Adam

It should have been clear that I started the "Earthquake Magnified" thread as sarcasm about such weak evidence being stretched to yield a supposed exact date for the Crucifixion. I'm skeptical about anything unique to gMatthew.

rlogan

I did no such thing. I'm trained in statistics. This is a bizarre straw man/false dichotomy. I can't fathom how it arose in your mind.

I already explained, and it is not my problem that you have a difficult time understanding. Perhaps you have spent too much time soaking in bogus methodology to appreciate what a real science does with data. But for the less obtuse:

You are not permitted to take the data and say "oh, these data points are too high, and these ones are too low so I'll cut the big ones in half and multiply by the little ones by two. Sure, if you do that then you can say "Oh look how this new data set fits my theory". It is the logical fallacy of begging the question. You make up data to fit your theory instead of finding the best theory to explain the data.

For example, the virgin birth. One says "that's impossible, so I'll remove that from the text to arrive at the conclusion Jesus' mother was an ordinary human that had sex to procreate". Well, no - you did the reverse: started with the assumption Jesus was a human of ordinary birth and forces the data to comply. Then one says "see how my historical Jesus did not have a miraculous birth? Try to reject my theory now." This is actually a whole methodology. So if you don't like the resurrection then just eliminate that too. Etc. In the end you have a "story" that there was a man named Jesus. Ha ha - try to reject that! You have not explained the data. You made up your own nonexistent data, and it has only one or two observations instead of the original text which has hundreds.

On the other hand, if you keep that data, along with all of the other data, it is pretty easy to see a tremendous quantity of it was lifted from the Hebrew Bible, and in this case along with some other examples the mistranslation in the Septuigint version of that Hebrew Bible.

Now you have explained the data instead of thrown away the data and substituted your own data that you just made up out of begging the question. You did not have any data regarding a normal birth. That was invented out of the assumption that Jesus was human.

This actual data on the virgin birth, along with so much else, points to an author far removed from the alleged events in both geography and time. Combing through the Hebrew Bible for a construction of this Christ.

That should be a starting point for additional work but we can never really get there in part because of problems Spin has articulated so eloquently.

J-D

There's no mention of Jerusalem or of a Jewish Temple in any version of 'Goldilocks And The Three Bears' that I ever heard of.

J-D

Why? What would that prove?

LegionOnomaMoi

If you are trained in statistics, then you must know that data points are often rejected or manipulated due to outliers, missing values/responses, etc. In fact, dealing with corrupt data is a huge area of active research in statistical theory (as you must know).

Certainly you don't simply make the data fit your theory, but you don't simply take data and then find a theory either. You start with a hypothesis built upon the work of others and test it against the data using (hopefully) valid methods. And the question of whether or not you should reject your results versus your data isn't clear-cut either (at least not in the sciences). If, for example, previous research and a great deal of theory predicts that X measurements should result in Y data, but they do not, often times it is the data which is rejected because the methodology/instruments employed are believed to be faulty or inadequate. The classic example is Millikan's rejection of measurements of electron charges which did not conform to his hypothesis. He was right, but the instruments/methods he had available weren't adequate enough to reveal this consistently.

Sheshbazzar

You'll never know unless you do it.

sotto voce

Circularity comes round yet again.

J-D

In this sense of 'outlier', mountainman is not the only 'outlier' here.I don't recall that. Can you point at it?But I do.

J-D

Why? What would that prove?

J-D

Good.


You do know what the word 'if' means, don't you?I know it's a false dichotomy. That was my point.It arose from lack of clarity in how you expressed yourself originally.Not clearly enough.That depends on whether you want people to understand you. Maybe you don't care about that.Perhaps.

On reflection, no, it's an interesting speculation, but I don't think it's correct.I haven't seen anybody in tyhis discussion multiplying data points by two or cutting others in half, for the simple and obvious reason that in this discussion there aren't numerical data points. Methodologies appropriate for dealing with numerical data can't translate fully without modification to non-numerical data.If (remember this word? understand it?) a 'tremendous quantity' (whatever that means, and you haven't made your quantitative metric clear) of the text is lifted from the Hebrew Bible, that is a partial explanation of those parts of the text which were so lifted (partial, because it still leaves the questions of how, when, by whom, or why the transfer from one document to another was made). But whatever 'tremendous quantity' means, it doesn't mean 'all', so your approach (also) appears to involve discarding some part of the data and leaving it unexplained.