What counts as a historical Jesus?

[JabbaPapa]

I shouldn't have to explain to you why a secondary source that includes text a man says while everyone else was asleep (Jesus in the garden) doesn't count as archaeological evidence.

You don't -- your presumptions otherwise are based on nothing more substantial than a prejudiced view of my reading of Scripture.

YOU want to use the Bible as evidence; YOU provide the justification to do so. Until then, the default position is it's not, not because it's the Bible and I'm an atheist but because it's a secondary source at best.

That's rather surprising, given that you have just used the "Jesus in the garden" story as evidence of its non-archaeological nature.

very politely

(for me, anyway) the errors in your reasoning. If you consider THAT an ad hom attack, you obviously aren't willing to examine your reasoning objectively.

Every one of your posts attacking me personally suggests that you have some sort of unwillingness to engage with me in anything other than a hostile manner. This is not objective "reasoning", it is emotionally motivated against my person.

I cannot help but notice that several other members in this forum seem to have no difficulty engaging in manners of discussion that are devoid of the hysterical smugness that informs these posts of yours that are aimed in my direction.

Tell me, what do you know of n-dimensional statistical analysis? Or tempos and modes across genera?

n-dimensional statistical analysis is (among several other uses -- trying to retain topicality from my POV) a useful tool in the statistical analysis of texts, and it provides a method for the simultaneous material analysis of the structures and variables of multiple manuscripts of the same work in a simultaneous and dynamic manner. The application of this method of analysis in textual analysis is limited by the quality of the software programming, the quality of the data input, and by the limitations of literary and philological analysis itself. It is also limited by preexisting theories of both linguistic and literary theory, as they will tend to frame the types of analysis that are requested in certain predetermined ways.

Never having been that sort of software programmer nor philological analyst, I've never needed to learn the nitty-gritty of the analytical technique ; and I therefore have a limited and only vaguely theoretical understanding of its wider uses in the material sciences.

Tempo and mode belong to disciplines that I have never specialised in, and that I'd guess are foreign to the contents of this thread -- it's hard to see how evolutionary theory might be relevant.

But so what ? your questions do not appear to be attached to anything at all.

ETA: And I really, REALLY hope you call my second paragraph an ad hom attack.

It isn't.

 

[JabbaPapa]

Also known as "the proper approach to the discussion".

... no, "a proper approach to the discussion"

Your own methodological preferences do not necessarily impose upon the preferences of others, and particularly upon the methodologies of non-archaeological disciplines with an interest in this question -- but in fact, to so violently insist that only your own methodological preferences provide validity is an a priori rejection of all that does not already agree with them.

I can understand and accept that from your point of view this is essentially an archaeological question ; it cannot be denied that this is a valid approach to it, that will provide interesting theories, analyses, and speculations.

Such theories, analyses, and speculations cannot however be expected to impose upon those of Philology, Comparative religions, textual analysis, and so on and so forth -- though they will certainly inform any other such disciplines as constituting a secondary source of data, as viewed from within the specific methodologies of those disciplines, despite their objects of analysis being the primary sources from the specifically archaeological point of view.

From the point of view of a literary analysis, which is the methodology that I'm most familiar with, the examination of the texts will at the first hand concern itself with their contents, language, and other philological and textual analyses, and the corpus of critical studies of the texts, as the primary source materials, and comparison with information provided by Archaeologists and Historians will be viewed as a secondary source, albeit one, in this particular case, that is of very significant importance. It would be a clear methodological error, for the purpose of an objective as possible literary analysis, to impose the methodologies and theoretical concepts of an entirely separate discipline to a literary study of texts -- because the purpose of objectivity would be immediately foiled by such a biased approach.

 

[IanS]

No it isn't -- the basic assumption when studying ANY text is that an original version of it either existed or exists ; in fact, the opposite suggestion would be a total logical absurdity. Texts do not spontaneously appear ex nihilo.

You provide what a "huge assumption" looks like in the following :

Well none of the above is even remotely near to answering the question of how you can possibly know what was written in a supposed original text that does not exist.

OK let's cut to the chase here...

... please just tell me now what was actually written about Jesus in this non-existent original text.

 

[catsmate]

Before providing critique of understandings that others have of certain rhetorical figures of speech, you should make sure that you fully understand the rhetorics yourself.

Oh I understand them well, it's been a few years since my classes in formal logic but I understand the terminology well.
You, on the other hand, appear to be utterly clueless about the terms you sprinkle in your posts.

Your accusation of "ignorance" on such a basis is rather ironic.

Not interested. I do not care in the slightest if you believe in my lack of interest or not ; I view that thread as being mostly composed of intellectual masturbation, and some grossly unpleasant expressions of emotionalised hostility.

Strawman. I did not comment on your lack of interest but in your lack of background knowledge of the subjects being discussed. It's rather pointless attempting to discuss things with you when you simply lack that knowledge.
As for "emotionalised hostility", you are the one that's dismissing the posts of others without bothering to address them. Shades of your behaviour in the shroud thread.

Well none of the above is even remotely near to answering the question of how you can possibly know what was written in a supposed original text that does not exist.

OK let's cut to the chase here...

... please just tell me now what was actually written about Jesus in this non-existent original text.

This should be interesting. I expect an evasion, some unsupported assertions or a failure to answer.

 

[davefoc]

Yes -- such a copy would by definition be free of any later transcription errors or additions.

This would not necessarily require that the best possible textual evidence must be considered as being of "good quality", but it would eliminate at least the question that other authors/editors had introduced any extraneous elements decades or centuries later.

Suppose you had a copy of a perfect copy of what the original author of the Gospel of Mark wrote. How much more reliable information would be available about the nature of an historical Jesus?

My view is that your point that scholars have been successful at making reconstructions of the texts of the Gospels which are closer to the original text is correct. But with regard to the question of whether an historical Jesus existed or not, so what? There are many issues which are much more significant with regard to the credibility of the Gospels than whether they were copied perfectly through the ages.

What reason is there to believe that the author of Mark was even in a position to know about the historical Jesus that he wrote about? Clearly he was making stuff up, why do you believe he just wasn't making everything up or at best copying what the author of a proto Mark wrote who was just making stuff up?

What do you know about the author of Mark that makes you believe he is a credible source for events that happened well before he was writing, in a region that he seems not to have lived in, that involved people whose language he didn't speak and whose culture he seems to be not particularly familiar with?

 

[eight bits]

JabbaPapa

From the point of view of a literary analysis, which is the methodology that I'm most familiar with, the examination of the texts will at the first hand concern itself with their contents, language, and other philological and textual analyses, and the corpus of critical studies of the texts, as the primary source materials, and comparison with information provided by Archaeologists and Historians will be viewed as a secondary source, albeit one, in this particular case, that is of very significant importance.

Your syntax seems to have betrayed somewhere in the course of this sentence. Could you possibly rephrase?

Yes, turnabout is fair play. Could you nevertheless rephrase it anyway?

Thank you.

 

[Akri]

You don't -- your presumptions otherwise are based on nothing more substantial than a prejudiced view of my reading of Scripture.

Where has he demonstrated a prejudiced view of your reading of scripture?

That's rather surprising, given that you have just used the "Jesus in the garden" story as evidence of its non-archaeological nature.

You're ignoring the context of this discussion. He's only been arguing about the Bible's inadmissibility as archaeological evidence, not as evidence of anything ever. And so far you've yet to demonstrate why his reasoning here is wrong (though apparently applying that reasoning makes me not worth talking to, without making Dinwar equally not-worth talking to, despite us making the exact same argument with different phrasing).

Every one of your posts attacking me personally

If he's been attacking you personally you should tell a mod.

 

[Dinwar]

I'm not going to respond to most of your first post against me. It's got nothing to do with the topic, with one exception: your equivocation between evidence for a historic Jesus and evidence for historical accuracy in the Bible. I will also say that you really, REALLY need to learn what an ad hom attack is. I've committed none against you. I'm not particularly nice to you, but then, you've shown that you have no regard for anyone else yourself, so I don't feel the need to be.

