Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Nelson on September 21, 2010 at 2:41am

but if the methodology is sound, that is, if how one searches is sound, then the methodology can produce reliable evidence.
it is both through material cultural remains (documents, coins, inscriptions, etc.) and through methodology that historians do history. if historians were forced to rely on only material cultural remains and nothing more then much of what we currently accept as true about history would have to abandoned. it comes down to what you're referring to when you talk about finding tangible evidence. if by tangible you mean material cultural remains then, sure, yes, obviously no one's found any of that relating to Jesus' existence. however, let's make sure we acknowledge that even when material cultural remains are found, the translation of any text, the meaning and significance of any images, and the dating of the artifacts are all subject to historical methodology when judging what if any impact the artifact may have on historical questions!

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on September 12, 2010 at 2:17pm

I have no real evidence but some of the text looks to be written like metaphors. The figure of Jesus representing a certain view that the writer want to promote.

but that doesn't explain the verses that multiple books have in common, sometimes with the exact same words and word order.
there's no question that the authors of the gospels had a particular salvific/theological/christological viewpoint they wanted to express to their readers but they had to express that viewpoint within the context of a story that was already known to at least some of their readers from oral tradition. we can almost hear the reader (or, really, "hearer" as the book would have been read to a congregation as opposed to being read individually) saying, "wait, that's not how the story goes!"
certainly the author could have moved pericopes around or left some out (they did) but the core story of a Galilean Jew who goes to Jerusalem to teach his conception of Yahweh's plan for the Jews and who is betrayed by one of his followers, arrested for sedition, and crucified is something that could not be toyed with no matter the viewpoint of the author or his motivation to express that viewpoint.
indeed, the criterion of embarrassment indicates that certain things about the narrative would have been changed if they could have been because they would have been an obstacle to faith and proselytizing (and there's evidence that things that were able to be changed were changed for just this reason by the authors of later gospels and copyist scribes). that they would have been changed if they could have been but weren't indicates that they could not have been for a reason and that reason is that the historical core was known to the followers and therefore above being changed regardless of the obstacle it was.
and as i keep repeating, the criterion of embarrassment can be criticized along with the rest of the methodology but that's not what's being said. except for "Rational Revolution", the criticisms are being made without the understanding that a methodology exists, how it works, or what it tells us.

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on September 12, 2010 at 2:49pm

wait. what? "due to such comments"? :(
i responded to your post Fred. if a simple critical response is going to be considered "such comments" then i'm not sure where we're going to go from here.
you said you engaged in this debate on another site and the "clever guys" made mince meat of those who were not good at debating. what does "clever guys" mean- better informed on the subject matter or better at debating or both? if someone isn't as good at debating does that mean that we shouldn't respond critically to their comments when a critique is deserved? i don't understand where you're coming from at all...

you're certainly welcome to express your "best take" just as everyone else is but if you think that it won't be criticized just because you're entitled to express it or because it's your "best take" then, i'm sorry, that just isn't the case. there's no demand on you to defend your opinion if you don't want to but neither is there a demand on me to refrain from critiquing your opinion. agreed?
anyway, i certainly wasn't attacking you or anything. you said something that deserved a critique and i critiqued it. that's all. :)

do i really need to point out that all of the people you named- Lenin, Stalin, etc.- were historical persons? besides, i allowed that the individual authors certainly added their own spin to things. you didn't address where in my response i pointed out that just because a spin has been added doesn't mean there isn't a historical core reality. just like with Lenin, Stalin and the rest. the texts that uncritically relate the stories of the life of those men are not totally a historical account, of course, but i'm not arguing that the gospels are totally a historical account, merely that they preserve a historical core reality just as do the texts that relate the lives of Lenin and the others you mentioned.

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Permalink Reply by Atheist Exile on September 13, 2010 at 7:49am

Fred,

As you know, I'm familiar with you at "the other site" and was a supporter of yours there. I think you're misreading Nelson's comments: he's simply stating his argument as best he can. I can detect no ill will toward you or anybody else.

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on September 13, 2010 at 1:11pm

thanks Exile, yeah, no ill will toward anyone! just a discussion. nothing to get upset about. :)

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Permalink Reply by Atheist Exile on September 13, 2010 at 7:45am

Hi Nelson,

When you say that, "the core story of a Galilean Jew who goes to Jerusalem to teach his conception of Yahweh's plan for the Jews and who is betrayed by one of his followers, arrested for sedition, and crucified is something that could not be toyed with no matter the viewpoint of the author or his motivation", all we need to do is look to Joseph Smith and Mormonism to see that the core story can indeed be toyed with. In fact, there's nothing stopping anybody from fabricating the core story out of whole cloth.

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on September 13, 2010 at 1:31pm

the analogy doesn't hold at all because we know for a fact that Joseph Smith intentionally toyed with the core story. we don't know that for a fact with the gospels. indeed, the core story as i described it is described as the "core story" at all because it isn't toyed with by the gospel authors. what's toyed with is, occasionally, the order of events plus the peripheral events apart from the core.

there is nothing technically stopping anyone from fabricating a story out of whole cloth, certainly, but it's just far more probable that the myths and legends that arose later evolved on top of a historical core.
i never said that it would be impossible for the story to have been fabricated out of whole cloth. i simply said that appears to be far less likely, prima facie, than that there was a historical core. anyone positing an out-of-whole-cloth type offering would need to explain why the simple straightforward notion of a later mythologized but originally historically core is less likely than that the whole thing was invented out of whole cloth.
the only way to do that is to first read the scholars and understand the methodology and what it tells us.

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Permalink Reply by rationalrevolution on September 13, 2010 at 8:30am

"but they had to express that viewpoint within the context of a story that was already known to at least some of their readers from oral tradition."


This is pure nonsense. If you would just read my article on the Gospel of Mark you would see the very clear evidence that this is provably false. Its absolutely and clearly provable that there was no oral tradition, that the Gospel of Mark was written via the use of literary allusions in a way that would be impossible to be based on oral tradition, and that all of the other Gospels aren't rooted in a common oral tradition, they are directly based on the Gospel of Mark.

That's the thing, is that this stuff is very easy to demonstrate if you would just take the time to look at the facts.

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Permalink Reply by Malcolm on September 24, 2010 at 8:57am

The problem with the "criterion of embarrassment" is that different authors would be embarrassed about different things. If the originator of a piece of tradition was not embarrassed by something that later authors were, this criterion will lead to nothing. Here are a couple of prominent examples:

It is often argued that Jesus must've been baptized by John the Baptist because the Gospel authors were much embarrassed by this, but mentioned it anyway. However, in the 1st Gospel, that of Mark, there doesn't seem to be embarrassment about this. This is because Mark appears to be a believer in the idea that Jesus became the Son of God at his baptism - either by adoption by God or by having the Spirit of Christ enter him. Thus before that he was not divine or without sin and thus there would be no shame in him being baptized by John for the remission of sins. Later authors (such as Matthew and Luke) thought that Jesus was divine from birth, and thus altered Mark to downplay the fact (as they learned from Mark) that he was baptized. John even went so far as to eliminate Jesus' baptism entirely. But the criterion tells us nothing about whether Mark inherited this tradition or invented it.

Similarly, we have another oft-cited example of the use of this criterion: the "fact" that the first people to discover the empty tomb were women. But again, Matthew, Luke, and John all seem to downplay the importance of this discovery, by adding more significant appearances by male disciples. Meanwhile, in Mark, from which they derived the idea that the first discoverers were women (Paul makes no mention of them in 1 Cor 15), the women are not witnesses to anything, since they are explicitly said to not tell anyone out of fear. (Mark doesn't need for them to tell anyone since he has already told the reader in his story - a strong indication that he did not think of himself as writing history.)

In short, the application of the criterion of embarrassment in these 2 cases, perhaps the 2 most common use of it, yields no reliable historical information.

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Permalink Reply by rationalrevolution on September 14, 2010 at 7:12am

This is just plain dumb. The idea that you can apply "common sense" to history is simply not true.

Have a read of:

http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/price_20_1.htm

The reality is that its very likely that "Buddha" never existed, and that if Mohammad did ever exist, we know absolutely nothing about him and he probably had nothing to do with the writing of the Koran and none of the Muslim "history" about his life is true.

If you aren't going to study the facts about the early history of Christianity or study the documents, don't go around pretending that having a completely uninformed opinion based on popular misconceptions is some kind of virtue.

