Quote:There is always something historians can glean from a text,
<sigh> Let me try this a different way. Not too long ago I saw a special in which some bozo with a divinity degree insisted that "the one thing we know from history is that jesus was baptised by John the baptist." How would you evaluate that statement? There is no more evidence...and certainly no more reliable evidence...for that statement than there is for any of the other jesus bullshit. The bible is a Rohrschact Test. People see in it whatever the hell they want to see in it. I do not consider that evidence.
#2:
Quote:When we look at the documents we have about other figures in history, all we have are writings that come hundreds of years later. We have nothing close to the originals. The situation with the New Testament is a lot better. We have, not only a lot of manuscripts, but fragments that go back very early.
Simply not true, as regards the first statement, depending on who you are talking about. One of the christards favorites on that is Caesar and another is Alexander the Great. With Caesar we have his own writings, the writings of Cicero and Sallust (one a friend one an enemy), inscriptions, coins, statues, the poems of Catullus (who died in 54 BC while Caesar was still cleaning the mud of Gaul off his boots) Lucan's Pharsalia, Vergil's Aeneid, and the writings of Augustus himself. Jesus has nothing matching that.
We have xtian wet dreams that their writings are "very early" but the vast majority keep coming back to the second/third century and it does not matter how many "manuscripts" you have. If you bring a document to a Xerox machine and run off 500 copies are you going to pretend that increases the veracity of your original by 500%? There is one original story: GMark. The rest are expansions of the original and revised for varying audiences.
So, you might be able to ferret out certain "facts" from the bible.... facts which are known from other sources. P. Sulpicius Quirinius was named Imperial Legate of Syria in 6 AD. That's in Josephus. So is the fact that Pilate was prefect of Judaea. Philo confirms that. But we have coins minted by Pilate and the other prefects to tell us that story, too. We don't need the bible for that.
Consider A Tale of Two Cities: Paris is a city in France. There was a revolution in which the nobility was guillotined in a public square. England was not supportive of the revolutionaries. London is a city in England. Ships regularly crossed the channel between the two countries. But the main characters in the book are all fictional and you cannot find historical facts about fictional characters. Caesar was not fictional. Neither was Alexander.
