The facts that nobody can argue with are that the earliest written materials about "the event" date from at least a century after they were supposed to have happened. How these were generated, where they came from, what they mean etc are all points of conjecture and faith.
Again, believe whatever you like. But I don't have to account for all the impossible things you say you believe in.
The Fragment is widely regarded as the earliest portion of any New Testament writing ever found. It provides us with invaluable evidence on the spread of Christianity in the provinces of the Roman Empire in the first centuries of our era. The first editor dated the Fragment to the first half of the second century (between 100-150 AD). The date was estimated palaeographically, by comparing the handwriting with other manuscripts. However, palaeography is not an exact science - none of the comparable Biblical manuscripts are dated and most papyri bearing a secure date are administrative documents. Recent research points to a date nearer to 200 AD, but there is as yet no convincing evidence that any earlier fragments from the New Testament survive. Carbon-dating is a destructive method and has not been used on the Fragment.
The facts that nobody can argue with are that the earliest written materials about "the event" date from at least a century after they were supposed to have happened. How these were generated, where they came from, what they mean etc are all points of conjecture and faith.
Again, believe whatever you like. But I don't have to account for all the impossible things you say you believe in.
From the website: "The Fragment is widely regarded as the earliest portion of any New Testament writing ever found. It provides us with invaluable evidence on the spread of Christianity in the provinces of the Roman Empire in the first centuries of our era. The first editor dated the Fragment to the first half of the second century (between 100-150 AD). The date was estimated palaeographically, by comparing the handwriting with other manuscripts. However, palaeography is not an exact science - none of the comparable Biblical manuscripts are dated and most papyri bearing a secure date are administrative documents. Recent research points to a date nearer to 200 AD, but there is as yet no convincing evidence that any earlier fragments from the New Testament survive. Carbon-dating is a destructive method and has not been used on the Fragment."
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes used to say 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'
Which is ironically completely wrong. Fatally wrong - it is impossible in most circumstances to "eliminate all that is impossible" and human nature tends to fill in the gaps with story.
And then we get the situation where impossible things get explained and where whole forms of scholarship are based on supposition, interpretation and faith. Where the "absence of evidence" is somehow used as the strength of a historicity argument and tradition is used as a trump card (even when in other circumstances the same tradition is explicitly denied).
It's not just Christianity of course, the same process is happening in many faiths.
Zero probability = an impossibility. It's working out the leap from low/least probability to truth that keeps us reading.
I think it is an entirely reasonable to think that an event which is said to be a miracle has an implication that in the general way this doesn't happen but in this specific case it did.
Or in other words: we all think these things are impossible. Believers say it happened on this occasion, I say it is impossible on all occasions.
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes used to say 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'
Which is ironically completely wrong. Fatally wrong - it is impossible in most circumstances to "eliminate all that is impossible" and human nature tends to fill in the gaps with story.
And then we get the situation where impossible things get explained and where whole forms of scholarship are based on supposition, interpretation and faith. Where the "absence of evidence" is somehow used as the strength of a historicity argument and tradition is used as a trump card (even when in other circumstances the same tradition is explicitly denied).
It's not just Christianity of course, the same process is happening in many faiths.
Zero probability = an impossibility. It's working out the leap from low/least probability to truth that keeps us reading.
I think it is an entirely reasonable to think that an event which is said to be a miracle has an implication that in the general way this doesn't happen but in this specific case it did.
Or in other words: we all think these things are impossible. Believers say it happened on this occasion, I say it is impossible on all occasions.
I was really just quipping about the Sherlock Holmes stories.
We just have to distinguish whether we're talking about the natural or the supernatural, and be clear about how we're using the word miracle. The US Men's Hockey Team's "Miracle on Ice" in 1980 required nothing supernatural, but "Near Impossibility on Ice" didn't have quite the same ring to it. That's what we mean most times, though: a near or virtual impossibility (an improbability) that actually came to pass.
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes used to say 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'
Which is ironically completely wrong. Fatally wrong - it is impossible in most circumstances to "eliminate all that is impossible" and human nature tends to fill in the gaps with story.
And then we get the situation where impossible things get explained and where whole forms of scholarship are based on supposition, interpretation and faith. Where the "absence of evidence" is somehow used as the strength of a historicity argument and tradition is used as a trump card (even when in other circumstances the same tradition is explicitly denied).
It's not just Christianity of course, the same process is happening in many faiths.
Zero probability = an impossibility. It's working out the leap from low/least probability to truth that keeps us reading.
I think it is an entirely reasonable to think that an event which is said to be a miracle has an implication that in the general way this doesn't happen but in this specific case it did.
Or in other words: we all think these things are impossible. Believers say it happened on this occasion, I say it is impossible on all occasions.
I was really just quipping about the Sherlock Holmes stories.
We just have to distinguish whether we're talking about the natural or the supernatural, and be clear about how we're using the word miracle. The US Men's Hockey Team's "Miracle on Ice" in 1980 required nothing supernatural, but "Near Impossibility on Ice" didn't have quite the same ring to it. That's what we mean most times, though: a near or virtual impossibility (an improbability) that actually came to pass.
What I mean is this;
Say for example Holmes finds a shoe with a certain kind of soil on it. Of course Holmes has made a study of local soils and states with confidence that the wearer of the shoe has been wandering around in a nearby village.
But of course it doesn't take much imagination to come up with other possibilities;
* There's some other place that Holmes is not aware of with similar soil
* Someone has manufactured an artificial soil that looks similar to the soil in that village
* Aliens have taken the wearer of the shoe to planet Zog where it just so happens to have soil similar to the village
* The shoe has just fallen into existence at the site of the crime and by incredible coincidence happens to also have soil on the bottom which is similar to the soil that Holmes knows
The more and more "impossible" the explanations are, the harder they are to disprove. As with contemporary conspiracy theories, there is something about the weird complexity of the story that a faith community holds tightly to that makes it more believable.
There’s something delightfully ironic in using a fictional detective’s investigative method as depicted in classic works of fiction to argue about what is historically real in the ordinary, non-fictional world we all share.
There’s something delightfully ironic in using a fictional detective’s investigative method as depicted in classic works of fiction to argue about what is historically real in the ordinary, non-fictional world we all share.
I'm not arguing anything about historicity, I'm saying it is impossible to know because there is no evidence
Christianity makes faith claims which are offered with unprovable claims of historicity.
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes used to say 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'
Which is ironically completely wrong. Fatally wrong - it is impossible in most circumstances to "eliminate all that is impossible" and human nature tends to fill in the gaps with story.
And then we get the situation where impossible things get explained and where whole forms of scholarship are based on supposition, interpretation and faith. Where the "absence of evidence" is somehow used as the strength of a historicity argument and tradition is used as a trump card (even when in other circumstances the same tradition is explicitly denied).
It's not just Christianity of course, the same process is happening in many faiths.
Zero probability = an impossibility. It's working out the leap from low/least probability to truth that keeps us reading.
I think it is an entirely reasonable to think that an event which is said to be a miracle has an implication that in the general way this doesn't happen but in this specific case it did.
Or in other words: we all think these things are impossible. Believers say it happened on this occasion, I say it is impossible on all occasions.
I was really just quipping about the Sherlock Holmes stories.
We just have to distinguish whether we're talking about the natural or the supernatural, and be clear about how we're using the word miracle. The US Men's Hockey Team's "Miracle on Ice" in 1980 required nothing supernatural, but "Near Impossibility on Ice" didn't have quite the same ring to it. That's what we mean most times, though: a near or virtual impossibility (an improbability) that actually came to pass.
