I would certainly agree with Aristotle Smith to the extent that the purported resurrection of Jesus is not a historical problem. Perhaps it is a philosophical one; I don't know. I certainly would not argue that it did not happen on historical grounds—it's unknowable on
those grounds and therefore historical grounds are irrelevant. Evidence from tortilla reading is probably more relevant to the question of Jesus's resurrection than any mass of historical evidence. I can't read tortillas, so I leave the question to others.
Yet, to SteelHead's question, it's clear that enough people did believe it happened after a crucifixion, such that
1) all four gospels meet some kind of expectation by including it. Even the so-called "short ending" of Mark 16 includes it, which is probably of the late 60s.
2) beginning in the 50s, there are references throughout the Pauline corpus, with no one apparently contradicting him and seemingly taking the crucifixion and resurrection as granted (though obviously, to Kish's point, belief says nothing about whether the resurrection happened, which only a handful supposedly witnessed anyway).
This is similar to the issue of baptism, although it's not in John (though imagery is). Paul presupposes the practice of baptism, although I don't remember right now whether he mentions Jesus's baptism. In any case, our sources present the baptism of Jesus and his crucifixion as widely accepted by the communities who were in a much better position to know than any group of human beings since. So, if one thinks these were
not historical incidents in the life of Jesus, neither of which are contradicted by the laws of physics (unlike resurrection), the burden is on the skeptic to adduce better, more reliable evidence or to demonstrate how those writers, who were not rubes, were able to pull off this conspiracy.
As for the "weak" case for a historical Jesus, there is nothing on offer with more plausibility, and it is only weak in relation to something else: it is weak in relation to case for the historical existence of Franklin Roosevelt, still weaker than historical Caesar and Alexander, but not weak in comparison to a historical Odysseus or a historical Nephi. I have argued plenty here, though, that the case for a community of mythicists, or the conspiracy to invent a historical Jesus that must have followed in their wake, is so weak that it is not even plausible.
Gadianton wrote:Why did Dehlin have a Christian apologist defend Jesus as history on his show? What does that have to do with Mormonism?
Please don't tell me he's going down the path Murphy did of siding with EV's on the historical reality of the Bible, and contrasting that with the Book of Mormon.
I have wondered that myself. Probably he just needs something to talk about. There isn't much "there" there in Mormonism, but that means there's not much in ex-Mormonism either.
SuperDell wrote:
Contemporaneous accounts of Jesus compared to contemporaneous accounts of Mohammed? Any real difference here? Enough so one would be more believable than the other?
I understand The Holy Bible accounts of Jesus are not written while he was supposedly alive. How about accounts of Mohammed?
Only using Mohammed because of a major religion based on his life and teachings is as big as Christianity.
The evidence from the Islamic tradition regarding Muhammad outside of the Qur'an (which presents its own problems) is even farther removed from that religious founderthan the evidence for Jesus is from Christian sources: two decades separate Jesus from Paul, but Muhammad gets his first mention in Arabic texts not for nearly 150 years after his death, although there are near-contemporary accounts in Christian sources (the earliest is just after Muhammad's death: an annotation in manuscript of Gospels, which is ironic for the conversation on this thread). This doesn't necessarily mean it's weaker, since the oral tradition is not easily dismissed, and there have been no scenarios that have been put forth that are all that convincing except to the polemically inspired (e.g. the infamous Christoph Luxenberg, whose work exhibits all the hallmarks of an unhinged conspiracist but few of the dedicated philologist).
To the question of the reliability of ancient texts, I think in general one should assume reliability until presented with a compelling reason that can be rationally articulated (i.e. not just emotionally compelling) by recourse to other kinds of evidence that are subject to less dispute and ambiguity. Apologists and polemicists often plunge their fingers into the history of the transmission of ancient texts in order to pull out an implication that is misleading in the effort to invent dispute and ambiguity that isn't really there: "our earliest Roman historian (or whatever) is in a manuscript only from the 9th century, a thousand years after Caesar; you aren't questioning
that author's reliability, so why are you giving my New Testament such a hard time!? It has papyrus fragments that go back to the 2ND CENTURY! It's because you're biased! Well, I'm a hard-headed historian who isn't biased, so I'm just gonna use math: 2 comes before 9—so there!" Through that jagged line of specious reasoning, we have it impressed on our minds, though it is rarely stated explicitly, that the gospels are therefore at least as reliable as any ancient historian, perhaps even more reliable.
Well, yes, of course, the 2nd century is before the 9th century, but what's the point actually? The reason we don't have texts that are earlier in most cases than the 9th century isn't because they were first
composed in 9th century but because they happened to be copied then. Most ancient texts were written on papyrus scrolls, as everybody knows, and it doesn't last long unless it's buried in a dry desert. For some reason, ancient readers didn't like burying their books in a dry desert, and they also seemed not to like papyrus scrolls, which were very cumbersome to use when compared to a new technology: the codex (book). They ditched them when they had the chance of it.
In the fourth and fifth centuries, if it was worth keeping, a work on papyrus was laboriously copied into a book; otherwise, it was left to rot or put to a more hygienic use (I have actually handled a papyrus fragment of Homer from the 2nd century with that distinctive dark-brown smear across the papyrus). Some went into trash heaps, and out of the heaps in Egypt we get most of papyrus fragments, but only because the desert desiccated them.
But then, there was a problem with handwriting and scripts that became acute as something like a book trade among monasteries developed in Late Antiquity and the middle ages: a copyist in one monastery couldn't read the work he was supposed to copy from another (or from an earlier copyist). As a practical remedy, a standardized script was developed, associated with the Carolingian court of the 9th century, and the memo went out, so to speak: a new round of recopying into the new script meant that anything not deemed to be worth the serious labor recopying demanded wasn't included in the system upgrade. Stuff not recopied was lost in various ways, even through recycling as palimpsests (i.e. scraping off the text and reusing the parchment or vellum that constituted "paper"), since books were not the cheap technology they are today.
Something similar goes on with Google Books: the stuff deemed most important gets scanned and uploaded soonest and with the greatest attention; less important stuff is less attentively scanned or not scanned at all. Archive.org has plenty of examples of poor scans—I especially hate it when fingers and hands show up—but that doesn't mean the original didn't exist; likewise, not all copyists were of the highest caliber and those of the highest caliber weren't always having a good day, but that doesn't mean anything about the historical reliability of the texts they were copying. It just isn't relevant.
Of course, this little primer on transmission of manuscripts is vastly oversimplified but its main outlines are reliable and they get to the point I want to make: the problem when someone invokes this "9th century fallacy," as I'm going to call it for now, isn't that there is a gap between the "text" and the events described in the event. The "text" is for the most part usually pretty stable and is often shown to be reliable when we can check up on them (i.e. a papyrus find, or an earlier manuscript is discovered). It's just a later edition of the text, not a late text. The real problem for me has nothing to do with historical reliability but with the fact that so much has been lost.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie