Posted: Sep 25, 2011 6:36 am
willhud9 wrote:No, but why are biblical sources automatically chucked out the door when dealing with historical fact?
You've got things the wrong way around. No literary text is evidence until the case can be made for it. What, say, gives a literary text like Tacitus, that comes to us from the earliest manuscript 12th c. and preserved by christians, any standing? No text is automatically chucked in.
willhud9 wrote:No one has to trust anything. You reach conclusions based on facts gathered.
There was a reason why I wrote the o.p.
willhud9 wrote:I know that Paul of Tarsus wrote many letters to different cities, we have several of them.
Paul never refers to himself as "of Tarsus", but you assume it to be right, because the later text Acts says so.
willhud9 wrote:I know that there was a Jesus of Nazareth because of the gospels.
You know no such thing. You don't know when the gospels were written, or where, or by whom. There is no way to connect the contents of the gospels with the era they talk about other than to trust them without having any cause to do so. This is not the stuff of evidence, but knowing requires evidence, so you'll pardon my rejection of what you claim to know, having a good knowledge of the source materials.
And as to Jesus of Nazareth, the "of Nazareth" is a later tradition. But you use it because the expression has come into our culture as a fait accompli. It is linguistically unlikely that Nazareth comes from the town name נצרת (Notsret), but that won't stop people from believing what they've heard all their lives. An ingrained falsehood is as good as a fact.
willhud9 wrote:Did they exaggerate? sure. Did they completely come up with Jesus out of thin fucking air? Most likely not.
How would we know? Paul didn't need a flesh and blood Jesus to develop his theology of the need for salvation from sin requiring a worthy scapegoat sacrifice, ie necessarily a never-sinning human willing to die for others. It is sufficient that such a seed be planted for a life of Jesus to grow. We see a small example of a life growing from a literary seed when Tertullian began arguing against Ebion the eponymous founder of the Ebionite movement, though Ebion never existed, though by the time of Jerome, he had a home town, had conflicts with a John and traveled the Mediterranean. It matters not that Jesus's story may have developed from believers, while Ebion's developed from non-believers. The only major difference is the willingness of believers to want more information. Jesus could easily have come out of thin air. But then again that's just a theory.
willhud9 wrote:Byron point rings true.
What's brown and sounds like a bell? D-U-N-G!