I view that thread as being mostly composed of intellectual masturbation,

And you have the audacity to lecture ME on politeness? You seem to view yourself as Moses come down from the mountain to teach us how to live. Problem is, some of us actually know a few things--some of us even know more than you on a few topics. So such tactics simply don't work.

... no, "a proper approach to the discussion"

No. We are discussing a HISTORICAL Jesus. HISTORY, JabbaPapa--the subject of the field of archaeology, which is a science. If you want to ignore that self-evident fact I of course cannot stop you, but at this point you are knowingly abandoning science and rationality for some flight of fancy.

n-dimensional statistical analysis is (among several other uses -- trying to retain topicality from my POV) a useful tool in the statistical analysis of texts, and it provides a method for the simultaneous material analysis of the structures and variables of multiple manuscripts of the same work in a simultaneous and dynamic manner.

This is an absurdly narrow view of the subject. n-dimensional statistical analyses are useful tools for all KINDS of issues.

Never having been that sort of software programmer nor philological analyst, I've never needed to learn the nitty-gritty of the analytical technique ; and I therefore have a limited and only vaguely theoretical understanding of its wider uses in the material sciences.

Good. We can therefore ignore your opinions on this.

Tempo and mode belong to disciplines that I have never specialised in, and that I'd guess are foreign to the contents of this thread -- it's hard to see how evolutionary theory might be relevant.

Really. You fail to see how understanding how rate of change and teh styles of change can be applicable to studying how books change through time.

That's rather depressing.

But so what ? your questions do not appear to be attached to anything at all.

Actually, they are. You're blathering on about certain techniques, ones very closely related to techniques I have a fair bit of experience with, and I wanted to know what you know about them. I've thus far gotten you to admit you don't know what you're talking about in regards to these techniques you consider so important, and that you're incapable of drawing simple analogies between related diciplines (I'm not a huge fan of meme theory, but there are good applications of it, such as language and changes in books through time). Basically, I've demonstrated that you don't know what you're talking about--at least, not to any depth that's actually useful in this conversation.

Oh, and I note that you ignored the fact that books CAN be created, as you put it, ex nihilo. It's actually vastly worse when it comes to writing books from oral traditions; a book appearing out of thin air would be far better for your type of analysis. Oral traditions are notoriously open to change, and any text written from a shared oral tradition will include, even in the original documents, regional variations. And the Bible is worse still, because it's not just one book, it's multiple books (until extremely recently, anyway). So the very concept of an original text is nonsense. What we actually can hope to have (at best) are multiple original copies of each individual book. This is precisely analogous to the start of biotic evolution, and runs square into the same problem: our techniques for dealing with change through time simply can't handle horizontal information transfer very well.

Since you don't understand these techniques, and they won't work for the Bible anyway, we can ignore them.

From the point of view of a literary analysis, which is the methodology that I'm most familiar with, the examination of the texts will at the first hand concern itself with their contents, language, and other philological and textual analyses, and the corpus of critical studies of the texts, as the primary source materials, and comparison with information provided by Archaeologists and Historians will be viewed as a secondary source,

Yeah.....no. There are actual definitions to these things, and the way you're using them isn't it. Primary sources are those sources which actually address the data. Scientific reports, for example. Photographs. Archaeological specimens. That sort of thing. If you could find a Roman court record dealing with Jesus that'd count as a primary source. Secondary sources, in contrast, do not address the actual data, but are still useful. Usually they comment on the primary sources. Stuff like newspaper articles (though some of them may be considered primary sources, depending on the nature of the article), National Geographic magazine, the better class of documentary, and so on. Tertiary sources would be things like novels. I could very easily make a case for the Bible being a tertiary source; no matter what, though, from a research perspective the Bible is not and cannot be considered a primary source.