What I mean is this;
Say for example Holmes finds a shoe with a certain kind of soil on it. Of course Holmes has made a study of local soils and states with confidence that the wearer of the shoe has been wandering around in a nearby village.
But of course it doesn't take much imagination to come up with other possibilities;
* There's some other place that Holmes is not aware of with similar soil
* Someone has manufactured an artificial soil that looks similar to the soil in that village
* Aliens have taken the wearer of the shoe to planet Zog where it just so happens to have soil similar to the village
* The shoe has just fallen into existence at the site of the crime and by incredible coincidence happens to also have soil on the bottom which is similar to the soil that Holmes knows
The more and more "impossible" the explanations are, the harder they are to disprove. As with contemporary conspiracy theories, there is something about the weird complexity of the story that a faith community holds tightly to that makes it more believable.
Thankfully we have Occam's Razor to assist us. The fantastical can be given far less weight in Occam's light. It's not an ultimately determining factor, but it can do a lot to steer us closer to the truth.
I understand what you're describing there at the end -- a religion is so uniquely and 'finely tuned' that it must be true -- the opposite of an appeal to complexity.
There’s something delightfully ironic in using a fictional detective’s investigative method as depicted in classic works of fiction to argue about what is historically real in the ordinary, non-fictional world we all share.
I'm not arguing anything about historicity, I'm saying it is impossible to know because there is no evidence
Christianity makes faith claims which are offered with unprovable claims of historicity.
Christianity makes a lot of claims, like all traditions of thought do. I certainly don’t think the gospels are reportage in the way, say, there is reportage of 9/11.
The gospels are literary texts before they’re anything else, I think.
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes used to say 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'
Which is ironically completely wrong. Fatally wrong - it is impossible in most circumstances to "eliminate all that is impossible" and human nature tends to fill in the gaps with story.
And then we get the situation where impossible things get explained and where whole forms of scholarship are based on supposition, interpretation and faith. Where the "absence of evidence" is somehow used as the strength of a historicity argument and tradition is used as a trump card (even when in other circumstances the same tradition is explicitly denied).
It's not just Christianity of course, the same process is happening in many faiths.
Zero probability = an impossibility. It's working out the leap from low/least probability to truth that keeps us reading.
I think it is an entirely reasonable to think that an event which is said to be a miracle has an implication that in the general way this doesn't happen but in this specific case it did.
Or in other words: we all think these things are impossible. Believers say it happened on this occasion, I say it is impossible on all occasions.
I was really just quipping about the Sherlock Holmes stories.
We just have to distinguish whether we're talking about the natural or the supernatural, and be clear about how we're using the word miracle. The US Men's Hockey Team's "Miracle on Ice" in 1980 required nothing supernatural, but "Near Impossibility on Ice" didn't have quite the same ring to it. That's what we mean most times, though: a near or virtual impossibility (an improbability) that actually came to pass.
What I mean is this;
Say for example Holmes finds a shoe with a certain kind of soil on it. Of course Holmes has made a study of local soils and states with confidence that the wearer of the shoe has been wandering around in a nearby village.
But of course it doesn't take much imagination to come up with other possibilities;
* There's some other place that Holmes is not aware of with similar soil
* Someone has manufactured an artificial soil that looks similar to the soil in that village
* Aliens have taken the wearer of the shoe to planet Zog where it just so happens to have soil similar to the village
* The shoe has just fallen into existence at the site of the crime and by incredible coincidence happens to also have soil on the bottom which is similar to the soil that Holmes knows
The more and more "impossible" the explanations are, the harder they are to disprove. As with contemporary conspiracy theories, there is something about the weird complexity of the story that a faith community holds tightly to that makes it more believable.
Thankfully we have Occam's Razor to assist us. The fantastical can be given far less weight in Occam's light. It's not an ultimately determining factor, but it can do a lot to steer us closer to the truth.
I understand what you're describing there at the end -- a religion is so uniquely and 'finely tuned' that it must be true -- the opposite of an appeal to complexity.
As Wikipedia says
For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives. Since failing explanations can always be burdened with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they tend to be more testable.
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes used to say 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'
Which is ironically completely wrong. Fatally wrong - it is impossible in most circumstances to "eliminate all that is impossible" and human nature tends to fill in the gaps with story.
And then we get the situation where impossible things get explained and where whole forms of scholarship are based on supposition, interpretation and faith. Where the "absence of evidence" is somehow used as the strength of a historicity argument and tradition is used as a trump card (even when in other circumstances the same tradition is explicitly denied).
It's not just Christianity of course, the same process is happening in many faiths.
Zero probability = an impossibility. It's working out the leap from low/least probability to truth that keeps us reading.
I think it is an entirely reasonable to think that an event which is said to be a miracle has an implication that in the general way this doesn't happen but in this specific case it did.
Or in other words: we all think these things are impossible. Believers say it happened on this occasion, I say it is impossible on all occasions.
I was really just quipping about the Sherlock Holmes stories.
We just have to distinguish whether we're talking about the natural or the supernatural, and be clear about how we're using the word miracle. The US Men's Hockey Team's "Miracle on Ice" in 1980 required nothing supernatural, but "Near Impossibility on Ice" didn't have quite the same ring to it. That's what we mean most times, though: a near or virtual impossibility (an improbability) that actually came to pass.
What I mean is this;
Say for example Holmes finds a shoe with a certain kind of soil on it. Of course Holmes has made a study of local soils and states with confidence that the wearer of the shoe has been wandering around in a nearby village.
But of course it doesn't take much imagination to come up with other possibilities;
* There's some other place that Holmes is not aware of with similar soil
* Someone has manufactured an artificial soil that looks similar to the soil in that village
* Aliens have taken the wearer of the shoe to planet Zog where it just so happens to have soil similar to the village
* The shoe has just fallen into existence at the site of the crime and by incredible coincidence happens to also have soil on the bottom which is similar to the soil that Holmes knows
The more and more "impossible" the explanations are, the harder they are to disprove. As with contemporary conspiracy theories, there is something about the weird complexity of the story that a faith community holds tightly to that makes it more believable.
Thankfully we have Occam's Razor to assist us. The fantastical can be given far less weight in Occam's light. It's not an ultimately determining factor, but it can do a lot to steer us closer to the truth.
I understand what you're describing there at the end -- a religion is so uniquely and 'finely tuned' that it must be true -- the opposite of an appeal to complexity.
As Wikipedia says
For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives. Since failing explanations can always be burdened with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they tend to be more testable.
Reading this thread, I'm reminded that the preservation of historical documents always comes with an agenda. (Up to the digital age, in which it's more the case that the deletion of documents comes with an agenda.)
It depends on what is meant by "agenda". Preservation of any texts reflects a culture's values as well as the technology available to preserve them, the durability of the form, the wealth of the culture to put what is valuable in forms that are durable, and the then current events as well as those over history.
Reading this thread, I'm reminded that the preservation of historical documents always comes with an agenda. (Up to the digital age, in which it's more the case that the deletion of documents comes with an agenda.)
I'm not sure it's fair to say that it always comes with an agenda. Lots of things survive just because, like ancient accounting documents made on clay tablets that were evidently accidentally fired when the storehouse they were in burned down.
It seems to me that historical documents are preserved because of a sense of history, broadly conceived. Plenty of things were destroyed not out of malice for the ideas they expressed, but because they were deemed to be "wrong" by the knowledge-parties in power. Different accounts of 'history' and why preserve it float around from time to time. So, for instance, early Christians clearly didn't have the same understanding of history as we do now.
