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ConsequentAtheist
SFN Regular
641 Posts |
 Posted - 09/18/2002 : 05:01:51 [Permalink]
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quote:
tergiversant wrote:
It would be an argument from ignorance if one were to conclude from that premise alone, "It is true that a Jewish sage named Jesus was indeed active in first century Palestine." Thus far I have not seen anyone do this.
When you say: "... historical evidence does not militate against the possibility." You are either implying an argument from ignorance or you are simply babbling.
Edited by - ReasonableDoubt on 09/18/2002 05:03:13 |
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tergiversant
Skeptic Friend
USA
284 Posts |
Posted - 09/18/2002 : 05:37:43 [Permalink]
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quote:
quote:
I myself find the claim that Jesus was not recorded by history and its logical implication that both the Q sayings and the Markan parables are spurious quite interesting. More specifically, I am interested in knowing why one ought to believe this assessment of the textual evidence.
Because A) there is no Q document. The one time existence of Quelle is a speculation, not a fact.
and B) you are already counting all the many so-called Gnostic gospels (which contradict Mark) as spurious. Why do you discount the gospels that say that Jesus was an entirely supernatural entity as fact, and then except the ones that say he was a 50/50 mix (some say 100/100 mix) of natural and super?
The bible is not " textual evidence." It is only a list of claims.
There is no evidence to base these claims on.
Re: (A) I did not claim that there was once a Q document. I was referring to the sayings themselves.
Re: (B) Who said that I discounted the teachings of Jesus the non-canonical gospels? For all I know, some of them may well trace back to the man himself.
Re: "Textual evidence" -- If the Biblical gospels record any of the sayings of an actual first-century sage named Jesus upon whom the Christian movement waw originally based, then these authentic sayings certainly should be considered as textual evidence of the life of Jesus. The question at hand is which sayings, if any, are indeed authentic.
-- tergiversant@OklahomaAtheists.org
"Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione."
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tergiversant
Skeptic Friend
USA
284 Posts |
Posted - 09/18/2002 : 05:39:36 [Permalink]
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quote:
quote:
tergiversant wrote:
It would be an argument from ignorance if one were to conclude from that premise alone, "It is true that a Jewish sage named Jesus was indeed active in first century Palestine." Thus far I have not seen anyone do this.
When you say: "... historical evidence does not militate against the possibility." You are either implying an argument from ignorance or you are simply babbling.
This is either an ad hominem argument, or else it is mere babbling. :p
Either way, you should reread my "babbling" above and attempt to derive the straightforward meaning to be found therein. If you cannot figure it out after a time, I would be happy to rephrase what I wrote in simpler terms for your benefit.
-- tergiversant@OklahomaAtheists.org
Edited by - tergiversant on 09/18/2002 05:51:31 |
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ConsequentAtheist
SFN Regular
641 Posts |
Posted - 09/18/2002 : 06:40:33 [Permalink]
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quote:
tergiversant wrote:
It does not seem to me at all improbable that a Jewish rabbi named (or dubbed) "Jesus" with Messianic pretensions (either of his own imputed to him by his followers) might be mucking about 1st century Palestine, speaking in parables and pithy little aphorisms like those found in Mark and Q, respectively.
Again: only a fool would argue the logical impossibility of historicity, but granting logical possibility is a far cry from proving anything.
quote:
tergiversant wrote:
The Romans crucified Jewish rebels as a matter of course, most often without trial. Who is to say that Jesus was any more interesting to them than any others?
I agree that the absence of historical references may be otherwise explained and, therefore, may not serve as irrefutable evidence against historicity. But the absence of such evidence against historicity does not constitute evidence for a historical Jesus.
quote:
tergiversant wrote:
I am saying that it is entirely possible that a Jewish sage named Jesus was indeed active in first century Palestine. ... As to whether this possibility is probable, I am uncertain. I would give it one in three, myself.
To declare something as "entirely possible" simply means that is cannot be 'entirely excluded". I'll return to your "one in three" estimate below.
quote:
tergiversant wrote:
If the parables of Mark and the sayings of Q are genuine, then some of Jesus' actual sayings were indeed recorded, though not by professional historians.
In other words: if the history is accurate, then there exists accuracy in the history. OK
quote:
tergiversant wrote:
I myself find the claim that Jesus was not recorded by history and its logical implication that both the Q sayings and the Markan parables are spurious quite interesting. More specifically, I am interested in knowing why one ought to believe this assessment of the textual evidence.
Quite interesting indeed.- If you likewise embrace this claim and "its logical implication", I would be "interested in knowing why one ought to believe [your] assessment of the textual evidence."
- If, however, you reject this claim and "its logical implication", i.e., if you claim that Jesus was recorded by history and that "both the Q sayings and the Markan parables are [not] spurious", I would be interested in knowing why you give historicity no more than a "one in three" probability?