If you don't want to study and understand the facts, that's find, just say "I don't know and I don't care", but don't pretend like your totally ignorant views mean anything.

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Permalink Reply by rationalrevolution on September 14, 2010 at 8:56am

Its not so dramatic as that. Do you think that Hercules existed, or Zeus, or Hera, or Romulus and Remus, etc.? All of these figures have stories about them which take place on earth.

If you would actually study the facts instead of just making uninformed guesses about things you would see that its actually quite possible to make informed opinions on thee matters.

Its not just a matter of studying "history", but also HOW history was made.

Indeed to a large degree the assumption that Buddha was a real person is an invention of modern liberal professors. The idea really cropped up within the last 200 years. There was a school of thought among Western historians and cross cultural religious studies professors that all ancient myths had some core truth to them, they made this assumption based on nothing, its an assumption. Furthermore, this was done in part to, in the eyes of these Western scholars, be more respectful to these existing religions.

It really has nothing to do with real history.

Did you know that the first images of Buddha were created by the Greeks in the 3rd century BC, some 300-400 years after the origin of the religion, and that the humanization of Buddha occurred largely after that time? Did you know that so-called biographies of Buddha were written hundreds of years after the origin of the religion, away from where the religion started by completely different people than the earliest practitioners?

That's all relevant information.

The same goes with Muhammad. The stories about the life of Muhammad were written hundreds of years after the origin of Islam, thousand of miles away from the location of the religion's origin, by a completely different culture. So, what is the likelihood that these are based on any kind of facts? Not very likely!

Islam actually originated as the Catholics took over in Rome and drove the non-Catholic Christian sects out of the Western Empire, along with many Jews. As these people traveled east they settled in the area of what is now Saudi Arabia and integrated with the local "pagan" cultures there. The product of this integration is Islam, a mix of early apostate Christianity, Judaism, and the local pagan religions of the Saudi natives.

There is record of some guy named Mohammad who was a marauder around the time of the origin of Islam, but all we have is one document that makes one mention of him., purely as some guy who led a band of warriors.

If you look at the actual Koran, you can plainly see that its not written in any kind of consistent style or organization.

What the Koran actually appears to be is a collection of existing laws and teachings from around the Arab world at the time, which was brought together and consolidated as part of a unification of Arab tribes.

The idea that these were a bunch of revelation to some guy named Mohammad in a cave is a bunch of nonsense, thats' just some story crafted later to try and get buy-in to the authority of the ruling leaders.

There was some biography written a couple hundred years after Mohammad supposedly lived, which is quite short on any kind of detail, and then there are a bunch of other writings about his supposed life, all written hundreds of years after that, in far off places, where, not surprisingly, his story parallels existing stories in the culture of existing gods and heroes.

So in the case of Mohammad, we can perhaps say "yeah, there was 'some guy' named Mohammad", and he probably had some role in at least part of the process of unification of Arab tribes around the 7th century.

Did he write the Koran? Not likely. Are any of the Muslim sanctioned biographies about him even remotely true? Not likely. Do we know anything about him other than his name and the fact that he was some kind of small time military leader? Not likely.

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Permalink Reply by rationalrevolution on September 14, 2010 at 9:30am

And furthermore, do you think that Adam and Eve were real, Abraham, Issac, Noah, etc.?

There is no reasonable basis for thinking that any of these people were real, much less even Moses.

The real scholarship today, if you read the research from books like The Bible Unearthed, is that the Torah (first 5 books of the "old testament") was written in the 7th century BCE as part of a political propaganda project of a Jewish ruler trying to create a unified empire.

There is no basis for believing that any of the history presented in Exodus, etc. is real or that most of those people even existed at all.

Surely you don't think that the story of Noah records the life and deeds of a real person, and YET, there were dozens of biographies of Noah written in ancient times, and multiple stories that expand upon the story line found in the Torah. The same with Moses, with Enoch, with Isaiah, with Adam and Even, with Cain, with Able, with virtually everyone mentioned in the Torah.

There are hundreds of additional stories written about all of these people, and yet, the reality is that none of them ever existed any more than Zeus or Hercules or Achilles, etc.

Its interesting that people have no problem believing that none of the figures of Greek mythology were real, but when it comes to religions that are still practiced today, everyone assumes that the figures in those mythologies were real.

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