But I think Kendel is also quite apt in pointing us to the material conditions involved. Those always account for much more than they may initially appear to.
Reading this thread, I'm reminded that the preservation of historical documents always comes with an agenda. (Up to the digital age, in which it's more the case that the deletion of documents comes with an agenda.)
I'm not sure it's fair to say that it always comes with an agenda. Lots of things survive just because, like ancient accounting documents made on clay tablets that were evidently accidentally fired when the storehouse they were in burned down.
I'm talking about preservation in the sense of "deciding to keep", not in any more technical sense relating to library and archive management.
I notice that Kendel changed "historical documents" to "texts". And some texts do survive by accident. (I imagine that whether that could be described as "lots" or "a few" depends on the historical period and context.) But, when a text is discovered and assessed, someone makes a decision about whether it is (or isn't) a historical document - whether it has historical significance or value.
It seems to me that historical documents are preserved because of a sense of history, broadly conceived.
That's what I was trying to get beyond. Things done by scholarly and academic institutions are done on the basis of rigorous policies. And in any policy, there's always an agenda. And that's aside from any unscholarly agendas that might play a part.
Ultimately, people and institutions keep historical documents because they believe there is a benefit from doing so, whether that is to an individual, a community, a society or a nation.
Plenty of things were destroyed not out of malice for the ideas they expressed, but because they were deemed to be "wrong" by the knowledge-parties in power. Different accounts of 'history' and why preserve it float around from time to time. So, for instance, early Christians clearly didn't have the same understanding of history as we do now.
The reasons for keeping or discarding historical documents change over the years, and include those you mention. And vested interests such as prestige, virtue signalling, reputation management and soft power play a part.
The longer the kept history of any historical document, the greater the arc of agendas and vested interests involved. I'm suggesting that when considering historical documents, we should be aware that there is a history of decisions involved in their continuing availability.
Originally posted by pease: The longer the kept history of any historical document, the greater the arc of agendas and vested interests involved. I'm suggesting that when considering historical documents, we should be aware that there is a history of decisions involved in their continuing availability.
As a historian I absolutely agree with this.
From a modern perspective, things written by men are more likely to be kept than things written by women, things written by men are more likely to have a clear attribution, whereas things written by women are more like to be anonymous or have a vague attribution, making then less useful, things written by men are more likely to have made it into secondary sources, and are more likely to be fully catalogued in archives, making them easier to access and hence more likely to appear in secondary sources etc etc.
Even more exasperating, even when there are perfectly good primary sources in archives etc, an assumption that everything important was written by a man means that sources produced by women aren't accessed.
I'm sure this is also true re race / nationality / class, but I am a gender historian and hence am commenting only on my experience within my own area (C19th women's history).
Textual, linguistic, historic and cultural scholarship that places the source texts within a timeframe of reliable and accurate reporting of events? That deal with 2000 year differences in world view?
Author, Title, Publisher (if a book)/Publication (if in a periodical), (Volume, Edition) Year, page/s.
The one person in this thread, who I know produces sources for arguments, confounds the view I hope is true.
I’m not sure what this means. Are you saying you want a bibliography for dating each text? The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels and the Dictionary of Paul and His Letters both provide these. They’re published by IVP. The New International Greek Testament Commentary series, the Yale Anchor Bible series, and the Hermeneia Commentary series are all good on technical stuff without getting too lost in the weeds.
Excellent, @Thomas Rowans . Thank you. And you've been one of the few to give any sources before my demand.
Up until my demand for sources were 2 2/3 pages sprinkled with unsupported claims, references to "concensus" and "scholars" and "philosophers" and "dates" without even a name, not a title, not a citation or reference. And that has continued into Page 4.
I've been reading bibliographies since I was 12. Sources matter. People can make anything up, and they do. Claims should be traceable.
For future reference, if that’s what you’re asking for, say so—and expect a minimal result, as this isn’t a research seminar and most of us have busy lives outside the ship. Generally we expect you can find basic biblical info on your own, or ask if not. People are happy to help. But we won’t do it without telling. It’s a discussion board, not a classroom.
The facts that nobody can argue with are that the earliest written materials about "the event" date from at least a century after they were supposed to have happened.
As rightly stated by others, the earliest materials come from Paul, writing about 20/25 years after the event. His use of anastasis and egeiro, for 'resurrection' (to the disciples), can only mean in Greek physical appearances, ruling out incorporeal.
Wikipedia entries on each individual book explain the overwhelming reasons for 50s AD dating for the hauptbriefe pretty well.
How these were generated, where they came from, what they mean etc are all points of conjecture and faith.
In C1 Judaism there was an expectation that a person (“Messiah”) would sent by God to sort out the problems of Israel. If a wannabe Messiah got themselves killed, this was conclusive proof that they weren't the Messiah, by definition. Theory meets reality in that both Josephus and Acts record very clearly what happened to the many movements whose Messiah dies- they simply vanished.
Yet for the earliest Christians, the 180 degree opposite happened. Not only was their dead Messiah successful in redeeming the people and land of Israel, he also redeemed the rest of humanity and the world, they said. Forgiveness, death defeated, God's Kingdom inaugurated...in fact, they concluded, this person must have been, somehow, God.
Now how on earth do you get all this from a man whose corpse was still rotting somewhere?
Again, believe whatever you like. But I don't have to account for all the impossible things you say you believe in.
Can we clarify, then, that you cannot provide a plausible alternative explanation to the Early Christian explanation?
Textual, linguistic, historic and cultural scholarship that places the source texts within a timeframe of reliable and accurate reporting of events? That deal with 2000 year differences in world view?
Author, Title, Publisher (if a book)/Publication (if in a periodical), (Volume, Edition) Year, page/s.
The one person in this thread, who I know produces sources for arguments, confounds the view I hope is true.
I’m not sure what this means. Are you saying you want a bibliography for dating each text? The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels and the Dictionary of Paul and His Letters both provide these. They’re published by IVP. The New International Greek Testament Commentary series, the Yale Anchor Bible series, and the Hermeneia Commentary series are all good on technical stuff without getting too lost in the weeds.
Excellent, @Thomas Rowans . Thank you. And you've been one of the few to give any sources before my demand.
Up until my demand for sources were 2 2/3 pages sprinkled with unsupported claims, references to "concensus" and "scholars" and "philosophers" and "dates" without even a name, not a title, not a citation or reference. And that has continued into Page 4.
I've been reading bibliographies since I was 12. Sources matter. People can make anything up, and they do. Claims should be traceable.
I am sympathetic to LC’s pointing out this is not exactly the right venue for a well-sourced academic discussion. Similarly, if us arguing for what the consensus states it seems like those people who are disregarding the consensus and relying on their own fallible judgment ought to provide some enduring rationale for why they can approach a problem like no one has ever thought about it before.
Doesn't it seem reasonable that statements claiming support of "scholarly consensus" and other somesuch in a thread about something so foundational to Christianity should have some sort of reference, even to a book title or author?
Well, it doesn't matter that I think it's reasonable. Reader beware. Any cat and dog can make any claim. And they do.
Doesn't it seem reasonable that statements claiming support of "scholarly consensus" and other somesuch in a thread about something so foundational to Christianity should have some sort of reference, even to a book title or author?
Well, it doesn't matter that I think it's reasonable. Reader beware. Any cat and dog can make any claim. And they do.
Particularly, if no one expects any better.
It’s not that people don’t expect better. It’s that people are trying to have conversations, and posts peppered with citations read like academic papers or legal briefs, not as contributions to conversations. They read as though we’re talking at people, not having a dialogue with people.
