(January 23, 2011 at 3:28 am)noselfwilling Wrote: I am not aware of anywhere Jesus is a literary figure; even so, historians concern themselves with just the primary sources, so that would be the sources within 150 years of His death.Historians also concern themselves with fun things like records outside of the biblical circle, tombs, geology, and so on.
Remember, Jesus has more sources for him than any ten figures in antiquity combined so you can't use the excuse there is not enough data.
They usually don't rely on one source for evidence and assume something is true for the same reason historians of the future won't rely on batman novels to assume he was truely alive between now and when he was created early in the 20th century in detective comics. It's just not reliable. Volume of written material isn't indicitive of truth nor is it evidence of anything in particular.
Consider Atlantis. Historians don't think this mythical city ever existed and likely simply Aristotle's flight of fancy in his written records because there's no physical evidence to support that the described place ever existed anywhere in the world.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
