Doug Shaver

Are the authors irrelevant? How do the texts come into existence?

The issue is what the people who wrote the texts were thinking and why they were thinking it. A text is a record of some person's thinking. That is all it is. That is all it can be. People make history. Texts do not make history. They may record history, or they may record something else, but they do not make history. People, when they make history, might be responding to what other people wrote in some texts, but the texts themselves are not doing anything.

The texts are necessary. That does not make them sufficient.

It is vacuous to refer to a document's purpose without reference to its author's intentions in producing the document. If we have no way to know, or intelligently speculate about, the author's intentions, then we have no way of knowing what was the document's purpose. Authorial intent and documentary purpose are inseparable.

You would respond, I suppose, that the document is our sole source of information about the author's intentions, that we are clueless about the author's thinking except for what we can infer by reading what he wrote. Very well, but that does not excuse to pretense that it is anything other than people that we are talking about.

We're looking at a document. Why does it even exist? It exits because some human being produced it. Why? Writing was very hard work in the old days, and it was also very expensive. Why did people do it? People had to go to a lot of bother and spend a lot of money to produce documents. Why did people do that?

Doug Shaver

I'm fine with that. Evidence does not have to be conclusive to justify a belief, even a belief held with great conviction.

In the first place, there is no necessary correlation between motive and probability. In the second, fiction can be, to a greater or lesser extent, based on reality. Gone with the Wind is fiction, but there really was an American Civil War. Walt Disney's Davy Crockett is fiction, but there was a real Davy Crockett and he really died at the Alamo. (Whether he was still fighting when he was killed is for another debate in another forum.) Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, on the other hand, are presumed to be entirely products of Margaret Mitchell's imagination.

But, we know the Civil War happened because of sources that are both contemporary and independent of Margaret Mitchell's novel, and we know about Davy Crockett because of sources that are both contemporary and independent of Walt Disney's TV series. There seems to be no contemporary source for Socrates aside from Plato and Xenophon, unless you count Aristophanes. Aristophanes's plays were certainly fiction, but was his Socrates a Davy Crockett type fiction or a Rhett Butler type fiction? We can't be certain. The consensus is for Davy Crockett, and I'm inclined to go along with it, but I wouldn't bet the mortgage on it.

For Jesus we have no contemporary sources at all. That alone is a problem for historicists, for reasons discussed at great length in other threads, but we can let that slide for the moment. If mythicists are arguing that the gospel authors had reason to fictionalize Jesus, it can be cogently argued that this does not imply his nonexistence. The gospel Jesus certainly could have been like the Disney Crockett, or the Hugh O'Brien version of Wyatt Earp, neither real nor purely imaginary. The question is whether the the known documentary evidence pertaining to Christianity's origins is easily explained by supposing that he was, or is better explained by supposing that the gospel Jesus was purely imaginary. I am inclined toward the latter view.

That the evidence in both cases is indirect does not mean it is equal evidence.

Plato and Xenophon both say there was a trial. Both were in the right place at the right time to know for a fact whether the trial actually occurred, even if neither was physically present during the proceedings. In the absence of any contradictory evidence, we might as well take their word for it that it did. That doesn't mean we have to accept their accounts of what Socrates said at the trial. They are almost certainly not Socrates' actual words. Maybe they contain the gist of his defense, and maybe they don't. I have no particular opinion on that issue. All I feel comfortable believing is that there was a trial, that it was politically motivated, and that the outcome was Socrates' execution. Further details are not known, and I don't think they're even guessable.

By comparison, the gospel authors are not even known. That alone undermines any presumption that we should just take their word for anything. On top of that, there is no good reason to think that any of them ever set foot in Jerusalem, and it is unlikely that any of them was even alive during Jesus' purported lifetime. It is possible that the authors were close enough in time and place to have talked with people who were in Jerusalem when the trial occurred, but possibilities are not evidence. There is just no prima facie case for presuming a historical background to the story of Jesus' trial, or at least not as good a case as there is for Socrates' trial when you compare what we know about the gospel authors with what we know about Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes.

ggazoo

Check out " The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict" written by Josh McDowell. This book is a quick way to counter those who argue that the bible and Christ have no historical support, and answers many criticisms.

The book covers historical evidence, fulfillment of prophecy, criticisms leveled against the authenticity of Christ and the bible and answers to those criticisms, sources and regions from which manuscripts have been recovered, and many references to search out specific area’s of interest.