The typical practice here, at least in my experience, has been to keep citations to a minimum, and to request a citation to support a claim if one is wanted or seems needed. So a post claiming a scholarly consensus might say something like “see this source for more info,” or it might not. And if it doesn’t, it’s reasonable for someone else to respond with something along the lines of “can you cite a source?,” or “do you have any authority for that?”
Yet people fussed recently over using AI as an information source.
Doesn't it seem reasonable that statements claiming support of "scholarly consensus" and other somesuch in a thread about something so foundational to Christianity should have some sort of reference, even to a book title or author?
Well, it doesn't matter that I think it's reasonable. Reader beware. Any cat and dog can make any claim. And they do.
Particularly, if no one expects any better.
To be clear, I don't think any LLM or AI is a valid information source.
I'm also not sure that the dating of texts is foundational to Christianity. The faith seemed to do quite well without a super clear idea of when they were written for quite a number of centuries.
And, again, why do we need to cite sources for claiming scholarly consensus (which is available even on, say, wikipedia) but the people instantiating their own suspect reasoning don't have to supply any sources?
If I'm going to tell you that atoms aren't real because I myself can't see them, surely you'd expect me to grapple with some of the relevant science and whatnot demonstrating the existence of atoms?
Several points, some of which have already been made (sorry!):
1. AI is no good as a source. It cannot and does not reflect on the truth or otherwise of its own statements. It's basically spicy autocorrect, as my son says. Those who rely on it are likely to wind up in the same place as those who rely blindly on spellcheck, ignoring the fact that it can't cope with homophones etc. Only it will be worse, because AI promises more and delivers even less.
2. This is a discussion forum that uses threads--not a gathering of academic papers. You cannot sensibly blame us for conforming to the normal usage of threaded forums, which is to supply citations to people who ask for them, WHEN they ask for them--and not otherwise. It's academic papers that are expected to provide citations every time, all the time. This difference is what allows discussion forums to be more readable, and to move more quickly and with more agility to different facets of a topic. If you prefer the other, you can find it easily by locating the database that specializes in your area of interest, and search for papers. You won't find it here, and you should not. That's not what we're all about.
3. You do realize that by demanding sources for everything we say on this thread, you are demanding that we reproduce the education of years? Seriously. I earned a doctorate in this stuff, and I've done any amount of reading since then. And you expect me to annotate (with publishers' data, even!) the information gathered over 35 years? Get real. I can and have pointed you in the general direction of scholars you can consult on a subject--for instance, Walter Ong on orality and textuality. I'm not going to go through my old notebooks (God knows where they are all these years later) and give you chapter and verse on every single point I recall from his courses. And if I did, a host would be along to shut us down for turning into a "homework thread," something that has the smell of "I'm consulting your forum so I can steal your stuff and present it as my own academic research," which is a problem that has occurred many times before. We aren't going to do that, and the hosts wouldn't allow it if we tried.
4. Why are you not getting your own education?
We don't mind you asking what we think about X, Y and Z. But you seem to want us to do all the hard work for you, rather than offering you the general pointers we would give to a peer. You are not a child. Surely you can consult the basic works of the field--or if you don't know what they are, you can ask for them! As it is, you are expecting us to hunt, cook, and cut up your meat for you--and in return you offer us half-baked theories without the shadow of a factual basis behind them. It won't do.
@Kendel I'm a tad more sympathetic to where you're coming from because it took me a long time to understand what frequent posters on the Ship took for granted, the more so as I had been trained in disciplines focused on the developing world and didn't have access to that many academic articles or textbooks online. Almost nobody had read theology or biblical commentaries coming from my corner of the world and much of the time they weren't that interested. Posters were often defensive or impatient and kept reminding newcomers that they didn't have to prove their credentials, that they had years of law or academic study or teaching behind them and that they were really busy in real life so it was up to us to get up to speed and figure things out.
At the same time, threads would tackle extremely complex and erudite topics, start off well then degenerate into what felt to me like irrelevance or sterile bickering, with a fair amount of trolling and overworked moderators/Hosts behind the scenes intervening to redirect traffic or calm things down. Some posters had long-established feuds, so we had a number of ongoing acrimonious exchanges or posters who ostentatiously ignored one another, or posters who would come in and make jokes to defuse tensions and the thread would unravel into tangents and aimless digressions. (This happens on most older forums I've spent time on, the lifespan of any thread is often truncated.) What I noticed too was that some posters had no idea how others (newcomers) floundered without any links or nudges in the right direction: I'll always be grateful to @tclune for once posting some links and clarifying arguments that helped me feel I knew enough of what was going on to follow the discussion. Kindness is never a waste of time when someone is new or out of their depth, but it's best to approach those who do seem to have more time or patience. This isn't an academic or seminar-style forum so shorter posts, snappy or irascible or in verbal shorthand, might be frustrating to puzzle through but after a while some of it starts to make sense.
KoF - not having a go at you at all, but one of the problems with any chat board such as the Ship is that the person in initiating a thread has no control on how things go (at least as far as I know). I've been through that in the past - usually I've concluded that any attempt to bring discussion back to what I had sought is doomed to failure. Good luck to any effort you may make, as long as you accept that it may get nowhere
My experience is that links to a specific scholar are easier than links to a scholarly consensus. For one thing, I can remember where to find a specific scholar; while I don't remember where to find statements of consensus. For another, to show that something is a consensus you'd have to link to a lot of articles.
The other thing is that this is a discussion group: we're supposed to be speaking for ourselves rather than ventriloquising scholars: a custom of discouraging links helps with that.
In the Islamic tradition, it's said that Mohammed once split the moon in half, and on another occasion, he stopped the sun to delay the sunset. As a non Muslim I find these stories to be highly unlikely, but to the faithful, they're taken on trust. .
The same answer to both of these: consider the impact. Did the historical claims of the faith themselves create and define the faith, or were they incidental?
For example, the splitting of the moon/stopping of sun had no impact on what was believed. Indeed, there is debate about whether they should be considered miracles at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracles_of_Muhammad .
About a month after the death of my mother, I found myself daydreaming. What if, there was a knock at the door, and my mother was standing there. She came in, and cooked us dinner. eating some herself. She left the long lost recipe for her beef mince in her inimitable handwriting, gave us directions to some of her money we had missed, told us about other things which couldn't be predicted or about things I didn't know which turn out to be true. All this was witnessed by the rest of the family, and even some neighbours who popped over.
At some point in the evening I would say to her, “Just before you died, you talked about the door you were going to walk through, and what might be on the other side. What is there?”. Her answer would no doubt utterly change the rest of my life.
That's what I see with the earliest Christians. In the blink of an eye, they've had everything they ever believed in one sense confirmed, and at the same time completely changed. They all went out saying to the world “Do your worst to me. It really doesn't matter any more”. And they stuck with it for life.
This sounds like the consequential fallacy, that if the results of something are desirable, then the initial claim is correct. Also called the appeal to consequences. There was a famous negative example in the appeal of the Birmingham Six, imprisoned for setting off bombs, when Lord Denning argued that if the appeal won, it would mean that various people had committed perjury. Therefore, the appeal must fail. In other words, if a consequence is undesirable, the initial claim must be false.
In the Islamic tradition, it's said that Mohammed once split the moon in half, and on another occasion, he stopped the sun to delay the sunset. As a non Muslim I find these stories to be highly unlikely, but to the faithful, they're taken on trust. .