Is it your position that 'Q' is legitimate but historicity remains unlikely?
quote:
tergiversant wrote:
If the Biblical gospels record any of the sayings of an actual first-century sage named Jesus upon whom the Christian movement waw originally based, then these authentic sayings certainly should be considered as textual evidence of the life of Jesus. The question at hand is which sayings, if any, are indeed authentic.
Authenticity is one question. Accuracy is a second. Your "one in three" estimate clearly suggests that you have doubts about one or both. Why not share your reasons.
quote:
tergiversant wrote:
Either way, you should reread my "babbling" above and attempt to derive the straightforward meaning to be found therein. If you cannot figure it out after a time, I would be happy to rephrase what I wrote in simpler terms for your benefit.
Some straight-forward meaning would be appreciated. Thanks.
Edited by - ReasonableDoubt on 09/18/2002 06:53:09 |
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ConsequentAtheist
SFN Regular
641 Posts |
Posted - 09/18/2002 : 06:55:45 [Permalink]
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tergiversant, my use of the term "babbling" was indeed unnecessary and inappropriate. I apologize.
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boloboffin
New Member
USA
1 Post |
Posted - 09/18/2002 : 07:23:01 [Permalink]
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Hi, folks!
You've really hit on an area of interest for me here. I haven't gone back and read the first two parts, where I imagine you've dealt with this already, but I think you're discounting what Josephus said about Jesus a bit too quickly. I know that the Christians preserved it, and spiced it up to make it look good, but I believe that there's a core of what Josephus actually said left in what we have preserved. Basically, if you take out the resurrection claim at the end, you have a document that could come from the hand of someone who didn't believe in Jesus.
The statement "He was the Christ" could simply be telling Josephus' readers that this Jesus guy is the Christ guy you keep hearing people argue about.
This is, of course, nothing like a scholarly analysis; it might have been my master's thesis if I had stayed in graduate school, though...
Just a thought, and I promise I'm not a wingnut here to convert you! Far from it...
Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavored to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.
-- Thomas Paine |
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ConsequentAtheist
SFN Regular
641 Posts |
Posted - 09/18/2002 : 08:17:33 [Permalink]
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quote:
boloboffin wrote:
... I think you're discounting what Josephus said about Jesus a bit too quickly.
Good morning. You might find Kirby's site, Testimonium Flavianum of some interest. The problem seems to be that, even if we assume that some portion of Josephus is genuine, i.e., that the Testimonium Flavium is not a complete interpolation, we are still left with something written 5-6 decades after the proposed death/resurrection of Jesus. Every suggested 'core' text that I've seen could easily be dismissed as hearsay.
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 09/18/2002 : 08:29:07 [Permalink]
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I was referring to the sayings themselves.
To say Q is to refer to a "lost" document. But a list of wisdom sayings-which seem to be drawn directly from Greek philosophy don't need "historic Jesus" to say them. The Q hypothesis makes the assumption that Matthew and Luke were written simultaneously and not consecutively. It makes the assumption that the authors both had Mark and both had a copy of Q. It makes the assumption that Q was attributed to Jesus.
That's too many assumptions
Who said that I discounted the teachings of Jesus the non-canonical gospels? For all I know, some of them may well trace back to the man himself.
The ones I was referring to say that Jesus wasn't a man, he was a spirit. If they trace back to the man himself then that man is a complete work of fiction.
"Textual evidence" -- If the Biblical gospels record any of the sayings of an actual first-century sage named Jesus upon…
We have no information on this
whom the Christian movement waw originally based,
We have no information on this
then these authentic sayings certainly should be considered as textual evidence of the life of Jesus.
We have no way to authenticate any of this. There is no historic record. That's what these threads are all about. Since we cannot authenticate that the sayings are from Jesus we cannot authenticate Jesus from the non-existent Q any more than we can authenticate him from the NT.
Q was just a collection of sayings-often contradictory. We don't know if they all came from a single person or each from a different person. What those persons names were or where they came from is completely unknown. If there even was a collection of sayings we call Q is also unknown. Matt and Luke could have copied from each other and were deffinately edited by the RCC.
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My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. ---Thomas Henry Huxley, 1860
Edited by - slater on 09/18/2002 08:29:58 |
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tergiversant
Skeptic Friend
USA
284 Posts |
Posted - 09/19/2002 : 08:38:19 [Permalink]
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quote:
ReasonableDoubt wrote: Again: only a fool would argue the logical impossibility of historicity, but granting logical possibility is a far cry from proving anything.
True enough. quote:
ReasonableDoubt wrote: I agree that the absence of historical references may be otherwise explained and, therefore, may not serve as irrefutable evidence against historicity.
