Talk:Evidence for the historical existence of Jesus Christ/Archive12

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Josephus on the Christ

What about the reference to Jesus that Josephus makes in his "Antiquities" around 94 AD? I think that should qualify as valid source outside of Christian writings for the figure of Jesus Christ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus - Sam^{— Unsigned, by: 71.36.147.121 / talk / contribs}

What about reading the part of the article that's all about him? Sophie^Wilder 20:56, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

How do we know the NT documents were written in the first century?

Been having a bit of a conversation (twitter - sorry) with this guy. He's a medical doctor who bills himself: "CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship. Formerly General Surgeon. Evangelical Christian. Kiwi. Blogger. Broadcaster." Any comments from our more knowledgeable folk? Scream!! (talk) 20:24, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Last I looked at this article (which has become just slightly dog's breakfasty), there were reference links to the possibility of 125-150 AD - David Gerard (talk) 22:25, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Which are of the 2nd century. This section asks how do we know NT documents were written in the 1st century?--BruceGrubb (talk) 20:52, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

What are you afraid of?

This keeps being deleted even though it is referenced to textbooks:

In addition to this you have as related by two Scandinavian textbooks, written by historians, source criticism:

1) Human sources may be relics (e.g. a fingerprint) or narratives (e.g. a statement or a letter). Relics are more credible sources than narratives.

2) A given source may be forged or corrupted; strong indications of the originality of the source increases its reliability.

3) The closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an accurate description of what really happened

4) A primary source is more reliable than a secondary source, which in turn is more reliable than a tertiary source and so on.

5) If a number of independent sources contain the same message, the credibility of the message is strongly increased.

6) The tendency of a source is its motivation for providing some kind of bias. Tendencies should be minimized or supplemented with opposite motivations.

7) If it can be demonstrated that the witness (or source) has no direct interest in creating bias, the credibility of the message is increased

I have to ask what those deleting this afraid of? That it shows that New Testament historians aren't playing by the rules?--BruceGrubb (talk) 07:59, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Huh? None of those things are specific to the New Testament, so I don't know how they show what you claim they do. & We don't need to go over them in every article that relates to evidence, which is a lot of our articles. This particular article is already overly long by RW standards and doesn't need to be padded out with basics of source criticism. You can assume that readers of this page already understand these issues, which are familiar to anybody who has studied history or any related discipline (and don't actually belong to some Swedish guy so talking about these textbooks as if they're the arbiter on the subject is just a little silly). If you've got examples of New Testament historians practising poor scholarship, then cite them directly & explain what's wrong with them, without referring to some list of "rules" in a textbook. Wẽãšẽĩõĩď^{Methinks it is a Weasel} 08:26, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Good source for such: Hector Avalos The End Of Biblical Scholarship - David Gerard (talk) 13:48, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

The article is long because it is dealing with a lot of nonsense and misunderstanding. Besides it is all this additional information that has raised the article to silver status.

The fact that pro-HJ scholars are claiming that a 10th-century version of Josephus shows what it contained in in the 1st shows they aren't following the "rules". Hector Avalos' The End of Biblical Studies ISBN-13: 978-1591025368 shows that NT historal research is a bad joke and that it does NOT follow the most basic rules used in other places and times by historians.--BruceGrubb (talk) 14:59, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

The article does need either condensing or parceling out into sub-articles - it's really very long. There's a missing section up the top which would basically crib from Carrier's Proving History: setting out that (1) there is an academic consensus (2) this consensus is provably bogus (3) here's why. One day I'll write it - David Gerard (talk) 11:18, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

6 BCE to 36 CE?

I do recall the most reliable claim on the length of Jesus' life was about 33 (could've been 30, didn't research it for now), but these dates imply he must've been 42 when he died. Is there an explanation for this?137.224.241.67 (talk) 10:43, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Imagine it's allowing for either date to be out by a number of years - hence the "c" in front of each date. I'll edit it slightly. Scream!! (talk) 13:19, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

The dates are based on the Gospels themselves and known historical facts:

History states:

• Herod died 4 BC per Josephus
• Josephus indicates John the Baptist was beheaded 36 CE
• Josephus tells us Pontius Pilate was recalled back to Rome by Tiberius but arrived after Tiberius' death (March 16, 37 CE). This means Pontius Pilate could not have had Jesus crucified any later then 36 CE.
• 1 BCE is followed by 1 CE.

The Gospels state:

• Herod the Great killed children two years and younger when he figured out he had been tricked (Matthew 2:16-18) This implies Jesus actual birth was roughly 2 years before this event.

Jesus was about 30 (ie anywhere from 26 to 34) in the 15th year of Tiberius (28/29 CE with most of it in 29 CE) Most people figuring Jesus age either forget or ignore the about in Luke.

• Herod Antipas believes that Jesus is John the Baptist returned from the dead so Jesus was still preaching in 36 CE.
• The Gospel of John had three Passovers indicating the minimum of a three year ministry

With all this the math is simple:

• 4 BC - 2 gets you 6 BC and with no year 0 this makes Jesus 34 years old in 28 CE which is within Luke's about.
• Since Jesus must be preaching after the death of John the Baptist in 36 CE his ministry was a minimum of 7 years long (more then enough for John's three passovers) and was a minimum of 41 years old when he was crucified.--BruceGrubb (talk) 21:50, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

"shitty sources don't belong in the intro."

