(January 22, 2019 at 7:08 pm)Acrobat Wrote: Like creationist, atheists generally making such arguments are all together clueless of history, in particular early history, it’s writing and contexts.
It’ll probably come as a surprise but people in the first century didn’t write that often, just like people didn’t really send email in the 1970s. Writing was a luxury, the primary method of convey things was through the oral tradition.
Such atheists also seem oblivious that writings we have of figures of early history, are almost exclusively written after these figures have died. The fact the we have writings about Jesus some 20-40 years after his death is pretty remarkable, in fact we have a first hand account on someone who met his disciples and brother. How many agreed up figures on ancient history, could we say that about, in comparison, let alone a religious figure?
On top of that the only historian writing of that entire period of Roman Palestine, that we still have is the works of Josephus.
Such atheists also seem incapable of reasoning, if the evidence for the historicity of Jesus was so lacklackuster, than you should be able to form a compelling ahistorical explanation, that’s close to as persuasive, contains a parallel degree of explanatory power as a historical explanations. The fact is you can’t without stretching credibility, as bad as creationist and holocaust deniers do, speaks volumes.
But such atheists are incapable of contemplating this. The historical method is about the pursuit of the best explanation, the strength of evidence is matter of explanatory power. No ahistoricist conclusions come even remotely close to a historical explanation in this regard, that folks here have yet to even offer one.
Atheists have perhaps been deluded by the idea of a lack of belief, think the real argument is between Jesus existing, and a lack of belief in Jesus existing, requiring some sort of super proof to resolve, when it’s an argument between Jesus existing, and not existing, the viability of historical explanation, over non historical ones.
Yet it seems that many atheists seem unable to get their head around this idea, perhaps deluded by the idea that lack of belief is an actual position, other than laziness in thought.
Okay, you're getting bogged down in a lot of speculation and nonsense. Here are the facts.
-Recorded history, as far as we know, began around 4000 BCE.
-Though reliable, chronological records were not being kept back then as they are now, there are plenty of writings about events, people and things for thousands of years before the supposed existence of Jesus that give us good reason to believe that those events, people and things actually occurred or existed.
-For whatever reason, only a small handful of historical writings exist on Jesus, all of which were written long after his death by people who never met him or even met anyone that he knew, for that matter.
-Some of the historical writings used to back up the idea of Jesus as a real man don't even mention Jesus by name.
Now here's a compelling piece of speculation.
-It's entirely possible that the "historical" writings about Jesus were produced to promote the pro-Christianity narrative, which would've been very strong during the time in which these writings were created.
The FACT is, there is no good reason to assume with such confidence that Jesus was real. Your argument basically adds up to: Writing was rare and there weren't many historians back then, so the fact that anyone mentioned during that time must mean that he was real. That's very akin to the Christians who say, "We have no clue how the universe was created, and some people wrote about its supposed creation, therefore what they wrote be true!"
Sorry, that's not a very compelling argument. Once again, is it POSSIBLE? Sure. Probable? Not at all. Until further evidence is produced, I remain unconvinced.
A video I remember from a long time ago featuring Christopher Hitchens on the subject.
If you're frightened of dying, and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the Earth.
