RE: Why Bart Ehrman Pisses Me Off..... sometimes
February 2, 2018 at 3:58 pm
(This post was last modified: February 2, 2018 at 4:14 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(February 2, 2018 at 3:43 pm)Khemikal Wrote: It's worthwhile if you're interested in a factual history rather than a list of plausible fiction..but otherwise..sure, doesn't matter much.
The point at hand, however, is that a person who goes to lengths to demonstrate how unreliable a story is, regardless of how plausible whatever of it's corpse remains may be, comparatively...has had a huge derp moment, in accepting those bones as a fact.
The logical conclusion of a fundamentally and grossly unreliable story is that the "plausible elements" are no more or less reliable.
The degree to which any plausible parts of the jesus story actually had any factual basis is really impossible to assess from this remove.
However, the more of the story one discard as implausible based on improbability, the more mundane would be the remaining parts of the story and therefore higher the probability that the remaining parts were based to some degree on actual, but mundane, occurrences.
This is what makes a complicated story with many parts of varying plausibility difficult to completely dismiss as totally made up.
It is also why it is a fruitless battle to fight to assert it is completely made up.
The reason why story of Hercules can often be sloppily asserted to be completely made up is simply because there is no pushback, not because it is really prudent or in the best service of discovering all facts to assert it really is totally devoid of all vestige of factual basis for any of its plausible portions.
The best one can say is the parts that made the story special on the eyes of the gullible is made up because those are precisely the implausible parts. Without those the mundane parts signifies nothing, but their bery banality is what made it possible for them to have basis in actual occurrences.
(February 2, 2018 at 3:54 pm)Minimalist Wrote: What do you consider "plausible?"
A carpenter by trade was lazy, afflicted with dilusion of grandeur, collected a following of dimwits from a malcontented society of gullible, acted out his fantasy in self destructive ways, and came to a predictable end that might be lemanted out of pity but for its insignificance next to the vast and vicious consequences it indirectly engendered.
Persons comparable to him are not hard to find throughout history and in our contemporary society. There is no need to plant a stake at the indefensible position that another such person could not have existed at the origin of the jesus cult.
