I have Thoughts on this one. Let's see if I can actually get any of them down usefully.
I don't know if I've told you this before but some time before I knew you, when I worked out that I was fundamentally not an atheist, I went through a period when I said to my religious friends, persuade me.
(The person who did was Helen, and largely what she said was 'work it out for yourself, fucknuts', and over the course of the next few years I developed my own personal brand of heretical jewish eclectic syncretistic neopaganism that works for me...)
Some Christians spoke pretty persuasively about their faith. But I also spent a while reading up on 'historical evidence for christ' stuff. And it really turned me off.
That sort of attempt to 'prove' that Jesus Christ rose from the dead read to me like the worst kind of missing-the-point-of-the-discipline history. Like, 'was Robin Hood Gay?', like 'Who Was The Real King Arthur?' like 'Did Margery Kempe Have Schizphrenia?' it had more in common with what sensationalist journalism thinks history is than anything actually useful.
What history does, in my understanding, is present accounts and contexts and speculations. Historians don't tend to call the artefacts they are working with 'evidence', they'd call them 'sources'.
(Gah, I'm sort of going round in circles writing stuff and deleting it. The other thing that put me off the book was much more unrelated to the historical evidence question and was around whether or not Jesus (and I always have the urge to call him Yoshki in this context) fulfilled the old testament prophesies reguarding the Meshioch, which is the bit where I get the most stuck with christianity, because I don't need historical proof to believe in mystery and miracle, that's what faith is for. But, while I accept that the disciples could have believed during his/their life times that Jesus was the Meshioch, it seems less plausible with hindsight; vis a complete lack of End of Days / time of the Messiah etc... )
Anyway, I am well off point now.There's also the issue that someone else touched on of most historical evidence that most people believe are things that are pretty... un-unique. We know what evidence for a medieaval battle looks like because there were lots and we can compare. We don't know what evidence for a bodily ressurection of the only son of god looks like, cos it only happened the once, there's no way to compare those sources with other sources of a similar nature and go, yup, looks very similar to all those other historical cases of the bodily ressurection of the only son of god...
In terms of plausibility of evidence, I haven't been impressed with most stuff I've read. I don't know of a comprehensive comparitive study, but for example re: he must clearly have been dead having been tortured for that long in that way: There are certain kinds of torture that we know more or less exactly how badly they damage someone and how long it takes to kill them. They are mostly types of torture that were carried out and meticulously documented by the Nazis, although a couple of South American dictators provide similar records. How much damage is done by crucifixion and precisely how it kills someone I am fairly sure is something we only have contemporary (ie Roman), and conflicted, accounts of. The Christian accounts of crucifixion must have been fatal that I have read have all been by modern experts in medical science, who hopefully haven't crucified anyone recently, presented as 'science'. This really rubbed me up the wrong way. Especially given that what a bunch of the Nazi torture documentation 'proves' is that people survive much worse things for much longer than you might expect.
Anyway. I'm wavering away from any sort of useful point again. I can imagine that sort of 'historical evidence' presentation being useful for someone who has faith but has been taught or come to believe that 'truth' needs to be presented in certain ways. But as a tool for conversion, it mostly made me feel like 'this is a bunch of people who believe that my truth is the only truth, and don't actually have a good handle on what kind of a truth this is they are dealing with...'
no subject
I don't know if I've told you this before but some time before I knew you, when I worked out that I was fundamentally not an atheist, I went through a period when I said to my religious friends, persuade me.
(The person who did was Helen, and largely what she said was 'work it out for yourself, fucknuts', and over the course of the next few years I developed my own personal brand of heretical jewish eclectic syncretistic neopaganism that works for me...)
Some Christians spoke pretty persuasively about their faith. But I also spent a while reading up on 'historical evidence for christ' stuff. And it really turned me off.
That sort of attempt to 'prove' that Jesus Christ rose from the dead read to me like the worst kind of missing-the-point-of-the-discipline history. Like, 'was Robin Hood Gay?', like 'Who Was The Real King Arthur?' like 'Did Margery Kempe Have Schizphrenia?' it had more in common with what sensationalist journalism thinks history is than anything actually useful.
What history does, in my understanding, is present accounts and contexts and speculations. Historians don't tend to call the artefacts they are working with 'evidence', they'd call them 'sources'.
(Gah, I'm sort of going round in circles writing stuff and deleting it. The other thing that put me off the book was much more unrelated to the historical evidence question and was around whether or not Jesus (and I always have the urge to call him Yoshki in this context) fulfilled the old testament prophesies reguarding the Meshioch, which is the bit where I get the most stuck with christianity, because I don't need historical proof to believe in mystery and miracle, that's what faith is for. But, while I accept that the disciples could have believed during his/their life times that Jesus was the Meshioch, it seems less plausible with hindsight; vis a complete lack of End of Days / time of the Messiah etc... )
Anyway, I am well off point now.There's also the issue that someone else touched on of most historical evidence that most people believe are things that are pretty... un-unique. We know what evidence for a medieaval battle looks like because there were lots and we can compare. We don't know what evidence for a bodily ressurection of the only son of god looks like, cos it only happened the once, there's no way to compare those sources with other sources of a similar nature and go, yup, looks very similar to all those other historical cases of the bodily ressurection of the only son of god...
In terms of plausibility of evidence, I haven't been impressed with most stuff I've read. I don't know of a comprehensive comparitive study, but for example re: he must clearly have been dead having been tortured for that long in that way: There are certain kinds of torture that we know more or less exactly how badly they damage someone and how long it takes to kill them. They are mostly types of torture that were carried out and meticulously documented by the Nazis, although a couple of South American dictators provide similar records. How much damage is done by crucifixion and precisely how it kills someone I am fairly sure is something we only have contemporary (ie Roman), and conflicted, accounts of. The Christian accounts of crucifixion must have been fatal that I have read have all been by modern experts in medical science, who hopefully haven't crucified anyone recently, presented as 'science'. This really rubbed me up the wrong way. Especially given that what a bunch of the Nazi torture documentation 'proves' is that people survive much worse things for much longer than you might expect.
Anyway. I'm wavering away from any sort of useful point again. I can imagine that sort of 'historical evidence' presentation being useful for someone who has faith but has been taught or come to believe that 'truth' needs to be presented in certain ways. But as a tool for conversion, it mostly made me feel like 'this is a bunch of people who believe that my truth is the only truth, and don't actually have a good handle on what kind of a truth this is they are dealing with...'