(March 31, 2015 at 5:47 pm)Minimalist Wrote: I had to go back into the archives to find something I hammered Drippy with once. So much for the "more historical evidence" for fucking jesus than anyone else line of shit.So you're willing to allow that historians writing 200-300 years after the event can cite reliable testimony but you don't allow testimony in the context of a religious movement that is purporting to write about a person who lived within the last 20-80 years? By the standard you're applying to Jesus, an ordinary but influential Jewish teacher, none of those historians' accounts of Alexander the Great are permissible.
Quote:A greater gaffe in defense of Jesus' historicity is to make claims that are conspicuously opposite the truth of the matter, as when E.P.
Sanders boasts that 'the sources for Jesus are better ... than those that deal with Alexander [the Great]'. A more suicidal remark for his case
could hardly be imagined. Unlike Jesus, we have over half a dozen relatively objective historians discussing the history of Alexander the Great (most notably Diodorus, Dionysius, Rufus, Trogus, Plutarch and more). These are not romances or propagandists, least of all fanatical worshipers, or anyone concerned about dogma, but disinterested historical writers employing some of the recognized skills of critical analysis of their day on a wide body of sources they had available that
we do not. Which doesn't mean we trust everything they say, but we still cannot name even one such person for Jesus, and 'none' is not 'more' than half a dozen.
Richard Carrier - On the Historicity of Jesus Pg. 21-22
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza