In the matter of references, I supplied a list of historians in my previous post. If you like, I can supply an extensive bibliography, though it's in book form, not hyperlink form.
I wasn't having a go at you so much as using your post to have a go at Scotty. He decided to have a go at my references when you hadn't posted any. Thereby revealing his bias in the matter.
I'm well aware you can quote links and in the cases where I've needed them due to an inability to check for myself I have and will ask for more information.
An appeal to both friendly and hostile witnesses is suicide unless the events described were irrefutable. A hostile witness would be only too happy to refute a false claim. But no hostile witness could disprove any of the events in question; they could only interpret or construe them for their own purposes.
You miss the point. If the Gospels were written at the later dates then an appeal to witnesses regardless of bias is fine because the witnesses would already be dead.
Not only is it not dubious, it is probable that they were written by their claimed authors, given the documentary record.
It's very doubtful that any of the Gospels were written by the Apostles of Jesus. You basically admitted that two of them weren't earlier. I have doubts about the other two as well (and so do many biblical scholars)
Furthermore, 20 and 50 years is an incredibly short time by historical standards. Numerous historical accounts were passed down by word of mouth for hundreds of years before they were written down in the first place.
And in those cases the historical accuracy is considered even more dubious. Besides this discussion is about you providing contemporary records and so far the only ones you've been remotely close with are the Gospels.
Incidentally, we haven't even touched yet upon the extensive quotations to be found in the letters by the early church fathers. The widespread availablility of quotations (sufficient to reconstruct all but eleven verses of the New Testament, according to Sir David Dalrymple) and the dates of the church fathers' letters themselves, lend further credibility to the dating of the primary documents.
If any of them can prove a date of before 40AD, bring it on. Otherwise I'm not particularly interested as it has little to do with disproving my point.
So 120 years after the death then.
As Scotty pointed out, Irenaeus became a Christian 37 years after the death of Jesus, not 120.
All right, I must be looking at the wrong Irenaeus. Every search I do turns up
this guy. I'll need a link to the one you're on about then.
Except that Jesus himself was, from the world's point of view, a passing fad. He came out of nowhere, enjoyed tremendous popularity for a short time, and then was unceremoniously rejected by the people and executed as a common criminal. There may have been records kept of his life, but after his execution very few people would have judged them worth preserving for more than a few years, any more than a person of today would want to keep a newspaper around for more than a few days.
Which simply backs up my comment that there is no contemporary proof of his existence and goes against your earlier assertion that there were records but that they were covered up in order to make the Romans look good.
And that's if I accept your point that it wouldn't have been written down and kept.
Try this one, from the Annals of Cornelius Tacitus. Not from 50AD, but pretty close:
The annals date from 117AD. How is that close?
Except that cults do not spring up under the sort of persecution experienced by the early Christians. They had everything to lose and little to gain by witnessing to the historical accuracy of the gospels and epistles.
Really? So how do you explain just about every single other cult that existed? Pretty much all of them were persecuted.
Secondly, disqualifying all the Christian documents on the basis of partiality is not justifiable. No judge would toss out a case based on the fact that the only witness to a crime was the victim himself.
Similarly no judge would allow one man to come forward, claim to be another man and give eyewitness testimony as to what that guy saw. I'm not dismissing the Christian documents due to their bias. I'm dismissing them on the grounds that they probably weren't written by the people who are claimed to have written them and thus are highly dubious.
Finally, you have long since crossed the line of reasonable skepticism and are now engaging in counter-advocacy. You're not following Aristotle's literary dictum that "the benefit of the doubt is to be given to the document itself, not arrogated by the critic to himself". Based on the number of extant Christian manuscripts, their proximity to the events they describe, and their corroboration by other sources; especially when compared to the same statistics for other historical records, there is no reason to reject them as historically accurate.
Nonsense. I'm showing perfectly health scepticism given that you can neither establish the date the document was written, nor the identity of the person who wrote it.
Most of the documents you've talked about don't even mention Jesus anyway. They're on about early Christianity. Which I haven't disputed existed.
