spin

Would you ask a theoretical chemist's views about scholarly aspects of Hindu poetry in the Mahabharata? How about geophysicist's views of literary theory? When you are dealing with literature you get a literary theorist's views. When dealing with history, you get a historian's views. New Testament scholars are not historians. They are text scholars, who mainly and unfortunately believe that there is history in the texts they study. Yet they are not historians. Citing text scholars giving their potted ideas of history is quite a meaningless procedure.

History is based on historical methodology, which involves an aloofness from the evidence being used for analysis. The historian tries to sublimate the stories they are familiar with in order to understand the period they are dealing with only from evidence of that period.

Citing biblical scholars -- who usually have commitments to the text --, as though they were historians, is a vain useless procedure.


spin

J-D

It's not my logic. It's basic formal logic, as anybody who understands the subject will confirm. I think you're right that you can't follow it, though. I think I've noticed that before.No, but that makes no difference to the point I was making.You haven't answered my question. Irrelevant to what?

aa5874

I understand logics but I don't understand yours.



What question? You don't understand what irrelevant means?

The historical Jesus cannot be reconstructed, no-one knows what he said, how he was derived, when and where he actually lived, what his real name was, where he was deified, or why he was deified. And, no-one knows what part of the NT is true about Jesus.

There is nothing on Jesus, external of the Church, except forgeries in Josephus and fiction in the NT and Church writings.

All that is known is that Jesus was described as a myth, as an implausible fictitious entity who resurrected and ascended through the clouds.

The historical JESUS is just useless, futile, waste of time and IRRELEVANT until you can get evidence of his relevance.

J-D

'Irrelevant' means 'not related to the matter being considered'. So whether something is relevant or not depends on which matter is being considered. You have said that 'the historical Jesus is irrelevant', but you have not said which matter you think is being considered, so it is not clear what specifically you mean by 'irrelevant' in this particular case.

dog-on

We deal with what we have.

What we have describes a certain character.

The character described is fanciful.

We have nothing else in our bucket of evidence.

What you are trying to do is remove fly specks from your buttered toast.

That is what I meant by, if one assumes an HJ...

dog-on

This "methodology" would historically validate any fictional character ever invented.

J-D

As I already pointed out earlier ...

dog-on

Perhaps when it comes to biblical historians, this is the case.

Actual historians may beg to differ.

J-D

You still haven't shown any evidence that this is so.This is obviously impossible. If book A quotes book B, the author of book A must have read book B before writing book A. There is then no way that the author of book B can have read book A before writing book B. If one of them is a copy, the other must be the original, at least relatively speaking; the 'original' might in turn be a copy of something still earlier, but it can't be a copy of its own copy. What you can't ever have is this:
http://tinyurl.com/ye7zsazNonsense. Confronted with any document, even a fictional document, a historian wants to know what in it is credible and what isn't. No historian would suppose for a moment that the novels of Jane Austen have any value as historical evidence for the existence in reality of any of the characters named in them. However, they do value as historical evidence in other ways: for example, Sense and Sensibility is of value as evidence that in the early nineteenth century it was considered improper for an unmarried woman to correspond with an unrelated man to whom she was not engaged. No historian would conclude that solely because some things in a document are not true, it is reasonable to dismiss it as containing nothing of any historical value. Historians consider the Behistun inscription an important historical source even though many of them doubt the historical accuracy of some elements of the account recorded there.

Now it may be that there are good evidential grounds to dismiss the canonical Gospels as containing nothing of any historical value. I haven't seen them yet, that's all.

J-D

Show me some who do.