In the world of real ANE scholarship, people lie, people are mistaken, people are misinterpreted, people are crazy, and sometimes people didn't even write the stuff that is attributed to them.
But you aren't aware of this because you don't bother to read the actual scholarship.
Who do you think it was who discovered, revealed, and explained all the above phenomena in the Biblical literature? Mythicists? Nope -- ANE scholars.
Reality check for you, Dave -- it was scholars of the ANE who determined that Paul did not in fact write all the letters attributed to him.
It wasn't mythicists, it wasn't Christian apologists, it was ANE scholars.
You clearly have no clue what you're talking about. Yet you have no compunction about pretending that you're an expert in this field.
I'm not saying that Paul is correct about Jesus being a real person simply because Paul says so, or because it's impossible for Paul to be wrong. Paul says a lot of things which modern scholarship recognizes are not accurate.
The reason modern scholarship accepts that Paul is talking about a real person is simply because that is our best (by a long shot!) explanation for why Paul is writing about Jesus at all, and because nobody has been able to cobble together any coherent and complete explanation for Paul's letters which does not include a historical Jesus.
You find my posts "long winded"? Well, I'm sorry if I'm testing the limits of your attention span. Good thing you weren't in any graduate classes with me… you wouldn't have lasted ten minutes.
As for my posts being "evidence poor", as soon as you start accurately summarizing 12 centuries of Jewish history, providing synopses of the most recent archaeology in Galilee, or dissecting the letters of Paul, then I'll listen to you. But so far, all I've seen from you is a bunch of low-information "seems to me" arguments from ignorance.
The only reason that there seem to be many more possible scenarios from your point of view than there are from mine is that you aren't familiar with the field.
Rage on all you want about my alleged lack of evidence… I'll let the posts speak for themselves. I have provided evidence, and continue to. You, on the other hand, have provided absolutely zero evidence for any of your "what if…" speculations.
This isn't personal. I don't know you, and have no opinion about you one way or the other. But for you to come here and start disparaging me for allegedly providing no evidence is utterly laughable.
Not specifically in reply to the, now all too frequent, personalised nonsense posted above, but just re. the issue of so-called "expert academic scholars" -
Piggy has frequently claimed here that a real-HJ is believed by almost all “expert academic scholars”. But who actually are these scholars, and what are their academic qualifications?
It seems to me they are of four types -
1. Theists who have degrees in religious studies
2. Theologians who have degrees in Theology and Religious Studies
3. People who call themselves “Historians”, but whose qualifications are mostly if not entirely in various forms of religious studies.
4. Genuine Historians who have degrees in mainstream History, and not in religiously related subjects.
I asked before if anyone knew of any surveys or statistics on how many people who publish academic peer-reviewed papers on the historicity of Jesus, fell into each of the those 4 areas. Piggy said he knew of no such surveys.
OK, if there are no details on that, then what do people here
think is the likely breakdown of the sort of people who are publishing papers in this field of study?
My guess is that the largest group will be of type 1, ie theists with degrees in religious studies, closely followed in number by 2, ie theologians, and then a somewhat lesser number of 3, ie people on the margins of actual history qualifications, but perhaps with a first degree in some religiously oriented branch of history along with degrees in more specifically religious studies. And then group 4, where I suspect that in fact there are virtually no genuine mainstream academic historians publishing in this field at all, or at most a relatively tiny handful.
As a complete guess, just to put some numbers on that, I would guess maybe 50% are in group 1, perhaps 40% in 2, perhaps 9% in 3 (although often being thoroughly mixed up with 1 and 2), with only maybe 1% or less in group 4 as genuine independent academic historians.
Now, some here may object on the basis of claiming that we should expect experts in this field to be qualified in “religious studies”, “theology”, and “superficially or mainly religious areas of history”. But in that case, it makes this field of study very different indeed from any other typical branch of academic research., and in particular totally unlike truly objective areas such as mainstream science. It makes it very much a unique niche area of academia, in which the researchers all come to the subject with a huge amount of pre-conceived religious baggage already in place.
