RealityRules wrote:MS2 wrote: ... I think it is legitimate for you to argue simply that the evidence is not good enough for HJ, and I want to say that taking that position does not make you an MJer. I don't agree with your argument, but that is a separate matter from acknowledging that your position is different from the MJ one.
(By the same token, it might be helpful if you didn't describe your position as the one held by 'the skeptics', as plenty of people who regard themselves as skeptical in general-outlook happen to think the evidence points to an HJ. Perhaps you could say 'HJ-skeptics'?)
I think elaborating the terminology is good, though I find it hard to see how people are skeptical of an HJ could "happen to think the evidence points to an HJ".
It would seem best to ascribe probabilities to these positions and I would think that -
Probability(HJ) + Probability(MJ) = 1
eg. P(MJ) = 0.4; therefore P(HJ) = 1 - 0.4 ... ie. 0.6
or P(HJ) = P(MJ) = 0.5 ... so P(HJ) + P(MJ) = 1
Another possibility is another category such as P(indeterminate), but that seems to be a cop-out.
The problem with any idea of trying to "firm things up" by attempting to determine some reasonable mathematical probabilities, which has been tried before many times in HJ threads on various forums, is that it's self defeating because it's inevitably completely subjective as to what anyone assigns as a probability number ... that defeats the entire purpose of trying to bring mathematical accuracy into the discussions.
But as I pointed out before, the established legal precedent, which is entirely appropriate in the case of such HJ disputes, is in fact more rigorous and much more robust anyway (and I say that as an ex mathematical-physicist/theoretician who would normally prefer the maths/science route over a legal approach every time). The point about making the legal analogy is that whilst opponents will try to claim that we are not in a court of law and that hence we should not compare our discussions to what happens in jury trials, we most certainly are in exactly the same position as a jury trying to asses what HJ writers and HJ-sceptic writers have historically presented as the evidence for or against the claimed existence of Jesus.
And the point about legal precedent is that it has long since established that hearsay evidence is rarely admissible before a jury, and never admissible as anonymous hearsay from witnesses who could never even appear before the court. That is legally established in every educated modern society, as not fit to be called "evidence" at all.
And yet that is precisely what we are being told we must accept as evidence in the case of Jesus. That is, to spell it out (again) for the sake of HJ believers here - what is being called evidence of a human Jesus is only anonymously produced hearsay writing from unknown gospel writers who never named their source of any such stories. That alone makes it anonymous hearsay which would be legally unfit even to be called evidence and unfit to be put before any jury.
And in addition to that utterly hopeless position (long since decided as a matter of law in the USA, UK, all of Europe and all other educated modern nations), that biblical writing has now also been shown by modern science to have been (1) constantly claiming untrue fictions on virtually every page, and (2) to have been taking it's Jesus stories from the OT. Not to mention also - to have been written centuries after the claimed events, subject to later copyists alteration, shown not to have actually been written (as it was once believed) by any personal witnesses named Mark, Mathew, Luke and John, and also shown not to have been four independent sources (as once believed) but in fact all copying from one-another.
It might be the case that despite what I say above, nevertheless that is the best "evidence” we have, even though it would be ruled completely inadmissible as evidence in any modern Jury trial. And it might be said that even apart from biblical studies, some actual historians might sometimes be forced to work with such poor or non-existent evidence, trying to draw conclusions from that. Well that may be true for tentative ideas discussed in secular issues of academic history. But we are not here doing that! We are not in an academic university “ivory tower” forced to debate notional possibilities from such awful evidence. Instead we are standing outside of any such ivory tower self-indulgent highly subjective discussions, and trying quite independently from academia to decide if material like that is fit to be presented as genuine “evidence” of a Jesus figure for whom there is actually no such evidence beyond 1st century religious beliefs drawn from OT prophecies about a supernatural god-messiah.
If one day some actual evidence of Jesus does turn up, then it might be reasonable to say that the newly discovered evidence does suggest he was probably a real person. But we are not in that position. At present, and despite literally millions of claims of such evidence, in fact there is zero such evidence of Jesus. And that is the problem in the HJ case - zero evidence for, and in fact a huge mass of proven evidence against the HJ/biblical writing.
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