ApostateAbe

The Histories by Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Book 4, Chapter 81:

And so Vespasian, supposing that all things were possible to his good fortune, and that nothing was any longer past belief, with a joyful countenance, amid the intense expectation of the multitude of bystanders, accomplished what was required. The hand was instantly restored to its use, and the light of day again shone upon the blind. Persons actually present attest both facts, even now when nothing is to be gained by falsehood.

According to this passage, Vespasian had miraculous healing power. Everyone knows that miraculous healing powers are clearly ludicrous. Using your absolutist skeptical logic, we should now dismiss as rubbish all of the claims of Tacitus contained in The Histories.

Fortunately, that is not the way legitimate thinking historians do history. Instead, they try to make the best sense of the textual evidence, be it completely true, completely false, mostly true, mostly false, or any other way to judge.

So, how do you explain the details of the accounts of the baptism and John the Baptist in the gospels and Josephus? Whatever your explanation may be, put it on the table, and we will see whose explanation is more probable.

Toto

To repeat:

"Miraculous healing powers" or apparent miraculous healing powers exist. Sometimes they are psychosomatic. Sometimes they are fakery.

So one report of a miraculous healing does not completely destroy the credibility of a source, although there may be other reasons not to gullibly accept everything that Tacitus wrote.

The baptism of Jesus is one element of a story that is based on theology and miracles and impossible events. There is nothing in Mark that would indicate that it even attempts to be history.

And please stop trying to invoke legitimate historians as if you spoke for them.

ApostateAbe

Luke certainly significantly modified the baptism narrative, but not Matthew, which I think gives the hypothesis the disadvantage of being ad hoc, and that may not be such a strong disadvantage (every hypothesis is ad hoc to some extent), but the competing theory is a principle consistent throughout all four of the gospels--Christians knew that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, it was otherwise an apologetic disadvantage against the Baptist cult, so Christians spun it in their own favor.

Nor does such a point explain the further details that I mentioned--the baptism by John the Baptist and the extreme humility of John the Baptist.

And, those same points also cause a plausibility/explanatory-power problem--Mark did not need Jesus to be baptized by John the Baptist, because it is an apologetic disadvantage without the rhetorical spin.
OK, maybe you should explain the version of "explanatory power" or other methodology that you prefer I should use instead.

ApostateAbe

I think if it were all about me trusting the sources, then such a point would be relevant. Tacitus makes plausible claims a lot more often than the Christian gospels, even if he had a miracle here and there, and therefore Tacitus is a more trustworthy writer. However, it is not about merely trusting the texts. It is primarily and centrally about choosing the best explanations for the texts. When it is all about trusting the texts and nothing else, then of course no conclusions can be made about the writing of a very untrustworthy text, except what happened to be in the mind of an ancient author. And, if you go as far as to conflate the practice of finding probable historical conclusions from texts with trusting those same texts, then it is merely putting on the blinders, because a heckuva lot of probabilistic knowledge really can be discerned from reading narratives even if they are completely untrustworthy. For example, under such a way of thinking, you would refuse to grant probability to the idea that there ever was such a thing as an English upperclass hierarchical nobility of male-based inheritance, if the only relevant information you had was the clearly-fictional and untrustworthy story of Pride and Prejudice (or via: amazon.co.uk). Good book, by the way.

Sheshbazzar

It would be interesting to determine what percentage of the NT writings such HJ advocates as Abe take to be historical facts.
I mean how can they tell? When they take a paragraph as in the one presented in the above example and latch onto about five words out of the fifty-five presented and insist that portion is 'historical' and credible but the rest is not?

It would be fascinating to have Abe go through each of the verses presented within the NT and tell us exactly which parts of each sentence it is that he thinks are the 'historical facts'.
Think he could defend even one percent of the entire content of the NTs texts as being factual history? I tend to doubt it.

Toto

You are doing much more that reading the gospels for social background. You are asserting that actual historical facts about the existence of a main fictionalized character can be extracted from them.

Perhaps you should start by trying to justify this, as no one else has.

ApostateAbe

And that is what I have done. See the OP.

ApostateAbe

That was what the Jesus Seminar did, and I think that is hair-brained. As I said before, it is not about trusting the texts--not even any part of them. It is about finding conclusions that explain them best. If you were to go through Pride and Prejudice and highlight all of the statements that are probably true, then you may not be able to highlight a single word of it, but that doesn't mean we can't gain some legitimate probable historical knowledge by analyzing the story. Same with the gospels. Review the OP again for an example of what I mean.

Sheshbazzar

Or...they no more 'knew' this than modern Christians do.
When the Gospels were finally written down all of the contemporary witnesses were long dead , The NT texts as they were, the work of unidentified and unknown authors, were handed to them on a platter.
Most of the converts were themselves illiterate, and had no way of checking or confirming anything, they just followed whatever line the local ecclesiastical authorities foisted off on them, as in the main they still do.

Can you provide any -evidence- from the the first-century that there even were any Gospels yet existent?
How then do you 'know' what contemporary first-century 'Christians' believed? From second-century writings???





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ApostateAbe

OK, let's flesh out that theory. Do you think that there was any rivalry between the Christians and the cult of John the Baptist?