Goat wrote:
historia wrote:
Goat wrote:
I find your example of John and John Adams to be boardering on the absurd.
It's not
bordering on the absurd, it
is absurd. That's the point. The analogy was meant to show the absurdness of catalysts' argument.
No, it doesn't. It doesn't address her argument at all.
The argument she made was that, because the gospels say Jesus was a faith healer, and because there were other faith healers in that area at that time, there could not have been a historical Jesus of Nazareth. Which part of that illogical argument would you care for me to address?
historia wrote:
Let's back up here a second. As I pointed out before, history (the dicipline) works like any other field of human inquiry: You begin with an observation, you proceeed to form a hypothesis, and then attempt to verify that hypothesis.
Nonsense.. absolutely and utter nonsense.
Surely, you are not suggesting here that the process of creating hypotheses to explain historical (or scientific) data is "absolute and utter nonsense"?
Read C. Behan McCullagh's
Justifying Historical Descriptions (1984), a classic in the area of historiography, particularly the section "Arguments to the Best Explanation." This is how historians work.
E.P Sanders is selling an eschological Jesus, and ignoring anything that disagrees with the understanding of Jesus he is promoting.
Listen,
every historian is faced with sources that contain conflicting and superfluous information. This is probably even more true of modern people and events than ancient ones, since there are just more sources. You have to
choose which data you think is the most accurate.
Sanders is not
ignoring the rest of the data -- as if this were mere bias or ignorance on his part. He has a
methodology for only using those parts of the available data that are considered most likely to go back to Jesus himself. He briefly discusses this in the text. Did you not read that part?
While very learned and well written, it does NOT address the subject of actual evidence that Jesus existed, taking it as a given, while admitting the evidence is scant. That ISN'T what you advertised it to be.
You had asked me what I considered to be "good books" on the subject. I gave you a biography of scholarly works. What exactly was I "advertising" it to be that it turned out not to be?
As I said already, you may well want to look at some of the other texts that dive more into methodology, since that is the area where I think you have the most questions.
That is a hypothesis, and all we can say is that some of the believers in Jesus constructed a eschatlogical prophet.. .. others constructed a Jesus that was a rebel against Rome.....
Those are not mutually exclusive ideas. In fact, any Jewish eschatological prophet declaring that God would soon bring about the restoration of Israel, and the overthrow of pagan rule, would have been a rebel against Rome, at least from the Romans' point of view.
There were plenty of people at this time who believed God would soon restore the nation of Israel; plenty of would-be messiahs that met their death proclaiming that very idea. We know that from Josephus and other writings of this time.
Why is it so hard, then, to believe that there was an actual historical Jesus of Nazareth who did the same? Why would the early Christians have needed to "construct" an eschatological prophet? Why
invent a 'mythical' prophet?
historia wrote:
The question before you, then, is this: Does that hypothesis explain the available data better than the mythicist hypothesis?
It is neither better or worse.
If you
honestly believe that, and not just saying this as a kind of rhetorical come back, then more power to you. I disagree, of course. But that's not the point that I'm trying to get across to you.
The point that I'm trying to get across here is that
this (the above) is the question at hand. Deciding which hypothesis
best explains the available data is how historical inquiry works. It's not about devising some arbitrary criterion or threshold for what "proves" Jesus existed. It's about finding the most
likely or
probable explanation for the available data.
That's all I want you to understand.
historia wrote:
Or maybe just read Ehrman's new popular-level book Did Jesus Exist? It approaches the question from the angle you are expecting, rather than these scholarly works, which ultimately address that issue, just not as directly as you would maybe like.
I found that too.. it was BADLY written,... extremely bad... I had not read any of his previous books, but on the sample of this one, I am not going too..
Now you're just starting to sound obstinate. I've only had a chance to read the introduction -- I'll order it here shortly, and read it, before deicing how good his arguments are -- but it was not badly written at all.
The thing is that, this is the kind of book you're apparently looking for. It approaches the topic in a way that scholarly works on Jesus are not; that is, it explains to the non-historian how historians actually do their work, and specifically how they do that for Jesus of Nazareth.