I do not know what you mean by 'hearsay'. In legal terms it means a second hand testimony. Ancient History is often based on analysis of second-hand texts which in many cases are anonymous, seudoepigraphics or of doubtful authorship. I insist: critical analysis. If you do not recognize that we have no more to discuss.
David, the entire problem here is that you were simply wrong to say that all of history would collapse if we ruled things out of consideration on the basis that all we had as “evidence” was anonymous hearsay with no other supporting evidence at all.
That is wrong. That would not rule out all of ancient history. It would not rule out events such as your example of Thermopylae.
And the reason is (as I already explained several times above), because contrary to what you were saying, it is in fact not the case that genuine academic university historians claim that such events really happened on the basis of anonymous hearsay evidence alone … far less do they claim such things on the basis of the sort of anonymous hearsay which we have for Jesus, where it is actually a chain of multiple anonymous hearsay sources known only from the writing of much later religiously devoted self-serving copyists, claiming constant untrue fiction on every page, and where those fictional beliefs are known to have been copied from what the authors thought was divine religious prophecy in their ancient religious books from centuries before!
No sane academic, in any field, could possibly claim that we should believe anything on that sort of “evidence”. And I’m quite sure they do not make any such claims about Thermopylae either.
So it’s quite untrue for anyone to say that sort of ancient history would all collapse.
The problem with the Jesus case, perhaps uniquely in all of ancient history (except of course for other similar religious beliefs), is that it’s practitioners, who are bible-studies scholars, mostly in the devoutly Christian USA, such as Bart Ehrman and all his colleagues (such as Dominic Crossan) of whom he says
"almost every properly trained scholar on the planet agrees",
do say that such evidence is good enough not merely to say they think Jesus existed, but as I have pointed out here numerous times, they say it is a matter of undisputed
“certainty”.
And this is a case where the claimed
“evidence” of Jesus comes entirely from the biblical writing (there is no independent external non-Christian writing which does not, as far as anyone can honestly tell, rely on what had already been written in gospels), and where the gospel writing is -
1. Entirely anonymous, from writers who never knew Jesus at all
2. Where those gospel writers were recounting stories from yet earlier anonymous people who also did not know Jesus,
3. Where the earlier anonymous people were said to have believed that even earlier people had been disciples of Jesus and knew what he had said and done.
4. But where none of those people ever confirmed a single thing that was said in any gospel
5. Where not one person ever wrote anything about Jesus during his lifetime
6. Where even for a century or more after Jesus was thought to have died (ie c.30AD) almost no historians even mentioned his existence at all
7. Where the few such as Tacitus and Josephus who did mention anything about Jesus, only mentioned him in passing in a couple of very brief sentences.
8. Where those authors such as Tacitus and Josephus were not even born at the time and could not possibly have ever known what Jesus did, except through even more hearsay from unnamed unknown sources.
9. Where even that quite hopeless anonymous hearsay supposedly mentioned by Tacitus and Josephus etc., is only known in copies written 1000 years later by Christian religious copyists themselves.
10. Where the only primary source ever known, i.e. the biblical writing, is so hopelessly unreliable and non-credible that it claimed completely untrue fiction about Jesus on virtually every page.
11. Where all of the biblical writers, inc. Paul, repeatedly stressed that they had obtained their Jesus beliefs by interpreting what they believed to have been prophecy written centuries before in the OT.
12. Where authors like Randel Helms have written in detail with entire books showing exactly where, how and why those gospel authors took their Jesus stories from specific passages in the books of the OT.
13. Where even that anonymous gospel hearsay, and the letters attributed to Paul, all reporting impossible supernatural fiction, and all very clearly obtaining their messiah beliefs from what they thought was the divine certainty of their OT, even that is not known from any of the original writers, but again only known from self-interested Christian religious copyists writing from about the 4th-6th century onwards (i.e. for relatively complete forms with substantially readable detail).
14. Where all of that Christian copying, whether it’s copies of Josephus and Tacitus etc., or copies of earlier gospels etc., is known even to the most devout bible-scholars and theologians, to have suffered from frequent “interpolations”, i.e. alterations, additions and deletions of what was originally written, wherever the later copyists and their masters wished to change things according to their changing beliefs.
Hearsay sources like that, i.e. 1 to 14 above, are not only totally inadmissible in the case of Jesus, as they would be in any legal case, but they are most definitely not used in other areas of ancient history such as Thermopylae, to conclude on that sort of anonymous hearsay devotional writing alone, that any event like Thermopylae was actually a real fact, or even probably a real fact … that sort of utterly useless fatally flawed
“evidence” is not remotely good enough to conclude anything at all about any claimed historical events or figures.
And just to repeat, in case you have lost the drift of this - that is why we, in this thread, most certainly should be using the same sort of evidential considerations that have been universally established in law, and rejecting anonymous hearsay of that sort as reliable and/or credible in any measure at all. It needs something vastly better than that before you can even begin to describe it as “evidence” … and that means
“evidence” of what is actually being claimed, not
“evidence” of something else entirely (such as merely being evidence that people often wrote about quite absurd superstitious religious beliefs).
