spin

((Do me a favour, Gamera: could you removed the opening quote tag from your reply if you aren't going to use it?

You frequently seem to leave one of these: {QUOTE=spin;4096588]))

Saying "if" when you mean something else.

I happily accept the physical evidence. You've got none.

I think you just know about about the evidence in either case.

Quit being hopeful.

You will not deal with the coin evidence.

Do you have problems with "anonymous", "unprovenanced" or "undated" for the original texts? It is your bane.

If you want to shift the argument onto the surviving copies you might want to find someone who wants to go down that path, but it is a different issue and irrelevant here.

Who wrote your gospels? How do you know? When did they live? How do you know? Where were the texts written? How do you know?

You have to make a substantive claim for your witnesses having any credibility for their statements.

No clothes. The only thing you have demonstrated is your lack of coverage.

When are you going to deal with the evidence available rather than continue extended attempts at tu quoque?

I guess hope is your only saving virtue. Coin evidence. Where is your debunking??

That is where your sad analogy falls apart.

This doesn't deal with what it claims to comment on.

When you can get past assuming your conclusions

ynquirer showed his knowledge of the issue when he jumped into this thread. Depend on that knowledge and that says a lot about your evidence techniques. Delegation finds its level of incompetence. Don't send a boy...

ynquirer is on my ignore list for good reason. If you have no argument on the coin issue, then you can drop all the tu quoque pretenses. If you have an argument which deals with the Alexander coins in their numismatic context then please go ahead and present it.

Who do I go to to get you disbarred for incompetence? Deal with the coins.

It's called "description".


spin

Doug Shaver

Prove it. Produce a quotation from Paul's writings in which he credits Jesus -- explicitly -- for one of his ideas.

I am not claiming that Christianity arose almost a hundred years later. I'm saying that no Christian writer claimed, until almost a hundred years later, that the religion's founder was a Galilean preacher named Jesus.

I think there are differences between an empire and a religion, and I think those differences are relevant to what their existence might prove about their origins.

So what? Nobody is disputing that Christianity had a beginning somewhere.

How so? The current teachings of a 2,000-year-old religion are not evidence of its original teachings unless it is demonstrably unlikely that a religion would have evolved in 2,000 years' time. Can you produce an example of any other religion as old as Christianity that has not changed since its founding?

If the two phenomena are really that analogous, it should be a trivial exercise to suggest an alternative explanation for the existence of the Alexandrian empire.

There is no shortage of alternative hypotheses about Christianity's origins that deny a historical Jesus. None of them has much of a following, but that's another issue. The point is that the evidence seems to be easily accommodated to a variety of theories. If your analogy is valid, it should be similarly easy to suggest alternative histories in which Alexander never existed but the we find the same evidence suggesting that he did.

ynquirer

This user downgrades their English. It really means that I showed my lack of knowledge. See #96:

Still in #127:

spin sticks to that opinion in #131, and explains:

Yet, I don’t believe spin. I don’t believe I am in spin’s ignore list because I know nothing of the coins. Let me guess the actual reason? If I add someone to my ignore list, I am free to comment on their knowledge and capabilities round the clock without ever addressing their arguments, while dismissing on ad hominem grounds other users’ comments that endorse such arguments. Read spin’s last reply to Gamera.

Nice ethics. :boohoo:

Gamera

Sure thing. I'll make it my top priority

But I don't. I mean if.

You mean the coins. Yes, you've been rebutted on that and I accept them too.

I'm not competent in numismatics and never claimed to be. But I can read what ynquirer said and follow his links. Your claims were rebutted by the physical evidence and yet you don't respond to him, but instead quibble about me quoting him. I take that to be an admission that you can't overcome his rebuttal and are reduced to quibbling. Next!

No, no problem at all. Do you have the same problem with coins and with the mss dealing with Alexander? It is your bane too. Which is the point of this thread.

It's relevant alright, but I understand why you would want to avoid that path.

Who wrote about Alexander and Socrates and Pericles? Same problem. You seem to have forgotten the topic thread.

Ditto with Alexander, Socrates, Pericles. See the topic thread and contemplate it.
Translated: spin cannot rebut this argument.

See ynquirer's post below. Everybody else realizes you've been rebutted but you. It's the damndest thing.

Translated: spin cannot rebut ynquirer's argument and so quibbles with me about me depending on ynquirer's argument.

Translated: spin cannot rebut ynquirer's argument and so quibbles with me about me depending on ynquirer's argument.

First it's "whom" so don't go to a grammarian. Second, translated: spin cannot rebut ynquirer's argument and so quibbles with me about me depending on ynquirer's argument.

Gamera

Galatians 1:11 - For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not man's gospel. For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ . . .And I was still not known by sight to the churches of Christ in Judea; 23 they only heard it said, "He who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy." 24 .

1 Thessalonians 4:9 - But concerning love of the brethren you have no need to have any one write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another;

Ephesians 5:2 - And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

I sense Paul giving credit here to Jesus.

Gamera

That's true of every teaching attributed to every religious and nonreligious figure before the early modern period. So if that's the case, Alexander's "teaching" are also lost to history.

No relevant differences. You claimed that Alexander was purported to have "done things" like found an empire, which is historically verifiable. Well, Jesus is purported to have founded a religion, which is also historically verifiable. It's clear the Alexandrine empire existed sometime after his death, and it's clear that Christianity existed sometime after Jesus' death.

You're disputing our ability to derive its early unknown elements from later known elements, which assume radical historical discontinuity, which if applied to Alexander, effaces him from history -- which is the topic of this thread.

Of course it changed. That's the point. We can track those changes back to a source. Unless you accept radical historical discontinuity. But if you do, there goes Alexander and Socrates, which is OK with me. Just be consistent. You can't have your Alexandrine cake without out your Jesus cake too.

