lcb

but aha, devils advocate, I am not sure what early christians had to gain by making up a Jesus who asked of them to sacrifice to "feed the hungry ,heal the sick and turn from worldly lusts..." and to face persecution and martyrdom either.

Tharmas

First, I found this <a href="http://www.xrefer.com/entry/553568" target="_blank">web page</a>. Gives the basics.

OK, as someone who knows what “devil’s advocate” actually means, I’ll take the bait Vorkosigan.

&lt;puts on debunking hat&gt;
So we have two supposedly contemporary sources of Socrates’ life, Plato and Xenophon, except they don’t agree on any of the details and even on some of the major points. Even their versions of Socrates’ speech at his trial differ in significant ways, which you think would be important enough to get right. Looks to me like they were both creatively adapting a lost source document. The truth behind the “Socrates” myth will never be known.

Aristohpanes’ caricature is exactly that, a caricature, a piece of admitted comic fiction like Falstaff.

Aristotle wasn’t even born until after Socrates’ supposed death, so everything he reports is hearsay.
&lt;/debunking hat&gt;

Against that, we have this: some details in Aristophanes are (so I’m told) obviously individual mannerisms, such as a funny walk. Plus, what the fact of the “caricature” really shows is that Socrates was indeed famous in his own lifetime.

Additionally it was no secret at the time that Plato creatively adapted his version of Socrates’ life in his writings. In fact Aristotle, who studied with Plato, spent a great deal of time trying to untangle the actual teachings of Socrates from Plato’s additions in his commentaries.

We find neither of these criteria with regards Christ. We find no unambiguous contemporary accounts, especially unflattering ones, and we find no critical readings of texts because in any case there are no texts for a generation after.

How’d I do?

PJPSYCO

I think it is mostly that no one says we should worship Socrates or they will hurt us. Ultimately the historicy of Socrates is irrelevant. So, it is unlikely that he would ever be put under the same scrutiny.

Ted Hoffman

questioning Socrates' historicity is okay, but its incorrect to do it while juxtaposing Jesus' historicity.
Plato made no extraordinary claims about Socrates; he did not claim socrates was the son of God nor that socrates rose from the dead, Socrates calming storms and raising people from death so why should we question Socrates historicity?

What is the significance of finding out whether or not Socrates was a real person?

philechat

Isn't Confucius' existence also doubted? Confucius also did not calm storms or raise the dead, but was described as only a "teacher" in ancient China. It is possible that Socrates was invented, in the same manner of Confucius. There might be a historical person behind these accounts, though the historical person might not resemble the characterization of Plato and the Analects.

[ July 27, 2002: Message edited by: philechat ]</p>

Tharmas

I believe the question has interest as a test of historical methodology, IntenSity.

The question has been often asked of Jesus mythicists on these boards, how can you deny the historicity of Christ when you accept the historicity of Socrates or other ancient figures on far less evidence?

I think it’s worthwhile to explore the question. We realize that it’s not cut-and-dried.

It turns out that historians do not “accept the existence” of Socrates in the sense that they believe everything Plato wrote about him without question. It turns out that even while Plato was still alive it was understood that much of what he wrote about Socrates was his (Plato’s) own creation. It turns out that there are pieces of evidence that can be evaluated and different historians probably place different weights on the evidence and have different answers.

In the end we can come back to the question of Christ’s historicity with renewed confidence in our methodology.

Anyway, that’s why I find the question interesting, purely as a question of methodology.

The Admiral

I am only asking a question, not advancing a viewpoint.

What evidence do we have for the historicity of Plato and Aristotle?

The Admiral

Defiant Heretic

Nowhere is Socrates revered as a god. He was a philosopher and a human being, no more. People read the writings of Socrates because they think the philosophy makes sense. If it were ever revealed that Socrates did not exist, and that the books were in fact written by somebody else, it would not detract from the content. The same cannot be said for the bible.

How many people have been imprisoned, tortured, and burned at the stake in the name of Socrates? How many in the name of Jesus?

Radcliffe Emerson

Noone is forcing us to accept Socrates, telling us every single human on earth who does not accept Socrates will be burned in hell for all eternity.

PopeInTheWoods

From <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/jesuspuzzle.shtml" target="_blank">Carrier's review of Doherty's Jesus Puzzle</a>:

... Christian literature, and history, holds almost no analogy with any other literature or history we could care to name. From Homer to Tacitus, there is by comparison virtually no such background or context of ideological conflict affecting the texts--affecting not only the doctoring or editing of their content, but their very selection and preservation. Christianity's own history, and above all the nature of Jesus, was the very target of contention here. I cannot think of any comparable problem in ancient history that is as seriously challenged by such biasing of the source material.

Yet the "victorious" sect happened to be historicist. Since that was an accident of their tactics and good fortune, we cannot be entirely confident that the orthodoxy, much less the surviving source material, reflects the truth about Jesus. This is all the more troubling since we know the orthodox sect was credulously eager to latch onto any piece of nonsense that supported their historicist position. Prominent examples include the obvious fantasies inserted into the Gospel narrative by Matthew, the wild legends believed and repeated by the early 2nd century Christian Papias, and Eusebius' belief and reliance upon a forged letter of Jesus himself. More troubling, though more debatable, examples include Luke's "importation" of historical details into the basic combination of Mark and Q so as to make a hagiography look like a history (see my " Luke and Josephus"), and John's probable invention of the Doubting Thomas tale (not mentioned by anyone else, least of all Matthew, who was clearly prone to recording the fabulous, or (Ps.-) Peter, and Paul, who had several occasions to call upon the story, e.g. 2 Pet. 1:16-19; 1 Cor. 15:5-7, 35-58).

All this does not entail that the historicist sect was wrong and that Jesus didn't exist. But it does throw a wrench into any argument that draws on analogies with other historical questions which were not subject from the start to this unusually intense and persistent ideological conflict and behavior. Historians are in a worse position regarding early Christian history than any comparable (and comparably preserved) institutional history (such as the origins of the major schools of philosophy), and the most suspect elements are, by an unfortunate coincidence, the very ones a historicist needs to settle his case.

As if there were other reasons needed to cast higher doubt on the source material for Jesus than the source material for Socrates.

Andy