spin

It takes a while to train people not to be such slaves to their own presuppositions.

hjalti

Add to that this:It's instructive to see what's going on. She wants to know who you are, so she can find biographical details that can be used to show that you are way too biased (which you obviously are, since you criticize the work Casey). Here "steph" thinks you are a certain Christian scholar, and brings up his uncritical, Christian view of the books in the New testament.

spin

Yes, the Randall Buth stuff was really a hoot--I mean it. It was endemic of a contentless vessel making noise. Why be quiet when you can make a fool of yourself. This thought has actually stimulated me to post a little literature on the page for Drusilla the Nun, a famous little piece of advice from Shakespeare:

Mark it, nuncle.
Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest,
Leave thy drink and thy whore
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score.

The most relevant advice is the line

Speak less than thou knowest,

We'll see if RJoe passes it on when he deletes it. That way as she clutches at straws, there's something else for her to use.

anethema

To Spin:"speak less than thou Knowest" - great advice to anyone incl. myself, espescially the conglomerate er i mean consortium. I am reminded of another quote, Ithink from Epicuras-" I dont speak on the subject ofgod, for the subject is too obscure and life is too short".I think the same could be applied the HS question.

spin

Latest post to Hoffmann for him to censor. It follows Hoffmann's response to Diogenes:

[t2]There is a smoking gun for historicity, called the New Testament; and it is signally important until you can show good cause why these documents should be set aside as forgeries or are so hopelessly irrelevant to the case that we can ignore them.

There is a smoking gun for the historicity of Ebion as well, called the church fathers, and it is signally important until you can show good cause why these documents should be set aside as forgeries or are so hopelessly irrelevant to the case that we can ignore them.

Of course these arguments are not logical. Ebion almost certainly didn't exist but it is ridiculous to call the church fathers who thought he was real forgeries. Jesus may have been real, but you need substantive evidence to establish his historicity.

Take a tradition source such as the gospels and let's arbitrarily discount all the outrageous material contained in them, so that we are left with plausible material, in discounting say half the text with its devils and mountains from which you can see all the world, walking on water, healing by spitting on eyes and ears, raising of the dead, and so on. There is a precedent of untrustworthy material, so let's look at the plausible material that's left. How can you distinguish a veracious datum from a plausible but non-veracious one when you only have the tradition from which to evaluate them? Once plausible data are absorbed into a tradition they become indistinguishable from the other plausible data in the tradition. This leaves those with ontological commitments in the quandary of having no epistemology. There is no real difference between the mythicist and the historicist other than the flavor of their ontological commitment. Both lack the ability to support themselves. We just happen to be used to the inherited ontological commitment. It's popularity is not a sufficient criterion for its validity.

The film Hugo has a character called George Melies, who was in fact a real human being. However, in the film he is just a character. Without external evidence for Melies, that's all he would be, a character in a story. The claim that the New Testament is sufficient evidence for the historicity of Jesus is simply bankrupt. Qualitatively there is no difference between such a claim and that of the mythicist that the bible is evidence that Jesus didn't exist.

I can show you evidence for very many people of the era you have never heard of whose historicity can be established with little doubt at all. Consider the named monuments along the Via Appia. Each one that preserves the name of the occupant attests to the historicity of that occupant. The lists of fire fighters at Ostia Antica provide a few hundred historically attested people. All have what Jesus doesn't have. A fairly firm historicity. And RJH offers a tradition text from which there is no epistemological support for his ontological commitment to a historical Jesus. Worrying about mythicism is ultimately a red herring. The task is to establish historicity for Jesus, not just to show that mythicists are wrong or working with insufficient means to justify their claims. I agree that they are. But it is also the case for the historicist. You have to stop wasting your time complaining about others and make a substantive case for your position. Best explanations need evidence.