I suspect nobody tried because nobody really cares about Alexander's historicity. But off the top of my head, I can come up with all kinds of Alexander Myth scenarios. They're implausible -- about an implausible as the Jesus myth scenarios.

Amaleq13

I sincerely wish you would because I'm really tired of correcting it.

Thanks in advance for making the rather minimal effort necessary.


Doug aka Amaleq13, BC&H moderator

spin

So we can all ignore it.

This just means you are clueless about the range of physical evidence.

I await your learned comments, but you've got none on the subject. Next.

I don't put much weight on the literary evidence. You don't understand what else is out there.

Yet you avoid the extra problem of anonymous, undated and unprovenanced sources. This is about the fourth time you have evaded the issue.

You have shown that you don't understand. You don't know the evidence. You have admitted that you can't even analyse the little that you have.

Both Thucydides and Xenophon amongst others wrote about Pericles. Aristophanes, Plato and Xenophon wrote about Socrates. You know when they wrote and basically where. What you have to do is pretend that that cannot be demonstrated.

Oh, so you want to go into total denial about the literary tradition which has demonstrated it has detailed knowledge of history.

Translated: you've given no argument to rebut.

ynquirer showed that he doesn't understand a thing about coins in his first sad attempts on the subject, so he is in your boat. And neither of you have a paddle.

As you don't understand the coin evidence on your own admission, your evaluation is meaningless.

Just to give a different response to my previous one, I no longer read ynquirer's posts, as I have told you. This means since the last marvels I read, I haven't seen his "argument", so you are displaying an apparent reading disability when you claim that I cannot rebut ynquirer's argument.

If you want to argue a case about the coin evidence please feel free. If you don't, well, evidence would seem to be of little interest in your apologetic exercise, wouldn't it? I'm happy to argue one, though if you want to remain incompetent in numismatics, well, that's your choice.

The issues involve the relationship between the early Alexander coins and those of Philip II, the wide range of mints used to produce the coins, the continuation of Alexander coins after his (reputed) death, the coins of his followers, and the iconography on the coins.



Reverting to such stupidity is unbecoming of you, especially when you don't seem to realise that "whom" is no longer used in colloquial speech. When people get nitpicky over antique grammar, they demonstrate that they have seriously lost the thread. Language changes there, Gamera. You need to keep up with it.

I don't mind you continuing to do this. You have shown yourself threadbare of thought. You are just pissing around now trying to keep alive a silly tu quoque pretense.

Why don't you do your homework and find out about the physical evidence instead of writing inane crap about ikea? If you want some more physical evidence I could give you a few pointers, once you deal with the coins.


spin

Doug Shaver

Hmmm . . . you "sense" it. Well, I sense the contrary, but lemme see if I can do a little better than tell you what I sense. Lemme see if I can apply some logic to the quotations.

I asked for an explicit attribution, by Paul, to Jesus of one of his teachings. There is, in this quotation, no attribution of any teaching to anybody. It is a teaching, but Paul attributes it to nobody -- not to himself, not to Jesus, not to God, not to anybody.

That is not an attribution to Jesus. If you are going to argue that in Paul's mind, Jesus and God were one and the same and therefore logically equivalent, then you are assuming your conclusion and thus arguing in a circle.

1. A revelation of Jesus is not the same as a teaching by Jesus.

2. So far as we can tell from Paul's own writings, he never encountered Jesus during the latter's lifetime. Therefore, he could have known nothing about his teachings except by word of mouth from people who had encountered him during his ministry. But Paul is here denying having learned anything about Jesus by that means.

Doug Shaver

I am not talking about a lag between a founder's purported lifetime and the religion's earliest writings. I am talking about a lag between a religion's documented existence and references within that relilgion's documents to the founder. The oldest known Jewish documents are the books of Moses, in which the authors very explicitly attributed Judaism's fundamentals to a founder who was very obviously a man of this world. The earliest Christian writings do not do anything like that. The documents attributing Christianity's founding to a man called Jesus do not appear until many years after the first documents, in which a man calling himself Paul says he learned the religion's fundamentals by direct revelation from God.

I don't have time to debate that. The lurkers can sort it out for themselves.


That is hardly the same thing as claiming that it had no beginning, so your comment is still a straw-man argument.

But neither am I disputing what you now say I am disputing, and so you are continuing to infest this discussion with irrelevancies. What I am disputing is the conventional interpretation -- conventional among both believers and most secularists -- of the earliest known elements of Christianity. And by earliest known elements, I mean the earliest known Christian writings -- those that have survived from the first and second centuries.

I do dispute your apparent assumption that Christianity in its earliest form must necessarily have been the same as what later became orthodox Christianity. That has nothing to do, though, with the issue of whether we can infer anything about the religion's origins from its later development.

Sure, but you are assuming that the source shared certain characteristics with what it change into. That assumption will constrain any reconstruction of the evolutionary track. Without that assumption, other reconstructions, which may posit more substantial changes, might be more plausible.

If I ever encounter an argument against Alexander's historicity that is as cogent as I think the argument against Jesus' historicity is, then we'll see what I decide about Alexander's historicity. Until then, I will assert that I am being quite consistent.

Well, nobody is claiming that anybody who questions it is going to burn in hell forever, so nobody cares that much. This hardly implies, though, that the scholarly community is generally indifferent to whether or not he really existed.

The best way to prove that something can be done is actually to do it.

Whether it comes from you or anybody else, if I ever seen one of those scenarios, I'll let you know whether I think it is comprable to Doherty's scenario in terms of how well it accounts for the totality of relevant evidence. Until I actually see one, though, I think my point stands.