Doesn't evaluating evidence depend on what you are investigating.
Well I don‘t know whether I would say that “evaluating evidence depend(s) on what you are investigating" (I may need to think about those precise words). But “evidence is “evidence”, whatever the subject is. There is no such thing as “historical evidence”, as if the word had a different meaning in certain subjects such as biblical studies. The word and concept of "evidence" means exactly the same thing in any field of enquiry.
But what is under investigation here is the biblical writing. Where, apart from multiple other fatal problems (e.g. late anonymous authorship, interpolations, selective destruction of non-canonical texts, etc.), the gospels and letters are in every case claiming events that have since been “proved” to be physically impossible ... that took nearly 2000 years and the discovery/invention of what now call science to finally show that the miracle claims which fill all of that ancient biblical writing, are not actually true.
That is huge and very direct "proven" evidence finally showing that such biblical writing is not at all reliable in what it constantly claimed about an unknown un-evidenced messiah named "Jesus". And we should never overlook that. That is a very serious and massive nail in the biblical coffin.
Siting the Bible as evidence that Jesus is a god / demigod is one thing, since the existence of a god or demigod is not documented in any useful first hand source. It is an extraordinary claim that requires a higher standard than more or less likely.
Siting the Bible that a random human is more or less likely to have existed is a horse of a different color. We know normal(ish) humans have existed since the dawn of man, so the claim that a human existed and that a letter writer claims to have worked or talked to the brother of that man is a rather workaday thing.
But the bible does
not say that Jesus was a "random human"!
The bible specifically insists that the was absolutely
not a "random human"!
Letters are commonly used by historians to tease out aspects of history in a second or third hand kind of way. They may not be great sources of accuracy, but being professional, experienced historians, they take that into account.
I may not be expressing myself well, but I hope I got the sense across. I'd wager that assigning a value of accuracy or usefulness to letters can cause a fair amount of dispute among historians, but it seems a valid and rational tool.
I'm not married to this concept, so it would be useful to see what historians themselves say about this.
OK, well I think the above is probably answered in my earlier two replies (above), but just as further comment - we are not actually talking here about academic "historians", as if these people were secular neutral un-biased non-religious academic researchers of the kind found in almost all university faculties. We are talking here instead about biblical scholars and theologians. Those are the people who are writing to say that Jesus was a real figure, and saying that the evidence is shown in the bible.
Many of those people, Bart Ehrman for example, probably do genuinely think that the biblical writing is good enough to be considered as credible evidence to conclude (as Ehrman says all his academic colleagues do) that Jesus was "certainly" real.
But in any other properly objective un-biased neutral non-religious faculty of university research, a book like the bible, composed of selected very late anonymously written Christian devotional eulogies, claiming that other unknown people of the past had once witnessed a messiah of constantly supernatural proportions, would be immediately dismissed as no sort of credible evidence whatsoever.
So instead on me giving my views on any of that, let me ask you - do you really believe for example, that the gospels in particular (as distinct from the letters, which are in a slightly different category) are actually a credible source of factual evidence for what unknown anonymous Christian writers said about a supernatural messiah that none of them had ever known, but where those writers were certainly using passages from the OT to create Jesus stories?
Do you really think that is good enough to be admitted as credible evidence when we are trying to establish as a factual matter (in that sense it’s a matter of scientifically credible fact), whether or not there really was a living person called Jesus?
Keep in mind that we are talking here, not merely of what
might be the case, or whether Jesus
might possibly have been real, and whether various words in the gospels
might be evidence of Jesus. We are trying to decide as a matter of fact, whether such words in the bible are actually credible as reliable evidence showing that he most likely did exist, i.e. with more probability than not. So the question is not whether certain words in g-Mark might be evidence such that Jesus might have existed. The question is whether or not those gospels demonstrate sufficient credibility and factual accuracy to be regarded as a genuine source of actual evidence showing that their accounts of Jesus were most likely true.
