Gamera

If emoticons were arguments, you might actually prevail in one sometime. But alas, they are not.

Amaleq13

If you actually put forth an argument rather than simply dodging and distracting until declaring a non-existent victory, that might be an observation worth noting. :wave:

badger3k

And we read some texts and say, "This bit is history, this bit is fiction, this bit has historical roots but has been fictionalized...." Given the discussion, I think we should make it clear that some texts are a mixture of all of these things - for example, the Conquest narratives from Judges.

Toto

It seems that you have engaged in some sort of bait and switch. If there is only a reader and a text, there is NO history at all. If the difference between history and fiction lies solely in the attitude of the reader, then Jesus could be fictional for me and historical for you, and the term has lost all meaning. There can be no difference between a mythicist and a historicist without some actual history.

But you want to say that ancient history contained ficitional elements, so its okay if the gospels contain fictional elements, and then charge ahead full speed and treat the gospels as history in the ordinary sense.

Gamera

Before writing there was no history. That's what history means -- written records. That's why we are able to talk about "pre-history." (Though we sometimes speak of history loosely as everything that ever happened -- a meaningless concept unless we have access to it through signifiers, i.e., almost always texts).

Let me suggest that you are assuming access to the truth of the past through some method outside of discourse, texts, historiography. Let me further suggest that such an assumption is completely ungrounded and overlooks the fact that everything you know about the past (indeed, the fact that you even understand that there is a past) is a function of discourse and texts, not some privileged access to the truth outside of texts. To understand that there is a relationship between a past and the present is a textual relationship: it's not something that just is.

As to the difference between myth and history, again, let's not be coy. We make these distinctions. Both come to us in the form of texts. We deem some texts to be historiography and some to be fictional. We do so for a variety of complex reasons. But you seem to want to leap over the fact that what we are talking about is a relationship to texts, not to life as lived by people in the past. Such living experience is forever lost to us. All we have is texts and our reading of them. We simply should not confuse the two.

Gamera

I agree completely. The gospels clearly are a mixture of historiography and legendary material that glommed onto the Jesus narrative. This is typical in historiography even in recent times.

Moreover, historiography is a narrative form, and that form has a content all its own. As White points out in The Content of the Form, the narrative nature of historiography creates certain relationships and functions that have nothing to do with what "really" happened. Alexander didn't live a story, he lived a life, like you and me. Only in historiography is there a beginning a middle and an end to the incoherency and randomness that is human finitude.

Gamera

Let the reader decide whether my discussion of historicity lacks an argument, or whether your blustering about it (with emoticons) does.

Historicity is a complex issue. Your one-liners and platitudes don't really address that complexity.

Perhaps you could track down a complexity emoticon.

Amaleq13

Still confused about the claim you were supposed to be defending or just continuing to attempt a smoke screen to distract from its ridiculousness?

The argument that is lacking is the one supporting your alleged ability to differentiate between historical and fictional characters without doing any research.