|
Welcome to the International Skeptics Forum, where we discuss skepticism, critical thinking, the paranormal and science in a friendly but lively way. You are currently viewing the forum as a guest, which means you are missing out on discussing matters that are of interest to you. Please consider registering so you can gain full use of the forum features and interact with other Members. Registration is simple, fast and free! Click here to register today. |
6th December 2017, 04:05 PM | #81 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
That's the point. We don't know who wrote the Gospels or the truth of them. We don't know if any of the Gospels were written by anyone with first, second, third or fourth hand knowledge. We don't know if the stories are the result of Paul making it all up and others rewriting his stories.
|
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
6th December 2017, 04:09 PM | #82 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
6th December 2017, 04:13 PM | #83 |
Graduate Poster
Join Date: Nov 2013
Posts: 1,567
|
Is it that dire though? Paul calls himself a Jew, a seed of Abraham and from the tribe of Benjamin. His 'gospel message' is clear: Jesus' death has relevance to the Gentiles. He was writing to churches in Christ outside Judea, made up of both Jews and Gentiles. He persecuted the early Christians (churches 'in Christ') in Judea, and then he converted after some kind of experience, to preach what the early Christians were preaching.
True, he doesn't spell out a lot of things, but again, if the letters were forgeries, why not spell them out? |
6th December 2017, 05:02 PM | #84 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
I still don't get your point.
I've never been particularly interested in the historicity of Jesus as I find the question irrelevant. I do find the battle between groups over the narrative of the story interesting. Nevertheless, what I do know is that the 4 canonical Gospels are anonymous. And that none were actually written until Paul was on the scene...So to speak. I know that Matthew, Mark and Luke are so close in actual words, order of stories that either 1 was source material for the other 2 and I've read hypothesized that unknown documents (Q, M) were the source for all of these 3. John being the outlier. Regardless the source material of all these books is from oral tradition, a highly unreliable source for any historical accuracy. So, you'll have to explain why it is not reasonable to compare the formation of more recent religions and posit the probability that ancient religions were likely created similarly. |
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
6th December 2017, 05:14 PM | #85 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
6th December 2017, 05:21 PM | #86 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
|
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
6th December 2017, 06:02 PM | #87 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
6th December 2017, 06:34 PM | #88 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
I grant you this. Religion was different. Just as it was different before and after Constantine.
Why not? You don't think people were motivated by similar things such as greed, notoriety or power? Actual believers of the canonical stories are probably the worst sources as they feel a need to defend their teachings. |
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
6th December 2017, 06:49 PM | #89 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
6th December 2017, 07:20 PM | #90 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
No, it's not presentism. You could also say that Rome and the Roman Catholic Church has been engaged in presentism from day one. They chose and even edited the writings from centuries before. They chose what was canonical and what wasn't.
Also, I'm not declaring my theory as fact, just a possible idea. |
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
6th December 2017, 07:25 PM | #91 |
Graduate Poster
Join Date: Feb 2015
Posts: 1,213
|
|
6th December 2017, 07:28 PM | #92 |
Graduate Poster
Join Date: Feb 2015
Posts: 1,213
|
|
6th December 2017, 07:36 PM | #93 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
Ehrman explains historiography in incredibly basic terms for the benefit of laymen with no exposure to academia (which frankly makes much of his non-scholarly work a bit tedious to read and Early Christianity scholars have their own peculiar lingo at times. It's possible they use this terminology at times. But saying that an anonymous author makes the work "not credible" is nonsense if you don't go out of your way to explain precisely what you mean by "credibility". A fair number of ancient sources are anonymous or pseudepigraphic. Many ancient authors are only known from what they wrote, and most of the time we just have to rely on the text and context. Certain authors who wrote very vast corpuses can sometimes be understood inbterms of reliability, but this is a rare luxury indeed.
