Of course we can, to the degree that we can identify their influence and reconstruct them.
So what's the evidence for this "reconstructed Q", and what does it say about Jesus independent of the Gospels?
What we can't do is use the fact that we don't have these sources NOW to support a claim that they never existed, no matter what the evidence.
I never claimed that they never existed. I simply claim that you can't use sources about which almost nothing can be known as evidence for your position, for the very simple reason that as "evidence" you can state that it very conveniently states whatever you need it to state, and I can't inspect it to judge whether that's the case.
Here's a hint Crash, when you accuse people who come to conclusions you don't like of being dishonest - just BECAUSE they come to conclusions you don't like
Don't get ahead of yourself, Paul. You've yet to demonstrate
anything about the supposed "Q source", least of which that it lends any support at all to your position or
that it even ever existed.
For instance we don't NEED to assume that other people exist at all. Solipsism is very parsimonious by your standard. And if there's no real need to explain why we see other people then solipsism wins. So your version of parsimony simply doesn't work.
This is nonsensical, just another example of how defending the Historical Jesus requires someone to take all leave of their senses.
Because they exist and they are relevant.
How are they relevant if they're not to be believed? How is a wrong argument at all relevant? How does it defend anything? How does it lend support to any conclusion?
It doesn't, which is why I'm amazed you brought it forward. Am I now supposed to take the role of both sides, and defend
your arguments, as well? Sorry, but I decline. It's clear to me which side has the lock of rational skepticism and which side is about taking ancient religious texts at credulous face value, relying on imaginary evidence, and substituting invective for argument: yours.
If you want to insist that there are no extra-Biblical references to Jesus then you are wrong.
Obviously people have talked about Jesus outside of the Bible. So that's another claim that you've utterly misrepresented.
My contention is that there are no
independent references to Jesus; there are merely references by people taking Christian claims at face value. Tacitus is one such reference, as I've abundantly demonstrated.
There's nothing that implies that Tacitus did not personally believe that Jesus existed.
Yes, there is - the fact that he's referring to the state of Christian belief. Just as someone summarizing
Star Wars refers to Darth Vader, but we know that he doesn't believe in the existence of a real Darth Vader.
Not when it's an accident, as it may be.
An "accident"? How does that work, exactly? Regardless, I'm prepared to accept that the forgery was accidental.
Plenty of people lived and died without leaving any records that survived to the present day.
But plenty of people did
not become the central figure of a major world religion. That makes it rather different.
Any attempt you make to argue that the Historical Jesus was "just folks", just a regular dude, nobody that anybody paid any particular attention to, undercuts your case that he actually
was the Historical Jesus. Because if he was "just folks" then why would anybody bother to make him the central figure of a religion? It makes no sense.
The Gospels and Paul's epistles are such evidence.
No, incorrect. The Gospels and Paul are a
claim that there was such a person. What is the
evidence that supports that claim?
Obviously the real story would be how Christianity ACTUALLY began.
Right, but why would anybody know that story? The early Christians would have believed that they were following someone who had actually lived, so the fact that Christianity had been started based on a figure that didn't exist would have been unknown to Christians, so who would possibly have written it down? There's nothing to be
replaced.
The people who worship Jesus Malverde and John Frum, in the present day, are unaware that these are mythical figures. To them they're as real as they come and the "real" origin is identical to their mythical origin. Certainly nobody in the faith has recorded any story about how a guy made up John Frum or Jesus Malverde, so there's no "true origin" that came to be replaced by a mythical origin; there's only the mythical origin that faith adherents promote, and the unknown "they were lied to" origin that nobody - not least of which the liar - would ever have bothered committing to paper. Why would they?
They were trying to get people to believe a lie!
Do you just not understand how lying works, Paulk? I'm surprised - you've done quite a bit of it in this thread.
If you have exaggerated and embellished to glorify an individual the last thing you do is replace him with an imaginary creation.
Don't be retarded. That's not at all what we're talking about. We're talking about the proven fact that it's a lot easier to embellish and glorify a fictitious individual who supposedly lived a while back somewhere over there - distant enough in the First Century to be beyond all capacity for fact-checking by the local audience - than it would be to embellish and glorify a real man with feet of clay. Stores always spread faster and have greater verisimilitude when they're decoupled from real people but coupled to a real place and time; that's why your cousin's campfire stories always claim they happened to a friend of his friend, not to himself, but not that they happened in a galaxy far, far away.
A lot of the exaggeration and embellishment wouldn't even be conscious falsehoods, just the usual failures of memory.
So too might the origin of Jesus! It's just as reasonable that the first Jesus storyteller thought he was remembering something that happened and embellishing it. The best storytellers start by convincing themselves. Frankly, it's yet another obstacle to the "Historical Jesus" position - I think it overestimates the degree to which people of the First Century could have remembered
anything well enough for the Christianity of the Gospels to truly be based on any actual events.
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