roger will refuse to post that information. That might prove to be embarrassing for him.

Would Roger claim that his interest in the Bible is entirely academic, and that he does not have any bias at all due to perceived self-interest if it turns out that the Bible is true? Perhaps he will tell us.

mountainman

Dear Transient,

I am far more optimistic in the detective and analysis disciplines and the advances in technology which will enable much more information to be obtained from the ever-increasing index of evidence. Hopefully when the bombing and war in the middle east is called to a stop, there will be more money available for research and archaeological insurgences into the ancient history beneath the ground of conflict, and we will again commence to gather knowledge instead of destroying it.

So in my opinion we will unravel our ancient history, if we are granted the opportunity to do so, and we may not have to go back 2000 years to do so, since the evidence already in our possession is not taking the shape of the expected Bell curve in the distribution of the citations for "christian origins" over the first four centuries. Rather, we have a black-hole of archaeological evidence (ie: zero evidence) in the Pre_nicene epoch and an explosive boundary event of evidence littering the fourth century, following the "council" of Nicaea.

We have two C14 citations confirming this distribution. As a third and fourth and fifth C14 citation (somewhere in the future) is added to our data, the picture will gain in intensity. My bet is that all the C14 citations will stack up this side of the boundary event called Nicaea, and the prenicene epoch will be shown to be "canonical christian free".

Best wishes,


Pete

Transient

Well I hope you are right - it would be nice to sort these things out with some degree of certainty.
Keep up your research - even tho I and many others are not sure you are correct, it does add another sort of flavor around here and I always find your info interesting, and who knows - you might even turn out to be correct.