> -----Original Message----- > From: PDML [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Collin B > > >Simply because the four biographers were not always in simultaneous > >attendance. > > > >Besides, there are plenty of non-Biblical writings of the times to > >corroborate the Gospels. > > > >Alan C > > Let's not overstate our case. Knarf caught that. > There are not many extra-biblical "writings" available. Josephus makes > mention, but that from a distance. > And we have only a couple of fragments from late first century NT > documents. > > But there is a good number of artifacts. > The "Pilate stone" is a fairly recent find and is the most significant extra- > biblical evidence of him. > That comes despite the Roman propensity to document everything. There > are others as well. > (The skeptical approach being that, without evidence, a thing should be > questions. Lack of evidence is evidence of lack, so they say.
Rubbish. > This approach makes the mistake of applying empirical/inductive methods to > the abductive nature of historical inquiry. ) > Rubbish. > The discussions around the James ossuary continue. It looks to be genuine, > but the arguments from both sides appear inconclusive at this point. > > Even with the small amount of material there is still more on Jesus than on > Aristotle & Plato, and many others. Whether Aristotle or Plato existed or not has no bearing on the question of whether Jesus existed or not. Or whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, for that matter. And whether Jesus existed or not is irrelevant to the question about faking his biography to fit the prophecies. I've no idea whether Jesus, or Plato, Aristotle or Shakespeare existed or not and I don't really care one way or the other. What matters is not their historical existence but their thought that does exist and that has come down to us one way or another, in all of these cases. To believe anything other than that the biography of Jesus was retrofitted to look as if he fulfilled the scriptures requires a chain of preposterous beliefs so extended and muddled that anybody but the blindest of believers just dismisses it out of hand. At the very least you have to believe that the Old Testament prophets could predict the future, and that the idea of the Christian Messiah as a divine being rather than just a very naughty boy is real. Then you have to believe that the Messiah the prophets predicted was actually Jesus, and not some other Messiah - indeed, in Jewish thought Jesus is not the messiah. In order to believe these things you also have to believe at least 6 other impossible things, and that's just before breakfast, and for each of those impossible things a dozen other impossible things, and so ad infinitum. Since you mention abductive reasoning, apparently without understanding what it is, the simplest explanation for the apparent fit between the Gospels' account and the OT scriptures is the one I have given, by essentially the same reasoning that Hume gives for rejecting belief in miracles. B -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
