Posted: May 01, 2012 11:32 am
proudfootz wrote:The whole exercise is reminiscent of christian apologists who claim Jesus is "better attested than ______________ (insert name of other totally unrelated person here)." It's like they're trying to hold Julius Caesar or Socrates hostage - 'give us Jesus or you'll lose Boudicca'.
Ok, yes, I agree, but I think if one can show that one isn't being inconsistent, then at least one can say that one isn't guilty of an accusation tossed around quite a lot. Furthermore, if one can also show that one is using reasonable criteria consistently, then one can feel some justification.
Even Willhud, who has a very reasonable approach, IMO, makes the same point about possible inconsistency and feels that if we toss out the way we use evidence in the case of Jesus, we may toss out the way 'we' (i.e. historians) assess historical evidence generally. I think I hear cito saying 'so what?' and that is fair enough, but allowing for the sake of the discussion that there are arguably reasonable things we can guess about history and unreasonable things we can guess about history, I find it interesting to ask how does a rational person tell the difference, and furthermore I can't see how casting doubt about Jesus impacts adversely, in fact I think it's warranted.
Yes, a lot of arguably unrelated (i.e not significantly comparable) figures are often cited. I think Ehrman cited a couple lately. The closer the analogy, the better for comparison, I think. Best ones I can think of are Guatama Buddha (even then, there are differences, mainly as regards the amount of time the stories are assumed to have circulated orally before being written in anything we now have a copy of, but otherwize he's a pretty good analogy, IMO) and Muhamad al Mahdi (again, not an exact match, but pretty close, IMO. This time, he was, I believe, written about within approximately 80 years of his supposed birth).
Many don't seem to have much of a problem being agnostic about those two.
On the other side of the coin, we have Sai Baba of Shirdi, perhaps the closest analogy of all, and he illustrates nicely, I think, how a figure very like Jesus could very easily have existed. He, however, is in the category of, 'those for whom we have much better hard evidence' (photos).