Gamera

I do, especially where the text purports to be recording history. Coins, grafitti, and marginalia don't purport to be doing history, any more than a novel does, so they are not as reliable as to what they are doing, because they are symbolic.

We issue coins with figures of Lincoln on them everyday, but he's long dead, so it has a symbolic meaning, not a current historical reference to a sitting president. Lincoln is ambiguous and contextual on our coins, having a social meaning somewhat unrelated to the man himself. We also issue coins with Indian figures, eagles, etc. In short coins are symbolic and don't purport to be doing history. They require interpretation to determine what the numismatic symbolism means. Not so with purportedly historical texts. We know what the text is attempting to do, because they tell us. They may be unreliable for other reasons, but its not because of what they purport to do.

spin

Only partially correct. A clearer example for your literalist attempt, the Tiburtine Gate makes it into no historical document, yet I know that it was constructed by Augustus, just as surely as I know the Pantheon was built by Agrippa, though I have to rely on literature to know about its repairs, which is not the case with the Tiburtine Gate, which also supplies the restorers as well. Of course these cultural artefacts are strong evidence for the existence of those people they name (just as the coins are).

But yes, texts have value when they can be shown to. You continue to assume that texts can have value without going to the important step of showing their value.

All you need to do is to show the value of the texts in helping you identify the tomb.

"Augustine"? Interesting (Freudian) slip.

(Rubbish...)

Again, rubbish. A historical figure is one who has been shown to have participated in the past. How does one do this showing? By whatever means available. Literary texts are one means, once the relevant content has been shown to belong to a witness who has been verified as reputable.

You keep falling over this kludge. If you are out by a hundred years does it matter if you are out by a thousand? Obviously not. You need to examine the texts for their trustworthiness. You hold in abeyance that which you cannot judge as historical while attempting to evaluate what is left. I have not seen you make a single attempt to evaluate your sources, yet the historical content of Tacitus has frequently been put up for scrutiny.

I understand why you don't get paid for your translation services.

Propagandists are selling propaganda which has a specific historical context, hence you have a start for retrieving some history from those texts already. Fabulists as you put it is an understandable reductio ad absurdum for someone who has nothing else but apparent fables to offer.

Better than purporting to be recording history coins and other cultural artefacts are evidence of history. I don't see any reason for your position of favouring secondary source to primary.

Naturally, you wouldn't expect Lincoln coins to exist before he did. And you'd expect Lincoln from the coins, given all the other coins in the American system, to have been a real person.

You are merely confusing yourself.

You don't know much about coins.

This new red herring about purporting is interesting. Artefacts which belong to historical moments and which reflect those historical moments are not purporting to be doing history, yet are immense source for history.

Agreed.

Missed out on History 101, I see.

Ummm, weren't you the one talking about post-modernism some time back? What a text tells you is merely a starting point in understanding what it is actually attempting to do. Gulliver's Travels tells us that it is recounting true facts. Is that what it is really doing? Of course not. What a text tells you is just the surface.

As is often the case, rubbish.


spin

Ben C Smith

The Morgan silver dollar, the gold double eagle, and dimes older than the mid forties each had Lady Liberty on the obverse; was she a real person?

Ben.

spin

Welcome to the complexities of coin evidence.

The image though is ultimately irrelevant to the authority which issued the coin and which is usually indicated on the coin. Do you have any doubt about the reality of that authority? (If so, where do you keep your gold?)


spin

Ben C Smith

In heaven. Matthew 6.20 = Luke 12.33. :angel:

Ben.

Gamera

How do you know that? Did God tell you through revelation? Or did you read it in a text written by a man who may or may not have been telling the truth?

Let us know in detail either way.

Gamera

Strong rebuttal on your part.

You mean like by founding a religioin that took over the world's most powerful empire in 300 years?


Without mss history there is no telling who wrote the mss. Late mss are inherently less reliable than ones close to the event at issue. The Christian scriptures are amazingly close in time to the Jesus event, by classical standards. Absolutely no comparison with any other historical person and his mss.