Figures we inherit from very old traditions may not be able to be shown to have existed. We can happily continue living despite not being able to say if Robin Hood or King Arthur was real or not. While I can see a wave of special pleading welling up, given--contra RJH--the lack of substantive evidence for Jesus, he doesn't warrant the adjective "historical", even though he may have lived. (And to be clear, by "historical", I mean "able to be supported by substantive evidence from the past".)

(Let's have no more mischief about me being Jacob. If you don't have access to IP, use your stylistic skills.)[/t2]

spin

OK, so Hoffman just doesn't want to publish my stuff. It has nothing to do with writing under the name of spin: he publishes comments of others with net names. I can only conclude that his motives are not good. With that thought here's an appropriate limerick:

Polemicist R. Joey Hoffers
Desired to teach all the scoffers
He would trump all the trash
With intellectual cash
But he found he had none in his coffers.

Chaucer

They're safer, though, than the direct wordpress links, apparently. Some security issues are apparently attached to the direct wordpress links. So it's safer to use Google cache links, which is what I've provided.

Chaucer

Ted Hoffman

Muhahahahaha! Yeah, thats a genocide of Kiswahili alright.

EarlDoherty

Superb! Best one yet.

Earl Doherty

Grog

I think it would be interesting for readers of this thread to consider this argument from Hoffmann (RJ, not the one 'n'd Hoffman of BC&H):

Parse this out:

Ok, I accept that Carrier suggests this (without rechecking).

What does RJH mean by "much later" here? This confuses me (in both Carrier and RJH) because this is a term used directly by Josephus:

προειστήκει δὲ τῶν κατειληφότων αὐτὸ σικαρίων δυνατὸς ἀνὴρ Ἐλεάζαρος, ἀπόγονος Ἰούδα τοῦ πείσαντος Ἰουδαίους οὐκ ὀλίγους, ὡς πρότερον δεδηλώκαμεν, μὴ ποιεῖσθαι τὰς ἀπογραφάς, ὅτε Κυρίνιος τιμητὴς εἰς τὴν Ἰουδαίαν ἐπέμφθη

IF the author of gMark were writing roughly contemporaneously with Josephus, I do not understand RJH's objection here. The term was used in Greek, as well as Latin, in the very source that Carrier would be referencing. I know that it is a latinism in Josephus...so why not in gMark? Especially if we accept (which I do) that the author of gMark knew of, at least, Wars? Maybe I am just not well-versed enough to understand this argument, but it seems to fail here.

Why not? How does RJH know what "no-one" would do in the middle of the first century when writing what appears to be a highly allegorized story (fable, as aa would say) about Jesus? Why wouldn't such an author combine the Hebrew "Ish," recognizing that it was used in Hebrew for names in just the way that the gMark author uses it? Why wouldn't an author writing an allegory based on the (supposed) life of Jesus, combine the word "Ish" with the word "sicarius" to blame, just as Josephus does, the Sicarii for the fall of "Israel?" This, to my admittedly amateur ears, sounds like a very good fit! Please someone, demonstrate that I am wrong here.

Here for proof of his proposition, RJH quotes gMark, but isn't this circular? Aren't we trying to determine what the author of gMark meant to be saying about "Judas Iscariot?" So Hoffmann starts by saying no one would do that, but here he offers an exact example of that in Mark 3:19. Does this seem as hopeless vacuous to others as it does to me?

He concludes:

But RJH hasn't shown that Carrier's argument isn't better. Here he just asserts that "man of Kerioth" makes sense without demonstrating that gMark would not have used the already occurring "sicarius" and the Hebrew prefix "Ish" as part of his allegorical tale. RJH, once the great agnostic skeptic, is now slipping into extreme historicism. Next, he'll be arguing that it is plausible that Jesus rode two colts into Jerusalem.

So I could be completely off base, but these are my observations of this argument from RJH. It appears to me, that when you wade through the verbiage, there just isn't much there.

EDIT: Also, I didn't mean for this to be a response to Chaucer, but to be linked to the OP. I will n/t this later, a put it proper unless there are responses. My meeting's over now though, so I am out of typing time.