The same answer to both of these: consider the impact. Did the historical claims of the faith themselves create and define the faith, or were they incidental?
For example, the splitting of the moon/stopping of sun had no impact on what was believed. Indeed, there is debate about whether they should be considered miracles at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracles_of_Muhammad .
About a month after the death of my mother, I found myself daydreaming. What if, there was a knock at the door, and my mother was standing there. She came in, and cooked us dinner. eating some herself. She left the long lost recipe for her beef mince in her inimitable handwriting, gave us directions to some of her money we had missed, told us about other things which couldn't be predicted or about things I didn't know which turn out to be true. All this was witnessed by the rest of the family, and even some neighbours who popped over.
At some point in the evening I would say to her, “Just before you died, you talked about the door you were going to walk through, and what might be on the other side. What is there?”. Her answer would no doubt utterly change the rest of my life.
That's what I see with the earliest Christians. In the blink of an eye, they've had everything they ever believed in one sense confirmed, and at the same time completely changed. They all went out saying to the world “Do your worst to me. It really doesn't matter any more”. And they stuck with it for life.
I'm not following this. Belief in the factual and historical reality of the Israʾ and Miʿraj is pretty close to being bedrock for Muslims. There is very little debate about that as far as I can tell.
I just don't understand what you mean about "The same answer to both of these: consider the impact. Did the historical claims of the faith themselves create and define the faith, or were they incidental?"
Eh? What do you mean incidental? How are you determining whether the events in a religious narrative define the faith?
Your final paragraph implies that Christianity is the only faith where this happens. Even if this is true, it is (fairly obviously) not the only faith where the devoted are prepared to die for it.
This sounds like the consequential fallacy, that if the results of something are desirable, then the initial claim is correct. Also called the appeal to consequences. There was a famous negative example in the appeal of the Birmingham Six, imprisoned for setting off bombs, when Lord Denning argued that if the appeal won, it would mean that various people had committed perjury. Therefore, the appeal must fail. In other words, if a consequence is undesirable, the initial claim must be false.
Sounds to me like faulty logic to me. Plenty of people have had dreams and visions and 'voices from God' which nobody else accepted and led quickly to being ostracized and sometimes killed.
The fact that they've died for a belief doesn't give the belief more credibility. It shows that they really believe it.. which we already knew.
The surprising behavior of the first Christians is evidence, not absolute proof. But then, I don’t think Vase was claiming it as anything but another piece of evidence to weigh.
I used to be much more sympathetic to the argument that the behavior of the early Christians was evidence in favor of the claim until QAnon came along. Now that I've seen that level of delusion develop and play out, I'm less inclined to that argument.
This sounds like the consequential fallacy, that if the results of something are desirable, then the initial claim is correct. Also called the appeal to consequences. There was a famous negative example in the appeal of the Birmingham Six, imprisoned for setting off bombs, when Lord Denning argued that if the appeal won, it would mean that various people had committed perjury. Therefore, the appeal must fail. In other words, if a consequence is undesirable, the initial claim must be false.
A bit of an aside - Lord Denning visited Sydney and said that the students' dinner given him justified his title of Master of the Rolls judging by the number of bread rolls thrown around. Despite that, his decisions were not highly regarded here, being said to be more along the lines of what some outsider might like the law to be.
I'm not following this. Belief in the factual and historical reality of the Israʾ and Miʿraj is pretty close to being bedrock for Muslims. There is very little debate about that as far as I can tell.
<snip>
Your final paragraph implies that Christianity is the only faith where this happens. Even if this is true, it is (fairly obviously) not the only faith where the devoted are prepared to die for it.
I was talking specifically about the 'splitting' of the moon, raised earlier as a test case, rather than Israʾ and Miʿraj , and I would refer you to the earlier linked article for alternative viewpoints based on translation etc.
Indeed, Mohammed's ability to perform miracles is far from clear and alternative explanation can be found . Importantly, one can (see article) explain the rise and earliest beliefs of Islam without the miracles.
By contrast, as Paul (who saw the situation clearly) says in 1 Cor 15, the very existence and meaning of Earliest Christianity relies on the resurrection. Jesus could not have done what he did in an agnostic setting in Croydon 2005. He was operating within the OT meta-narrative of C1 Judaism of the return of God to establish His Kingdom. This was generally believed at the time to involve simply booting the Romans out of Israel, and great national renewal.
Then suddenly you have this huge change-but-not arriving overnight within one branch of Judaism. That it's not about the Israelites, but the promise to Abraham, to free all of humanity from death. Not about a patch of Mediterranean land, but the world. Not about military force, but a nasty death. And so on. And so on. All within the parameters of the C1 Jewish narrative, but dramatically different to how it was understood at the time.
All 'sold' to anyone who would listen by a group of people, previously scared out of their wits, but now unconcerned about their personal safety, even though they knew what could happen to them. All this on the back of...what? A by definition failed Messiah? A rotting corpse?
Remember, whether Lazarus (John 11), the resurrected saints (Matt 27), or Herod's Baptist redivivus (Luke 9), merely returning from the dead does not give rise to any speculation about the Kingdom of God arriving.
What explains the change in the beliefs? The impact?
Plenty of people have had dreams and visions and 'voices from God' which nobody else accepted and led quickly to being ostracized and sometimes killed.
Is that your alternative explanation? A dream or a vision?
I'm not following this. Belief in the factual and historical reality of the Israʾ and Miʿraj is pretty close to being bedrock for Muslims. There is very little debate about that as far as I can tell.
<snip>
Your final paragraph implies that Christianity is the only faith where this happens. Even if this is true, it is (fairly obviously) not the only faith where the devoted are prepared to die for it.
(a) ...Paul (who saw the situation clearly) says in 1 Cor 15, the very existence and meaning of Earliest Christianity relies on the resurrection. (b) Jesus could not have done what he did in an agnostic setting in Croydon 2005. He was operating within the OT meta-narrative of C1 Judaism of the return of God to establish His Kingdom. This was generally believed at the time to involve simply booting the Romans out of Israel, and great national renewal.
Then suddenly you have this huge change-but-not arriving overnight within one branch of Judaism. That it's not about the Israelites, but (c) the promise to Abraham, to free all of humanity from death. Not about a patch of Mediterranean land, but the world. Not about military force, but a nasty death. And so on. And so on. All within the parameters of the C1 Jewish narrative, but dramatically different to how it was understood at the time.
All 'sold' to anyone who would listen by (e) a group of people, previously scared out of their wits, but now unconcerned about their personal safety, even though they knew what could happen to them. All this on the back of...what? A by definition failed Messiah? A rotting corpse?
Remember, whether Lazarus (John 11), the resurrected saints (Matt 27), or (d) Herod's Baptist redivivus (Luke 9), merely returning from the dead does not give rise to any speculation about the Kingdom of God arriving.
(f) What explains the change in the beliefs? The impact?
Plenty of people have had dreams and visions and 'voices from God' which nobody else accepted and led quickly to being ostracized and sometimes killed.
Is that your alternative explanation? A dream or a vision?
(a) Agreed.
(b) Why not?
(c) That's your post hoc interpretation of Genesis 12:3 2/2. Not even Jesus did that.
(d) You mean the folk religion springing up about Jesus?
(e) No, by a group of totally beguiled people, intoxicated with the vision and its man. And even so, they didn't rush to follow His witness.
