The third part of Raphael Lataster’s Questioning the Historicity of Jesus is where he presents his case for mythicism, and since his case is essentially a review of Richard Carrier’s arguments in On the Historicity of Jesus, this post is a review of a review. Lataster has is differences from Carrier and several times points … Continue reading “Review part 9: Questioning the Historicity of Jesus / Lataster (Case for Mythicism – the Evidence)”
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1. Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible (2016-10-16) Russell Gmirkin in his new book, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible draws attention to striking similarities between the Pentateuch (the first five books of the “Old Testament”) on the one hand and Plato’s last work, Laws, and features of the Athenian constitution … Continue reading “Plato and the Hebrew Bible (Gmirkin)“
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I intend to pause and try to analyse, in future, exactly what is going on when I read a scholar responding to an explanation, a hypothesis, an alternative viewpoint by saying “I don’t find that persuasive”. My reason for taking on this hope is partly the result of having begun to gain some notion of … Continue reading ““I don’t find that argument persuasive””
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I said I needed to add a complementary post to Can We Find History Beneath the Literary Trappings?, one that presented the positive side of historical research showing what is a valid approach by way of contrast with the often fallacious methods and unjustified assumptions of much scholarly research into Christian origins and the historical … Continue reading “How To Do (and not do) History – by Historians Biblical and Non-Biblical”
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We have seen that the hypothesis that the Jesus of the gospels was in some way modeled on the story of another Jesus, Jesus son of Ananias, does have scholarly cachet and is by no means considered a fatuous instance of “parallelomania”. Jesus son of Ananias is a figure we find in Josephus’s account of … Continue reading “Can We Find History Beneath the Literary Trappings?”
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For the background to this post see Vridar Maintenance. I am listing here the posts that are categorized or tagged as “Ancient Historiography“. This list is for my own editing purposes but I am making it public because I know it’s a topic that if of particular interest to some readers, so they can share … Continue reading “Ancient Historiography and Historians — Vridar Posts”
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Continuing from Luke-Acts Explained as a form of “Ideal Jewish History” (Part 1) The reasons Luke-Acts has been considered a form of ancient history writing: Like other ancient historiography the work begins with a prologue announcing its superiority over what has gone before; Steve Mason notes that unlike the preceding gospels Luke-Acts, as a two volume … Continue reading “Luke-Acts as form of history-writing (Luke-Acts Explained . . . Part 2)”
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TL;DR The author of Luke-Acts was following an ideal that Josephus had presented as a superior feature of Jewish historical writings: that history learned from revelation (e.g. works of Moses) was superior to the uncertain and often disputed historical inquiries of the Greeks. I think Steve Mason has nailed Luke-Acts. I think, as a specialist … Continue reading “Luke-Acts Explained as a form of “Ideal Jewish History” (Part 1)”
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When I was an undergraduate history student the one book anyone doing the honours course was required to address was What Is History? by the renowned “red” historian of Soviet Russia, Edward Hallet Carr. One claim Carr made in the book was particularly controversial. It was his idea of what counted as a “historical fact”. For … Continue reading “What Is a Historical Fact? – How Historians Decide”
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It is in the end not very surprising that university students of history, with some knowledge of the sources for, say, Tudor England or Louis XIV’s France, find ancient history a ‘funny kind of history’. The unavoidable reliance on the poems of Horace for Augustan ideology, or in the same way on the Eumenides of … Continue reading “Ancient History, a “Funny Kind of History””
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A historian specializing in the study of Josephus, Steve Mason, presents a case that the war that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple was not prompted by any messianic movement among the people of Judaea. Rather, Mason suggests that the prophecy of a ruler to come out of the east and rule … Continue reading “Is Josephus Evidence that a Messianic Movement caused the Jewish War?”
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Once again I am succumbing to the temptation to do an easy post, little more than a copy and paste of something I posted on the earlywritings forum recently. A topic I was addressing had to do with the significance of prophecy, or rather, fulfilled prophecy, in the narrative of our apparently earliest gospel, that … Continue reading “History (or something else?) as Fulfilled Prophecy”
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If all we have is an ancient historical or biographical narrative that we cannot verify by independent evidence (and keeping in mind that, as we saw in the previous post, external claims also need to be capable of verification) then how can a historian go about deciding how much of the narrative is likely to … Continue reading “How a Historian Establishes “What Happened” when “we only have the words of the text””
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Peter Kosso [link is to his academic page], a philosopher of epistemology (or “philosopher of how we know things”), explains how historians can know “what actually happened” in ancient times. I would love to see scholars like Kosso direct their understanding and criticism to attempted explanations by biblical scholars. Well, this post is an indirect … Continue reading “How We Know “What Actually Happened” in Ancient Times”
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