My point was that a lack of Roman historical references to Jesus and other Jewish peasant rabble is so unsurprising that it does not constitute even mildly persuasive evidence against Jesus' historicity. quote:
ReasonableDoubt wrote:
But the absence of such evidence against historicity does not constitute evidence for a historical Jesus.
Of course not. That would be an argument from ignorance. I was merely defending against the argument that a lack of historical evidence should in this case be interpreted as evidence against Jesus' historicity. quote:
ReasonableDoubt wrote:
...if you claim that Jesus was recorded by history and that "both the Q sayings and the Markan parables are [not] spurious", I would be interested in knowing why you give historicity no more than a "one in three" probability?
I have not a clue whether these sayings are spurious or not, indeed, I hardly even have a guess. I was sincerely hoping that someone (e.g. Slater) would argue that they are indeed spurious, while someone else argues for their authenticity. Such a discussion would be both enjoyable and enlightening, I believe. Hopefully, I have made my position (or lack thereof) clear enough.
-- tergiversant@OklahomaAtheists.org
"Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione."
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ConsequentAtheist
SFN Regular
641 Posts |
Posted - 09/19/2002 : 09:34:39 [Permalink]
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quote:
tergiversant wrote:
... a lack of Roman historical references to Jesus and other Jewish peasant rabble is so unsurprising that it does not constitute even mildly persuasive evidence against Jesus' historicity. ... have not a clue whether these [Q sayings and the Markan parables] are spurious or not, indeed, I hardly even have a guess.
... Hopefully, I have made my position (or lack thereof) clear enough.
No. - You totally discard "lack of Roman historical reference" as having no probative value.
- You "hardly even have a guess" with regards to the Synoptics.
- You nevertheless give historicity no more than a one in three chance.
The only reasonable conclusion would be that (a) your two-in-three bias against historicity is baseless prejudice, or (b) your two-in-three bias against historicity is based on "mildly persuasive evidence" that you choose not to share.
Edited by - ReasonableDoubt on 09/19/2002 09:40:58 |
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ConsequentAtheist
SFN Regular
641 Posts |
Posted - 09/19/2002 : 09:58:05 [Permalink]
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Slater, you don't think tergiversant is simply stirring the pot in the hopes that you and I will go at it again, do you? 
Edited by - ReasonableDoubt on 09/19/2002 09:59:07 |
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 09/19/2002 : 10:43:47 [Permalink]
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It could very well be. And I thought we were behaving ourselves nicely too.
quote:
I was merely defending against the argument that a lack of historical evidence should in this case be interpreted as evidence against Jesus' historicity.
T could you explain what you mean by that, 'cause when I read it it sounds like something DA would write.
To be an historical character one has to have been recorded by history. That's the only way that you-in the future-can have the information transmitted to you from the past. If they didn't record him then you have no means of knowing anything about him.
What was recorded about Jesus was myth, pretty standard myth at that. And some philosophy, which wasn't original either. This information-transmitted from the past- only allows us to know that there was a mythical (read as fictional) person called Jesus. It gives no indication at all of an actual historic person.
One could easily use the same logic you are using for Mark and Q for the Odyssey.
Someone-or group- we call Homer wrote about Pallas Athena and how she changed shape to become Mentor son of Alcimus. If we discount all of her magical attributes then we can assume that Athena was a real person and a friend of Telemachus because somebody wrote about her.
We could assume the same for Tarzan and Clark Kent by these standards while we are at it.
People write fiction all the time. There is nothing unusual about a fictional character (a magical fictional character at that) not being based on a living and breathing human.
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My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. ---Thomas Henry Huxley, 1860 |
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darwin alogos
SFN Regular
USA
532 Posts |
Posted - 09/19/2002 : 11:31:33 [Permalink]
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quote:
Again: only a fool would argue the logical impossibility of historicity, but granting logical possibility is a far cry from proving anything.
It seems Slater is more than willing to become that "fool".Tell us poor mortals Slater just how it is that you know quote:
"Textual evidence" -- If the Biblical gospels record any of the sayings of an actual first-century sage named Jesus upon…
We have no information on this
whom the Christian movement waw originally based,
We have no information on this
then these authentic sayings certainly should be considered as textual evidence of the life of Jesus.
We have no way to authenticate any of this. There is no historic record.
