Oh Bernard, behave yourself. The method I am talking about has absolutely nothing to do with mythicism. You really do have mythicism on the brain. Does it ever let you get a good night's sleep?Bernard Muller wrote: ↑Sat Dec 09, 2017 10:06 am
The fact is the corroboration from Tacitus and Josephus are from non-Christians, who certainly had no interest to attest to someone who did not exist.
Tacitus and Josephus described events and mentioned persons happening/living before their time and most of them are not contested, even if sometimes uncorroborated. Why should it different in that case?
But Tacitus & Josephus corroborated in a different ways with each other about the existence of Jesus/Christ. And I do not see why there are problems with the authenticity of this secondary evidence. Mythicists do see problems, but that's because their half-baked theories would crash if they accept that evidence.
That's all from Finley, M. I. (1999). Ancient History: Evidence and Models. Chapter 2Yet a Livy or a Plutarch cheerfully repeated pages upon pages of earlier accounts over which they neither had nor sought any control. . . . Only Thucydides fully and systematically acknowledged the existence of a dilemma, which he resolved in the unsatisfactory way of refusing to deal with pre-contemporary history at all.5 . . . .
Where did they [ancient historians like Tacitus and Josephus] find their information? No matter how many older statements we can either document or posit - irrespective of possible reliability - we eventually reach a void. But ancient writers, like historians ever since, could not tolerate a void, and they filled it in one way or another, ultimately by pure invention. The ability of the ancients to invent and their capacity to believe are persistently underestimated.6 . . . .
I suspect that Ogilvie's slip reflects, no doubt unconsciously, the widespread sentiment that anything written in Greek or Latin is somehow privileged, exempt from the normal canons of evaluation. . . .
Unless something is captured in a more or less contemporary historical account, the narrative is lost for all time regardless of how many inscriptions or papyri may be discovered. . . . .
So when men came to write the history of their world, Greek or Roman, they found great voids in the inherited information about the past, or, worse still, quantities of 'data' that included fiction and half fiction jumbled with fact. That is what modern historians, unwilling for whatever reason to admit defeat, to acknowledge a void, seek to rescue under the positive label, tradition (or oral tradition).24 Few anthropologists view the invariably oral traditions of the people they study with the faith shown by many ancient historians. The verbal transmittal over many generations of detailed information about past events or institutions that are no longer essential or even meaningful in contemporary life
invariably entails considerable and irrecoverable losses of data, or conflation of data, manipulation and invention, sometimes without visible reason, often for reasons that are perfectly intelligible. With the passage of time, it becomes absolutely impossible to control anything that has been transmitted when there is nothing in writing against which to match statements about the past. Again we suspect the presence of the unexpressed view that the traditions of Greeks and Romans are somehow privileged . . . .
There is no guarantee that the tradition has not arisen precisely in order to explain a linguistic, religious or political datum; that, in other words, the tradition is not an etiological invention . . . .
Some of the supposed data are patently fictitious, the political unification of Attica by Theseus or the foundation of Rome by Aeneas, for example, but we quickly run out of such easily identified fictions. For the great bulk of the narrative we are faced with the 'kernel of truth' possibility, and I am unaware of any stigmata that automatically distinguish fiction from fact. . . . .
For reasons that are rooted in our intellectual history, ancient historians are often seduced into two unexpressed propositions. The first is that statements in the literary or documentary sources are to be accepted unless they can be disproved (to the satisfaction of the individual historian).
Quite so. So for fear of ending up with a void you propose that we should accept accounts that cannot be corroborated? That sounds like the sort of person who would believe there was probably a historical Heracles!Bernard Muller wrote: ↑Sat Dec 09, 2017 10:06 am I think we can be fairly confident of uncorroborated sources, but only after they pass the test of critical analysis. If not, we would have to throw away a lot of accounts of the ancient historians.
Simply rewriting myth and creative and uncorroborated narrative is not serious history.
We cannot allow the fear of consequences be the deciding factor in whether a method is valid or not.