Amaleq13

Thank you. His wife worked for the same special ed co-op as I did in Chicago.

Jeffrey is correct that your selective bolding of the Meier quote fails to support your claim. The first part of the sentence explicitly limits the extent of the rest to "later apocryphal Gospels and the Nag Hammadi material".

It is misleading to offer this quote as though it supports anything you've been claiming. Unless you encounter someone who claims that the "later apocryphal Gospels and the Nag Hammadi material" do provide reliable historical information, this quote is useless.

Dave31

Amaleq13 your point is well taken but, I did provide the full quote so I don't think I was misleading anyone here. Had I only provided what I made bold as a quote then, certainly that would be misleading. Anyway - okay, fair enough.

Would you prefer I bold a different part of the quote or nothing at all?

LOL, chill out Jeffrey, I have it right here along with many others. Still, the quotes and citations are accurate. Do you not have anything substantive to offer - that appears to be the case since all you can do is attack me personally by trying to assume I haven't read certain books. This type of argument is not impressive. Deal with the issues surrounding the quotes from Christian biblical scholars instead.

Are you a Christian Jeffrey? Have you written anything else besides Temptations Of Jesus In Early Christianity? Any more books planned?

thedistillers

They are accurate, but how is it relevant (or how does it support) to what you're saying in this thread? :huh:

Dave31

You don't find: "...there are very few sources for knowledge of the historical Jesus beyond the four canonical Gospels. Paul and Josephus offer little more than tidbits." relevant?

Jeffrey Gibson

Relevant to what? Certainly not to your previous claim that Meier and others base their conclusion that there was an HJ on faith.

Jeffrey

Dave31

First of all, how many OTHER sources do we have for Simon bar Kochba? We even have LETTERS from bar Kokhba, the authenticity of which has not been questioned, to my knowledge. There is no reason to question the existence of Simon bar Kokhba, as his story doesn't really read like myth.

I'm sure you could find any number of exceptions to any rule, but you still would not provide a sound scientific basis for believing that the magical character in the New Testament called "Jesus Christ" - famed far and wide but never mentioned by any historian of the day, many of whom were quite familiar with Judea - ever existed. There's no comparison to a scruffy rabblerouser and a rabbi, since we're talking about someone who supposedly miraculously healed the sick, raised the dead, resurrected himself from the dead and ascended into heaven - all this in front of hundreds to thousands of people for at least one to three years in a very small area, but one that was nevertheless well traveled, well known and densely populated.

That's not exactly an accurate comparison, is it?

Lets have a look at Jesus famed far and wide:

:huh:

Jeffrey Gibson

What happened to the "ex"?

It?? Note the plural "works" above. And my wager wasn't about whether you have Tenny's works in your possession. It was whether you had actually read them - along with all three volumes of Meier and the works of Crossan on the HJ -- in their entirety.

The dodge and the equivocation on your part says no.

Jeffrey

thedistillers

I'll ask again: how does it support the various claims you've made in this thread?

Jeffrey Gibson

We didn't have these until recently. And in any case, they are irrelevant to the present point -- which is why Dio Cassius did not mention the instigator and leader of a 3 year anti Roman revolt that he takes pains to report on and portrays as significant.

I wonder if you actually read the story. It's as mythical as the story of the Maccabees, which is mythical indeed.

But more importantly, the issue isn't whether we should question the existence of someone. It's the assumption that because someone was famed for being god's agent, he could not have been ignored by others who wrote histories of the period and the area in which he was famed and that we could and should expect that he would be mentioned by them.

It's quite obvious not only that that such persons could be ignored, but that they were by the very sorts of people you clam should have, or had to have, mentioned them.

Leaving aside the fact that you are engaged in petitio principii here (Josephus?), I thought the issue was why someone who is reported by partisans to have been famous (especially for being God's agent) is not mentioned anywhere else outside the literature produced by those partisans and whether the only possible way to explain the silence in both other partisan and non partisan literature about the existence of this person was that the person in question didn't really exist.

It obviously isn't.

Bar Kochba was a scruffy rabblerouser? Is this what his partisans say of him?

There is nowhere in the NT in which it is claimed that Jesus resusrrected himself. This is always and everywhere -- even in those passages which speak of Jesus being risen -- presented as something that was from first to last an act of the God of Israel.

Jesus healings, not to mention his resurrection and ascension, were witnessed by hundreds or thousands of people?

Was his healing of the leper in Mk. 1 done in an area that was densely populated?

In any case, so what? How many Roman historians mention Apollonius of Tyanna who was reputed by his biographer to have done much the same?


Umm, this is not a look at Jeusus famed far and wide. It is a look at an evangelical scholar claiming that Jesus was claimed to have been famed far and wide.

Jeffrey

Amaleq13

Unless you are arguing about whether the "apocryphal Gospels and the Nag Hammadi material" do provide "independent and reliable historical information about Jesus", there would appear to be no good reason to offer it let alone put any of it in bold. :huh: