@unclee

I think that is a false trichotomy!

Professor Bart D. Ehrman

From Whose Word is It (Introduction) , speaking about studying at the Moody Bible Institute[he later stated -..showing how fundamentalist Moody was..]

"Only one perspective was taught in these course, subscribes by all the professors(they had to sign a statement) and by all the students(we did as well): the Bible is the inerrant word of God. It contains no mistakes. It is inspired completely and in its very words- verbal, plenary, inspiration." All the courses I took presupposed and taught this perspective; any other were taken to be misguided or even heretical. .....

As we learned at Moody in one of the first courses in the curriculum, we dont actually have the original writings of the New Testament. What we have
are copies of these writings, made years later—in most cases, many
years Later. Moreover, none of these Copies is completely accurate,
since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intentionally changed them in places. All scribes did this....

The rest can be read on-line at "Google Books"..

Added to the above was the "Licona affair" I referred to earlier. So "experts" and the academic institutions they are from operate in this paradigm.

Just last night I was reading "The Case for Christ" wherein the author interviewed "experts" in various fields. I was marking questions as I read. After hearing from the first expert, one would have thought that those were the essential answers but this was not the case when consulting Robert M Price book which is purported to be a refutation of Strobel's book. He outlined all the other things that the other expert conveniently left out.

So I guess it depends on the experts and historians one consults.

The word conspiracy as it relates to certain matters as now become an emotionally loaded word. It is often used in a pejorative sense. Prof Bart Ehrman, Robert M Price are slowly but surely letting the cat out of the bag. Not to mention all the works that are not in English.

What happened to David Friedrich Strauss when he dared to subject to the Gospels to critical logical examination in his The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. The protection of faith first then scholarship is the guiding principle of many of these experts but the tide has/is shifting.

As time goes by the scrutiny will become far more intense!

Which experts are you talking about secular or evangelical experts. The two camps are represented above from my example. Conspiracy maybe, but more of allegiance to faith than scholarship.

Welcome documentus. There's certainly a big difference between a secular scholar and an evangelical scholar (though Strobel and Price are not scholars), but a scholar like Ehrman would argue that the Gospels are not very reliable sources, not that Jesus didn't exist.

"Unfortunately, we do not have the originals of any of the books of the New Testament, or the first copies, or the copies of the first copies. What we have are copies made much later - in most cases hundreds of years later."

"How do we know that these copies were changed in the process of reproduction? Because we can compare the thousands of copies that we now have, which range from the second to sixteenth centuries, to see if and how they differed from one another. What is striking is that they differ a lot. In fact, among the over 5,000 Greek copies of the New Testament that we have, no two of them are exactly alike in all their details. We don't know how many differences there are among these copies because no one has been able to add them all up. But the total is in the hundreds of thousands. Possibly it is easiest to put the matter in comparative terms: there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament."

"Most of these differences are altogether minor and unimportant (misspelled words, changes of word order, the accidental omission of a line, etc.). But some of them are of immense importance."

Ehrman then proceeds to list the last twelve verses of Mark's Gospel, the story of the adulteress brought before Jesus in John's Gospel and the sweating blood part in Luke's Gospel.

Bart Ehrman, A Brief Introduction to the New Testament, 8-9 (first edition, second edition is revised)

"Although historians cannot demonstrate that Jesus performed miracles, they have been able to establish with some degree of certainty a few basic facts about Jesus' life: he was baptized, he associated with tax collectors and sinners, he chose twelve disciples to be his closest companions, he caused a disturbance in the Temple near the end of his life, this disturbance eventuated in his crucifixion at the hands of the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, and in the wake of his death his followers established vibrant Christian communities. What is striking is that all of these pieces of information add up to a consistent portrayal of Jesus. Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who anticipated the imminent end of the age, an end that would involve the destruction of Israel, including the Temple and its cult, prior to the establishment of God's kingdom on earth."

Same book, 174-175

So though from a traditional point-of-view he is certainly "letting the cat out of the bag", he is nowhere near the mythical realms of Price.

Talk of shifting tides and protection of faith is odd, since the nineteenth century there have been plenty of scholars who contradicted Christian dogma, staunch disbelief in miracles was quite common among liberal Christians for a while and there has been a great deal of work by Christians on the failed category of dying-and-rising gods (now a common theme used by mythers). Not the best of protection.

fortigurn

I will answer your last post but before doing so let me go from the start of the discussion as it relates to my original reason for posting "Based on purely the content of the site[History Hunters International] I am looking for responses on-line and came across this forum.". In reviewing the discussion it would appear we are going off topic. May I propose offering questions and/or statements and in replying to these if you could please state the resources [archaeological:artifacts, manuscripts, coins], books by relevant experts etc that may possibly refute the claims set forth by the above site and the others listed sources below. Any resource that will clarify and inform this query. So we have to go through these questions before "uncleE" trichotomy can be addressed and then also addressing the other tangential discussions that has sprung up . Let us also for the moment focus just on the facts[true or not] and arguments[valid or invalid] and not the persons making the claims.

Please Note - My questions/statements are extracted from the sources below and worded in ways that will allow me to get the best feedback.

Question #1

Are there any text[sacred or secular] which can be dated directly before the 4th century which mentions Christ or Christians [yes or no]


Question #2

What are these text[sacred or secular] which can be dated directly before the 4th century which mentions Christ or Christians? Please be as reasonably exhaustive as possible.

Question #3
Is there a difference between Chrestians and Christians?.Is there also a difference between Chrest and Christ? [yes or no]. If they refer to different persons then what does it imply?

Question #4

Does Manuscripts say Chrestians or Christians?

"In Christian bible translations, Christian appears in three places; Acts 11:26, Acts 26:28, and 1 Peter 4:16. The oldest known Greek manuscript of the New Testament is the Sinaiticus, the second oldest is the Vaticanus. Neither of these texts contain the Greek term Christian. However, copies made after these replace the original Greek term XPHCTIAN (CHRESTIAN) with XPICTIAN (CHRISTIAN).
Without any exception the original word in every instance is not XPICTIAN (CHRISTIAN) but XPHCTIAN (CHRESTIAN)"[2]

these statements may be checked at independently sources different from the one I will be citing at the end of these questions. The earliest extant Greek New Testament to explicitly contain the name "Christian" is the Codex Alexandrinus dated ca. 450 c.e.

Question #5

If the above and below is correct, then how could experts and scholarly opinion be so wrong for so long as pertains to the correct translation of two words[and not just any word at that]? If it was not done in error then it must have been deliberate. Why?

Statement #1

"Chrestian has no apparent relation to the word Christian although they coincidently appear and sound similar, so much so that during the second century there was some confusion between the terms. Chrestian comes from the Greek chrestos having the meaning; good manners or morals, pleasant, better, useful, beneficial, kind, gracious. Christos on the other hand means to be anointed. [2]These are scans from 'The New Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible'. Although the Greek in the manuscripts appears in upper case, the concordance displays these terms in lower case, but the similarities in appearance can still be observed. "

Question #6
Does it make a difference if Tacitus read Chrestians? Does it imply anything?

Statement #2

"Most readers have come away reasonably convinced that a program of changes have been made to the original texts but a few are in utter denial out of fear of what the ramifications of such a fact. One of the rationalizations the fearful offer is that it is common to find variant spellings of the same word throughout a manuscript. The problem with that is there are no variations within the Sinaiticus or any other codex. While spelling between different codices may vary, (and is the point of this article) the spelling within each is remarkably consistent. In the Sinaiticus all references to Christ are spelled with an iota and all references to his followers as Chrestians with an eta. The scribes made no attempt to connect the two terms etymologically until the 5th century. This reconciliation did not occur until centuries later.

If Chrestians is a variant spelling of Christians then why do the early Christian authorities, such as Tertuallian, take issue with the two being used interchangeably? He clarifies that Chrestian is a proper term in it's own right. It is a different word with a different meaning - not a variant.

Additional non-Christianized Greek and Latin codices have come to light such as the 5th century Codex Bezae5. Inscriptions such as Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum VI24944 epitaph which attest to the existence of Chrestians rather than Christians in the 1st century ce. The Christian historian Orosius also changed the spelling of Suetonius' Chrestus to Christus which may or may not have been justified - the point being the pens of the scribes are capable of revision."

Statement #3

In response to "Rylands papyrus P52, dated to the first half of the second century"

"What emerges from this survey is nothing surprising to paleographers: paleography is not the most effective method for dating texts, particularly those written in a literary hand. Roberts himself noted this point in his edition of P52. The real problem is the way scholars of the New Testament have used and abused papyrological evidence. ....What I have done is to show that any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries. Thus, P52 cannot be used as evidence to silence other debates about the existence (or non-existence) of the Gospel of John in the first half of the second century. Only a papyrus containing an explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context could do the work scholars want P52 to do.

Brent Nongbri, 2005. The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel. Harvard Theological Review 98:23-52." [see entire article below - very enlightening] [3] [also remember our agreement just consider the facts and arguments]


Sources:
historyhuntersinternational.org
[2] www.natzraya.org/Articles/Christian/Christian.html#2
codexsinaiticus.org/en/codex/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rylands_Library_Papyrus_P52
[3] www.pocm.info/scholarship_getting_started.html

G'day documentus,

Some of the others have replied in detail, leaving me little to say.

What other possibilities would you suggest?

