gstafleu

And, I wonder, do we also agree that such an HJ is an invalid hypothesis?

Gerard Stafleu

KrisK10

That's it for me folks. I would be interested in Vinni's response if he does respond, but I won't be able to check until next week.

Kris

spamandham

....I would have thought the #1 reason would be that, it's impossible for virgins to give birth to males.

KrisK10

Yep. I omitted the obvious. ----Kris

Vinny

I was attending my daughter’s college graduation so I was gone for the weekend as well.

I would go back to the nature of the book. As a historian of Roman society, Sherwin-White was commenting on the accounts of Jesus’ trial and the discussions of Paul’s citizenship and how they lined up with what he knew about Roman law and practice at the time. For the purpose of his book there was no need to make any overall determination of the ratio of legend to fact in the gospels and I don’t find any evidence that he did so. I have no doubt that he had an opinion on the subject, but I find no assertions that are not equally consistent with fact-to-fiction ratios of either 95%-5% or 5%-95%.

I think it would be like a Civil War scholar commenting on the extent to which Gone with the Wind gets historical details right. The scholar would no doubt have an opinion on the extent to which Margaret Mitchell’s tale came from actual events that she heard about from her parents and grandparents and the extent to which it came out of her own imagination, but he would not have to reach any firm conclusion on this in order to discuss whether Mitchell got known facts right.

My perspective is that of a lawyer rather than a historian. When a lawyer seeks to use a judicial opinion for precedent, he has to be wary of the fact that judges tend to run off at the mouth. In deciding a case, a judge may comment on a number of legal issues that really weren’t necessary to decide the case before him. In legal parlance, such comments are considered obiter dictum which are not binding. Only those legal conclusions that were necessitated by the facts of the case are considered precedent for later courts.

Sherwin-White acknowledges in his preface that he is an amateur in the field of New Testament scholarship. He is very careful to hedge his comments on the historicity of the gospels for this reason. His book was concerned with a very small segment of the New Testament stories. His book did not require him to make any overall conclusions about how much of the gospels were legend and how much were fact. It did not require any original research to develop any precise rule to estimate the overall percentages of legend and fact in any ancient document. Given that, I think it makes sense to view his comments about legendary accumulation as casual observations.

As far as whether any such rule is generally accepted among historians, I can say that my internet searches didn’t turn up anyone other than Christian apologists citing such a rule. The only historian I have heard from is Richard Carrier who was kind enough to compliment my posts on Sherwin-White.

Ben C Smith

Only females?

Ben.

spamandham

Heh, this has come up here before. The distinction of male offspring is important oddly enough: Parthenogenesis


I couldn't get the original link to work despite that it appeared to be correct so I changed it from wiki tags to url tags. I've added this because it is too long an explanation to fit in the Reason for Editing box

premjan

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1483688Maybe it is possible for an XXY person to be functionally female and give birth to a male by parthenogenesis?
http://www.notjustskin.org/en/Story-Susan.html
http://content.karger.com/produktedb...&file=ccg91204
In mice, XXY can be associated with good female fertility.
http://www.reproduction-online.org/c...tract/97/1/151

Ben C Smith

Well, I admit that is a new one on me, and I am glad you linked to it. Who would have guessed? Very interesting, at any rate.

I am supposing from a cursory skimming of that article that this kind of parthenogenesis has not yet been documented among humans, correct?

Ben.

premjan

Never naturally among mammals as far as I know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis#Mammals
I think genes can be switched on and off though so technically it ought to be possible to switch on either male or female phenotype in an XXY individual, allowing a female XXY individual to produce a clone of either sex by parthenogenesis. There are merely technological hurdles to overcome.