James The Least

Doherty's response to Casey is already at Vridar:

http://vridar.wordpress.com/

"This is the traditional attitude of historicist scholarship toward mythicism since time immemorial, and it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. It’s a scandal in any discipline claiming to be scholarly and open-minded. But I am not going to lose any sleep over it, and I will continue to defend myself and mythicism against it."

Amen!

Grog

"Blogger" could become a title, like Citizen Kane or Brother Jeb.

tanya

Apologies for having written so obscurely.

"the person" : I offered three names of "people", who did not actually live, but, instead represented fictional characters.

Some novels, of course, portray, in addition to fictional characters, genuine people. Tolstoy did this with War and Peace.

I guess, in that situation, one could argue, that it would be important to distinguish the date when a source, commenting on an actual person, analyzed various aspects of the fictional presentation.


NOPE.

Fictional characters do not have lives. They are like Superman, Paul Bunyan, Santa Claus: comic book characters, who come to life, only in our imagination.

There is no evidence that Hercules was ever alive, but there is evidence that he was never alive: his paternal DNA, or rather, absence thereof, guarantees his non-life attribute. Deities do not possess, or require, human DNA.

I defer to Andrew Criddle, who commented a month or so, ago, in another thread, that at least 1000 years passed between the origin of Hercules, and Philo's description of him.

Do we not have archaeological data now, from Turkey, regarding the excavation of the ancient city of Troy? I thought that the Trojan War took place in 1100 BCE, approximately, according to Eratosthenes, renowned mathematician, geographer, head librarian at Alexandria, and the man most famous to me, for having computed the circumference of the planet earth, using just two pieces of wood. Am I incorrect, about Eratosthenes' claim?

I will answer your question by asking a similar question of you:
How do you explain the ten year gap in age between 28 year old Captain Yossarian of Catch 22, flying airplanes in 1944, and the same guy fifty years later, 1994, now aged only 68? What happened to those missing ten years, Don? Authors writing fiction, have no requirement to accurately portray any aspect. They are free to create according to their imagination.....


Hmmm....
Strange thinking here....

50 years, five minutes, or 500,000 years, it is all the same, if one is referring to an attestation of a non existent, imaginary event.

Do you suppose those were real flying saucers that landed in Roswell, NM? Will it make any difference if the person describing their landing was writing five minutes after they landed, or five hundred years later?

With regard to history, most of the descriptions, are, I find, rather clumsy, inept, inaccurate, politically tainted portraits, designed to reveal the grace, beauty, and power of the one who succeeded militarily, and illustrate, conversely, the despicable character of the loser. Benedict Arnold, comes to mind....

Jesus never existed, Don, he is an imaginary character, with attributes modeled after Heracles. There is nothing to be gained by searching for clues about his historical existence, he was not a Galilean preacher, he was not sure footed, clambering up tall buildings in Jerusalem for a chat with Satan, waving his hands about to cure epilepsy, and spitting into some poor bloke's face, to restore vision to one whose eyes had been gouged out by Roman soldiers, as punishment for some minor infraction.

:huh:

Sheshbazzar

That accords with old Crazy Jake's attestations of having met and enjoyed a leisurely lunch with Jesus Christ while out squirrel hunting in Northern Michigan around 1965.

Jesus Christ, (or Christ Jesus) like Pecos Bill, can pop in anywhere at any time, screw with peoples heads, and poof! disappear again, leaving nothing but these insane 'witnesses' or liars for Jesus behind.

If old Jebus could do it back then, aint nothin perventing him from doing it today. If yer nuts enough to swallow 'Paul's' tall tale, you might as well have old Crazy Jake's tale for dessert.






.

GakuseiDon

:huh: I see you responded in a similarly obscure manner to Hoffmann on his blog. Onto my Ignore list you go. Thanks.

GakuseiDon

Agreed. Sad and disappointing. Casey's and Fisher's stupid and mean spirited attacks like those above makes them sound biased and agenda-ridden. If they have evidence on their side, why not just present the evidence?

Steven Carr

STEPHANIE FISHER
Cohn was a German Jew who emigrated to Israel, where he became Attorney General of Israel, and Minister of Justice, as well as a member of the Supreme Court of Israel and the International Court of Justice in the Hague. He was a member of the “T’hila” Movement for Israeli Jewish secularism. It is culturally ludicrous to expect anyone like Cohn to give a fair account of a New Testament narrative, especially one which has played such an appalling role in the history of Christian anti-Semitism.

CARR
Is Stephanie Louise Fisher really claiming that it is ludicrous to expect a Jewish scholar to be objective about Christianity?

Diogenes the Cynic

That raised my eybrows too, but to be fair, she essentially says the same thing about atheists and fundamentalists, so I don't know who's really left. Muslims maybe?

Steven Carr

People who read Aramaic...

Well, *some* people who read Aramaic.

hjalti

Probably not, since she later says:But what is this "appalling role" in "the history of Christian anti-Semitism" that Cohn played? Claiming that the Jews didn't kill Jesus?