I thought I made it clear I was talking about secular experts. One can perhaps identify several positions in NT scholarship:

• At one end of the spectrum are the evangelicals, who appear to be guided by faith as well as historical evidence. Craig Blomberg would be an example - a qualified and respected scholar, but working from within evangelicalism. Lee Strobel tends to interview these types of people (though sometimes he gets more objective). There is nothing wrong with these people if you are a christian looking to support your faith, but they are not always objective.
  
  
• At the other end of the spectrum are the die-hard sceptics, who are just as much guided by their non-belief as the evangelicals are by their belief. A few of these are recognised scholars (Price and Funk perhaps) and many more are not scholars at all (Wells, Docherty, etc), and there are some more extreme people who might be considered "ratbags". If you want an objective and evidence-based view, don't go here either. The website you are referencing seems to fit in here.
  
  
• In the middle are the recognised scholars, still a wide range of views, but they are all (supposedly) based on solid historical investigation, and there is a fair degree of consensus. Among the most eminent in this group are atheists and agnostics (e.g. Ehrman, Sanders, M Grant, RL Fox), christians (e.g. Meier, Wright, Bauckham, Evans, Dunn), agnostic christians (e.g. Crossan, Borg) and even a Jew (Vermes). While many of these differ about some aspects of Jesus' life, including whether he was divine, I don't think there are any who disbelieve he actually existed.
  

As an example, I offer the following list of 'facts' about Jesus (gleaned from lists given by Grant, Sanders & Wright), most of which would be accepted by most scholars:

• his time of birth, location of childhood, and baptism;
  
• he called disciples (probably 12 of them) and associated with outcasts (uncommon for a Rabbi in his day);
  
• he effected cures and exorcisms (or was at least believed to have done so);
  
• he preached "the kingdom of God" in Galilee and called people to repent;
  
• he believed he was the Messiah, inaugurating the Kingdom of God and that repentent sinners were eligible for the kingdom;
  
• welcoming "sinners" was part of his teaching and he claimed to be able to forgive people's sins;
  
• he believed his death would be redemptive;
  
• he created a disturbance in the temple in Jerusalem, had a final meal with his friends, was arrested and interrogated by Jewish authorities and was executed by the Roman Governor, Pilate
  
• his tomb was really empty and his disciples believed that saw him after his death.
  

Now there would of course be scholars who would contest some items on that list, but that is a reasonable lowest common denominator. Note that the list doesn't include belief that Jesus was divine or that he actually rose again - many historians believe those things, many don't, but most that I have read believe they are matters of faith as well as history.

So I hope you see I am not presenting some evangelical plot, but the study of history by respected academics.

So having clarified that, perhaps I can ask you again, do you accept the findings of the secular historians or do you believe they are not to be trusted (in which case who can we trust?)?

Yes. Repeating Sandwiches's point made here:



"Nunc igitur, si nominis odium est, quis nominum reatus, quae accusatio vocabulorum, nisi si aut barbarum sonat aliqua vox nominis aut infaustum aut maledicum aut impudicum? "Christianus" vero, quantum interpretatio est, de unctione deducitur. Sed et cum perperam "Chrestianus" pronuntiatur a vobis ---- nam nec nominis certa est notitia penes vos ----, de suavitate vel benignitate compositum est. Oditur itaque in hominibus innocuis etiam nomen innocuum.

Tertullian, Apologeticum, Ch. III, Verse V
Latin edition, edited by Becker, 1961

If "Christianus" was originally "Chrestianus" here, half the verse would have been completely pointless. So we can be quite certain there has been a genuine reference to "Christ" or "Christians" before the fourth century (Tertullian lived during the second and early third century).

Anyway, I do not understand why, if "Chrestos" was the correct version, it follows that Jesus would have been a myth. All I can conclude was that he would have had the epithet "the Useful (One)" instead of "the Anointed (One)".



Chrestos was a common Greek name for slaves. But in Koine Greek the eta (η) and the iota (ι) were often confused because they sounded the same. "Chrestos" could refer to a different person or it could be a spelling error and still refer to Jesus. It would not be the only η/ι spelling error in Koine Greek!



As far as I know, the oldest papyri don't read either, but abbreviate both "Jesus" and "Christ".



This is just claiming the original was Chrestos instead of Christos. There was no expectation of a Useful One (Chrestos) in Judaism at the time, but we know pretty well there was an expectation of a Messiah when Jesus lived. Since Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ and Greek χριστος mean both "Anointed (One)", Jesus was a Jew, we get a special mention that some people can't get the word "Christianus" right and that there are several Biblical texts that try to accent Jesus's status as the Messiah (the Transfiguration in Mark) or simply call him μεσσιας (John), it is a safe bet that "Christos" is the right answer.

documentus, here are some quotes from your posts:

Firstly, from your first post (my emphasis)


Then from a more recent post:


As has been said, almost all scholars date P52 to early-mid second century, but even if we accepted your later dating, this document disproves your earlier statement.

Is that not so?