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
6th December 2017, 07:38 PM | #94 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
6th December 2017, 08:06 PM | #95 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
|
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
6th December 2017, 08:20 PM | #96 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
There was no organized Christian church until the 4th and 5th century.. One only needs to read the variety of non-canonical gospels and read about Marcion and the dimurge to understand that. Before it became the state religion of Rome Christian beliefs varied greatly. Many Christian churches didn't believe Jesus was flesh and blood. Some were polytheistic...ie Marcion.
|
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
6th December 2017, 08:29 PM | #97 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
6th December 2017, 08:55 PM | #98 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
|
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
6th December 2017, 09:06 PM | #99 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
The majority position among scholars is that the TF is an altered original passage. Supporting evidence for this is the later reference to James, the brother of Jesus, and the fact that some of the suspicious bits read a lot like incorporated margin notes (e.g. "if he can even be called a man" or however it goes).
Anyway Josephus is not the most important source on Jesus, although he is the only source for a lot of figures he mentions. And, lest you have forgotten, a source written within a generation after the events is extraordinarily good as far as historical attestations go. |
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
6th December 2017, 10:36 PM | #100 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 14,185
|
|
6th December 2017, 10:53 PM | #101 |
Philosopher
Join Date: Dec 2013
Posts: 7,051
|
Please check out this thread and specifically this page (written by our very own and rather impeccable, Nick Terry) to find out the answer.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com...ghlight=vridar |
6th December 2017, 11:45 PM | #102 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
So let me try to give you a sense of it. Take Alexander the Great. Hard to think of a more famous and impactful figure, eh? Surely there must be scores of contemporary attestations! OK, here's an exhaustive list of contemporary attestations of Alexander:
1. An inscription containing a decree of Alexander's settling an obscure Thracian land dispute. 2. A fragmented Babylonian clay tablet, containing the phrase "Alexander and his troops". 3. BCHP 2, which is a Babylonian tablet that... well, just judge for yourself. ... That's it. That's literally it. So where does our knowledge of Alexander actually come from? It comes from... 1. Diodorus Siculus, writing 300 years after Alexander's death. 2. Arrian, writing 500 years after Alexander's death. 3. Plutarch, also writing 500 years after Alexander's death. 4. Curtius, writing 400-500 years after Alexander's death. 5. "Justin", writing 400 - 700 [sic] years after Alexander's death. We have no idea who the guy was, his name just appears on a work. These accounts, needless to say, all have their hosts of issues,and the better they are, the less they say. As a result, we are less certain of much of Alexander's life (what the relationship of Macedonia was with the Achaemenid Empire, if the famous battles really played out as said, etc). But, obviously, the broad strokes of his deeds speak for themselves. So... yeah. I hope this gives some perspective of how amazing it is to have so many semi-independent sources written within a few decades of the death of a semi-obscure 1st century Jew from a Gallilean backwater. On your question of how reliable in an absolute sense they are... Well, one unexpected advantage is that it is easy to anticipate and establish the biases of the authors. Even if we don't know exactly who they were, we know that they were devout followers of Jesus, writing for followers or potential converts, and they are rather ham-fisted about the narratives they push (e.g. Matthew's obsession with incredibly far-fetched 'fulfillment of prophecy', which is actually an old Jewish exegetical tradition). This is in a sense better than having to work with a biographer with his own personal views navigating a complex political landscape, appealing to patrons, et cetera. But, ultimately, your question is hard to answer. Historians often take a bit of an easy way out in saying that history is about working with what we can establish and infer using the sources we have, not about "finding the truth about the past". Of course, there are cases where we are able to more or less definitely confirm something, e.g. through archaeology or discovery of much better sources. In this way, historians have certainly been able to refine the methods used to evaluate ancient sources. And I think that's about as good as it can get - using the standard approaches that have yielded the knowledge you'll find in your average textbook on ancient history, it is reasonably certain that Jesus existed. The implications of this, and the conclusions one reaches when working with the sources, generally conform with what we expect from experience working with other "personality cult" movmeents in antiquity and how various literary traditions functioned. There is not really any way to work with the available evidence and conclude that he did not exist, except to start from that conclusion and work to systematically explain away every available piece of evidence, and it is hard to see what the nonexistence of Jesus would explain; why one would find this conclusion, so to speak, 'desireable'. It's always possible that there was an incredibly elaborate conspiracy to start a chain of events that would, to historians 2000 years later, look exactly like compelling evidence for the existence of an original charismatic leader of an initially small religious movement and not like cults surrounding certainly mythical characters (e.g. Hercules), but certainly nothing to suggest it. |
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
7th December 2017, 12:07 AM | #103 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Iowa USA
Posts: 12,131
|
|
__________________
"Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence. = godless Dave |
|
7th December 2017, 12:14 AM | #104 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Iowa USA
Posts: 12,131
|
|
__________________
"Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence. = godless Dave |
|
7th December 2017, 12:14 AM | #105 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
7th December 2017, 12:15 AM | #106 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
7th December 2017, 12:35 AM | #107 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Iowa USA
Posts: 12,131
|
|
__________________
"Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence. = godless Dave |
|
7th December 2017, 12:38 AM | #108 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Iowa USA
Posts: 12,131
|
|
__________________
"Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence. = godless Dave |
|
7th December 2017, 12:47 AM | #109 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 22,841
|
We can't know if he did. We are told that he communicated with "Peter", and with "James the Lord's brother", who resided in Jerusalem. These are the same names as those of an Apostle and a brother of Jesus mentioned in the Gospels, so we have to decide if they were the same people.
