I don't understand, you got so exasperated that you threatened to leave, so I said I wouldn't respond to you anymore. I was answering Tricky's question, not yours. Now, as if to prove some point, you are asking me to prove a negative? Were you on Bush's advisory team when he told Saddam he had to prove he didn't have WMD's? You are making the positive assertion, the burden of proof is on you.

-TC

I don't set-up camp for long, TC. The frustration I expressed at that time was not from you, however I am frustrated that you have the capability to be a great opinion generator, but lack the serious interest in doing so. Unfortunately, I see you as the Enquirer version of intelligent internet posters. You can only go so far until such discussions get, well, err... boring. It doesn't keep me from trying to get you out of the Enquirer mentality--but (unfortunately) so far to not much avail.


That doesn't make sense to me. I can't think of an opinion that I have where I don't have positive evidence to argue for the merit of my view. The issue of "burden of proof" is greatly exaggerated in my opinion. There is a burden of proof, however it deals with how evidence should be treated, not as an excuse to not giving evidence. For example, the burden of proof is on someone who wishes to say that science is not the most accurate means to understand the physical origin of the universe. This is not to say that science has no burden to produce evidence to show that science is an accurate means to understand the origin of the universe. Rather, "burden of proof" in this context just means that someone must show that they can match or surpass science's ability to understand the origin of the universe (good luck...).

Similarly, when you say the burden of proof is on me, that seems like a strange comment to me because every human being has a different belief, so we each have a burden to show what we think is better than what someone else thinks. We do that by forming opinions that agrees with the experts in that field, and then we can rely on the evidence produced by the experts in the field. If someone says the burden of proof is not with the experts, then this suggests that there is something deficient with the historical methodological method (e.g., my example above indicates something is deficient with all scientific methodologies), and therefore this person ought to show us how their methodologies are so much better. That, to me, is their burden.

However, this does not mean the experts (and including me as one who agrees with those experts) are off the hook having no burden to establish "proof." Rather, any opinion must be well-established (pro, con, or undecided).

Btw, this is what many agnostics (and people who call themselves atheists even though they are agnostics) often do not understand. There is this false understanding out there that the undecided individual is somehow riding high without need to produce evidence for their position. Nothing can be further from the truth. If someone holds a position, then they should be able to produce evidence (or argument) for their position as well as evidence (or argument) against their opponents position.

What you seem to be saying is that you are not required to present any evidence for what you believe, which in my opinion is a clear giveaway that your position has no merit. Even if you produced evidence against the historical methodologies used by NT scholars, you'd still have to produce evidence for the methodologies that you think are better.

Fundamentally, what is wrong with your position TC is that you do not think methodologically, at least very little in the way you think is methodological. Rather, you seem to go by a "seat of your pants" methodology where you read something and then pass judgment on where you stand on this or that issue (e.g., Josephus Ant. 18, Ant. 20, archons, etc.). This is poor methodology!

What you ought to be doing is introducing criteria that you feel is practical to producing historically reliable information, and then showing that in applying your criteria we find that Jesus does not appear to be a historical person. In addition, you should show why ancient history is still largely possible once we accept the same criteria for other historically plausible people (e.g., Alexander the Great).

Now, the only criteria that I've seen from you is negative criteria. That is, criteria that would establish that rules out something from being historical. For example, one criteria you mentioned in these Josephus debates is that the later church showed bias and did some horrible things, etc. Now, that's on the road toward a methodology, but the problem is that it doesn't tell us what is probably a historical event. The negative criteria that you produced is heavily biased against Christianity in that it cannot tell us if Alexander the Great lived. If we generalize that criteria to a culture having a bias in general, then all history crumbles since (of course) every culture and every ancient historian is biased in the history that is being considered. So, pinpointing bias is not a very good methodological means to know whether an event is historical or not.

Now, part of my frustration with you in particular is that I just typed out these words, but I feel like Jackie Chan's character in "Rush Hour 2" where he said to Chris Tucker's character: "do you understand the words coming out of my mouth?" I say these same things repeatedly, but you just ignore them and then go right back to poor methodological practices.

You've expressed interest in biblical scholarship, etc., but if you really had an interest, then you'd have to accept methodology in your research. Otherwise you might as well work for the Enquirer. I think I've mentioned that I have a friend who thinks that Jesus does not exist, and I see a very similar problem in his view. There's no or very little methodology behind these beliefs.