I've got an English professor sister I used to help out with this sort of thing, so I'm familiar with what literary analysis entials. One tiny little flaw you left out bears mentioning: Literary analysis is completely and categorically incapable of determining, by itself, whether a character in the book in question actually existed. The side-research (into what you are improperly calling secondary sources) is what proves it, and THAT is the research that's applicable to archaeological questions. So your analysis of the text is completely irrelevant to this discussion, as it is incapable of answering the question at hand.

Another tricky aspect in applying literary analysis to the Bible is that we don't actually know when it was written, and there are strong indications (such as confusion about Roman tax law and the process of crucifixion) that the Bible stories were created after the events. Since we can't prove that the book was written during the society when the events took place, and since literary analysis is completely incapable of determining whether an individual character actually existed or not (the part you conveniently left out), we can safely dismiss this entire class of arguments, in so far as they apply to the question of the existence of a historical Jesus.

 

[Belz...]

"faithful to the original text"

The original author-approved manuscript of a text is obviously more faithful to that text than a 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc generation copy of it.

Yeah, that doesn't answer my question: how do you know how far what we have is from the original ?

 

[Belz...]

Before providing critique of understandings that others have of certain rhetorical figures of speech, you should make sure that you fully understand the rhetorics yourself.

Humour him. What's an ad hominem (don't look it up) ?

 

[JabbaPapa]

the question of how you can possibly know what was written in a supposed original text that does not exist

OBVIOUSLY, I don't -- just as OBVIOUSLY nor does anyone else.

Duh.

I'm not the one engaging in spurious guesswork about non-existent texts.

 

[Dinwar]

OBVIOUSLY, I don't -- just as OBVIOUSLY nor does anyone else.

Duh.

I'm not the one engaging in spurious guesswork about non-existent texts.

Than what the devil ARE you doing? YOU brought up the idea of going back to the "original" text (despite the clear flaws in such a notion). If you're not going to base any conclusions off of your derived "original text", the whole discussion was a pointless waste of bandwidth. If you ARE going to base any conclusions off of it, given the errors inherent in the methods you're using it's fair to call them guesswork.

So either you're guessing or your prattling on about a pointless topic.

 

[IanS]

Well none of the above is even remotely near to answering the question of how you can possibly know what was written in a supposed original text that does not exist.

OK let's cut to the chase here...

... please just tell me now what was actually written about Jesus in this non-existent original text.

OBVIOUSLY, I don't “ know what was written in any supposed original text “ -- just as OBVIOUSLY nor does anyone else.

Good. So you have no idea what if anything was written in any original text, if any such original ever existed at all.

You cannot quote to me even one single word that was in any supposed "original" text of the NT.

Right, so how then do you know, which of your numerous later “copies” says anything like what was said in the presumed but non-existent original?

You appear to be comparing your copies with your copies. But you cannot, apparently, ever compare any of them to a non-existent original ….

… what you are doing is deciding which of your copies you prefer!

 

[JabbaPapa]

Oh I understand them well, it's been a few years since my classes in formal logic but I understand the terminology well.

This statement belies the claim that it makes.

FYI : the ad hominem figure of speech is a so-called "impure" figure of speech, belonging to the argumentative genre of Rhetorics. The claim, that I've VERY often seen from ignorant amateurs that the figure belongs solely to Logic is unsupported by analysis.

An ad hominem is any attempt to influence any argument by reference to any supposed failings of any of its participants, rather than by sole reference to the arguments being put forward.

For example -- my reference two paragraphs ago to "ignorant amateurs" is an implicit ad hominem attempting to attack your argument with the ridicule that I think is deserved.

I am not responsible for your failure to study the tropes of Classical Rhetorics.

I did not comment on your lack of interest

So bloody what ?

My loss of interest is not conditioned by your personal approval of it.

If I were interested I would naturally defend my stated positions --- but I view the ongoing "discussion" in that thread to be pointless and vapid.

You are unlikely to be able of convincing me otherwise.

This should be interesting. I expect an evasion, some unsupported assertions or a failure to answer.

No -- it's a ******** question. There is no reason why I should take it seriously.

