Dr. Dale Martin's argument for an HJ is logically fallacious.
He has already admitted that he is a Christian who believes Jesus existed.
Dr. Dale Martin uses the very Christian Bible as evidence.
It is just absurd to use the Bible as MULTIPLE attestation of itself.
It is just asinine to use the Bible to attest to its own veracity.
Not only that but the whole thing ignore several aspects of the Historical Method:
In order of quality good evidence is:
1) Contemporary evidence: Evidence that dates to the time the person or event actually happened.
2) Derivative evidence: Evidence that is known to use contemporary record-evidence that has since been lost.
3) Comparative evidence: Evidence that gives details that can be checked against known factors of the time.
A good rule of thumb here is that history records the unusual, the special, and the important; and the amount history records is generally directly proportional to when these factors achieve a critical mass.
If a person is said to be important and popular during their lifetime then it is reasonable to expect contemporary evidence, or at the least derivative evidence, documenting this.
Other criteria include:
A) A given source may be forged or corrupted; strong indications of the
originality of the source increases its reliability.
B) A primary source is more reliable than a secondary source, which in turn is more reliable than a tertiary source and so on.
C) If a number of
independent sources contain the same message, the credibility of the message is strongly increased.
D) The tendency of a source is its motivation for providing some kind of bias. Tendencies should be minimized or supplemented with opposite motivations.
E) If it can be demonstrated that the witness (or source) has no direct interest in creating bias, the credibility of the message is increased
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The best we get with the Gospels and Acts is comparative evidence and in that they do poorly: there are social political irregularities galore, people and institutions behave in manners totally at odds with other sources, and more you assume it actual history rather then exaggeration the worse things get. More over Paul is the only
known possible contemporary and he gives us nothing that can be cross checked with history, only vague generalities.
Regarding points A, B, and C above everything more or less can be traced back to Paul so the originality issue begins with him and he give us NO real information to put the Jesus he talks about in a specific time. The potential independent sources all have problems: either evidence of tampering or conflicts with people known to be in the rough place and time being decribes many years later. Finally nearly all we have is propaganda; it was designed to portray Jesus, his supporters, his enemies, the Jewish community of the time, and the Romans in a particular way. As such it is subject to the same issues as all propaganda with distortions, half-truths, omitions, and outright lies.