It seems you are defintely in the minorty opinion on this matter.For example,even The Jesus Seminars scholars Crossan and Borg admit"That he[Jesus]was crucified is as SURE AS ANYTHING HISTORICAL CAN EVER BE," [emp.mine](Crossan,Jesus:A Revolutionary Biographyp.145),and Borg is emphatic when he states that Jesus excution as the "as the certian fact about the historical Jesus",(Borg,Jesus:A new vision:Spirit,Culture,and the Life of Discipleship,p.179).Now as far as I know before someone's death can be declared a fact they FIRST HAVE TO HAVE EXISTED. And there's skeptism about your historical solipsistic position concerning Jesus existence from secular historians as well quote:
Michael Grant writes, "Modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory [Osiris, Mithras, etc.]. It has again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars." [Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (Scribner's, 1977), p. 200.] ]
M. Grant. writes, "Judaism was a milieu to which doctrines of deaths and rebirths of mythical gods seems so entirely foreign that the emergence of such a fabrication from its midst is very hard to credit." [Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (Scribner's, 1977), p. 199.]
.As I've said before Classical scholars wish they had the amount of textual evidence and materials to work with in their fields as we have for the NT [quote]John Macquarrie writes, "Myth is usually characterized by a remoteness in time and space... as having taken place long ago." By contrast the Gospels concern "an event that had a particularly definite location in Palestine... under Pontius Pilate, only a generation or so before the New Testament account of these happenings." [John Macquarrie, God-Talk: An Examination of the Language and Logic of Theology (Harper, 1967), pp. 177-180.]
A.N. Sherwin-White writes, "The agnostic type of form-criticism would be much more credible if the compilation of the Gospels were much later in time... than can be the case... Herodotus enables us to test the tempo of myth-making, [showing that] even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core." [A.N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 189-190.And he is a first rate Classical Scholar ]
Edited by - darwin alogos on 09/19/2002 11:40:48
Edited by - darwin alogos on 09/19/2002 11:49:49 |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 09/19/2002 : 12:02:32 [Permalink]
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quote:
It seems Slater is more than willing to become that "fool".
Once again, I don't believe Slater, nor anyone else here has ever claimed that an historical Jesus is a logical impossibility.
quote:
The Jesus Seminars scholars Crossan and Borg admit"That he[Jesus]was crucified is as [b]SURE AS ANYTHING HISTORICAL CAN EVER BE,"
Based upon what evidence? [And don't say "The Bible!"]
quote:
M. Grant. writes, "Judaism was a milieu to which doctrines of deaths and rebirths of mythical gods seems so entirely foreign that the emergence of such a fabrication from its midst is very hard to credit."
Wouldn't this be evidence of a source for Christianity other than Judiasm, then? As Slater has pointed out before numerous times, Jesus seemed to be pro-Roman, and acted very un-Jewish like. What was it, pretty much his circumcision, then 33 years later his passover or something? Nothing Jewish at all in between?
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The NASA Vision:
To improve life here,
To extend life to there,
To find life beyond.
Edited by - tokyodreamer on 09/19/2002 12:05:31 |
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 09/19/2002 : 13:12:53 [Permalink]
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It seems Slater is more than willing to become that "fool". Tell us poor mortals Slater just how it is that you know
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it YOU who are claiming to know things that you have no knowledge of?
You claim Jesus was historical, fine. Produce some historic record of him or of a person he was based on.
If you cannot do that you cannot make any claims of historicity without lying.
Now as far as I know before someone's death can be declared a fact they FIRST HAVE TO HAVE EXISTED.
And yet you cannot prove that he existed, so you are a liar.
You cannot prove that his death was a fact so you are again a liar.
You cannot prove that he was resurrected so you are three times a liar. How can you look at your own face in the mirror?
Michael Grant writes, "Modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory [Osiris, Mithras, etc.]. It has again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars." [Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels
Except if one actually reads the myths and compares them. Something you will never do, because you know that your beliefs are built on self deception and you are too much of a coward to challenge them.
"Judaism was a milieu to which doctrines of deaths and rebirths of mythical gods seems so entirely foreign that the emergence of such a fabrication from its midst is very hard to credit
He's right. Jesus as a Jewish myth is pretty unbelievable. Unless you attribute it the Hellenised Jews who had given up their religion.
John Macquarrie writes, "Myth is usually characterized by a remoteness in time and space... as having taken place long ago."
That would support my theory of a Constantian Christianity with events that took place hundreds of years before in a country that no longer exists. However in classical, and to some extent modern day, Europe myth is the fabric of everyday life. It is not removed from the common place but infuses it.
A.N. Sherwin-White writes…even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core."
Cargo cults that worshipped US Navy pilot "John Frum" as a god spread across the entire island of New Guinea by 1944. Two years after he was supposed to have crash landed.
Today twenty five years after he shat himself to death it is easy to find people who will tell you that Elvis was a wonderful singer- the best, the king. Twenty-six years ago he was a joke, a public embarrassment.
It takes no time at all for a myth to start and less for it to spread.
As an Apologist Alogo you are pathetic. You need a new name for your AOL account.
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My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. ---Thomas Henry Huxley, 1860 |
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