Posted: Feb 27, 2010 7:48 am
Monkey's Nephew wrote:TimONeill wrote:Sorry, what does this mean? If there is no contemporary record of Jesus, much as there isn't for most ancient figures except a few extremely important ones, how could there be any record of any of his "acts"? And what exactly does "any act that, if not carried out by Jesus, would have to have been carried out by some other, similar (and missing) figure" mean? I can't work that highly confused sentence out at all.
Just summarizing the argument as I read it:Pierce Inverarity wrote:You see, somebody had to have led the Carthaginian forces across the Alps and into Italy. Somebody had to defeat Scipio and the fleet from Pergamum. Somebody had to have been the brilliant tactician that had every military leader of the era learning and imitating his tactics. There's a big "hole" in history if we remove Hannibal from the picture, so it's not a matter of having a source from anyone that actually saw him. So much about our historical record of late Republican Rome would have to be rewritten to remove Hannibal that it's far more likely that he existed than that he did not.
Can you say the same for Jesus?
Since the analogy between the lack of contemporary attestation for Jesus and the equivalent lack of contemporary attestation for Hannibal doesn't require me to, this question is irrelevant.
I honestly think you're misunderstanding this. I'd guess that it isn't that people are accepting these characters' historicity without question, so much as these characters simply aren't important enough to history to bother spending much time questioning their veracity.
Understood. But the so-called "importance" of an ancient figure to someone today makes no difference to whether or not there is sufficient reason to accept they exist. There is sufficient evidence for historians to accept that Theudas, the Egyptian, the Samaritan Prophet and several others exist. Given that there is even better evidence for the existence of the historical Jesus existed, they accept the existence of him as well. So the internet amateurs who disagree with the scholarly consensus have to explain why we should not accept that any of these people exist.
The fact that they don't like modern Christianity or they have some teenaged resentment of their Christian parents isn't enough. Can you present some rational reasons to doubt the existence of any of these people? Let's start with Theudas.
Over to you. Make it good.