Earlier in this thread I raised with Piggy the fact that several times he had referenced Bart Ehrman. But although he tried to hand wave it away, Ehrman for example, is someone whose qualifications are in religious studies, and who teaches in a religious studies dept. He is not a neutral academic “history professor” in any normal sense of such terms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman
William Lane-Craig is also someone who has all sorts of degrees in religious studies and theology, probably far more such qualifications than Ehrman. He also is supposed to be an expert on the historicity of Jesus. Though most non-theists probably regard him as a self-serving evangelical bible thumper. Is he supposed to be one of these “expert academic scholars” that we should all rely on?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lane_Craig
John Dominic Crossan is also someone Piggy has mentioned several times. But have look in Wikipedia at what sort of life Crossan has spent in religious belief and what sort of “expert academic scholarly” qualifications he has - his entire life has in fact been spent immersed in Chrsitian religious belief,, studying in religion, becoming a priest, and finally teaching religious studies in a US university the history of which was also steeped in religion. See Wikki on J.D Crossan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dominic_Crossan
The point of those three very well known examples, two of which Piggy has mentioned repeatedly here, is to show what sort of expert academic qualifications we are actually talking about in this thread.
Further - we are repeatedly told here (by Piggy, and some others) that all serious historians agree that Jesus was real and that all the peer-reviewed papers agree with that. But when did these papers agree with that? At what point in time were these academics, like Ehrman, Crossan, Lane-Craig, publishing evidence showing Jesus was real? I suspect that few if any of them publish papers describing actual evidence of that sort. I suspect that all these modern “scholars” take it for granted from quite ancient publications, that Jesus is simply agreed to be real. And what they now publish under peer-review in recent decades, possibly even for a century or more, is not so much showing the evidence of a real-HJ, but simply discussing the details of language and meaning in various ancient documents in Judeo-Christian history.
IOW - they are publishing papers on all sorts of other aspects of study into writing from biblical times, and simply taking it for granted that much earlier now long forgotten authors were correct to think that Jesus was supported by overwhelming evidence. Ie, they are not typically in the business of continually re-examining that evidence and re-publishing conclusions to say Jesus seems to be either real or unreal … they are nowadays just taking a real-HJ for granted.
Now you might try to argue that this is precisely what we should expect, and that it’s all perfectly reasonable for current scholars not to keep publishing evidence of Jesus, since they all agreed hundreds of years ago that he was definitely real. So that would not be new, novel, and worth publishing to say again that Jesus was real. But keep in mind what I just said above about what sort of
“expert academic scholars” these people are, - I suspect they are very far indeed from being anything other than almost entirely made of up of theists, theologians, and so-called “historians” who just happen to be qualified mostly in religious issues. In which case, they are not by any means neutral independent researchers in the usual academic sense of word, but instead people with a clear and quite obvious conflict of interest in the matter - scholars such as JD Crossan, no matter what other scepticism he may express about the accuracy of the gospels etc., are going to find it extremely difficult to admit that Jesus may very easily be entirely mythical, and/or to admit that what has for centuries been claimed as “overwhelming evidence” is in fact not evidence of Jesus at all … it may be evidence of all sorts of other things, such as evidence of what people believed and wrote about in biblical times, but none of it is actually evidence of a real Jesus ….
... someone like Crosssan (just as an example) with his whole life totally invested in Christian belief and Christian worship, an “expert academic scholar” of the type we are being told we have to trust here, is going to find it virtually impossible to divorce his thinking from all that overwhelming lifelong baggage of Christian devotional belief, and start seriously questioning the fact that what has been called “overwhelming evidence” is not merely in fact “not good” evidence, but actually not even evidence of Jesus at all … Zero genuine reliable objective evidence.
But, I suspect these are the sort of people we are being told here to accept as the absolute experts whose views surely cannot be wrong.
Well, imho, they most certainly can be wrong, and in fact certainly are wrong if they are claiming to show any genuine reliable objective evidence for Jesus, because as has been shown and explained over & over again in this thread, there actually is NO such evidence of a real Jesus.
