Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

I acknowledge that Ulan's comment is well written. He errs, however, in identifying, as principal issue preventing assertion of historicity, an author's opinion . Claim for historicity depends only on reliable data, not on presuppositions--fact 1; ancient city of Troy existed: contemporary excavati...

My take on Bayesian historicity calculations is that they result in a false assumption of objectivity. In the end, you just shift the subjectivity from formulating the result to assigning probabilities to your premises. They help with drawing the right conclusions from your presuppositions, but the ...

Q seems a bit more straightforward than ye olde JEDP hypothesis. A now-lost text shared between two Gospel authors... make of it what you will, but it's a pretty mundane idea overall. It is one of several, mutually exclusive attempts to crack the synoptic problem. Oh, I agree that it is a perfectly...

Yes, thanks, that's very useful. "Q" is merely New Testament critics trying to come up with their own "Documentary Hypothesis," since they are not allowed to posit that gospel writers could invent material about the Savior. In principle, the Q business has indeed a bit of this pr...

Quite right, I should have said 'story' instead of document. Still, I referred to the hypotheses, not the story, which, as you rightly said, wouldn't hang in a void, even if it were invented. Even in full mythicist hypothesis, the story is bound into its environment. As you find most of the stuff i...

RecoveringScot wrote:No document hangs in a void.

Then it's good that nobody claimed that.

The suggestion seems to be that Christians never actually believed in the story of a person named Jesus. But then, what do theories like this do with the concept of 'faith'? They must argue then that they had 'faith in self-acknowledged fiction' i.e. that the authors weren't trying to 'pull the woo...

I don't see why anyone should accept the existence of this 'Hasmonean component' any more than Charles's 'Flavian component' to the gospels or ghost's 'Caesar component' or Pete's 'Constantine component. ... or the general "mythicist" story. "General", because they basically all...

One does not work from the gospel story. One works from actual hard 'historical evidence'. Nothing else will do. Then show me the 'hard historical evidence' that links the gospel to the Hasmoneans. And no, the coins won't do. Your explanation of the allegorical doesn't help either. That's the same ...

So where are we? 1) You "still think(s) a historical Jesus would be the easiest assumption".. 2) doesn't mean the alternative is excluded. (this in response to a post re the Carrier-Doherty mythicist theory. Methinks you need to rethink both these positions. 2) is not an alternative to th...