LGM

Yeah...just like the "Exodus" mentions Egypt. Much like Stephen King's novels mention Maine.

I guess that qualifies them as "genuine historical reminiscence" on some meaningless scale.


And this is simply the crux of the mythicist argument. That the early "Christian" epistles mentions none of the details of Jesus of Nazareth's earthly life, death and resurrection, and quote none of his alleged teachings, as found in the later gospel narratives. What you have is simply another collection of Messianic/Apocalyptic cults, headed up by guys like Paul, who discerns his "Christus", and his authority, from his exegesis of the sacred Jewish texts, and his own personal "visions", which were most likely influenced by various other cultural/religious traditions he was exposed to.

Reverend Paul meet Reverend Moon. Same ole...same ole.

Neither one of them ever met any earthly Jesus, they only know the invisible, nebulous, spiritual version, who they claim to converse with in their day dreams and visions.

Ho hum...

Roger Pearse

A coin or an inscription is not the same kind of information as that contained in a many-times copied text, surely? Quite why this is 'special pleading' you do not say.

Usually one tries not to compare apples and oranges.

This does not seem to be history at all, since history depends on written sources.

To dismissing all information about antiquity other than that derived from archaeology or inscriptions seems obscurantist to me. Nothing of real importance about ancient society is known to us that way, and that evidence itself only makes sense in the context of the literary texts. How little we know of the 3rd century by comparison with the 1st, in the absence of a Tacitus, a Suetonius, a Pliny, etc etc.

I only wrote in order to injure you? A curious idea, surely?

Firstly, you need to decide whether or not texts are transmitted from antiquity. If they are, then the NT is; if it is not, none of the classics are. That should not be a matter of debate between you and your friends. The assertions about censorship apply equally to all texts, and I would only ask: have they been transmitted or not? The same applies to all.

The other issue is whether or not what those texts contain is an accurate representation of what went on. That is a much larger or looser subject. It would be deeply silly for us to demand of a 1st century author that he write as if he had completed a degree in history at a minor American university around 1950, just as much as to demand that he had been a pupil of Alcuin, or went drinking with Thucydides.

If your argument -- you seem to me to mingle a lot of ideas together, you see, which is why I am writing conditionally -- is that poets can't be relied on (you mention Petronius), well, I'm not sure what the point of this remark is. They can certainly be relied on to give us data about antiquity, even when writing fiction. But this is not a question different in kind for antiquity from any other period.

Indeed. But the question is not whether documentary texts of this kind should be compared to literary texts transmitted via copying; that's a silly business. You need to decide now whether the classics have survived. Your position is that they have not, for all practical purposes. This is obscurantism. The discovery of the classics -- in late copies -- is the beginning of the modern era.

Of course! But most of what matters in life leaves no trace in the archaeological record. We learn far more about Cicero and the later Roman republic from his letters than any archaeology could give us, even if we dug up his house. To ignore all these is to plunge ourselves in the dark.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

LGM

And to assume the tales of Homer or "mark" refer to actual historical events, can plunge you just as deeply in the dark.

Being in "the dark" doesn't seem to bother the humble historian or scientist as much as it does the pride filled theologian.

No Robots

Questions surrounding the history of Troy are quite similar to those surrounding the Gospels.

Historians and scientists seek to clarify obscurity, not wallow in it.

LGM

Well said.

Clivedurdle

An example of the intertwining of history and theology - note the line below -

http://www.xmission.com/~fidelis/volume1/volume1.php

If the orthodox xian perspective is that it is a whole cloth - the Son of God coming into history to save us - is not a historical jesus perspective that denies the supernatural a complete misunderstanding?

LGM

No, it is just a complete waste of time.

Peeling the layers of an ancient, anonymous myth filled with countless supernatural elements, till you find the historical ordinary man at it's core, always leads nowhere.

