Biff the unclean

Do you think that in 2000 years "professional historians" will be arguing for an historic Harry Potter? HP would fit the analogy to a "T" that Bush so widely misses

Julian

They didn't actually write it. They weren't around when it was written. If they were they would probably not need apologetics. The apologists has the invincible advantage of being allowed add anything not explicitly written in the text. They are also allowed to modify any semantics to extreme cases despite obvious readings. They can't lose, must be nice.

Julian

jgibson000

Leaving aside the question of whether you can demonstrate all of these claims, you have just summarized the MJ approach to the texts.

Jeffrey

aa5874

And, 'professional historians' will be arguing that 2000 years ago, 'professional historians' were mythical.

Julian

I will refrain from commenting on the MJ/HJ as I have no interest in that issue.

As for the other claims, I am surprised that you would challenge them. Or was it merely a reflex? While the basic beginnings of proto-orthodoxy arose fairly early, one would be hard-pressed to claim that the catholic church was around from the very start. We certainly have enough evidence of an enormous amount of trajectories within christianity. Since it seems fairly obvious that the catholic church was not around in the earliest days, it logically follows that they cannot have written the books of the NT. Providing evidence of this should be unnecessary but would be an easy enough task.

As for my classification of apologistic methods, I am sure that you are aware of them and again I wonder why you feel the need to question it. I will be happy to dig up a few links to apologetic websites so you can sample their methods for yourself, but somehow I don't think that you would want to expose yourself to something so likely to make you slam your forehead into your monitor.

Again, I care not at all about the MJ/HJ question as I find it unresolvable as well as entirely irrelevant. Since god obviously doesn't exist and any historical Jesus who may have been present at the beginning of the movement has become so marginalized that he has had no measurable influence on the development of the religion, I can safely ignore these issues and simply read these threads because of my moderation duties.

Julian

Chris Weimer

Why would they? We have so much literature being written about the fiction of Harry Potter and about its author, none of which is present then.

Biff the unclean

Amazing…do you actually think that the only way to know that the Harry Potter stories are fiction is if some other author tells you they are?
Let’s suppose none of these commentaries on Harry Potter survives 2000 years. Let’s say they have in the future the same amount and quality of information available to them about Harry that we do of Jesus in the present.
Would these future historians be more apt to say Harry’s fat cousin was a real person who lived on a real street in a real suburb of real London, and he always behaves like Harry is real therefore we assume HHP…
Or would they say that since Harry works magic and they can find no historic personage on which he was based then they cannot claim that Harry Potter was historic?

Chris Weimer

False parallel from the very beginning. We do have ancient commentaries, and those commentaries take the story as history. The earliest commentator we have, Paul, wrote only two decades after it happened.

Moreover, we have ancient fiction as well. Satyricon is one. We don't need ancient commentators to figure out who's writing history and who's writing fiction.

Finally, clearly your modernist bias shows through here - the ancients had no conception of the type of genre to which Harry Potter belongs. It doesn't exist.

Biff the unclean

Actually the only one who is showing bias is you. You fall apart so quickly and so consistently that it is almost impossible to have a conversation with you. I understand that it is difficult for you to think new thoughts other than the ones spoon fed at school but try to persevere.

I picked Harry Potter because he is a known quantity. It is a given that he is not an historic character. If you actually had a criteria that could distinguish between the historic and the mythic with the amount of information available to you for Jesus then with that same amount you should be able to peg Harry as not being historic.

You seem to ignore that the ancients had stories about demigods that were a dime a dozen. All with commentaries from the believers about how they believed they were true. Yet none of them were.

Let’s say that in 2028 someone writes book in which they claim to have met Harry Potter’s Ron. It’s fiction, of course, but they write it in commentary style. And you have other writings about Harry Potter fan clubs and how they worshiped him.

What criteria have you to accurately categorize Potter, considering that you are 2000 years in the future?

Chris Weimer

Perhaps after you finish writing it, I can analyze it for you.