(f) Which beliefs? Whose? The pivotal ones were Mary's and kinswoman Elizabeth's, after six centuries of apocalyptic leading to the overt messianism of C2nd BCE. These women, stoned on their own endorphins, saw themselves as vessels of Messiah, confirmed by Simeon to be in the suffering servant tradition. They brainwashed their sons accordingly. Jesus distilled, concentrated the social justice essence of the prophets in Himself. There had never been the like. His non-violent, socialist, humanist, kind message. That He had to conspire to die for. To be martyred for. In the 1,300 days of his ministry in between, this brilliant, charismatic, actor, conditioned a Manchurian candidate in Peter who led the conspiracy triggered by His death. The message was so good it justified anything and everything. That's what Paul encountered in a handful of years.
Is that your alternative explanation? A dream or a vision?
I don't really think I need an explanation to not believe your impossible thing or to think that your impossible thing is more believable than anyone else's impossible thing.
But to me the most likely explanation is a dream (or wishful thinking or delusion) likely caused by all the stresses implicit in following then losing a charismatic leader.
Given what we now know about QAnon, it seems plausible that the whole story is completely made up from a mix of oral stories floating around at the time.
Point for me is that there is absolutely no way to tell from this distance.
Again though, believe whatever impossible thing you like. Knock yourself out.
I don't really think I need an explanation to ...<snip>
Again though, believe whatever impossible thing you like. Knock yourself out.
Thanks for the reply.
An astonishing set of physical appearances by the very-much-alive Jesus is a sufficient and necessary explanation for the creation of Earliest Christianity with its claims about an earth-shattering event having happened. By contrast, all other explanations are far, far away from even sufficiency.
For centuries some of the best minds on the planet in diverse fields have tried and failed to provide a reasonable alternative; with the relatively recent arrival of using the wider C1 Jewish context to examine the texts, this task has become even harder still. Surely the time has come to ask ourselves whether what they said happened, actually happened?
Impossible? If one starts with an open mind about whether there is a God who created everything, surely for God, appearing on earth in human form is trivial. Leading to the questions “Could this human die?” and “If so, is that it?”. To which the answers would appear to be “Yes”, and “No”.
Levels of certainty in ancient History can be up there with any a posteriori field. We know that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Apply the same rules of history to the NT.
It won't have been a dream. (1) Multiple and many forms and attestation that whatever-it-was was physical (anastasis, egeiro, eating fish, breaking bread, 7 mile walks in the Palestinian sunshine...) (2) Saul had a vision, but was forced to use physical language coming from the disciples (3) A vision of someone dead from beyond the grave is conclusive that they're still dead, whereas the earliest claim was that Jesus was alive.
The subsequent spread of Christianity could be analysed as for QAnon's spread, but the initial creation of the particular beliefs cannot. Very ordinary reasons for how Qanon's ideas got started are not hard to find...
There are plenty of ordinary explanations for Christianity; here's one: wishful thinking. Here's another: someone made it up when they were on drugs.
There are plenty of even simpler explanations: one person in a messianic passion thought and wrote one thing, which was mangled and added to and reinterpreted to the extent that the version we have in the oldest fragments and manuscripts doesn't much resemble the story that was first spoken, never mind what actually happened.
One can't know at what point the story was embellished or exactly where it came from any more than one can extract an egg from a baked cake. Or any more than one can sensibly work out a timeline of the QAnon nonsense.
Comments
From that website:
From the website: "The Fragment is widely regarded as the earliest portion of any New Testament writing ever found. It provides us with invaluable evidence on the spread of Christianity in the provinces of the Roman Empire in the first centuries of our era. The first editor dated the Fragment to the first half of the second century (between 100-150 AD). The date was estimated palaeographically, by comparing the handwriting with other manuscripts. However, palaeography is not an exact science - none of the comparable Biblical manuscripts are dated and most papyri bearing a secure date are administrative documents. Recent research points to a date nearer to 200 AD, but there is as yet no convincing evidence that any earlier fragments from the New Testament survive. Carbon-dating is a destructive method and has not been used on the Fragment."
I think it is an entirely reasonable to think that an event which is said to be a miracle has an implication that in the general way this doesn't happen but in this specific case it did.
Or in other words: we all think these things are impossible. Believers say it happened on this occasion, I say it is impossible on all occasions.
I was really just quipping about the Sherlock Holmes stories.
We just have to distinguish whether we're talking about the natural or the supernatural, and be clear about how we're using the word miracle. The US Men's Hockey Team's "Miracle on Ice" in 1980 required nothing supernatural, but "Near Impossibility on Ice" didn't have quite the same ring to it. That's what we mean most times, though: a near or virtual impossibility (an improbability) that actually came to pass.
What I mean is this;
Say for example Holmes finds a shoe with a certain kind of soil on it. Of course Holmes has made a study of local soils and states with confidence that the wearer of the shoe has been wandering around in a nearby village.
But of course it doesn't take much imagination to come up with other possibilities;
* There's some other place that Holmes is not aware of with similar soil
* Someone has manufactured an artificial soil that looks similar to the soil in that village
* Aliens have taken the wearer of the shoe to planet Zog where it just so happens to have soil similar to the village
* The shoe has just fallen into existence at the site of the crime and by incredible coincidence happens to also have soil on the bottom which is similar to the soil that Holmes knows
The more and more "impossible" the explanations are, the harder they are to disprove. As with contemporary conspiracy theories, there is something about the weird complexity of the story that a faith community holds tightly to that makes it more believable.
I'm not arguing anything about historicity, I'm saying it is impossible to know because there is no evidence
Christianity makes faith claims which are offered with unprovable claims of historicity.
Thankfully we have Occam's Razor to assist us. The fantastical can be given far less weight in Occam's light. It's not an ultimately determining factor, but it can do a lot to steer us closer to the truth.
I understand what you're describing there at the end -- a religion is so uniquely and 'finely tuned' that it must be true -- the opposite of an appeal to complexity.
Christianity makes a lot of claims, like all traditions of thought do. I certainly don’t think the gospels are reportage in the way, say, there is reportage of 9/11.
The gospels are literary texts before they’re anything else, I think.
As Wikipedia says
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
Is this where I express appreciation for the idea that the word "may" always implies "or may not?"
By how many sigmas is there a God?
I'm not sure it's fair to say that it always comes with an agenda. Lots of things survive just because, like ancient accounting documents made on clay tablets that were evidently accidentally fired when the storehouse they were in burned down.
It seems to me that historical documents are preserved because of a sense of history, broadly conceived. Plenty of things were destroyed not out of malice for the ideas they expressed, but because they were deemed to be "wrong" by the knowledge-parties in power. Different accounts of 'history' and why preserve it float around from time to time. So, for instance, early Christians clearly didn't have the same understanding of history as we do now.
But I think Kendel is also quite apt in pointing us to the material conditions involved. Those always account for much more than they may initially appear to.
I notice that Kendel changed "historical documents" to "texts". And some texts do survive by accident. (I imagine that whether that could be described as "lots" or "a few" depends on the historical period and context.) But, when a text is discovered and assessed, someone makes a decision about whether it is (or isn't) a historical document - whether it has historical significance or value.
That's what I was trying to get beyond. Things done by scholarly and academic institutions are done on the basis of rigorous policies. And in any policy, there's always an agenda. And that's aside from any unscholarly agendas that might play a part.
Ultimately, people and institutions keep historical documents because they believe there is a benefit from doing so, whether that is to an individual, a community, a society or a nation.
The reasons for keeping or discarding historical documents change over the years, and include those you mention. And vested interests such as prestige, virtue signalling, reputation management and soft power play a part.
The longer the kept history of any historical document, the greater the arc of agendas and vested interests involved. I'm suggesting that when considering historical documents, we should be aware that there is a history of decisions involved in their continuing availability.
