Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Steven Carr · 02-10-2005, 02:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

Lack of a description and criticism of sources is a general problem with ancient (and medieval) historians it is not confined to the Gospels.

Andrew Criddle

Andrew is quite right. The standard of scholarship of the Bible is that of 2,000 years ago, rather than the standards historians have learned in the intevening period.

lpetrich · 02-11-2005, 02:57 AM

J.P. Holding and like-minded apologists would likely respond to Diogenes the Cynic by charging that he has "materialistic presuppositions" that keep him from considering rising from the dead as plausible as crossing a river. However, it is not for nothing that rising from the dead is generally considered a miracle and crossing a river is generally not. How many people in well-documented circumstances rise from the dead? And would Jesus Christ's alleged resurrection be as great a selling point if rising from the dead was as plausible as crossing a river?

And though Exile's comments may seem rather bitter, he does hit the nail on the head about many Xian apologists' double standard of rejecting every religion's miracles but theirs. Like every religion's divine impregnations but theirs, every religion's divine interventions but theirs, every religion's miraculous healings but theirs, every religion's revelations but theirs, etc.

As to Andrew Criddle and Steven Carr on scholarship standards, some Greco-Roman historians do show some skepticism about stories they consider farfetched; Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire, Richard Carrier notes:

Quote:

Miracles were also a dime a dozen in this era. The biographer Plutarch, a contemporary of Josephus, engages in a lengthy digression to prove that a statue of Tyche did not really speak in the early Republic (Life of Coriolanus 37.3). He claims it must have been a hallucination inspired by the deep religious faith of the onlookers, since there were, he says, too many reliable witnesses to dismiss the story as an invention (38.1-3). He even digresses further to explain why other miracles such as weeping or bleeding--even moaning--statues could be explained as natural phenomena, showing a modest but refreshing degree of skeptical reasoning that would make the Amazing Randi proud. What is notable is not that Plutarch proves himself to have some good sense, but that he felt it was necessary to make such an argument at all. Clearly, such miracles were still reported and believed in his own time. I find this to be a particularly interesting passage, since we have thousands of believers flocking to weeping and bleeding statues even today. Certainly the pagan gods must also exist if they could make their statues weep and bleed as well!

Where do any of the writers of the Bible show that sort of skepticism?

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