Rick Sumner

If I suggested that you could, through historical critical method, extract an "historical Santa Claus" from the Coca Cola ads featuring a fat red guy you would rightly tell me I was being absurd.

You can't apply historical method to unprovenanced literature. It is based on the idea that you can, through careful exegesis, turn secondary sources into primary sources. You can't.

andrewcriddle

Hi Rick

If I argued that we cannot extract a historical Socrates because all our contemporary sources, (Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes...), are literary sources rather than historical evidence, how would you reply ?

Andrew Criddle

spin

I'd respond with genre (certainly not tradition), perspective (Aristophanes is highly critical and often ridicules real people) and provenance (you know the context and time of writing)!

spin

In this context what does "historical" mean? Is it any different from "real" here?

Diogenes the Cynic

Anything real is automatically historical. Everything that happens, happens historically. Whether that history can always be perceived by historical method is not the same thing as if it's historical. Unknown history is still history.

Diogenes the Cynic

By the way, my driving motivation in studying Christian origins (something I've pursued for the better part of two decades, including getting a BA in religion and Classical Languages) is to find out what really happened. I am not invested in any particular answer, I just want to KNOW the answer. No answer would disappoint me. My satisfaction would come only in the knowing, not in the answer itself. The only thing I'm certain of is that nothing supernatural occurred.

ApostateAbe

Great spirit, and I think even the anti-supernaturalism is ideologically a priori and superfluous, in my opinion. I would be comfortable with believing in supernatural phenomena if it were truly plausible (such as if supernaturalism happened observably and sensibly day to day). The only thing I am absolutely certain about is that I exist in some form (cogito ergo sum). Every other claim is less certain to various magnitudes. The exceptional focus on anti-supernaturalism seems to reinforce some of the anti-religious delusions among atheists.

spin

This doesn't help me understand what you mean by "historical" or how it differs significantly from "real" (at least "real in time"). It still sounds to me like 'the "Historical Alice" is simply the real, historical person' is functionally tautological, saying "the real person" or "the historical person" making little difference, and that "Everything that happens, happens historically" is not much different from "Everything that happens, happens".

This seems to be a plea for a species of ontology that doesn't need an epistemology, god's book of life.

Is history a kind of knowledge or not? If it is, then "Unknown history is still history" is unreasonable. Surely history is the fruit of historical methodology and doing history is applying historical methodology, the attempt to reclaim the past (which historians stitch into a narrative for future historians to rip to shreds in hindsight for its lack of perspective). "Historical" is past reclaimed (as much as it can be).

mountainman

In the field of history it is not an absolute fact Jesus existed, it is technically just a hypothesis that many people believe to be true. I think you need to understand this clearly.

Based on the assessment of all the evidence available to them within their own conceptual framework, the historicists take this hypothesis as true and then construct their theories about the HJ.

Antithetically, based on the assessment of all the (same) evidence available to them within their own conceptual framework, the mythicists do not talke this hypothesis as true. Instead they use the hypothesis that Jesus did not exist as their hypothetical starting place.

mountainman

The question is WHEN did it begin - in which century: -1, 1, 2, 3 or early 4th. We know it exploded at Nicaea and was fully legalised AD 381 CE for example, therefore the indisputable answer has to be either -1, 1, 2, 3 or early 4th. Again any one of these answers (-1, 1,2,3 or 4) represents a hypothesis (this time about chronology) and most people seem to think it was the 1st century, although many think it may have been the 2nd century.

The hypothesis about the HJ (as a YES (HJ) or NO (MJ)) coupled with the above hypothesis of the century of the J-Church generates all contemporary mainstream theories (HJ and MJ) about the history of christian origins. At present there appears to be insufficient evidence by which any agreement can be reached to objectively say any one of these theories are any better than another. There is certainly no really unambiguous evidence by which any of all these competing theories can be said to have any real concensus of opinion.