The longer the kept history of any historical document, the greater the arc of agendas and vested interests involved. I'm suggesting that when considering historical documents, we should be aware that there is a history of decisions involved in their continuing availability.
As a historian I absolutely agree with this.
From a modern perspective, things written by men are more likely to be kept than things written by women, things written by men are more likely to have a clear attribution, whereas things written by women are more like to be anonymous or have a vague attribution, making then less useful, things written by men are more likely to have made it into secondary sources, and are more likely to be fully catalogued in archives, making them easier to access and hence more likely to appear in secondary sources etc etc.
Even more exasperating, even when there are perfectly good primary sources in archives etc, an assumption that everything important was written by a man means that sources produced by women aren't accessed.
I'm sure this is also true re race / nationality / class, but I am a gender historian and hence am commenting only on my experience within my own area (C19th women's history).
Excellent, @Thomas Rowans . Thank you. And you've been one of the few to give any sources before my demand.
Up until my demand for sources were 2 2/3 pages sprinkled with unsupported claims, references to "concensus" and "scholars" and "philosophers" and "dates" without even a name, not a title, not a citation or reference. And that has continued into Page 4.
I've been reading bibliographies since I was 12. Sources matter. People can make anything up, and they do. Claims should be traceable.
As rightly stated by others, the earliest materials come from Paul, writing about 20/25 years after the event. His use of anastasis and egeiro, for 'resurrection' (to the disciples), can only mean in Greek physical appearances, ruling out incorporeal.
Wikipedia entries on each individual book explain the overwhelming reasons for 50s AD dating for the hauptbriefe pretty well.
In C1 Judaism there was an expectation that a person (“Messiah”) would sent by God to sort out the problems of Israel. If a wannabe Messiah got themselves killed, this was conclusive proof that they weren't the Messiah, by definition. Theory meets reality in that both Josephus and Acts record very clearly what happened to the many movements whose Messiah dies- they simply vanished.
Yet for the earliest Christians, the 180 degree opposite happened. Not only was their dead Messiah successful in redeeming the people and land of Israel, he also redeemed the rest of humanity and the world, they said. Forgiveness, death defeated, God's Kingdom inaugurated...in fact, they concluded, this person must have been, somehow, God.
Now how on earth do you get all this from a man whose corpse was still rotting somewhere?
Can we clarify, then, that you cannot provide a plausible alternative explanation to the Early Christian explanation?
I am sympathetic to LC’s pointing out this is not exactly the right venue for a well-sourced academic discussion. Similarly, if us arguing for what the consensus states it seems like those people who are disregarding the consensus and relying on their own fallible judgment ought to provide some enduring rationale for why they can approach a problem like no one has ever thought about it before.
Yet people fussed recently over using AI as an information source.
Doesn't it seem reasonable that statements claiming support of "scholarly consensus" and other somesuch in a thread about something so foundational to Christianity should have some sort of reference, even to a book title or author?
Well, it doesn't matter that I think it's reasonable. Reader beware. Any cat and dog can make any claim. And they do.
Particularly, if no one expects any better.
The typical practice here, at least in my experience, has been to keep citations to a minimum, and to request a citation to support a claim if one is wanted or seems needed. So a post claiming a scholarly consensus might say something like “see this source for more info,” or it might not. And if it doesn’t, it’s reasonable for someone else to respond with something along the lines of “can you cite a source?,” or “do you have any authority for that?”
To be clear, I don't think any LLM or AI is a valid information source.
I'm also not sure that the dating of texts is foundational to Christianity. The faith seemed to do quite well without a super clear idea of when they were written for quite a number of centuries.
And, again, why do we need to cite sources for claiming scholarly consensus (which is available even on, say, wikipedia) but the people instantiating their own suspect reasoning don't have to supply any sources?
If I'm going to tell you that atoms aren't real because I myself can't see them, surely you'd expect me to grapple with some of the relevant science and whatnot demonstrating the existence of atoms?
1. AI is no good as a source. It cannot and does not reflect on the truth or otherwise of its own statements. It's basically spicy autocorrect, as my son says. Those who rely on it are likely to wind up in the same place as those who rely blindly on spellcheck, ignoring the fact that it can't cope with homophones etc. Only it will be worse, because AI promises more and delivers even less.
2. This is a discussion forum that uses threads--not a gathering of academic papers. You cannot sensibly blame us for conforming to the normal usage of threaded forums, which is to supply citations to people who ask for them, WHEN they ask for them--and not otherwise. It's academic papers that are expected to provide citations every time, all the time. This difference is what allows discussion forums to be more readable, and to move more quickly and with more agility to different facets of a topic. If you prefer the other, you can find it easily by locating the database that specializes in your area of interest, and search for papers. You won't find it here, and you should not. That's not what we're all about.
3. You do realize that by demanding sources for everything we say on this thread, you are demanding that we reproduce the education of years? Seriously. I earned a doctorate in this stuff, and I've done any amount of reading since then. And you expect me to annotate (with publishers' data, even!) the information gathered over 35 years? Get real. I can and have pointed you in the general direction of scholars you can consult on a subject--for instance, Walter Ong on orality and textuality. I'm not going to go through my old notebooks (God knows where they are all these years later) and give you chapter and verse on every single point I recall from his courses. And if I did, a host would be along to shut us down for turning into a "homework thread," something that has the smell of "I'm consulting your forum so I can steal your stuff and present it as my own academic research," which is a problem that has occurred many times before. We aren't going to do that, and the hosts wouldn't allow it if we tried.
4. Why are you not getting your own education?
We don't mind you asking what we think about X, Y and Z. But you seem to want us to do all the hard work for you, rather than offering you the general pointers we would give to a peer. You are not a child. Surely you can consult the basic works of the field--or if you don't know what they are, you can ask for them! As it is, you are expecting us to hunt, cook, and cut up your meat for you--and in return you offer us half-baked theories without the shadow of a factual basis behind them. It won't do.
Um. Isn't part of getting one's informal education sometimes comprised of following up on things other people have read? Which I do to exhaustion.
You mentioned Walter Ong and orality and extuality. Super! That's something that can be followed up on.
"Scholarly concensus" can come out of my back pocket, AI, my imagination, anywhere.
But as you please, @Lamb Chopped You needn't bother. I will follow other leads, which I have been doing for a very long time.
At the same time, threads would tackle extremely complex and erudite topics, start off well then degenerate into what felt to me like irrelevance or sterile bickering, with a fair amount of trolling and overworked moderators/Hosts behind the scenes intervening to redirect traffic or calm things down. Some posters had long-established feuds, so we had a number of ongoing acrimonious exchanges or posters who ostentatiously ignored one another, or posters who would come in and make jokes to defuse tensions and the thread would unravel into tangents and aimless digressions. (This happens on most older forums I've spent time on, the lifespan of any thread is often truncated.) What I noticed too was that some posters had no idea how others (newcomers) floundered without any links or nudges in the right direction: I'll always be grateful to @tclune for once posting some links and clarifying arguments that helped me feel I knew enough of what was going on to follow the discussion. Kindness is never a waste of time when someone is new or out of their depth, but it's best to approach those who do seem to have more time or patience. This isn't an academic or seminar-style forum so shorter posts, snappy or irascible or in verbal shorthand, might be frustrating to puzzle through but after a while some of it starts to make sense.
In a way I'm sorry I started the thread as I hadn't really thought it through about how it might be received.