But it sure is a helluva cottage industry.

jakejonesiv

What if we compared Christianity to the mystery religions, but only used artifacts and inscriptions?

spin

We are dealing with accounts from the past, whether they are written on parchment or on stone. You are trying to favour some text because it has a better transmission record than others, yet you won't some transmissions in the discussion, ie almost direct. The topic is history, not necessarily manuscript transmission. I see no reason to favour a text solely because of its transmission history.

One establishs whether something is an apple or an orange first. If you want to make any distinctions, now is the time.

I make distinctions between texts that have authors who we can know something about and their contexts which we can discern information from, and those which don't or which have perhaps questionable backgrounds.

History is about uncovering what happened in the past. It need not rely on purely literary texts for its content. And literary texts are not bound to say what happened in the past.

You are sorely misrepresenting what I have said. If your view were the case then there would be no point in my mentioning Tacitus and Suetonius at all.

Now you are to some degree misrepresenting history. We learn a lot about some societies without any literary texts whatsoever, from what other cultural artefacts indicate about the culture's past. Yet, I have never claimed that we should abandon literary texts, but that they are often secondary sources that help to bring coherence to other evidence.

This is true, but also true because of the fewer cultural artefacts for the period.

If nothing else, yours is certainly an interesting interpretation.

Not really. Texts that survive from before any possible censorship, such as texts from caches of various types, do not fit into your analysis. Neither do other forms of epigraphy.

But I may agree with your general point. However, the discussion about manuscript transmission is still somewhat of a red herring: Whether a text can be related to 100 years after the reputed fact rather than five hundred doesn't get us back to the reputed fact. We must use other means to get to some indication of the veracity of the content.

You seem to be obfuscating here. If we want to gain historical content from a text, we need to be able to establish certain things about the text. If you introduce a witness you need to show that there is some reason for trusting the witness.

Transmission history doesn't tell us about content. It is only one means of giving ear to a text. A better transmission can help us say that the text is not necessarily unable to reflect the period it purports to deal with.

I agree. Transmission history is in itself not particularly useful.

You are not making sense to me. I would like to wean you from the irrelevant thought that a longer transmission history is particularly meaningful in attempting to understand what happened in the past.

No-one is talking about ignoring anything, except you. Literary texts must be put in their place. They are but one means of knowledge about the past and they never have any necessary priority over other sources.

You seem to be literature-bound. When Raffaello Sancti spent so much time in the grottoes found in his era, it was because he any others like him were captivated by the "grotesque" representations of life from an earlier era found on the walls of the grottoes -- which turned out to be the internal walls of Nero's Domus Aurea. The Domus Julia has a wealth of information about the times and customs. A walk around the streets of Ostia Antica will give you a cultural wealth simply unavailable in any literature.

One derives information from where they can, be it literary or any other cultural artefact.

Giving priority to literary artefacts over others can lead to various errors, as can be seen in the interpretation of Qumran's significance through the Dead Sea Scrolls. Cultural artefacts such as coins help give a different picture of Nero from the one we get from Tacitus and Suetonius: the artefacts lead one to a more nuanced and critical reading of the literary source.

When one only has literary sources, one is at the whim of those sources, leading only to attempts at shaving off the overtly improbable and guessing about the rest, without any contextualisation to get further. This is why literary sources by themselves are extremely problematical and the history behind them just as difficult.


spin

Gamera

How do you know its his house? Oh, yes, texts. A text tells you. Kind of what we have with the NT. I can show you Jesus "tomb," does that count too?

Of course I accept the historicity of Augustine. And for the same reason I accept the historicity of Jesus. We have some texts that attest to the their existence. And that's what it means to be an historical figure.

Do you mean that Tacitus who believed in Phoenixes and was so nostalgic about "traditional" Roman virtues that he would say anything to promote them, maybe even inventing whole fictions. Do you know the mss history of Tacitus' works? How do they compare with the NT mss?

Translated: the mss history is dubious and ambiguous, the writers are propagandists and fabulists, and you believe them? Why?