Why can't Christians Verify Exactly Where Jesus Was Buried?

[Aractus]

Are you being deliberately obtuse? You're assuming the evidentiary value of the writing you're citing, which is wholly insufficient for the claim under discussion. To answer this question -- have you not heard of archaeology? Societies leave behind a lot of physical evidence for their cultural beliefs and mores.

Without ancient writing, archaeological finds are much more difficult to evaluate meaning from. This is why we debate the function of the Pyramids for example, and wouldn't you know it arrive at a scholarly consensus on that. Again you are deliberately creating a false dichotomy as any decent archaeologist is a scholar of ancient literature as well - like Israel Finkelstein.

Say, next week can we debate the existence of Beren and Luthien? I'm sure they existed, because Tolkien wrote about them. And writing is evidence!

AGAIN you are using a false dichotomy. A straw man argument. The writings of Shakespeare are, according to Scholars, hard evidence for the historicity of William Shakespeare. They don't tell us anything directly about his character however, but they do provide clues. They are not evidence for the historical existence of Romeo and Juliet. Without writing we have no evidence whatsoever that Shakespeare ever existed. Therefore it is at least possible that the plays were written by a woman using a pseudonym; so I could put forward that hypothesis and you wouldn't be able to directly refute it. I could indeed go further and use the evidence of women using pseudonyms to have novels published in later centuries. But I would be doing the same thing that Carrier does, which is assuming that a paradigm that exists elsewhere (female authorship of novels) would apply to the case I'm looking at (authorship of plays), and therefore the onus of proof would be on me to show why it applies. Again, from what I've seen of Carrier he does not do this, he simply assumes that what he sees in ancient polytheist religions would apply to a first century monotheist religion.

But WHAT IS THAT EVIDENCE, Danny?  Hint:  It's the fucking gospels which are about as useful as tits on a bull in this discussion because they are:

1: Anonymous
2: Date from considerably later than the events they describe
3: Are full of errors
4: Have been deliberately altered to fit later theological designs.

Now, all of this comes from Professor Ehrman.... who has shit all over them for 25 years but then decided they could be useful to him when he chose to write another book.  I lost a lot of respect for him when he did that.

Right, so I'll say this a third time: you are knowingly putting forward a false dichotomy. The writings of Josephus contain author errors as well. The writings of Herodotus contains errors - in fact they contain a WHOPPER that had Egyptologists the world-over convinced that the ancient Egyptian Pyramids were built using slave labour for more than 2 millennia! Every ancient writer made errors, so you can't expect the gospel writers to have higher standards: that is creating impossible conditions, as you well know.

NB: The gospels are four books, five including Acts of the Apostles. They are not the only evidence, nor did I say they are the best evidence for the historicity of Jesus. We also have non-gospel/Gnostic writings such as the gospel according to Thomas, we have seven letters penned by Paul in the 0050's, and we have the Epistle of James as well.


I'll go through your points:
1. It is true that the gospels are anonymous, however we do know that Luke-Acts was either written by a close associate of Paul's named Luke the Physician, or someone that was close to Luke. There is scholarly consensus that one of those two options is the most likely, and there is scholarly consensus at least among critical scholars not accept second century ascribed authorship to the other three. Although we can't know for certain about the other three, the fact that Luke is associated with Paul means scholars can make reasonable inferences about the other synoptic gospels, and that is that Mark was already written and Matthew was written around the same time as Luke. Please note that there was another gospel written in Hebrew quite similar to Matthew, that scholars think was written before Matthew as well.
2. Their dating is early by ancient standards. They are however written at least 30 years after the death of Jesus, and probably 40-50 years later.
3. Errors can help authenticate works, as well as help to discredit them. Mark's ignorance of geological locations within Judea indicates the author was likely a Gentile Christian rather than a Jewish Christian for example. This would in-turn lead to the plausibility of Acts 15's account of an early Christian Council in Jerusalem at which proselytising to non-Jews was discussed.
4. They haven't been deliberately altered, at least not substantially. I'm not sure where you're getting that from, but there are numerous quotations of the New Testament made in the writings of Church Leaders in the early centuries (2nd, 3rd, and 4th), and nothing within them suggests that the text was systemically altered (i.e. what is quoted is exactly what is in the New Testament as found in ancient manuscripts). Ehrman himself confirms this is the case. That is, he has no evidence to show that what existed in the first century was in anyway dissimilar to what existed in the 2nd-4th centuries, beyond the textual variation that presently exists, and has said so.