I'm wondering why these are "shitty sources." Ehrman's book is on Oxford University Press -- they don't put out a lot of junk. He has a a PhD from Princeton and a named chair at UNC. That's about as good an academic trajectory as it gets. What exactly is your problem with the text/its author? TeenageWasteland (talk) 19:03, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

It was more "Josephus, what? Fuck off" - why that's a shitty source is dealt with in the body. (And general fatigue at how fucking bloated the article is getting, with the main bloat adder, i.e. Bruce Grubb, being unresponsive to queries on the subject.) - David Gerard (talk) 00:41, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

What "queries"? I got one from you over a year ago about how long the article was that had no real relevance. Calling an Oxford University press book (which would qualify for RS on Wikipedia) a "shitty source" is IMHO beyond delusional. The fact of the matter is the main argument for Josephus is a 10th century source...even though the forgery is thought to have happened in the 4th century and there was supposedly 16th century copy that didn't have the passage.--BruceGrubb (talk) 13:25, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

This bit still doesn't belong in the intro, I think.

Now that you're here ... is it time to break this into subarticles? That is, have you pretty much done with adding lots of new stuff in the quantities you have been? (And thank you very much for your hard work on this, by the way.) - David Gerard (talk) 13:46, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

And just what would these subarticles be on?--BruceGrubb (talk) 14:50, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Each of the sections. e.g. summarise the problems with Josephus, main article exhaustively going into everything there is to know about the Flavian testimony.

The article is bloated to unusability. It's >150,000 characters, that's half a small book. This is a web page. - David Gerard (talk) 16:24, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

It is pretty enormous. I can't imagine anyone actually sitting down and reading at one go - which rather defeats the purpose of having it. The sections need to be reduced to paragraph summaries which link to full sections for those wanting more info. Probably quite a bit of work though. --Bob^{"I think you'll find it's more complicated than that."} 17:33, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

I checked and the article is actual just over 125,000 characters but only 27,000 actual words. A short "book" runs 7,000 words and would include such wikipedia articles as Christ Myth theory, Historical Jesus, Rorschach test, and many others. IMHO "It's too long comes" off as "I'm too lazy to actually read" especially given that unlike an actual paperback book you have hyperlinks to the section that go to the section one is actually interested in. That said I do agree that the article is a little cluttered but do we create new subarticles or see if there are existing articles some of this falls under?--BruceGrubb (talk) 17:59, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

"they're just too lazy to read my brilliance" is not an excuse for an overly-long and less than optimally organised article, however detailed the research. I've been wanting to make it into a cluster of subarticles for a while, which is why I was wondering if you'd more or less finished adding lots of new stuff. But you mostly seem to have, so I suppose it's time to do the bit that's actually hard work ... - David Gerard (talk) 18:06, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ The following copypasta comes from WP:Wikipedia:Article size which I have found useful once or twice:

===Size guideline===

Some useful rules of thumb for splitting articles, and combining small pages:

Readable prose size	What to do
> 100 kB	Almost certainly should be divided
> 60 kB	Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading material)
> 50 kB	May need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size)
< 40 kB	Length alone does not justify division
< 1 kB	If an article or list has remained this size for over a couple of months, consider combining it with a related page. Alternatively, why not fix it by adding more info?

---

Note that those character counts only apply to readable prose, not wiki markup, but in my experience a raw character count is good enough for rough estimates in many cases. Sprocket J Cogswell (talk) 15:37, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Ok, but how about we trim some of the more extraneous nonsense from this, first? There is much of this that is regarding the Gospel Jesus rather then a hypothetical flesh and blood man in 1st century Galilee.--BruceGrubb (talk) 16:46, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

I've been trying to trim some of the more extraneous nonsense, but you & David G just add it back in. This is supposed to be an article, not a thesis or a book. Ultimately, we want to present content that our readers will read, and if it's too long & circuitous they won't bother. Brushing that off as "they're too lazy" doesn't help the situation. There are over 200 citations, most of them to offline printed sources: readers aren't going to refer to these. Tangents about "what qualifies as good evidence" (no more relevant here than in any of our other articles on historical subjects), Miner's essay on Nacirema, literacy among Roman slaves, evidence for the Holocaust, sources on Julius Caesar, Socrates, Confucius et al, aren't needed here. Stick to the article subject: evidence for the historical existence of Jesus Christ. Wèàšèìòìď^{Methinks it is a Weasel} 13:05, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

But your arguments do come of as "they're too lazy" as you are complaining about "There are over 200 citations, most of them to offline printed sources: readers aren't going to refer to these." The whole point of those references is to show the information we are putting in the article aren't coming out of our own heads. It does NOT matter if they are offline source; newsflash with the way copyright is being done odds are outside of Google books much of what we are referencing will not be online in the near future. Never mind that much of what I put in is online...that is how I found it in the first place!

As for the so called "Tangents" the whole point of "what qualifies as good evidence" is to show when it come to Jesus the historical method goes off the rails.

Miner's essay on Nacirema is a way to quickly lead into the Ethnocentrism problems with the way many times on both sides the hypothosis drives the data rather then the way it is supposed to work.

The literary section is about Roman and Jewish citizens with a Roman slave being given as an example of how even the lowest social rung was expected to read and write.

Given how may pro-historical Jesus supporters use the strawman of comparing Jesus mythers to Holocaust denialists it needs to be a addressed as they are implying that the evidence of Jesus is just as good as that for the Holocaust which is just a variant of the "There is more evidence for Jesus than for (insert famous ancient person or event here)" tap dance. Go to the Bart Ehrman on the Historical Jesus over on the JREF Forum and see that every one of those people has been used as a counter to the Jesus myth theory.--BruceGrubb (talk) 08:36, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

We're not writing for an academic audience. Offline sources are not ideal because, as I already said, readers aren't going to refer to these. When there's an online source, a fair number of readers may be interested enough to follow the link, which only takes a second or two. When you cite a book, maybe like one in a thousand readers will actually go to the library/bookshop and check it out, but the rest won't. So it's barely better than no citation at all.

If the whole point of "what qualifies as good evidence" is to show when it come to Jesus the historical method goes off the rails, how does it achieve this? The terms you introduce here (contemporary evidence, derivative evidence, comparative evidence) aren't referenced again in the rest of the article. The points this section makes are obvious to anyone with an interest in historical sources, aren't specifically more relevant here than in other articles about myths and historical controversies, and just contribute to an overlong introduction to the core subject of the article.

Again, I don't think the primary point of Nacirema is that "the hypothosis drives the data rather then the way it is supposed to work". It's about the cultural imperialism that underlies conventional anthropology. That may be an example of the hypothesis driving the data, but using the two concepts synonymously is an ill fit.

John Frum is at best an analogy for Jesus. It isn't evidence one way or the other, & should be treated in a separate article or else mentioned much more briefly here. Same goes for the arguments about the Holocaust, Confucius, etc.

Your argument on literacy is horribly bad and displays the kind of poor sourcework and deduction that this article is supposed to be arguing against. A household slave in Rome could be expected to be literate as his duties could include accounting and record-keeping etc. This tells us nothing one way or the other about whether farmers and fishermen in Judea or Galilee could read & write. Щєазєюіδ^{Methinks it is a Weasel} 17:50, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

"We're not writing for an academic audience." That's just an incredibly terrible argument. We have enough academic readers that you can be quite sure there will be enough people to look and call out inaccurate references. This sort of anti-intellectualism is grossly inappropriate on RationalWiki in general.

You are failing to realise - after having it pointed out multiple times - that it's historical Jesus advocates bringing up Holocaust comparisons. These comparisons are odious, but they're part of the discourse, and that needs addressing - David Gerard (talk) 18:44, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

"We have enough academic readers that you can be quite sure there will be enough people to look and call out inaccurate references." Assumption not in evidence. People encountering an egregiously tendentious article are just as likely to write it off. (Or write the whole site off.) Why bother correcting something if there's no guarantee that it will stay corrected?--ZooGuard (talk) 19:11, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Maybe "audience" was the wrong word, but we have a distinct style that doesn't resemble academic journals. This isn't anti-intellectualism; it's inherent in the nature of the site. ₩€₳$€£ΘĪÐ^{Methinks it is a Weasel} 19:32, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Academic journals don't have a "distinct style" and if you want proof just read some Lewis Binford. The man had a style all his own regardless of what academic journal which IMHO could be summed up as 'stream of consciousness' or 'where is the freaking introductory paragraph ie what is the overall point of the section I am reading?!?' Everybody else in that journal was normal but the minute you hit a Lewis Binford article it was like you were reading a totally different journal. Besides the main wikipedia isn't intended as a academic journal either but it uses one of the many academic journal citation styles.

Besides as I pointed out before if you step back and really look at the article's individual sections we see the length problems are not in the supposed "superfluous content" but in the main points. The Josephus Flavius section is arguably the longest in the article taking up nearly a tenth of the entire article. Then you have the really short stuff that has me scratching my head as to why it is even here; who has used Mara Bar-Serapion and Lucian as proof a historical Jesus? Scott Oser gave us.a list of usual suspects and those two aren't there.--BruceGrubb (talk) 05:27, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

"One guy didn't do it like the others did it, thus there isnt a "style" for tat type of thing!"--Miekal 05:34, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Binford was simply the most blatant example. Patty Jo Watson writes in a different style from Micheal B Schiffer whose style is different style from Miller who is different in style from James Hill and I think by now everybody has gotten the point. There isn't even a standard citation style as Anthropology journals have the APA, MLA, and AMA citation styles while works for the non academic use the Chicago citation style and Students have their own Turabian citation style.

This is diverting from the issue as hand which is the length of the article's main text not how the number of references it has which is Weaseloid's current argument and I agree with David Gerard about it being "anti-intellectualism is grossly inappropriate on RationalWiki in general."--BruceGrubb (talk) 06:27, 17 June 2014 (UTC)