aa5874

The Dead Sea Scrolls are evidence against an historic Jesus. Not a single fragment of the DSS make mention of Jesus or his apostles, even though they are regarded to have been written well past the governorship of Pontius Pilate. There is simply no known history for the unknown.

Jeffrey Gibson

Assuming you are correct about the date of the composition of the DSS, let's note that they don't mention Pilate either, or Caiaphas or John the Baptist or Theudas for that matter.

By your logic -- i.e., if X is not mentioned in the DSS, that person did not exist -- then we must rule out Pilate and Caiaphas and John the Baptist and Theudas as historical figures.

Jeffrey

Clivedurdle

On Roman hegemony, this xian site has a fascinating slant!

http://www.believersweb.org/view.cfm?ID=1102

Doug Shaver

I would not bet the mortgage on it yet, but I suspect that the whole case against historicity stands or falls on the cogency of arguments for #2.

I'll concede your objection to #5. On re-reading it, I see that it depends on an unstated premise. I'll see if I can fix that in my response to Solitary Man.

aa5874

Pilate, Caiaphas, John the Baptist, and Theudas are all established or considered to be figures of history, these persons are mentioned by historians including Josephus, Philo and Tacitus.

Your seem not to understand logic. Pilate, Caiaphas, John the Baptist and Theudas were established or considered to be figures of history hundreds of years before the discovery of Dead Sea Scrolls.

However, two thousand years have passed and no known extant non-apologetic writing have established that the Jesus of the NT existed. These non-apologetic writings include all the extant works of Josephus, all the writings of Tacitus, everything from Suetonius, Philo, and all the discovered Dead Sea Scrolls.

Now, using your logic, if X is not mentioned in the DSS, then X must exist or is likely to do so.

Logically, I differ.

Jeffrey Gibson

Please show me where in Philo and/or Tacitus that Caiaphas, Theudas, and John the Baptist are mentioned. Please also show me where in Josephus and/or Philo, and/or Tacitus that Gamaliel and Hillel -- two figures whom the DSS also do not mention but whose historicity is not in doubt -- are spoken of.

Jeffrey

Doug Shaver

Where do you think the ,modern standards came from? Modern scholars developed them when they realized that ancient standards of historiography were inadequate. The fact that many ancient people accepted a purported work of history as reliable does not mean that we, 2,000 years later, have to consider it reliable.

I don't know what you mean by "discounted," but my argument in no way implies that either we believe all of it or we believe none of it. That is, of course, the easy way out for people averse to hard intellectual work.

We can barely even begin to evaluate testimony until we know who is doing the testifying. An unknown author relying on unidentifiable sources is suspect from the start.

As I recall, Doherty thinks the gospels are midrash. That is a subset of fiction. Whatever your literary or polemical purpose, if what you write is not factual, and you know it's not factual, and you neither expect nor intend for your readers to think it is factual, then you're writing fiction.

Mea culpa. Let's try it this way.

5 (revised). There is no clear evidence that anybody thought there was a historical Jesus before the gospels were written. This, conjoined with premise #2, implies that nobody did think there was a historical Jesus before the gospels were written. It is not plausible that the gospel authors were the first people to think there was a historical Jesus, but they would have been the first if nobody had thought so before they wrote the gospels. Therefore, the gospel authors probably did not think so.

Doug Shaver

Yes. You can ridicule me for asking, or you can provide a reference. It's up to you.

Thank you. I'll look it up when I get an opportunity.

No. An argument from personal ignorance would be:

• I don't know of any evidence that it happened
• Therefore, it did not happen.

That is not my argument.

Thank you. I'll look it up when I get an opportunity.

Of course there is. There is also a significant difference between believing it happened several times because the evidence says it happened several times, and assuming from evidence that it happened once that it must have happened several times.

And with good reason.

If you want to argue that whatever could have happened must have happened, go for it. I'm trying to figure out what was likely to have happened, given the evidence that is actually available for examination.

Among other things:

• It was essentially unnoticed during its founder's lifetime.
• The founder was executed for political reasons.
• The founder's followers came to believe, within a short time after his death, that he had been raised from the dead and was a god.
• Their belief in the founder's divinity would have been contrary to the fundamental values of the followers' native culture.
• The followers convinced many other members of that same culture that the cult's founder was a god.
• Histories of the cult, written by cult members, strongly suggest that the founder's original followers had no notion of his divinity during his lifetime, and therefore belief in his divinity apparently arose among them only after his death.

You may accept or not, as you wish, my criteria for sufficient similarity. The lurkers can make up their own minds whether I'm being reasonable.

Well, yes, it is obvious. So obvious, that it is and always has been one of the key arguments against Jesus' historicity.

That, too, is obvious.

How would his mentioning facts about Jesus' life have undermined that desire?

My conclusion is that the gospels are fiction. Lack of sourcing fits perfectly well with that.

Oh, you're calling that an assumption? I don't think any of my logic teachers would have let me do that.

That you're assuming your conclusion. The gospels cannot inform us about Paul's thinking without some question-begging about Jesus' historicity.

aa5874

You know its true that if you read Josephus, Philo and Tacitus you'll see the names Pilate, Caiaphas, John the Baptist and Theudas. I put those three writers together to make a point, please don't separate them.

The name Gamaliel is in The Life of Josephus and Antiquities of the Jews, and there may be more than one Gamaliel.

You need to give some more information about these names if you wantt me to find them for you.

Apparently, there are more than one Hillel, too, one may have been a relative of a Gamaliel in Josephus.

Anymore figures of history to look up that are not mentioned in the DSS?

Solitary Man

You're avoiding the question. Josephus is not modern history. Please answer the question.

Then I assume you have a methodology, right?

Really? That seems to me to be an unsupported assertion. Can you demonstrate otherwise? Can you support your statement?

Argument from Authority fallacy.

Do midrashim have plot? Do you have any clue as to what midrash is?

Since #2 is your opinion, and a particularly uninformed one, relying on Doherty's uninformed hypothesis, I think we can safely ignore your conclusions. Especially since #5 is also bunk.