Gamera

Tell us how a coin is evidence of anything but the coin maker's symbolic worldview.

So who's that Indian on the Indian Head Nickel?

Yep, ambiguous history. Hard to tell what they mean or their purpose.

You're finally starting to get it.

spin

What were the coins for?

I went down your dead end. So keep going round and round and try not to understand the significance of coins. You're so wound up, the notion of who is responsible for the production of the coin is not in your grasp.

Doh! And you're never going to get your mind muddied going into it.

Pity you didn't. Otherwise you would have said something a bit more useful to save me the effort saying what I did.


spin

Gregg

What do we have that "attests to Jesus' existence?" What?

People writing immediately after his death have nothing to say about him as a human being. Nothing. Not a word about his life, where he lived, who his parents were, what he did for a living, what he taught, why he was crucified, who crucified him, where he was buried. Not just Paul. ALL the epistle writers. They are not only silent about him, they write him right out of the picture. Paul received the good news of Christ's sacrifice from God through scripture and personal revelation, and now he is preaching it. No mention of hearing it from the people who had actually witnessed the sacrifice. The Christ is spoken of exclusively in spiritual terms.

Then we have what? A solitary reference to Pilate in one of the epistles, easily a later interpolation. A mention of, seemingly, the last supper--but there is nothing that says heavenly redeemer gods cannot "break bread." Two or three highly suspicious references by contemporary historians, all of them most likely later Christian interpolations.

Then we finally get the gospels ... the first one some 50 years after Jesus' supposed crucifixion. The first gospel, on which the others are clearly based, is carefully structured on the 5 books of the Torah and portrays the Christ as a new Adam, a better Moses, a greater Elijah, and so on. We have a passion and crucifixion that are described using passages from Scripture. We have inaccuracies and contradictory information. Matthew, Luke, and John are all heavily dependent on Mark--these are not independent eyewitness accounts.

THEN on top of this, we have evidence of belief in non-historical dying/rising savior gods and of widespread belief in heavenly intermediaries that impart spiritual knowledge or undergo sacrifices in the spiritual realm. The writer of Hebrews describes the Christ offering up his blood in a heavenly sanctuary in a scene that bears no resemblance whatsoever to Calvary, or, to that matter, Paul's vision of Christ's sacrifice. He further declares, quite explicitly, that had it taken place on Earth, Christ's sacrifice would have no more effect than the daily priestly sacrifices of animals in the Temple. It is the very heavenly nature of the sacrifice that gives it permanence, with enduring effects on the world of matter.

When all this is taken as a whole, it simply doesn't make sense any more to apply your standard of historicity to Jesus, not when all the evidence clearly points to Jesus being, basically, a god, a figure of pure faith, and regarded as such from the earliest writings we can find about him (such as the hymn in Philippians). It's like saying that because we have textual references to Attis, Adonis, Isis, Zeus, Uhura Mazda, Mithras, or for that matter, Yahweh walking in the garden in the cool of the day, we should regard these figures as historical.

The standard should not be simply, "We have some texts that mention so-and-so, therefore the sensible thing is to regard so-and-so as historical." Is not what those texts are and what they say about so-and-so equally important? When we have letter after Christian letter that describes Jesus as a heavenly redeemer and makes no mention of his earthly life or ministry, when we have Paul utterly ignoring that ministry and declaring that Christ's sacrifice was revealed to him through scripture and visions (as it was, apparently, for all the apostles of Christ), when we have "biographies" that were written decades after the events they supposedly portray and which show clear evidence of being allegorical.

In these circumstances, the "sensible" thing to me seems to be to put Jesus in the imaginary god category, and to group the gospels loosely with other stories of gods coming to earth and acting like human beings. (I say "loosely" because the authors of, say, the Greek myths may have been writing down old oral traditions they believed to be true, whereas the author of Mark knew that what he was writing was strictly allegorical.) We do not hesitate to declare other ancient gods non-historical and imaginary, despite all the texts that "attest to their existence."