Toto

This is placing too much importance on the idea of embarrassment. But these apolcalyptic cults never seem to be embarrassed when their prophecies fail.

And even if gMark was written in 70 CE, that's still fairly late to have any indication of accuracy. But if you look into the discussions of dating Mark, 70 is just the earliest date that can be assigned. There's no good reason for it. It would be more honest to give a date range - 70 to 150 CE.

On the contrary, there are mythicists who accept a standard dating, and others who date the gospels to the second century.

You don't know what you are talking about. There is no clear evidence. The establishment dating of the gospels is ad hoc because Christians need to push the dating of the gospels as early as possible.

Nothing you type here makes any sense. The gospel stories contain some accurate historical detail, but that's all you can say. They contain no indication that they were written as history. There is no method of extracting the real history from the myth, if there is any real history there.

Have you actually read any of the scholarly literature on the novelistic elements in the gospels?

Steven Carr

Which are?

Please show that the evidence for the existence of Jesus of Nazareth is statistically significant at the 5% level.

If you can't put numbers on your 'probabilities', then you don't have any statistically significant evidence.

Nobody is expecting fantastic accuracy on your estimates of probabilities.

Just a demonstration of how you know the evidence really is statistically significant at some level that can be quantified.

ApostateAbe

I don't think absolute probability estimates would be all that useful, though I would love to see someone try to assign probability ratios to certain conclusions. The more useful method is relative probability estimates, which is our end goal. When you need to choose an explanation out of a set of explanations, then you go with the explanation that seems the most probable of the lot. For example, it is more likely that "James, the Lord's brother" means the literal sibling of Jesus, based on the evidence, than the hypothesis that James was only a high-ranking member of the church. What is the rote probability ratio? I don't know, but it is a legitimate conclusion based on probability regardless. I take that to be the normal historical method of arriving at conclusions.

Toto

Read this before you talk about probabilities:

Bayes’ Theorem for Beginners: Formal Logic and Its Relevance to Historical Method



This is overly simplistic. Read what Carrier writes about the misuse of this reasoning.

That is a very subjective statement on your part. You have no actual evidence.

"rote"? Sometimes you betray your lack of background with words that don't make any sense.

No, that sort of uninformed speculation passing as analysis is the normal method in NT studies, not among historians.

If you read and understand all of the material referenced in Carrier's article and in the PM I sent you, you might be able to come back here and carry on a dialogue in about six months.

:wave:

Yellum Notnef

I tend to side with AA more than with Abe on this. AA is operating under the premise that the gospel Jesus is just as they portray him to be: a magical being conceived withe help of otherworldly forces who does miracles and talks about getting somewhere that doesn't exist. That IS the Jesus of Christianity. At least it's the one that I and everybody I grew up with learned about. There was no talk of a mortal man who spread the idea peace or was a "genius". It was all about an all powerful GOD that we had to obey and believe in if we wanted to live forever in heaven. All total bullshit, of course.

Abe seems to be going with a premise shared by liberal Christians which plays to sympathetic unbelievers: that there was a man behind the myth. But I don't see how anyone could reliably ascertain this? How do you do it? If Jesus isn't talking magic or fancy than it's probably the historic words of a real man? If the story mentions a real place than a real Jesus must have stood there? Early believers thought he was a real man?
I don't see how any of this speculation proves anything???

Abe might be right, but so might AA. The subject matter has a lot to do with it as well. If it walk and talks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And we all know that history is full of magical ducks. They might not line up as neatly as Archarya (how ever the hell that's spelled) would like to think, but there are plenty of ducks none the less.

On a side note, one curious thing I've noticed is that the vast majority who argue tooth and nail for a historical Jesus are believers who claim that others don't "do history right". But how do you trust someone to "do history" right when they can't even manage to "do reality" right?

ApostateAbe

Fenton Mulley, you seem to have the right attitude. You said, "Abe seems to be going with a premise shared by liberal Christians which plays to sympathetic unbelievers: that there was a man behind the myth. But I don't see how anyone could reliably ascertain this? How do you do it? If Jesus isn't talking magic or fancy than it's probably the historic words of a real man?"

I think it is best to not let such judgments, about what plays into the hands of your ideological opposition, affect your judgments about what is correct and what is incorrect. Perhaps you did not mean to make an argument out of that--maybe you meant only to make a point about the wishful thinking of those sympathetic to Christianity--but it is something I see repeatedly in such debates. Anti-religious activists really want Jesus to be merely mythical, so they tend to believe it. Just be aware of that psychological fallacy.

I certainly do not accept the presumption that there is typically a real man at the origin of mythical characters, and I do the best I can to discourage the notion that there should be a "default" position. To me, it is about fitting the most probable theory to the existing data, whatever that probable theory may be.

My reasons for accepting a historical Jesus, which I summarized for PhilosopherJay, are these:

• Paul's writings of meeting James, the brother of Jesus, and Cephas, also known as the Apostle Peter, in the letter to the Galatians.
• The apocalyptic prophecies in the synoptic gospels, expected of a human cult leader but not expected of a myth.
• The historical pattern of religions, seemingly matching Christianity, being started by living human leaders who are then glorified in religious myth.
• The historical background details surrounding Jesus that the gospels apparently got correct (especially the existence of the otherwise-unknown town of Nazareth).
• No references to Jesus or anyone much like him are found prior to the first century.

The second point is very important to me. I explained most thoroughly my theory of the historical Jesus in this thread:

Jesus the apocalyptic cult leader and the checklist of cult characteristics

In it, I explain that Jesus was a cult leader, and the evidence seems to strongly back it up. An MJ advocate may rebut, "Jesus could have been a mythical cult leader and still match all of those characteristics." But, to me, again, it is about accepting the most probable explanations of the evidence. History and the present day are filled with examples of such living human cult leaders, but they seem completely absent among the population of mere mythical characters.

You can always make space in the evidence for whatever arbitrary historical theory you have in mind, but that is not the way to go about separating what is probable from what is improbable.

You said, But how do you trust someone to "do history" right when they can't even manage to "do reality" right?

Good question. I suggest that you do not trust such people to do history right. I suggest that you trust the non-ideological intellectual professionals. In this case, they would be the non-religious New Testament scholars. I think it is best to get out of the mindset that it is all about reasonable people like us versus religious apologists. MJ advocates too often tend to be in that mindset.

Toto

Please STOP making unwarranted assumptions about others' motives.

Most anti-religious activists have no need for Jesus to be merely mythical. In fact, it is a distraction. It is quite sufficient for Jesus to be just human.

ApostateAbe

The more anti-religious someone is, the more likely he or she is to accept or grant probability to the theory that Jesus never existed. MJ advocacy is weakly correlated with the strength of the ability to reason and strongly correlated with the strength of opposition to Christianity. That is why MJ was the doctrine of communist nations, for example. It facilitates the ridicule of Christianity, and it is an extension of the skeptical outlook that all religious claims are mere myths. It is not an unwarranted assumption. It is an observation.

Toto

What evidence do you have? Have you gathered statistics and calculated the correlation?

Evidence?

We had a thread on this. Jiri remembers mythicism being the orthodoxy in his country, but there are other materials from the Soviet Union that assume a historical Jesus.

It is not an observation. It is your projection. It only has an inflammatory effect and cuts off discussion on the real issues, which you are sadly uninformed about.

Please end this line of posting. Any more will be split off (and these may also be, if I have the energy.)

Chaucer

You don't understand, Abe, that around here, the "non-religious New Testament scholars" just don't exist. They are too _inconvenient_.



Chaucer