Doug Shaver

Nope, not me.

Digging is hard work or, if you're using powered machinery, expensive. I'd need a better reason for expecting a payoff than "I have no evidence immediately at hand establishing the inauthenticity of this note." The first thing I'd look for would be not the treasure but a reason to think the note was authentic.

John W. Loftus

That's fine. I agree. I guess I needed to say that. If it was written in crayons and on printed notepaper with flowers on it then no. But what if it clearly was very old that indicated it might be from the time of known pirates who once landed at that spot, and/or Pirate Pete was known in those parts?

thedistillers

No... Just no.

People can write what they want. They might be honestly mistaken, or they might lie. You cannot make a judgement on a text without applying a methodology.

Probably because people are desperately looking to make money? I suppose people would try to find it for the same reason people buy lottery tickets. You're presenting a scenario where human beings would act irrationally; you might want to pick a better example.

Just because a claim is possible doesn't make it credible. "I'm eating chicken wings right now". There is nothing extraordinary about that claim. That says absolutely nothing about whether it is true or not. How would you know?

A text is just that, a text. A bunch of words put together. It's meaningless and random to attribute a truth value to it on first examination.

Ben C Smith

I personally find it hard to believe that a person would risk coating his computer keyboard with chicken grease by eating chicken wings while posting to an internet discussion board.

Ben.

aa5874

So, any old note makes you dig. You probably will never stop digging.

Now, you say Pirate Peter was known in those parts with the old note, but was Jesus known in the parts where notes about him were found?

No.

You can't dig there for Jesus.

Toto

Digression on whether Earl Doherty is an authority split off here.

mountainman

Dear aa5874 and John W. Loftus,

The objective premise seems to be that there must be some integrity with the document tradition of the literary evidence, but that we do not at present know what that integrity is. We cannot simply assume its integrity. Other avenues of corroboration clearly exist (or not, as the case may be) with the various forms of monumental and archaeological evidence.

Do a search on the term new testament archaeology and see what turns up.


The problem compounds when bits and pieces of the ancient treasure trove start turning up in the public eye again. In this instance we would have reason to suspect that the treasure was very early on stolen and removed by brigands.

Best wishes,


Pete

spamandham

If he's correct, then I'm happy to report I am not a historian. The idea that we should simply assume everything we read to be true until proven otherwise, is frankly, idiotic.

Doug Shaver

Then I might start looking for a shovel.

Ben C Smith

Hi, John.

I think you will find most of your disagreement with the mythicists and Jesus agnostics on this board will come at that initial point of deciding how much the text is worth. Most here have no problem treating various ancient historians in exactly the way you seem to be taking the gospels. I have seen Josephus (except the Testimonium and the James reference), Tacitus (except the passage about the fire), Suetonius (except the part about Christians), and Plutarch taken at their word here very frequently, with little or no confirming evidence from outside, simply because nothing cast doubt on whatever the historian was saying. Few here, however, treat the gospels in such a trusting way. They may view the historians as old maps found in places once frequented by pirates, but they view the gospels as crayon sketches on stationary, as it were.

I am neither confirming nor denying here that this picture of the gospels is correct. But, if you are treating the gospels as biographies or histories with legendary accretions while your debating partners are treating them as pure legends with only coincidental attachments to history, that goes a long way toward explaining your disagreements. You are disagreeing, in effect, over the genre of the gospels.

Ben.