 

[Dinwar]

Not really. There ARE ways to determine which copies are older, given a few assumptions (for example, changes happen slowly and rarely, a change will propogate to all subsequent variations unless something happens, that sort of thing). And it's still just a working hypothesis. This is directly analogous to phylogeny, and the methods have been tested numerous times in that context and others. JabbaPapa merely is doing a very, very, VERY poor job of explaining it.

 

[Dinwar]

An ad hominem is any attempt to influence any argument by reference to any supposed failings of any of its participants, rather than by sole reference to the arguments being put forward.

Nope.

Ad hom: You're wrong because you smell funny.
Not ad hom: You're wrong and you smell funny.

Here's a handy reference guide. What you're trying to do is make ANY comment on you what so ever an ad hom attack, and to use that to dismiss them rather than adressing them.

Also, please note that just because an argument includes a fallacy, that doesn't make the conclusion wrong. "You smell funny, therefore 2+2=4" is an ad hom argument and the conclusion is still right.

but I view the ongoing "discussion" in that thread to be pointless and vapid.

For lurkers: The discussion in question consists of one member repeatedly referencing previously-debunked claims, often re-referencing articles that had carefully been shown, line by line, to be wrong. The "vapid" part was when we pointed that out. Speaks to JabbaPapa's biases.

 

[JabbaPapa]

Suppose you had a copy of a perfect copy of what the original author of the Gospel of Mark wrote. How much more reliable information would be available about the nature of an historical Jesus?

The only objective answer is contained in the post that you're replying to -- the purification of texts from ulterior modifications does not magically invalidate all other sources of information.

My view is that your point that scholars have been successful at making reconstructions of the texts of the Gospels which are closer to the original text is correct. But with regard to the question of whether an historical Jesus existed or not, so what?

The central question from the point of view that you suggest is the dating one -- the earlier the terminus post quem, the likelier that the authors were eye-witnesses. And the clear tendency in the contemporary analysis is that the texts are earlier rather than later.

What reason is there to believe that the author of Mark was even in a position to know about the historical Jesus that he wrote about? Clearly he was making stuff up

"clearly he was making stuff up" ??? Interpretative bias in a nutshell.

What do you know about the author of Mark that makes you believe he is a credible source for events that happened well before he was writing, in a region that he seems not to have lived in, that involved people whose language he didn't speak and whose culture he seems to be not particularly familiar with?

What do you know about the author of Mark that makes you believe that he isn't ?

This is NOT a shifting of goalposts, this is me pointing out a basic element of analytic neutrality -- you avoid (as much as possible) imposing your own prejudice onto your interpretation.

before he was writing, in a region that he seems not to have lived in, that involved people whose language he didn't speak and whose culture he seems to be not particularly familiar with

Case in point -- these theories of yours are unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, but they are instead informed by a certain number of fallacies and clichés. Though of course -- feel free to post "evidence" otherwise ...

 

[JabbaPapa]

Your syntax seems to have betrayed somewhere in the course of this sentence. Could you possibly rephrase?

Yes, turnabout is fair play. Could you nevertheless rephrase it anyway?

Thank you.

Fair enough ; though the syntax is correct, albeit probably more complex than was needed.

(and I've always been a better editor than writer)

--

Literary analysis is the methodology that I'm most familiar with.

From that point of view, any examination of texts will at the first hand concern itself with their contents, language, and other philological and textual analyses. It will simultaneously study the corpus of critical studies of those texts.

Together, these constitute the primary source materials of the discipline of literary analysis.

Comparison with information provided by Archaeologists and Historians is absolutely necessary -- but such information will be viewed as a secondary source, not primary ; although, in the particular case of biblical studies, such secondary sources are of very significant importance.

 

[JabbaPapa]

Where has he demonstrated a prejudiced view of your reading of scripture?

bah !!! typo

 

[JabbaPapa]

This is an absurdly narrow view of the subject. n-dimensional statistical analyses are useful tools for all KINDS of issues.

None of which are on-topic as far as I can see -- it's hard to see how Einsteinian geometry (for example) is relevant to this discussion.