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Author | Topic: Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tangle Member Posts: 9627 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
PaulK writes: It’s better than claiming certainty when no certainty is available. Sure, but "more likely than not" is a kind of certainty. Not knowable is the neutral position.Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London. Olen Suomi Soy Barcelona. I am Ukraine. "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
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Tanypteryx Member Posts: 4597 From: Oregon, USA Joined:
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Tangle in Message 179 writes: PaulK in Message 177 writes: It’s hard to say. How do we tell the difference between pure fiction and fiction with some historical basis? We don't we just say there's no evidence and then shrug. Exactly! Fiction is the operational term here. The bible is fiction and there is no independent verifiable evidence that Jesus was not a fictional character. If there was everyone would know by now. The thing that's odd to me is seeing people who don't believe in Jesus and who know there is no evidence are using the same arguments as creationists and pretending that no evidence is actually evidence. These are the same meaningless arguments GDR uses when he knows there is not a shred of evidence, but he wants to rationalize his beliefs. There is NO verifiable evidence that Jesus was a real person.Stop Tzar Vladimir the Condemned! What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty Python One important characteristic of a theory is that it has survived repeated attempts to falsify it. Contrary to your understanding, all available evidence confirms it. --Subbie If evolution is shown to be false, it will be at the hands of things that are true, not made up. --Percy The reason that we have the scientific method is because common sense isn't reliable. -- Taq Why should anyone debate someone who doesn't know the subject? -- AZPaul3
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PaulK Member Posts: 18047 Joined: Member Rating: 5.0 |
quote: It isn’t though. It’s more likely than not that I’ll roll 3 or higher on an ordinary die. But it isn’t certain at all. And if you want to change my mind all you have to do is offer better evidence or a better explanation of the evidence we do have. But I’ve yet to see any really good arguments for a purely mythical Jesus - although I have seen some appallingly bad ones.
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Tanypteryx Member Posts: 4597 From: Oregon, USA Joined: |
PaulK in Message 180 writes: The Gospel stories are there. Saying that they were just made up is not an adequate explanation for their existence - it explains nothing about them. Since we don't have an adequate explanation for their source or basis, I don't see how making up an explanation helps.
quote: It’s better than claiming certainty when no certainty is available. Yes!Stop Tzar Vladimir the Condemned! What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty Python One important characteristic of a theory is that it has survived repeated attempts to falsify it. Contrary to your understanding, all available evidence confirms it. --Subbie If evolution is shown to be false, it will be at the hands of things that are true, not made up. --Percy The reason that we have the scientific method is because common sense isn't reliable. -- Taq Why should anyone debate someone who doesn't know the subject? -- AZPaul3
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Theodoric Member Posts: 9489 From: Northwest, WI, USA Joined: |
Correct. John the Baptist shows up in all extant copies of Antiquities by Josephus. Jesus only shows up in much later copies. There is no historical evidence for Moses.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -Christopher Hitchens Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts "God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness. If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up why would you have to lie?
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PaulK Member Posts: 18047 Joined: Member Rating: 5.0 |
quote: Then the Jesus Myther’s position is dead. Without an alternative explanation for the Gospels, the idea that they are a heavily fictionalised account of Christianity’s beginnings stands unchallenged.
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Theodoric Member Posts: 9489 From: Northwest, WI, USA Joined: |
If you think there was some Jesus dude walking around and he started a religion, was his name Jesus? What was his name?
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -Christopher Hitchens Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts "God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness. If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up why would you have to lie?
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Percy Member Posts: 23144 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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PaulK writes: The point being that sensible people wouldn’t jump to conclusions on clearly inadequate evidence.... Obviously not - it’s the reasoning I’m criticising, not the position. Revisionism. Discussion hadn't even started.
quote: No, I’m clearly not saying that. You clearly are. Just look how you ended your post.
On the other hand you aren’t answering with substantive points. You’re just complaining that you are considered less than sensible (possibly incorrectly, even after my clarification in Message 337). Message 337 is a clarification? Who could tell.
Would a sensible person do that? There you go again, trying to characterize people as not sensible even before any discussion has taken place. Nothing of substance on the topic has yet been exchanged between us. Your insistence on a priori ruling that a certain position is not sensible makes no sense. --Percy
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PaulK Member Posts: 18047 Joined: Member Rating: 5.0 |
quote: Outright falsehood. My original statement was
quote: Note the last four words. It’s not the conclusion it’s the reasoning.
quote: Yes, look at it and note how it doesn’t support your claim at all.
quote: Someone who read it and noticed that I was suggesting that further evidence could make the conclusion sensible?
quote: Pointing out that your behaviour is less than sensible is simply stating a fact. The fact that you haven’t made any substantive points is down to you - it hardly makes your position any more sensible,
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Tangle Member Posts: 9627 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
PaulK writes: It isn’t though. It’s more likely than not that I’ll roll 3 or higher on an ordinary die. But it isn’t certain at all. But that 'more likely than not' is based on evidence - it's not an opinion, it's fact-based. Without evidence, saying something is 'more likely than not' is creating a probability that you'd bet on out of thin air.
And if you want to change my mind all you have to do is offer better evidence or a better explanation of the evidence we do have. But I’ve yet to see any really good arguments for a purely mythical Jesus - although I have seen some appallingly bad ones. Without actual evidence all any of us can say is "I believe ..."Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London. Olen Suomi Soy Barcelona. I am Ukraine. "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
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PaulK Member Posts: 18047 Joined: Member Rating: 5.0 |
quote: Answer my question first.
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PaulK Member Posts: 18047 Joined: Member Rating: 5.0 |
quote: So? The point remains that “more likely than not” is not certainty.
quote: Indeed, but that’s not the situation we are discussing.
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Granny Magda Member (Idle past 356 days) Posts: 2462 From: UK Joined: |
Evidence of what? Evidence for the existence of Jesus as I made clear. People are fond of saying that there is "no evidence", That is simply false. People saying this are seemingly pretending that the Pauline Epistles, the Gospels and the rest of the NT don't exist. They are certainly not the most reliable evidence, to put it mildly, but to pretend that they don't exist is asinine. Same for the References to Jesus by Josephus and Tacitus. They exist. They are evidence. You are not compelled to take them at their word, but the claim of zero evidence is false.
Believers have interpreted every part of the Bible in a multitude of ways. Of course, but I'm not suggesting we give the job to candle2 or something. Modern historians and textual critics hold to a higher standard than those who torture the Bible for their own weird purposes. There are also agnostic, atheist and Jewish scholars, with no axe to grind, who are not under the same pressure for the text to conform to some presupposition. It would not be fair to compare someone like Bart Ehrman to a fundamentalist apologist.
Or since there was no such person as Jesus it was necessary for the story's conclusion to include his disappearance, otherwise his absence from the world would have been difficult to explain. Not what I'm talking about. It's easy to kill your fictional character off at the end, and that would indeed be convenient for a fraudster. But that's not what I meant. I'm talking about places where the Gospel authors tie themselves in knots trying to make problems go away, when need not have created the problem in the first place were they simply writing fiction. Take the narratives of Jesus' birth for example. The early Christians had a problem. They had come to think of Jesus as Messiah, but he didn't fit the bill in a number of ways. One of those was Micah 5:2, which was taken as prophecy.
quote: So the Messiah was supposed to come from Bethlehem, whereas Jesus was from Nazareth. Worse, he had probably gone by "Jesus of Nazareth", a common way of identifying individuals in a world where few people had surnames. There was no hiding it, certainly not from the people of Galilee, where Jesus was known and where his followers would have been based. This was a problem and the solution was to invent the story of the census, the journey to Bethlehem and everything that goes with it. The problems with this story are well known, it contains much that is spurious or ahistorical, censuses did not and could not work that way, etc. The versions presented in Luke and Matthew are highly contradictory. I think we can all agree that the story is made up and indeed that is the majority opinion of scholars. Why go to all this trouble? If one was creating a wholly fictional Messiah, why not simply have him born in Bethlehem? Why bother with the story at all? The most parsimonious answer is that Jesus was real and he was inconveniently from Nazareth. People knew this. He was "Jesus of Nazareth". Jews of the time would have made this objection, just as in the Gospel of John;
quote: To get around this, the idea was planted that he was born in Bethlehem. It's quite clever really. Even if most people who had heard of Jesus knew he was brought up in Nazareth, very few people outside of sleepy little Nazareth would be in a position to deny that he might have been born elsewhere. If the whole thing is a fabrication, why even include an insignificant detail like Nazareth at all? It was an obscure little place that hardly anyone had heard of and no-one cared about. Why not just cut it from the narrative altogether? The most parsimonious explanation and in my view the most likely, is that Jesus did indeed come from Nazareth. It was a known fact and the early Christians couldn't make it go away, so they had to create a workaround.
Don't forget Peter. Ah! Thank you. That should of course read "James and Peter were both leaders of that church before Paul". I also forgot that Paul claims to have met John the Apostle as well in a later visit to Jerusalem and he alludes to Jesus' other siblings. Are all these people made up? Is everyone Paul mentions made up? This seems unlikely. These are letters to other Churches after all. He is writing to people who would be in a position to know if none of these people or proto-churches didn't exist.
But "an obscure religious mystic" is not the Jesus people of faith believe in. Generally, Christians believe in the Jesus of the gospels, and I'm saying that Jesus didn't exist. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a plausible historical Jesus and you know that. Why insist upon responding to a claim I'm not making? It's obtuse, it's unnecessarily confusing and in my opinion it's just sloppy rhetoric . Your doing the same thing as Theodoric, addressing only the lunatic claims of Christians and ignoring the far more plausible claim that I am making. This matters because a bad habit of Jesus Mythicists is a sort of bait and switch. They claim to address a plausible Jesus but then switch to arguments that only matter for the magical Jesus. It's infuriating. Saying "Jesus didn't exist" when you're really talking about the magic Jesus is just confusing and contrary. It has no place in any sensible conversation about a plausible historical Jesus. It's a waste of time; we're all already agreed that no-one walked on water. People who are not onboard with that aren't engaged in any recognisable kind of scholarship. I don't care what Christians believe; I'm not interested in that conversation. I don't understand why you insist upon framing it like this. I know that you don't believe in magic. You know that I don't believe in magic. I just don't get it. Mutate and SurviveOn two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage
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Tangle Member Posts: 9627 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
PaulK writes: So? The point remains that “more likely than not” is not certainty. Last word on this because we both know what we mean. "More likely than not" implies prior knowledge, the actual outcome is uncertain but the probability is known. "More likely than not" with no prior knowledge is a guess.Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London. Olen Suomi Soy Barcelona. I am Ukraine. "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
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Theodoric Member Posts: 9489 From: Northwest, WI, USA Joined: |
There is no historical evidence for a historical Jesus. Zero, none, nada, zilch.
But I’ve yet to see any really good arguments for a purely mythical Jesus - although I have seen some appallingly bad ones.
Then you either are not looking hard or have no interest in actually finding any.Here are a couple easy to read examinations of a historical Jesus by an actual historian. Amazon.com Amazon.com There are also peer reviewed scholarly articles and books. For example, Richard Carrier. Care to examine the 10 myths? What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -Christopher Hitchens Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts "God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness. If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up why would you have to lie?
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