What I would like to have with you is a discussion purely about methodology. Instead of talking about biblical history, I'd like to understand the criteria of your historical methodology, and then we can begin to see how consistently you apply your methodology when given the opportunity to apply these criteria to people of history. Are you game?

this post looks to be a over the top case of talking in circles.....yikes

We definitely see the world differently, Sendy. You know if all we talked about was methodology, then the other stuff of what we think wouldn't matter. Once we settle in on a firm methodology which we are willing to stick to, then it would be much easier for me to understand TC's position. I could live with him not thinking that Jesus of Nazareth existed if he is also willing to consider that other historical persons did not live (e.g., Sargon II, Socrates, Julius Caesar, etc.). In that case, we could just accept the fact that ancient history for TC is fool's gold. What I find to be unacceptable from an intellectual point of view is to cherry pick his methodology as he is fond of doing.

I am over my head here in keeping up....but I think when someone posts ..i have the answers...i know this to be true...questions as why cant you see my proof...why is it not clear...I am spelling it out...is not for another to understand...but for you......I myself think many do not attend churches or like to see a religious person come into a room...(kinda like the salesman) because...there hell bent on you getting what there saying ...there adamant that they know they get it...and you dont...and well...we all get it...for where it is that we are on our rung of the ladder of life...you can not prove nor disprove anothers history....each thing you try to pass as fact and must be proof is from another time..another language...another exsistance for the most part...we can not pass a note and get it from one person to another with out it being messed up...or someone wishing to add to it for personal reason.....we continue to grow because of those who have passed on important information so that we might not have to be repeatitive to learn old ways we can know things a little quicker...and still can not take it as a positive and through trial and error of what we think we are being shown from passed on info see where trust and confidence can be seen and then ...guess what...take a chance where you put your trust was correct..and should you live on faith...it does not take books...nor others words...or there concern for your thinking....if one lives on faith...and many i think do and even many who dont know there doing it...do....

anyway..one of those ams i felt like posting....it is all good....Breathhhhhhhh

Harvey1, you are free to start any thread you like. But let me briefly address some of your concerns.

1. I am an amateur, so I have no doubt my methodology is sloppy. Its a past time for me, like playing golf. I can play golf, but my game is not nearly refined enough to play at the highest levels. So, a pro may think my approach sloppy, a worse handicap may think it quite refined, I can only be who I am. Professionally, I specialize in rates, (like closing rates, rates of turn, rates of descent/climb) and sequencing and prioritization. Because of poor staffing plans by the administration, I have worked six day work weeks for the past year and told not to expect better conditions for a few years in the future, so I really don't have much more time to devote to refining the technique of my methodology, this is isn't a profession for me. My golf game has suffered too!

2. While I understand the poignant point you think you are making, it sounds a lot better than it actually is. This has been a constant source of your criticism, you constantly attack the source, often using it as an excuse to ignore the content. Like I said above, we're not professional here, we're talking about topics that are interesting and spark interest. If you want to discuss someone's methodology, why don't you read the book, The Jesus Puzzle or The Jesus Mysteries and got to one of those author's websites and question them there? They obviously think themselves at least semi-pro.

3. The reason I have stopped trying to present counter-points to your alleged "evidences" is that you don't bother to consider it. "Does the person have a PhD?" Then you just don't bother. It seems an ostrich approach to me, in the sense that if its not one of your New Testament scholars, it can't possibly have any merit so it is fit to be ignored. You do it so often its not interesting to discuss these things with you because you don't appear to want to have a discussion, at least, not a discussion with some very serious strings attached.

Now, I get this is your faith, and its probably not something you want proliferated. So you see this as your own personal crusade to rid the world, or at least the world wide web, of this Enquirer Methodology employed by the likes of those such as myself. But, your comparisons to Alexander the Great to Jesus are just odd to me! Nobody worships these other figures in history, or makes such divine claims, and where those once surfaced, they are universally recognized as myths. What I don't see from your methodology is any attempt to state where the history probably is and where the myth likely is. You guys never do this, because you want to go from establishing historicity to arguing possible divinity. But, when forced to admit what parts are obviously myth FIRST, you clam up. But, like I said, you can start any thread you want, this one is supposed to answer other people's questions.