Most commentators assume that they are, and I am inclined to accept this as true; but can we "know" this in the sense of proving it? Certainly not. |
7th December 2017, 01:16 AM | #110 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
Seriously? You obviously read the thread, so this is nothing but abject dishonesty, much like your earlier reply on a misstatement I had already corrected a few posts down.
Here: http://www.internationalskeptics.com...4&postcount=64 |
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
7th December 2017, 01:17 AM | #111 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
7th December 2017, 03:45 AM | #112 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
|
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
7th December 2017, 03:58 AM | #113 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
It's really a reasonable question. There are 3 dozen Gospels and 3 of which that were somewhat modified copies of the first or some other unknown document or document and your argument is that this means that those 4 are the most credible. Is it a surprise that believers of the religion are fully accepting of what is canonical and totally dismissive of what is not? I don't find it surprising. Now I'm not arguing for a mythicist position, or for non-canonical writings just that decisions on what was true was led by bias then and bias now.
|
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
7th December 2017, 04:35 AM | #114 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
Off-hand the only apocryphal gospel I know to be close in time to the canon (excluding the Apocalypse and non-Pauline epistles) is the Gospel of Thomas. We see development of the proto-canon quite early. So yes, unless you have some evidence you're sitting on, I would take the synoptics as the "most credible", less so John.
Regardless I'm not sure it really matters. The evidence we have is far, far beyond sufficient. In fact, the existence of apocrypha presenting different traditions in the early 2nd century only makes it more likely, not less, that Jesus existed |
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
7th December 2017, 04:40 AM | #115 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
7th December 2017, 04:51 AM | #116 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
|
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
7th December 2017, 05:06 AM | #117 |
Knave of the Dudes
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 12,936
|
|
__________________
"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy |
|
7th December 2017, 05:06 AM | #118 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 22,841
|
I haven't raised that question. I propose that the James and Peter Paul encountered in Jerusalem are the same James and Peter mentioned in the Gospels as respectively a brother and a disciple of Jesus.
Of Josephus references to Jesus and James, I reject the So called TF as entirely interpolated, and accept the other one as probably authentic. My grounds are that the later commentator Origen notices the second, but not the first. Previously I was prepared to accept that a different Jesus was involved, as a Jesus son of Damneus is mentioned in the Josephus text; but now I think it more probable that the reference is to the Nazarene, and that it constitutes a notice of James independent of Paul. That inclination of mine is tentative and not held with absolute tenacity. |
7th December 2017, 06:49 AM | #119 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
|
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
7th December 2017, 07:02 AM | #120 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 33,710
|
My position is I don't know. I believe it is much more likely that Josephus is repeating stories that he has heard as actual history. Its not like there was a daily newspaper in Jerusalem that was published where as an historian he could go back through old archives. Just imagine the absurdity of trying to write about events that happened 60 years earlier without a written record.
|
__________________
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get to me. . |
|
Thread Tools | |
|
|