diana

Yes, quite possibly so (about Mein Kampf being more widely read than I'd like to believe).

Still, I think it's an interesting question and a new way to look at it. How long/well does paper keep, usually? How long before the book goes out of print due to lack of interest or the language changing so drastically that it must be completely rewritten--like The Canterbury Tales--in order to still be accessible?

And there's also the possibility of wars and insurrection (which helped obliterate evidence hither and yon betwixt Yeshua and us), which also tends to obliterate works of literature, or at least shifts people's priorities so drasticallyl that certain works of literature fall inexoribly into disuse.

Perhaps even 200 years from now, the films of Hitler could be lost or destroyed, so all we'll have are people's insistence that this evidence did exist, but it is lost. Much of the eyewitness testimony is likely to have been lost by then.

This is such an interesting question to me because I think the records we keep, while more diverse, more carefully scrutinized for falsehoods, and more specific, are also far, far less durable than the "records" we have from the 1st C.

d

Enai

Yup. I'm only here to confuse those who don't know about the godly conspiracy (in Olymp, but it's actually populated with the norse gods. They didn't like Norways climate, so they moved). I don't exist; all maps of Germany are forgeries; flights that go there take you to a fake land. But I'm oly a small part of the conspiracy, so I don't know what the reason is and what the gods want to accomplish with that little game. </conspiracy joke>

Seriously, the evidence better be extremely convincing. I lived at the Germany/Germany border for the first half of my life. I was there when it fell. I saw lots of Hitlers pictures. I heard audiotapes, spoke to eyewitnesses. I visited several Konzentrationslager (concentration camps). Does malookiemaloo suggest I dreamt that?
I surely don't want Hitler to have existed. I don't want the war to have happened. But I'm afraid, the evidence speaks otherwise.

Enai

Gary Welsh

Even if there was less evidence for Hitler than for Jesus, Hitler would still be the more "historical" of the two figures, because no magical powers are ascribed to Hitler.

Jesus has about as much historicity as Odysseus or King Arthur. There might be a kernels of truth which those myths are woven around, but that is likely the extent of it. There might have been real people whose lives were used as the basis for fictional stories of Odysseus, King Arthur and Jesus. There may really have been a Greek warrior named Odysseus who came from Ithaca, fought against the city of Troy, and took a long time to get back home. After all, an archaeologist dug up Troy, and found evidence of battles there around the time ascribed to Homer's ILIAD. But even if that is so, is that evidence that all of the supernatural aspects of the Odysseus tale are true? Calypso the goddess-nymph, the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, etc? Is that evidence that Athena exists? Or in the case of Arthur. Even if we dig up an old ruins in Glastonbury Tor or wherever, and say this was Camelot, where a Romanized Celt who fought against the invading Saxons was the basis for the King Arthur stories -- so what? Is that evidence that Excalibur is real, that Merlin and Morgan Le Fay could really cast spells, or that valkyries took Arthur's body off into the mists after his death? The exact same reasoning applies to Jesus. Even if we could establish that there was a man named Yeshua who preached to the outcasts of Jerusalem early in the 1st century AD, that would not be by itself evidence that the Biblical Jesus, who walked on water and raised the dead, was real.

So, even if you do make an argument that a certain figure most or all of us accept as historical has less written about him, than say, Jesus, it doesn't matter. It is not the quantity of evidence that makes one historical. The quality of the evidence also needs to be ascertained. Any extraordinary claims that are made need extraordinary evidence. In these cases, it's not enough that some writer claims its true, or even that multiple writers attest to the same thing.

Where history blends into legend, there really isn't much we can say, as historians. We can only hand it over to folklorists and etymologists.

JoeWallack

JW:
Here is more evidence that Hitler really existed:

Just found in the basement of The Holocaust Memorial Museum!
Poetry recital by then twenty-one year old Pat Buchanan
at "Mein Kampfeehouse", Berlin, Germany, April 30, 1963.

"To mein furkengroovin fuhrer. Man, I really dug the way you
were swingin through Poland. Barbarossa was so heavy, that it
blew my mind. You restated the negativeness of the universe.
The hideous, lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness.
The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless
eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with
nothing but waste, horror and degradation forming a useless,
bleak, straight-jacket in a black, absurd, cosmos.
Mein furkengroovin fuhrer, to me you'll always be the
coolest of the fritz cats and the biggest daddio of the
daddio-land."


Pat Buchanan,
Berlin, Germany
April 30, 1963.


Joseph

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Errors...hristian_Bible

malookiemaloo

Since I started this thread I have remembered more re the book to which I was referring.

It was written at the time of the cold war and the plot was that there has been a nuclear war and all records were destroyed.

Those who survived could not convince the next generation that Hitler ever existed and even that WW2 took place.


m

Boro Nut

Something by Von Daniken Perhaps? Seriously, I think you will have a hard time convincing the Russians and Jews that the millions upon millions of their familly, friends, and relatives who don't exist for the simple fact that he did, actually do really because he didn't.

Boro Nut

Boro Nut

Fuck me, I've been nutted!! Congratulations!!

diana

Gary Welsh,

Beautiful post, and good point.

JoeWallack,

I'm sparing on these, but I simply must :notworthy

Boro, my main man...

Getthefuckouttahere.

But good point. And as always, deftly and humourously made.

d