Mythical character exposed

[Lord Jim]

So you're a product of incest...

That explains so much...

[Crackpot]

I'd be surprised if your family tree didn't join much sooner. After all don't you claim southern heritage?

[Lord Jim]

I'd be surprised if your family tree didn't join much sooner. After all don't you claim southern heritage?

Only on one side...

My father's family came here from England in the 1600s and settled in Virginia and North Carolina...

My mother's people came here in the very early 1900s from Italy and settled in California..

I think you'd really have to back quite a ways to find convergence...

[Crackpot]

Not really you got that chunk from the 1600 on

[Crackpot]

My dads side of the family OTOH has been hard to track my grandmother goming from a part of Germany/Poland/Prussia that has constantly been changing "ownership" over the past few centuries and my grandfather who comes from Russian-Ukrainian heritage and the subsequent poor record keeping there.

[rubato]

Mythical historians cannot prove the existence of mythical characters. Do we have holographic writings of any of the above?

yrs,
rubato

I assume you refer to Gob's list as well? The answer is 'no' for all

Claiming that MMLJ are proof of the existence of Jesus is like saying that Dumbledore is proof of the existence of Harry Potter.


yrs,
rubato

[MajGenl.Meade]

So long as you agree that there are no (=not one; zero) holographic writings by Gob's list of alleged "historians", then I can tolerate your ignorance on other matters.

Claiming that MMLJ are proof of the existence of Jesus is like saying that Dumbledore is proof of the existence of Harry Potter.

No, not really. The author of Harry Potter does not claim that her writing about Dumbledore proves the existence of the bespectacled boy. You create a false (and rather pathetically piss-poor) analogy to the claim that MMLJ, Paul and Hebrews (works of historical theology and history, with the earliest known mss. within 200 years of writing) are evidence of a man named Yeshua.

No, it's more like claiming that Plato (earliest known manuscript approximately 1,300 years after he died), Aristophanes (earliest known ms. approx. 900 years after death) and Xenophon (earliest known ms. about 1750 years after death) are proof of Socrates. So, apparently, do scholars agree.

To merely chant reflexively "that's not evidence" is to echo fools, and lazy ones at that.

[rubato]

...

No, not really. The author of Harry Potter does not claim that her writing about Dumbledore proves the existence of the bespectacled boy. You create a false (and rather pathetically piss-poor) analogy to the claim that MMLJ, Paul and Hebrews (works of historical theology and history, with the earliest known mss. within 200 years of writing) are evidence of a man named Yeshua.

No, it's more like claiming that Plato (earliest known manuscript approximately 1,300 years after he died), Aristophanes (earliest known ms. approx. 900 years after death) and Xenophon (earliest known ms. about 1750 years after death) are proof of Socrates. So, apparently, do scholars agree.

To merely chant reflexively "that's not evidence" is to echo fools, and lazy ones at that.

And you know what the intentions were of the fabulists who wrote the gospels? Maybe they were like J.C. Anderson just writing stories to amuse.

The analogy is perfect unless you begin with multiple unsupported conclusions about the texts which were randomly assembled into the bible centuries later on.


Socrates and Plato are worthwhile whether or not they ever existed physically or if they are fictional characters created to provide provenance to the ideas attributed to them. And no one claims they were related to god. That's just cwazy.


yrs,
rubato

[MajGenl.Meade]

Way to evade the entire point. Well done! A+

[Econoline]

I picked, more or less at random*, just one of the "126 writers" on the list Gob posted--Vindex, the last one on the list. According to Wiki

Gaius Iulius Vindex, of a noble Gaulish family of Aquitania given senatorial status under Claudius, was a Roman governor in the province of Gallia Lugdunensis. In either late 67 or early 68, he rebelled against the tax policy of the Emperor Nero. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Vindex "was powerful in body and of shrewd intelligence, was skilled in warfare and full of daring for any great enterprise; and he had a passionate love of freedom and a vast ambition" (Cassius Dio, 63.22.1-2). In order to gain support, he declared his allegiance to the then governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, Servius Sulpicius Galba, as the new emperor. Vindex was defeated and killed by the commander of the Germania Superior army, Lucius Verginius Rufus, in a battle near Vesontio (modern Besançon).
By June 68, military support for Galba led to Nero committing suicide. Galba, acclaimed by the Senate, struck coins to commemorate Vindex, to whom he owed his position as emperor.

So he not only never went anywhere near Judea, he apparently never wrote anything at all of any significance.

I'm sure I could easily find many millions of people living right now in the U.S. who have never written anything about rubato, and many millions of people living right now in Australia and in the U.K. who have never written anything about Gob...so I'm pretty sure that proves that neither of them exists.




* That's a lie. I picked Vindex because (besides the fact that I'd never heard of him) I'm still hoping to get some vipers to vipe my vindows, and I figured they might need some Vindex in order to do the job.

[Econoline]

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. 4 historians (granted the names associated may not be the actual writers as such). Paul and the author of Hebrews, that's two more.

You forgot about Biff.



(Has anyone else here ever read this? I thought it was wonderful and hilarious, with just the right mixture of irreverence and genuine respect for the biblical Jesus.)

By the way, his name was Joshua. Jesus is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Yeshua,
which is Joshua. Christ is not a last name. It's the Greek for messiah, a Hebrew word
meaning anointed. I have no idea what the "H" in Jesus H. Christ stood for. It's one of
the things I should have asked him.
.....Me? I am Levi who is called Biff. No middle initial.
.....Joshua was my best friend.

BTW, at the end of the book Biff finds out what the "H" stood for.

[Gob]

Although the first of the Synoptic Gospels is technically anonymous, traditionally the Gospel of Matthew was held to be written by the apostle. As a government official in Capernaum, in "Galilee of the Gentiles", a tax-collector would probably have been literate in both Greek and Aramaic. Greek was the language used in the market-place. Some early church fathers recorded that Matthew originally wrote in "Hebrew", but still regarded the Greek text as canonical.

Many scholars today, such as Raymond E. Brown, believe that "canonical Matt[hew] was originally written in Greek by a non-eyewitness whose name is unknown to us and who depended on sources like Mark and Q", a theory known as Markan priority. However, some scholars, notably Craig Blomberg, disagree variously on these points. The more traditional interpretation of the Synoptic Gospels posits a Matthean priority, most notably in the Augustinian hypothesis after one of the earliest and most notable proponents Augustine of Hippo.

Obviously a good source..

Shall I do the others?

[MajGenl.Meade]

Well that's a lot of nothing new... well done. Go ahead. Also discuss extant ms. of your list of "historians" and tell me how reliable ancient documents are (or are not) depending upon one's bias.

[Big RR]

When I was in college, we used to joke it stood for haploid since jesus, lacking an earthly father, only had chromosomes from his mother and was, hence, haploid.