Kishkumen wrote:Philo Sofee wrote:Well too though we understand that there wasn't just one theology floating around that time. And we don't have access to all the various vagaries of theological speculation that we're going on then either. There was no singular interpretation of Jesus or of any other group. The Essenes had their savior Redeemer Messiah type in Melchizedek not Jesus. The gnostics had something completely different. The Ebionites had a completely different View. And several different Jewish groups had theirs; even Paul recognized people were following following Apollos view and said so. So just because we can't find all of them doesn't mean that's a count against the Mythicist view. Some Gnostic views are very close to the Mythicist view. Others aren't. There was no singular Gnostic theology either so we have to be careful with this. We have no reason to believe the Mythicist views survived the ravages of Christian destruction of all of their opponents. We know as a historic background Christianity was so paranoid that it wiped everybody else out that it could. We didn't really actually have the Gnostic views until 1945. All we had was the polemics of their enemies, who were the church fathers.
If one is to make a sound historical judgment, then one has to go with the evidence one has. You do the best with what you've got. I grant you, Philo, that there are a lot of things we do not know, and that many things are possible. When I find evidence of these other things, I will happily incorporate them into my historical narrative. Until that time, I will stick with the evidence, every time. If I am not going to stick with the evidence, then I might as well go back to believing, against the evidence, that Joseph Smith understood the real deal with those papyri, while all those darned non-LDS Egyptologists are simply wrong.
I trust that you will do this. Go with the evidence. It is what you have done, and you will be consistent in applying this to mythicists' claims as well as those of LDS apologists.
Ah Kish... is it any wonder I so enjoy being around you on the same message boards? An excellent reminder, but realize, and I know you do, that evidence by itself is not what we have. We also have interpretation of it which may very well, and usually is, different giving us different outcomes. Hence the enjoyable discussions my friend.