-TC

COMPARING JESUS TO OTHER HISTORICAL FIGURES

Many Christian apologists attempt to extricate themselves from their lack of evidence by claiming that if we cannot rely on the post chronicle exegesis of Jesus, then we cannot establish a historical foundation for other figures such as Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, etc. However, there sits a vast difference between historical figures and Jesus. There occurs either artifacts, writings, or eyewitness accounts for historical people, whereas, for Jesus we have nothing.

Alexander, for example, left a wake of destroyed and created cities behind. We have buildings, libraries and cities, such as Alexandria, left in his name. We have treaties, and even a letter from Alexander to the people of Chios, engraved in stone, dated at 332 B.C.E. For Agustus Caesar, we have the Res gestae divi augusti, the emperor's own account of his works and deeds, a letter to his son (Epistula ad Gaium filium), Virgil's eyewitness accounts, and much more. Napoleon left behind artifacts, eyewitness accounts and letters. We can establish some historicity to these people because we have evidence that occurred during their life times. Yet even with contemporary evidence, historians have become wary of after-the-fact stories of many of these historical people. For example, some of the stories of Alexander's conquests, or Nero starting the fire in Rome always get questioned or doubted because they contain inconsistencies or come from authors who wrote years after the alleged facts. In qualifying the history of Alexander, Pierre Briant writes, "Although more than twenty of his contemporaries chronicled Alexander's life and campaigns, none of these texts survive in original form. Many letters and speeches attributed to Alexander are ancient forgeries or reconstructions inspired by imagination or political motives. The little solid documentation we possess from Alexander's own time is mainly to be found in stone inscriptions from the Greek cities of Europe and Asia." [Briant]

Inventing histories out of whole cloth or embellished from a seed of an actual historical event appears common throughout the chronicle of human thought. Robert Price observes, "Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Cyrus, King Arthur, and others have nearly suffered this fate. What keeps historians from dismissing them as mere myths, like Paul Bunyan, is that there is some residue. We know at least a bit of mundane information about them, perhaps quite a bit, that does not form part of any legend cycle." [Price, pp. 260-261]

Interestingly, almost all important historical people have descriptions of what they looked like. We have the image of Augustus Caesar cast on denarius coins, busts of Greek and Roman aristocrats, artwork of Napoleon, etc. We have descriptions of facial qualities, height, weight, hair length & color, age and even portraits of most important historical figures. But for Jesus, we have nothing. Nowhere in the Bible do we have a description of the human shape of Jesus. How can we rely on the Gospels as the word of Jesus when no one even describes what he looked like? How odd that none of the disciple characters record what he looked like, yet believers attribute them to know exactly what he said. Indeed, this gives us a clue that Jesus came to the gospel writers and indirect and through myth. Not until hundreds of years after the alleged Jesus did pictures emerge as to what he looked like from cult Christians, and these widely differed from a blond clean shaven, curly haired Apollonian youth (found in the Roman catacombs) to a long-bearded Italian as depicted to this day. This mimics the pattern of Greek mythological figures as their believers constructed various images of what their gods looked like according to their own cultural image.

Historial people leave us with contemporary evidence, but for Jesus we have nothing. If we wanted to present a fair comparison of the type of information about Jesus to another example of equal historical value, we could do no better than to compare Jesus with the mythical figure of Hercules.



IF JESUS, THEN WHY NOT HERCULES?

If a person accepts hearsay and accounts from believers as historical evidence for Jesus, then shouldn't they act consistently to other accounts based solely on hearsay and belief?

To take one example, examine the evidence for Hercules of Greek mythology and you will find it parallels the "historicity" of Jesus to such an amazing degree that for Christian apologists to deny Hercules as a historical person belies and contradicts the very same methodology used for a historical Jesus.

Note that Herculean myth resembles Jesus in many areas. The mortal and chaste Alcmene, the mother of Hercules, gave birth to him from a union with God (Zeus). Similar to Herod who wanted to kill Jesus, Hera wanted to kill Hercules. Like Jesus, Hercules traveled the earth as a mortal helping mankind and performed miraculous deeds. Similar to Jesus who died and rose to heaven, Hercules died, rose to Mt. Olympus and became a god. Hercules gives example of perhaps the most popular hero in Ancient Greece and Rome. They believed that he actually lived, told stories about him, worshiped him, and dedicated temples to him.

