dastardly stem wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 6:54 pm
To me, its safe and fair to say, we're talking along enough ago, we're talking an era with a paucity of confirming evidence and records, compared to say our modern era, so we're left with lower probability that named people from that era really lived in contrast to named people from the past 3 or 4 hundred years. So we'd have to say there's a lower probability that Alexander really lived, to use a previous mentioned example, than Napoleon. There's nothing problematic in that type of thinking, I don't think.
There is definitely something wrong with that type of thinking. If we are talking about a world in which 95+% of the people who live pass without mention because there is such a low level of literacy and documentation, when you find a person such as Alexander the Great, about whom we have contemporary eyewitness accounts, you would have to conclude with certainty that he did live.
With Jesus I would say we have the separation between Paul and the people Paul met in Jerusalem who were Jesus' associates. The odds that he lived are pretty damned good. Not Alexander the Great certain, but good.
A fine list of pieces particularly as we compare it to others of that era. But, I'd suggest, we'd still have to conclude something along the lines of its still less likely that Jesus lived than Joseph Smith. I mean Joseph Smith is a near 99% level while Jesus would be somewhere less. If less, then there is plenty of questions to explore, I'd think.
To the contrary, and I think this is where you get it wrong from the outset of this post, you should have to adjust your expectations of documentation according to the circumstances of the time. In other words, you don't run the odds unfavorably for not living after the invention of the printing press. We wouldn't say, "Well, we see a lot of people are talking about Publius after he died, but darn if he didn't live at a time when hardly anyone was mentioned, so that relative silence during his actual lifetime counts heavily against the chances that he lived."
I found out that I share the last name of a woman who participated in paranormal research in the early 1990s. Darn if I haven't found getting information on her difficult, and yet she co-wrote pieces with one of the leading researchers in that area. I finally figured out that this was her married name, so, if I am related to anyone there by blood, it is to her husband. Still the whole thing fascinated me--how in this modern era, with the internet, you could be closely connected to someone fairly well known for this research and yet hardly leave much of an accessible trail.
So, when we see people recorded in the way Jesus was, we don't go out of our way to exclude them from reality based on that level of evidence. As I said, if we did, we would erase so many people from history who did actually live. Moreover, we know what ancient fiction looked like, and the Gospels don't really fit those genres very well. There is a reason why the
Acts of Paul and Thecla are deemed to be fictional, whereas the Gospels are not.
What I see in you is an unrealistic expectation about the kinds of evidence we should possess to validate the reality of people who lived in the past. I have to work with the kind of evidence we are likely to see for these people. You want the kind of evidence we see for a very few people who lived in antiquity. Where there are no records, there are still people.
With Joseph Smith I have no idea why you would allow 1% doubt for his existence. That's silly.
"He disturbs the laws of his country, he forces himself upon women, and he puts men to death without trial.” ~Otanes on the monarch, Herodotus Histories 3.80.