[Cheese]

Originally Posted by Textcritic

You are clearly not reading the bolded portions correctly because that is not at all what I am saying. I'm not even sure how you can arrive at such a perspective from what I wrote. More appropriately, the very few details that are recorded by Roman historians about Christianity need to be measured carefully against everything that we do know about Second Temple Judaism and the more sympathetic sources that we do have.


NO! We are to treat the gospels as we would any historical source from the period, taking careful precautions to weigh all their claims against well established historical methodologies, and to further recognise that we can at best only reconstruct the past, and will likely do so incompletely.


Not at all. Apologetics is manipulating the historical sources uncritically to support one's assertions. Historians who treat the gospels as historical sources neither have a pre-set agenda, nor do they invoke uncritical methodologies and presuppositions. The best historians will not be very highly invested on one side or the other on any given matter, and will hopefully arrive at balanced and persuasive historical models that are unprejudiced. This means that they will treat the gospels like they would any source from the period; carefully weighing their claims against everything that we know about Palestine during the Second Temple period. When considered accurately, there is actually a good deal of historical information to be gleaned from the gospels, even despite their obvious theological interests.


No. It is a form of estimation that is both necessary and characteristic of any historical evaluation from ancient history. This is how history is done: by taking into consideration the sources as evidence, and weighing them accordingly.


What on earth are you talking about? Christianity was not invented by Constantine.

Originally Posted by Textcritic

When speaking of "records" I believe most people are referring to official administrative documentation of the daily on-goings of the Roman Empire. These are the sorts of documents that do not exist, and there is not much evidence that Roman government was this well organised in the first place.

It depends entirely upon what you believe is "remarkable". Furthermore, based on their writings and descriptions about Palestine, I am fairly certain that Tacitus, Heroditus, Pliny or whoever neither understood nor cared much about distinguishing one particular Jewish sect from another. In the first century CE and much of the second at least, Christians were still attending synagogues, reading Jewish scriptures, and celebrating Jewish festivals. In what way would they have appeared interesting enough to garner special attention?

Pretty decent by what standards? Certainly not by modern estimations, and I think most people have a tendency to either overestimate the extent and quality of evidence, or simply project modern expectations of what they imagined constituted "Roman record keeping" backwards. Again, our sources are pretty sparse, and not just for the existence of Jesus, but for the daily activities of huge numbers of people and instances.

Right. But again, this should not come as any surprise, because most of our sources about everything in the Roman empire are sparse, and they do not really function like you seem to imagine that they should. We know that there were hundreds of so-called "mystery religions" throughout the empire, but we know virtually nothing about them. We know even less from Roman historians about the practices of mystery religions than we do about the presence of Christianity. Should we then become dubious about the existence of mystery religions?

It seems to me that you along with a number of mythicists are dismissing all the evidence in the Gospels and in Paul for the existence of Jesus, on the basis that they are agenda driven sources. That may very well be, but they are still our best sources for the life of Jesus, and they do in fact contain a good deal of historical information, even amid the clutter of propaganda and "mythicised" exaggerations. In this instance, I am using the word "myth" differently, to note that many of the stories we have about Jesus have been developed or even cut from whole cloth to express various theological ideas.

The above are your words TC....you are suggesting as far as I can see that there are no "official records" or "administrative documents" as we would think today, outside of Second Temple Judaism which I admittedly know little about.

Then you say:
"It seems to me that you along with a number of mythicists are dismissing all the evidence in the Gospels and in Paul for the existence of Jesus, on the basis that they are agenda driven sources. "

I guess my answer to the above has to be yes, "until proven otherwise". It is you and your brethern's responsibility to educate the masses on the history/significances of the day and how that translates to a historical Jesus. That's the skeptic in me I guess.
I also freely admit that my Constantine example above was hypothesized and is likely fallacious.