The other thing is that this is a discussion group: we're supposed to be speaking for ourselves rather than ventriloquising scholars: a custom of discouraging links helps with that.
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host
The same answer to both of these: consider the impact. Did the historical claims of the faith themselves create and define the faith, or were they incidental?
For example, the splitting of the moon/stopping of sun had no impact on what was believed. Indeed, there is debate about whether they should be considered miracles at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracles_of_Muhammad .
About a month after the death of my mother, I found myself daydreaming. What if, there was a knock at the door, and my mother was standing there. She came in, and cooked us dinner. eating some herself. She left the long lost recipe for her beef mince in her inimitable handwriting, gave us directions to some of her money we had missed, told us about other things which couldn't be predicted or about things I didn't know which turn out to be true. All this was witnessed by the rest of the family, and even some neighbours who popped over.
At some point in the evening I would say to her, “Just before you died, you talked about the door you were going to walk through, and what might be on the other side. What is there?”. Her answer would no doubt utterly change the rest of my life.
That's what I see with the earliest Christians. In the blink of an eye, they've had everything they ever believed in one sense confirmed, and at the same time completely changed. They all went out saying to the world “Do your worst to me. It really doesn't matter any more”. And they stuck with it for life.
I'm not following this. Belief in the factual and historical reality of the Israʾ and Miʿraj is pretty close to being bedrock for Muslims. There is very little debate about that as far as I can tell.
I just don't understand what you mean about "The same answer to both of these: consider the impact. Did the historical claims of the faith themselves create and define the faith, or were they incidental?"
Eh? What do you mean incidental? How are you determining whether the events in a religious narrative define the faith?
Your final paragraph implies that Christianity is the only faith where this happens. Even if this is true, it is (fairly obviously) not the only faith where the devoted are prepared to die for it.
Sounds to me like faulty logic to me. Plenty of people have had dreams and visions and 'voices from God' which nobody else accepted and led quickly to being ostracized and sometimes killed.
The fact that they've died for a belief doesn't give the belief more credibility. It shows that they really believe it.. which we already knew.
Yes, I'm agreeing with you, although possibly not exactly with your reasoning.
A bit of an aside - Lord Denning visited Sydney and said that the students' dinner given him justified his title of Master of the Rolls judging by the number of bread rolls thrown around. Despite that, his decisions were not highly regarded here, being said to be more along the lines of what some outsider might like the law to be.
Indeed, Mohammed's ability to perform miracles is far from clear and alternative explanation can be found . Importantly, one can (see article) explain the rise and earliest beliefs of Islam without the miracles.
By contrast, as Paul (who saw the situation clearly) says in 1 Cor 15, the very existence and meaning of Earliest Christianity relies on the resurrection. Jesus could not have done what he did in an agnostic setting in Croydon 2005. He was operating within the OT meta-narrative of C1 Judaism of the return of God to establish His Kingdom. This was generally believed at the time to involve simply booting the Romans out of Israel, and great national renewal.
Then suddenly you have this huge change-but-not arriving overnight within one branch of Judaism. That it's not about the Israelites, but the promise to Abraham, to free all of humanity from death. Not about a patch of Mediterranean land, but the world. Not about military force, but a nasty death. And so on. And so on. All within the parameters of the C1 Jewish narrative, but dramatically different to how it was understood at the time.
All 'sold' to anyone who would listen by a group of people, previously scared out of their wits, but now unconcerned about their personal safety, even though they knew what could happen to them. All this on the back of...what? A by definition failed Messiah? A rotting corpse?
Remember, whether Lazarus (John 11), the resurrected saints (Matt 27), or Herod's Baptist redivivus (Luke 9), merely returning from the dead does not give rise to any speculation about the Kingdom of God arriving.
What explains the change in the beliefs? The impact?
Is that your alternative explanation? A dream or a vision?
(a) Agreed.
(b) Why not?
(c) That's your post hoc interpretation of Genesis 12:3 2/2. Not even Jesus did that.
(d) You mean the folk religion springing up about Jesus?
(e) No, by a group of totally beguiled people, intoxicated with the vision and its man. And even so, they didn't rush to follow His witness.
(f) Which beliefs? Whose? The pivotal ones were Mary's and kinswoman Elizabeth's, after six centuries of apocalyptic leading to the overt messianism of C2nd BCE. These women, stoned on their own endorphins, saw themselves as vessels of Messiah, confirmed by Simeon to be in the suffering servant tradition. They brainwashed their sons accordingly. Jesus distilled, concentrated the social justice essence of the prophets in Himself. There had never been the like. His non-violent, socialist, humanist, kind message. That He had to conspire to die for. To be martyred for. In the 1,300 days of his ministry in between, this brilliant, charismatic, actor, conditioned a Manchurian candidate in Peter who led the conspiracy triggered by His death. The message was so good it justified anything and everything. That's what Paul encountered in a handful of years.
It's a very easy novel to write.
And that message keeps beguiling.
Naturally.
I don't really think I need an explanation to not believe your impossible thing or to think that your impossible thing is more believable than anyone else's impossible thing.
But to me the most likely explanation is a dream (or wishful thinking or delusion) likely caused by all the stresses implicit in following then losing a charismatic leader.
Given what we now know about QAnon, it seems plausible that the whole story is completely made up from a mix of oral stories floating around at the time.
Point for me is that there is absolutely no way to tell from this distance.
Again though, believe whatever impossible thing you like. Knock yourself out.
An astonishing set of physical appearances by the very-much-alive Jesus is a sufficient and necessary explanation for the creation of Earliest Christianity with its claims about an earth-shattering event having happened. By contrast, all other explanations are far, far away from even sufficiency.
For centuries some of the best minds on the planet in diverse fields have tried and failed to provide a reasonable alternative; with the relatively recent arrival of using the wider C1 Jewish context to examine the texts, this task has become even harder still. Surely the time has come to ask ourselves whether what they said happened, actually happened?
Impossible? If one starts with an open mind about whether there is a God who created everything, surely for God, appearing on earth in human form is trivial. Leading to the questions “Could this human die?” and “If so, is that it?”. To which the answers would appear to be “Yes”, and “No”.
Levels of certainty in ancient History can be up there with any a posteriori field. We know that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Apply the same rules of history to the NT.
It won't have been a dream. (1) Multiple and many forms and attestation that whatever-it-was was physical (anastasis, egeiro, eating fish, breaking bread, 7 mile walks in the Palestinian sunshine...) (2) Saul had a vision, but was forced to use physical language coming from the disciples (3) A vision of someone dead from beyond the grave is conclusive that they're still dead, whereas the earliest claim was that Jesus was alive.
The subsequent spread of Christianity could be analysed as for QAnon's spread, but the initial creation of the particular beliefs cannot. Very ordinary reasons for how Qanon's ideas got started are not hard to find...
There are plenty of even simpler explanations: one person in a messianic passion thought and wrote one thing, which was mangled and added to and reinterpreted to the extent that the version we have in the oldest fragments and manuscripts doesn't much resemble the story that was first spoken, never mind what actually happened.
One can't know at what point the story was embellished or exactly where it came from any more than one can extract an egg from a baked cake. Or any more than one can sensibly work out a timeline of the QAnon nonsense.
When, where, who, how, why did someone ordinarily make up Christianity on drugs?
How are Chinese whispers even simpler?
Though engaging in the fun word play game of passing on a whispered phrase might be a regular occurrence, the term itself comes from negative stereotypes established in America during the height of Chinese immigration that framed the sound of Chinese people speaking as unintelligible or nonsense. These days, the better term is to call the game Telephone.