agentacer800

I am a novice student of the historicity of the bible, so I apologize in advance if my question has been asked before. My goal for the summer is to (begin) research about Jesus, and for some reason not related to my goal, I decided to talk to Todd Friel on Way of the Master Radio... but I won't get into exactly what happened in this thread. If you look on the board, you will find my brief telling of the experience.

During the conversation, we talked about the historicity of Jesus. Currently, my thesis is that there is not any historical proof that Jesus exist, and that much of his story was compiled from various Messiah figures which were around during the same period that Jesus supposedly existed.

Once I told him this, his reply was that Jesus and the bible are accurate because there are a lot of manuscripts which contain sections of the bible. Is this a valid argument which refutes my claim? Does anyone know any research materials which show that Friel is right or wrong? During my brief research of his claim so far, the websites I have seen give very little supporting evidence.

By the way, I am just at the beginning stages of my research about the historicity of Jesus, and at this time I'm not ready to give a argument for my thesis. So excuse me if I don't answer questions about it to anyones satisfaction. I will definitely post more about my research once I get further along in my studies.

Dreadnought

One word of advice from an atheist novice to another. Forget your preconceived notions and go where the evidence takes you. If you're only in it to reinforce your beliefs then you'll probably find exactly what you're looking for. What you find will still be worthless.

agentacer800

I'm really not trying to "reinforce" my beliefs in anything. My thesis is just that, a thesis, and I an ready to drop it at anytime if I can find evidence which is accurate, knowledgeable and factual.

I might just drop the thesis for now, but I still want to research the historicity of Jesus. Maybe he was a real person, maybe he wasn't, but I would like to study it just the same.

Toto

This is a very silly argument. There are a lot of manuscripts that describe Harry Potter, but he is not real.

Roger Pearse

Some of this has been beaten to death many times on this fora. Indeed I recall making some points about the transmission of texts in the last month. No doubt Toto will have the reference to the thread. But some brief thoughts:

Are you perhaps talking past each other, I wonder? If I understand correctly:

* On the one side is a claim that Jesus of Nazareth never existed.

* On the other is a claim that the biblical text has been transmitted to us reliably, and that this means what it says is correct.

I'm not clear that the response addresses the claim, other than implicitly; and implicit argument is invariably fallacious.

The first position is not a disagreement between atheist and Christian, but between the uneducated or foolish and the educated. As such this query would best be directed to any professor of ancient history -- not biblical studies -- in any university in the world. In my cynical way I would have thought that common sense should tell us that every ideological movement is founded by a chap with a beard on a soapbox, and unless compelling evidence appears to the contrary we would certainly suppose the same of Christianity.

The second position involves category mistakes. The bible is indeed extant in more and/or earlier manuscripts than any other literary text surviving from ancient times. This should not surprise anyone, since almost all these texts were copied by monks, and they copied bibles more than anything else. If any text has survived from ancient times, this one has. (Some unwary people sometimes go for obscurantism to try to avoid this evident truth, or start introducing theology to try to create a double standard).

But of course just because we have a reliable -- at least for all non-theological purposes -- text does not mean that the authors of it were correct in what they said. That is a different issue altogether. I know that this is obvious once one says it; the problem is that the two get slurred together.

I hope that helps.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Toto

You won't get very far in your argument if you mischaracterize the opposition.

Saying that someone with a beard and a soapbox started Christianity is not the same as saying that someone was Jesus, who inspired it by his death on the cross and perceived resurrection.

Peter Kirby

Why's that? You got a better name for him?

Toto

Paul could have been that guy (he didn't have a beard AFAIK, but he had a soapbox.)

Besides, I don't think that the gospels describe Jesus as starting the movement, do they? He is only alleged to have inspired his disciples to go out and preach.

Roger Pearse

An illustration of this has just come my way in the shape of several volumes of the Loeb edition of Diodorus Siculus (although not vol. 1, frustratingly). This may illustrate what a normal text tradition -- as opposed to the very rich tradition of the bible -- looks like.

As everyone knows about half of this massive historical work is lost. Vol. 11 and 12 of the Loeb consist of fragments of books 21-40 (which covered 301-60BC), and the introduction discusses how these come to us.

Most of the fragments come from 4 collections of excerpts from classical writers, compiled at the orders of Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the 10th century. In fact this emperor order some 53 collections to be made; only 4 have reached us. Each of these reached the renaissance in a single copy. We know De insidiis in two late copies of its single, lost exemplar. One of these, Codex Vaticanus Graecus LXXIII, is a palimpsest, and the chemicals used by Angelo Mai to read it have erased all text on the page, leaving us dependent on his printed copy of the early 19th century. We know De legationibus in copies made in the late 16th century or later of the single manuscript, which was lost in the fire at the Escorial Library in 1671.

There is another collection of fragments from books 21-26 known as the Eclogae Hoeschelianae. Hoeschel was an early editor who was lent a manuscript by an English friend R. Thomson. This was copied from one belonging to a German named Ludvig living in Florence. Hoeschel printed these in his edition of Diodorus in 1603; another edition appeared in 1604 with corrections by a different editor; and no-one since has ever seen either manuscript, which are therefore lost. These bits of Diodorus are known to us solely from the editions of 1603 and 1604.

Finally some fragments are preserved in Photius' Bibliotheca, itself preserved in two mss of the 10th and 11th centuries in Venice.

---

Does anyone have access to vol.1 of the Oldfather edition, the Loeb? If so, does he discuss earlier English translations? I've found one, via Wikipedia, which is on Google Books and am anxious to know what the quality is like.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

I love you too Toto.

All the best,

Roger Pearse