Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
The question of parallels has been raised in different posts and comments lately on Vridar. Firstly, I questioned Joseph Atwill’s claim that there was a parallel between Jesus calling disciples to become “fishers of men” beside the “sea of Galilee” and a scene in Josephus’ War where Romans kill drowning Judeans in a battle that … Continue reading “When is a parallel a real parallel and not parallelomania?”
Life of Apollonius of Tyana . . . is a text in eight books written in Ancient Greece by Philostratus (c. 170 – c. 245 AD). It tells the story of Apollonius of Tyana (c. 15 – c. 100 AD), a Pythagorean philosopher and teacher. — Wikipedia In addition to teaching wisdom on his travels … Continue reading “How Historians Study a Figure Like Jesus”
Apart from archeological evidence, the only facts we can attain are the texts. We must therefore reason about the texts that relate facts, not about the facts related by the texts. Yesterday I completed reading a most unexpected argument (an argument that led to the conclusion that Christianity did not originate with a historical Jesus) … Continue reading “Enticed by a great quote & surprised by an unexpected “mythicist””
PZ Myers has responded to some points by Tim O’Neill about the question of the historicity of Jesus and historical methods — Uh-oh. I get the Tim O’Neill treatment — and I cannot help but adding my own sideline remarks here. Perhaps it’s because I have only just a few hours ago completed a fascinating book … Continue reading “PZ Myers on “the Tim O’Neill Treatment”: Jesus Mythicism and Historical Methods”
PZ Myers is a biologist with a curiosity about how historians determine whether a person appearing in ancient records is considered historical or otherwise. He asks: How does one assess people and events that are contradictory, vague or preserved only in stories passed on by word of mouth? As for figures about whom we have … Continue reading “How do historians decide who was historical, who fictional?”
Lately while filling in gaps in my time by digging out scholarly publications addressing the problem of how much historians can know about “the real Socrates” or let’s say “the historical Socrates” I have become more aware of how many overlaps there are between the portrayals of Socrates and Jesus in their respective sources. If … Continue reading “Here’s How Philosophers Know Socrates Existed”
Here is an annotated list of Vridar posts addressing the famous passage in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, commonly known as the Testimonium Flavianum (TF). –o0o– The Jesus reference in Josephus: its ad hoc doctoring and various manuscript lines (2009-03-06) From various sources I have set out chronologically the earliest evidence we have for knowledge of the … Continue reading “Jesus in Josephus: Testimonium Flavianum“
An email update this morning informs me that linguist Paul Hopper has uploaded to his academia.edu page another copy of his earlier paper, A Narrative Anomaly in Josephus: Jewish Antiquities xviii:631, that was published in 2014 in Linguisitics and Literary Studies. There is now a new link to the paper. The paper is a few … Continue reading “A Narrative Anomaly in Josephus”
I am posting here an off-the-cuff comment that I hope to develop more completely (and with citations by historians) in future posts. I love Matthew Ferguson’s posts on Κέλσος. Many of his interests overlap with mine, especially his studies on ancient literature as a comparative backdrop to the study of the gospels. His two recent … Continue reading “Just what do you mean… HISTORY?”
For an annotated list of previous posts in this series see the archived page: Daniel Gullotta’s Review of Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus Criticized for being Euro-centric and male-centric, these holistic-comparative theories have been almost universally rejected by scholars of folklore and mythology, who instead opt for theories of myth that center on … Continue reading “Continuing Gullotta’s Criticism of Carrier’s Use of the Rank-Raglan Archetypes”
For an annotated list of previous posts in this series see the archived page: Daniel Gullotta’s Review of Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus For other Archives by Topic, Annotated see the right margin. In the previous post we began to look at Daniel Gullotta’s treatment of Richard Carrier’s argument that the gospels are … Continue reading “Gullotta’s Misleading Portrayal of Carrier’s claims…. Part 2”
Damn. I fell for it (again). A professor promoted a new book as “making the most sense of the crucifixion” and “making a fresh contribution to studies of the ‘historical Jesus’” so I made a rush purchase and read it the same day it arrived. Silly me, I should first have checked the University of … Continue reading “Testing the Claim that Jesus Scholars Use the Methods of Other Historians (Part 1)”
Is it “hyper-critical” to approach ancient historians like Livy, Plutarch, …. with caution? In response to my previous post on why I do not think of myself as a “Jesus mythicist” one person insisted that we have every right to accept the words of Tacitus and Josephus about some incident that they say happened a couple … Continue reading “The evidence of ancient historians”
Here’s an interesting twist to the standard argument explaining why we have so many gospels all with different accounts of Jesus. Different eyewitnesses report different details about the same event, it is said, and that explains the multiple “reports” of Jesus’ arrest, trial, death, resurrection, etc. But check the following by a scholar of Socrates: … Continue reading “Ad Hoc explanations for all those different biographies of Jesus …. (or Socrates)”