The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[robvalue]

Indeed, I should never have said that. I did enjoy and appreciate your input, and I should have stressed that more. Please accept my apologies. I had mixed opinions of you, you had some very good points and what I considered to be some mistakes. But it's just my opinion, I'm not the god of logic.

And "aplenty" was unnecessary again. I apologize, it was an exaggeration I should not have made. It was a throwaway line I wrote without a lot of thought, and you're damn right, I wouldn't have written it had I known you were watching so that's my bad again. I spent like 10 seconds writing it, it wasn't a pre-meditated character assassination, and I regret writing you off without thinking about what I was saying properly and checking my facts. I'm always beating myself up for being rude, even when I'm not, this time I was.

I've picked out some below, I don't want to get into a massive fight about it but these are in my opinion examples of poor logic. I don't expect you or anyone else to agree with me on that.

Some of them are involved in our PM exchanges I think because I can't find them on the forum, and I don't want to post PMs as well unless it's important to you. I can PM them back to you if you want with commentary, I remember at least 2 more.

But again, what I said was out of order and way over the top. Looking back over what you have written, my memory of our exchanges is not accurate and you made much better cases than I gave you credit for. I was not holding such a logical grudge as my memory served me, I had already pointed out where I disagreed, I believe.

If it's any consolation, I'm going to be beating myself up all day for this now.

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He may well have been a nazarene at one point then the wine stuff was added later to the story, and no one noticed the problem.

Why go to all this effort to come up with a Jesus who wasn't from Nazareth, was a Nazarene and yet somehow this got forgotten and then Nazareth gets invented? Why not just accept a much more parsimonious reading of the text - that he ... was from Nazareth?

Is there some reason this is not likely? I've never seen it.

And if Nazareth was invented as a way of explaining Ναζαρηνός after it was (somehow) "forgotten" that this meant he was a Nazarite (why?), then it's very strange that a town of that name appears in the late first century, given we have an inscription detailing how a course of priests was settled there in the wake of the Jewish War. Co-incidence?

This whole tangled mess is simply unnecessary. Why was he called Ναζαρηνός? Because he was from the village of Ναζαρέτ/Ναζαρὲθ . Simple - no convoluted and unnecessary suppositions and tangled "what ifs" required. Occam's Razor applied.

Appeal to motivation. We have no idea why including this detail may have been so important, I don't see why it indicates it is true.

What I want to know is who wrote the damn things.

I’d like to know that about many anonymous ancient sources. I’d also like more sources, closer sources to the events in question and sources with better indications of where the ancient authors got their information (footnotes would be nice as well). Unfortunately, I’m unlikely to get any of these things. Welcome to the study of ancient history.

Being in the third person, it appears to be someone either making it all up, or following some dude around and writing about him. It seems very unlikely to me it would be the named guy writing it.

What “named guy”? None of the gospels name their writers – those are later editorial additions.

Or maybe just hearsay about people who may or may not have existed.

Most ancient sources are what you keep calling “hearsay”. That’s just the nature of the material we have. And “may not have existed” is not the default position. “Probably existed, though we can’t be certain” is.

Incorrect default position (in my opinion). The sceptical approach is not to believe anything without good reason.

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