It's filled with references of expert analysis of writings of antiquity, and even though there are no direct original transcripts of the bible, there are copies from within a generation, and writings from the disciples of the Apostles and the generations following shortly after, such as Polycarp (A.D 115), Justin Martyr A.D. 100-165), Ignatius (A.D 50-115), there are many other secular references also, such as a letter from Pliny to the Emperor (A.D. 112), Cornelius Tacitus (A.D. 55-120) was a recorder of history and is referred to as the greatest historian of ancient Rome, two of his most notable works are Annals and the Histories, the Annals cover the era from Augustus’s death in A.D. 14 to that of Nero in A.D. 68, while the Histories began after Nero’s death and continue Domitian’s death in A.D. 96, there are numerous references to Christ and his death along with references to Christians.

But we live in a time of denial: the Holocaust never happened, the lunar landings were faked, Islam is a religion of peace... people believe what they want in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Toto

Check out The Jury Is In: The Ruling on McDowell's "Evidence" before you cite McDowell to us.

It's a standard apologetic reference.

I'm sorry, there are no copies from within several generations of the time that Jesus allegedly lived.

These are not "shortly" after.

There are not "numerous" references to Christ and his death. Would you mind detailing what you have in mind?

There is hard evidence that the Holocaust happened and that the lunar landings happened. But Christians continue to believe in their religious myths in spite of mountains of evidence against them, so your last statement might have a grain of truth.

TomboyMom

I have not read Josh McDowell, but check this thread for some reactions to his work: Josh McDowell However, at last we get some specific secular references, so let's talk a little about some of them.
(1) letter from Pliny to the Emperor
This letter, written around 112 C.E., states that Christians exist. It does not refer to Jesus whatsoever.
I do not dispute that there were Christians around a century after Jesus lived. I do not think you can conclude anything about Jesus from this, any more than say Islam, do you?
(2) Tacitus
IMO this is in the ball park of what we're talking about. Tacitus, also by coincidence writing in around 112 C.E., wrote that there were Christians, which I do not dispute, and that "Their name comes from Christ, who, during the reignof Tiberius, had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate." This does refer to Jesus as a living person. However:
It is not remotely contemporary, but around two generations later. Therefore Tacitus could neither have observed the alleged events or spoken to anyone who had.
Some historians believe it may have been a later Christian interpolation, which is a nice word for forgery.
It seems to be probably a report from the Christians themselves as to where they got their name, nothing really independent.

I don't think it's accurate that there are "numerous references to Christ and his death." What references are you referring to?

Sven

Hinbt: This board has a search function.
Another hint: McDowell is a joke.

And the evidence for this would be?

See above about the search function.

Problem is of course that none of the denials you mention above represent anything like the consensus of scholars. To compare fringe crackpots to scientists is somewhat a stretch.

Dargo

Here's a link to a recent thread about Josh McDowell.
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=165110

Sparrow

Others can be more specific, but Josh McDowell is only regarded as a biblical scholar by diehard Christians. Anything I found in his books I'd double or triple check. After all, he already 'knows' the answer and possibly overlook contrary evidence.

While I was waiting for IIDB to come out of surgery, I found a site titled The Foundations of Christianity. The author has a couple of pages I found particularly interesting. The first is something of an overview of early NT manuscripts which shows in a table format what we have and from when. This may be quite eyeopening to those who assume that because we think that GMark was written in 70CE, that we have an extant copy from that date. Another page that was interesting was a table showing the development of some of the theological themes of Christianity by date and document. I offer this here not to derail the thread, but to offer, especially the the lurkers, some framework for understanding what we have available in terms of evidence. Also from this site I see continued availability of of anti Christian documents throughout the first 4 centuries suggesting that the idea that no one disputed the historical nature of Jesus in antiquity to be false. If you find errors or otherwise dispute the site, do not castigate me as I am not the author. If anyone wants to discuss this material in another thread let me know and I'll probably follow you there.

ETA: This thread was actually started in response to claims made in the Josh McDowell Shootdown thread.

No Robots

Please supply quotations from those texts from the first 4 centuries that deny Christ's historicity. You know what? You can't, because they don't exist. None of the early enemies of Christianity contested Christ's historicity.

TomboyMom

Well, here's Celsus, writing around 180 C.E.: