Yes it is actually... The whole purpose of this issue is to tell whether or not a book is fact or fiction (or which part of it is what).
Your test is suppose to tell the two of them apart.
No. The test is applied after something is thought to be of some historical value. If there is reason to believe that a source is a work of fiction, then it will be discounted, and historical analysis won't be used. This is why analysis is not used on things like the book of genesis. The writing style, purpose of writing, story form, etc. make it clear that it is not the work of someone piecing together what they think has happened.
In other words, your criteria is only useful when it's impossible to actually verify the results... Translation: you are basically just making stuff up.
I don't understand this business of "impossible to verify the results". History will very often be impossible to verify, as it isn't like science where we can repeat the test. Instead, we have to use the sources we have available. We have multiple independent sources for Jesus, and so the challenge is that his existence cannot be verified
outside of these sources. Of course, that is true. Historians do not "make stuff up". They find what probably happened.
Seriously, if you want to propose a test\methodology to tell apart fact or fiction, you first need to prove that said system would show known works of fiction as fiction and known works of facts as facts, at least with a decent probability.
If something is presented as fact, from the time period. That is generally a decent reason to start trying to extract historical knowledge from it. If there are multiple independent sources for the event, then better still. What we are working with in the case of Jesus is not "fact" so much as "lore" and biblical scholarship rightfully tends to treat it as such. It's certainly not uncommon for historical sources of minor philosophical/cult figures to be in this form, and historical analysis is fine with this, given how extremely unlikely it would be to have multiple fakes which have left no clues as to the fakery.
First you start with stuff you know the results, then you use said system to identify cases where you don't know.
Not really, but if you wish to do this, John the Baptist is a decent starting point is he not?
Let me clear the problem to you in plain english, the debate is whether or not a certain part of the NT is fact or fiction.
You claim to use methodology X to do so.
You then said that methodology X is useless to use on fiction.
So how can you permit yourself to use methodology X on the NT considering you have still failed to produce any evidence to exclude it as fiction?
I cannot exclude the possibility that all the sources are fiction. Indeed, I cannot exclude the possibility that all written historical sources full stop are fiction. But it is intensely unlikely, so in order to do history, this possibility is not real ever dwelled upon.
If you used methodology Y, then that is the one we care about and you must present it and stop wasting everyone's time.
If you have no other method, then you are basically doing a circular argument. I.E I say it's real because I say it's real.
I don't really get why you seek continually to say this is something "I" do, as opposed to the methods and conclusions of every serious historical analyst.
) because "Son" sounds like "Sun". Whackiness.
It was a Jewish rabbi and commentator. As far as I'm aware he did not attempt to rewrite the story with his conclusion included as definitive. You would have done better to choose the story about the adulterous woman, which WAS added later. Naturally, various historical techniques identified this.
