Owen said:
Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger all lived after Jesus died. They never met him. So all their accounts are based upon the words of others which cannot be investigated.
This standard would virtually eliminate the study of history! Granted, history is not an exact science. We can't know everything about the past with 100% accuracy. But let's not go to the opposite extreme and contend that we can't have any reliable information about such matters at all.
The fact that writings of the Bible have now been collected into one book doesn't mean that they come from just one source.
The New Testament itself contains many separate accounts written by a number of different authors. Some of those authors claim to have been eyewitnesses (Peter, James, John, for example). Others, like Luke, were not with Jesus during his ministry but claim to have talked with eyewitnesses to investigate the truth of what was being said about him.
If I understand your comments correctly, you reject all of this testimony because you consider them unreliable and biased. You also reject them because they are part of a "holy book". I think these assumptions show a priori bias on your part, but you're entitled to your opinion.
You asked for other, non-Bible sources, so I cited the Talmud, Josephus, Tactitus, and Pliny the Younger, none of whom can be accused of being biased Christians.
Then you said that they came along after Jesus, that their writings are based on what others said, so those claims can't be investigated. I really don't understand this objection for several reasons:
1. Many who did claim to be eyewitnesses wrote their accounts but you seem to take an "all or nothing" approach and throw them out completely because you see them as hopelessly biased.
2. We don't have accounts of eyewitnesses who contradict what the Bible says about Jesus, so somehow this is evidence against the historicity or accuracy of the Bible. Yet, if such writings DID exist today, you would be saying that these "he said" / "she said" conflicting stories written by people long dead is so contradictory that we can't know the truth of any of it.
Either way, nothing is reliable...
3. The Bible itself actually does contain many references to what contemporary unbelievers said about Jesus -- that he was a bastard, that he had a demon, that he got his power from Satan, that he was a false Messiah, that he couldn't have been from God because he kept company with notorious sinners, that the "resurrection" can be explained by the disciples having stolen the body, etc.
4. You said that Josephus could not have written a reliable history of Jesus because he was born 5 years after Jesus died. Does this mean he couldn't write a reliable history about Jesus? That would mean that a person born in or after 1968 couldn't write a reliable biography about John F. Kennedy. Many people who saw and heard Jesus were still alive and available for interview during Josephus' lifetime.
5. You said that scholars believe that some of Josephus' writings about Jesus contain forgeries. Fine, throw those passages out -- as scholars do -- and with what's left you still have a great deal of information about Jesus and his followers. The study of history is not an all-or-nothing affair. Scholars sort out truth from fiction, as the critical examination of Josephus' writings shows.
6. Put all this in the context of someone other than Jesus. How many eyewitness accounts do we have of the life of Julius Caesar? Of Alexander the Great? None that I know of, and if we did have them, no doubt those people would all have their biases. So do we assume, therefore, that these men were fictional characters or that if they were real our information is so unreliable that we should stop teaching them and their actions as historical? Is this your view of the study of history in general or only of the study of historical claims made in the Bible or other "holy books"?
Many statements made in the Bible have been shown to accord with archaelogical finds, in contrast, say, to the Book of Mormon, for which there is no archaelogical confirmation at all. Doesn't this tell us ANYTHING about the comparative reliability of those two "holy books"? Or should we just throw the Bible out completely because its authors were religious and had a religious bias or agenda? Should we also throw out all historical claims made by authors who are irrelgious and have an anti-religious bias or agenda?
7. Was George Washington real or fictional? Do we really know anything about him? Can we verify anything today, given that all the eyewitnesses are long dead? The information we have from his era may have come from biased sources who revered him. How can we trust anything they say? Besides, how do we know no forgeries have been inserted into their original writings? Are all biographies of Washington therefore hopelessly untrustworthy?
My point is that, using the standards you are setting, man's attempt to study history would be worthless or at least hopelessly curtailed. We couldn't rely on anything written after the eyewitnesses have died, and we couldn't rely on what they eyewitnesses themselves said because they were biased and because we can't conclusively prove that what they allegedly wrote or said wasn't intermingled with forgeries and falsehoods inserted by unknown persons with an agenda of their own.
MoneurMallard wrote:
No book character can be proved to exist outside of the context of the book.
Of course they can!
Gibbon wrote about Julius Caesar in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Even though those events occurred before the birth of Jesus, historians are able to establish that Julius Caesar existed and performed certain actions in reality rather than merely in the pages of Gibbon's book.
Conversely, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about two men named Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Because Doyle and his contemporaries are all dead, does this mean that we are at a loss to know whether Holmes and Watson and their supposed exploits were fictional or real?
True, we can't know everything about history, but that doesn't mean we know nothing of significance about it at all.
