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Originally Posted by Travis Clementsmith
"We have to accept somewhat looser standards. In the legal profession, to convict the defendant of a crime, you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In civil cases, a preponderance of the evidence is sufficient. When dealing with the Bible or any ancient source, we have to loosen up a little; otherwise, we can't really say anything."
-David Noel Freedman (in Bible Review magazine, Dec.1993, p.34)
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So, TC, does this mean that you are willing to dismantle the study of ancient history? As Professor Freedman alludes to, and what I've been saying for some time, ancient history is a study of what probably happened based on the current evidence that we have. Actually, all of science is based on the same assumption, but in the case of ancient history we might be lucky in having a source or artifact, but there are no video and audio recordings, no DNA to analyze, no spectrometer readings, no data from Spitzer or Hubble space telescopes, or anything of this sort.
If you are content with not analyzing history based on these limitations, then why are you providing so many radical hypotheses (and what almost all scholars would label "very improbable" hypotheses) to the questions that ancient history raises?