Apollonius wrote:Agrippina wrote:..
But from the point of view of reading the history, and having spent almost two decades reading ancient history, the evidence does seem to prove that he did actually exist but I always question everything I read, and I always look for more than one reference. The bible certainly doesn't make me confident that he did exist but the other sources quoted by Jerome
here, certainly indicate that he was real. I just think that even though the history points to his existence, a
lot of the history should be read with a
certain amount of scepticism because of the bias of writers who were not subjected to peer review.
..
The sources I read/listen to, such as Erhman, already approach it with a great deal of skepticism. Just because a lot of theists are full of shit and they just look for what they want to believe, it does not follow that skeptical historians do not exist.
There is a lot of work done on this. It's called textual criticism.
Yes I know about textual criticism; one of the worst offenders when it comes to reporting history is of course the Father of History, Herodotus, although his
Histories is a wonderful read, what he's reported there is always taken with a big helping of skepticism but it's fun to point out to believers that it probably has more truth that the bible.
Then we also have to deal with subjectivity.
One of the things that I learned from my years at university and of course from writing on the internet is that people find it very difficult to read and interpet without subjectivity. It's easy to say that the words used mean something specific, but even then do words always mean the same thing to all people. With dead languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek, and the biblical languages, where the meanings don't change it is probably possible but when you talk about modern languages it becomes very confusing. Take a word like 'cool' or 'gay' for instance. The first time a child comes across old literature where the words are used in their original sense, he/she might be confused between the modern use that is generally accepted today and the use in older literature. For instance Noddy was 'gay' meaning that he was happy. A modern child seeing an original Noddy could say, "look proof that he was homosexual." I know that is a ridiculous analogy and not realistic but just to make a point, did this sort of thing happen in ancient times? We think not. And it seems that we can trust what we know of 'dead' languages but who's to say that an obscure word might have had a different meaning to people living in Cyrene to what it had in Ephesus and yet another meaning in Rome. (Just an example Tim, don't get worked up please).
I've noticed that even among people who speak and write English, some words are interpreted differently in different parts of the world, take for example my comment about the term "take a chill pill." To Tim it meant a literal pill and possibly "use some drugs" whereas a South African would laugh and understand what I meant.
But I digress. If I'm asked about the truth of historical works, for instance Suetonius, I always say that he should be viewed like a tabloid newspaper, some truth, but a lot of it also hype and sensationalism. And then how much of the rest of them are that way? This is why you can't base history on the words of one book, and one author only. and is the real problem with the bible. If there were other books that offered some sort of verification for the biblical stores, maybe non-believers wouldn't be sceptical, but there isn't so we are.
A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation. - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BCE - 43 BCE)