Likewise the "evidence" of Hercules closely parallels that of Jesus. We have historical people like Hesiod and Plato who mention Hercules in their writings. Similar to the way the gospels tell a narrative story of Jesus, so do we have the epic stories of Homer who depict the life of Hercules. Aesop tells stories and quotes the words of Hercules. Just as we have a brief mention of Jesus by Joesphus in his Antiquities, Joesphus also mentions Hercules (more times than Jesus), in the very same work (see: 1.15; 8.5.3; 10.11.1). Just as Tacitus mentions a Christus, so does he also mention Hercules many times in his Annals. And most importantly, just as we have no artifacts, writings or eyewitnesses about Hercules, we also have nothing about Jesus. All information about Hercules and Jesus comes from stories, beliefs, and hearsay. Should we then believe in a historical Hercules, simply because ancient historians mention him and that we have stories and beliefs about him? Of course not, and the same must apply to Jesus if we wish to hold any consistency to historicity.

Some critics doubt that a historicized Jesus could develop from myth because they think there never occurred any precedence for it. We have many examples of myth from history but what about the other way around? This doubt fails in the light of the most obvious example-- the Greek mythologies where Greek and Roman writers including Diodorus, Cicero, Livy, etc., assumed that there must have existed a historical root for figures such as Hercules, Theseus, Odysseus, Minos, Dionysus, etc. These writers put their mythological heroes into an invented historical time chart. Herodotus, for example, tried to determine when Hercules lived. As Robert M. Price revealed, "The whole approach earned the name of Euhemerism, from Euhemerus who originated it." [Price, p. 250] Even today, we see many examples of seedling historicized mythologies: UFO adherents who's beliefs began as a dream of alien bodily invasion, and then expressed as actually having occurred (some of which have formed religious cults); beliefs of urban legends which started as pure fiction or hoaxes; propaganda spread by politicians which stem from fiction but believed by their constituents.

People consider Hercules and other Greek gods as myth because people no longer believe in the Greek and Roman stories. When a civilization dies, so go their gods. Christianity and its church authorities, on the other hand, still hold a powerful influence on governments, institutions, and colleges. Anyone doing research on Jesus, even skeptics, had better allude to his existence or else risk future funding and damage to their reputations or fear embarrassment against their Christian friends. Christianity depends on establishing a historical Jesus and it will defend, at all costs, even the most unreliable sources. The faithful want to believe in Jesus, and belief alone can create intellectual barriers that leak even into atheist and secular thought. We have so many Christian professors, theologians and historical "experts" around the world that tell us we should accept a historical Jesus that if repeated often enough, it tends to convince even the most ardent skeptic. The establishment of history should never reside with the "experts" words alone or simply because a scholar has a reputation as a historian. Historical review has yet to achieve the reliability of scientific investigation, (and in fact, many times ignores it). If a scholar makes a historical claim, his assertion should depend primarily with the evidence itself and not just because he or she says so. Facts do not require belief. And whereas beliefs can live comfortably without evidence at all, facts depend on evidence.

A compelling post TC and one I very much enjoyed. Why do you think the Jesus story has not died along with so many others? After all, it seems to have stood the test of time quite well.

Unfortunately TC is not always clear on when it is his material and when it is someone else's material. (TC, if this is not your material, then you ought to be clear about it whenever you post other material.)

Why? You probably are more of an expert than them. I've read their stuff, and I've read your stuff, and I'm more impressed with you TC.


Ha ha. Oh, TC, no one here is changing the world and I hope not suffering from any such kind of grand delusion. All you can do is just have a little fun by sharing (and debating ) with a few people who have an interest in these subjects. I have no ambitions to change the world, or even the 8 or so people who browse through some of the text (and might read 40% of it).


My view is that it is all myth unless there are historical criterions that provide reason to believe that certain sections of it are not myth. Where I depart from you is that I think that methodological criterions are applicable, whereas you seem to never think so. That's why I label your views as Enquirer stuff because you are guided by your gut reaction which is heavily biased against texts having mythical elements containing any kind of historicity.


It would never be necessary to establish historicity for a Christ figure. For example, I don't think historicity could ever be established for the mythical story of Adam in the garden of Eden, but that doesn't mean that Adam didn't exist. Rather, establishing historicity has little or no relevance to whether there are "true" elements to the story. The only people I know who are dedicated to establishing historicity are those who maintain inerrancy of the scriptures. Most Christians do not think that the scriptures are inerrant, so I think you are type casting.


Okay. I'll start this thread...