Historical Jesus, Biblical Jesus

[Dānu]

I have a few other preliminaries to get out of the way prior to a more complete response to your post, jerry, but I'm not in the mood tonight, so rather than keep you waiting another day, I'd start by requesting some clarification.  You say in your latest reply to me that I am basically misrepresenting you by attributing a comparative argument to you.  I thought that might be the case, which is why I qualified the matter in each of my replies.  However, I'm not familiar with any non-comparative argument which can either substantiate or undermine a claim of special pleading, so if that is not your argument, then I have no clue exactly what it is that you actually are arguing.  I'll need you to explain your argument to me, and explain why you think it leads to the conclusion about special pleading that you've made.  It doesn't have to be in syllogistic form, loose or rigorous, but you need to make your argument more explicit, because I can't see that you've made any argument, if you're not making a comparative argument.  Naturally, it would be preferable for you to state it as a syllogism, but I'm not demanding it.

So, for now, I'll have to wait until you explain what it is that you are in fact arguing.

I think this discussion is useful to neither of us.  If you think suspecting there might have been a "real" Jesus, in some bastardized human form, is "special pleading" because no one believes there was a "real" Krishna, then it's not really that big a deal.  If you want to flesh out your reasons for asserting the special pleading case, just pick up where we left off.  If it's just an assertion, unexamined, unexplained, just blurted out as if it's supposed to be taken seriously, that's cool, but I for one don't take it seriously.

We seem to be having some difficulty understanding each other. Earlier in this thread, you claimed that there was evidence for a historical Jesus. You have also asserted that some of that evidence is more than simply that which is contained in the holy texts themselves which helps establish the historicity of the account. So let's get a few basic questions squared away here. Do you believe there was a historical Jesus? Do you believe there was a historical Krishna? As best I can tell, the limits of what you are claiming now are that you simply are too ignorant of the relevant evidence to give an opinion one way or another regarding the charge of special pleading. Is that what you are saying? I find your latest complaint most strange. You put forward a point about the historical Jesus, namely the story of Jesus and the money changers illustrating a very human and therefore a historical Jesus. When I provide you the corresponding detail about Krishna, you simply dismiss it and raise additional points about Jesus that, I presumed you thought qualitatively different from the details of the Krishna story. If you didn't think they were qualitatively different, then why did you bring them up? This is nothing more than the iconic Gish gallop applied to the question of a historical Jesus.

Any discussion of religious narratives requires some familiarity with the evidence if you are going to venture an opinion on it. The amount of information that you and Free have presented about the bible is a mere fraction of the knowledge of the religious literature required to even make sense of that discussion. The Testimonium Flavianum makes no sense whatsoever to a person who has no knowledge of the relevant biblical literature. If that is your standard then, yes, you are correct, I cannot hope to compete when you demand that I educate you on the Krishna stories yet you conversely simply expect me to display that very same competence about the Jesus story. If you're simply saying that you don't know whether there is a historical Krishna and therefore you don't know whether believing in a historical Jesus is special pleading, then I can accept that. Is that what you have been trying to say? I must confess that this is not the impression I got from your prior arguments. If that is what you are saying, and you are simply saying that you take no position on the question of whether there was a historical Jesus and no position that there is or is not special pleading involved in concluding that there was a historical Jesus, then that's fine. If you have no position on either question, then you're probably right that there isn't much to discuss.

From my familiarity with some of the Krishna stories I believe there are clear parallels, at least with regard to the story alone, and that there are compelling arguments for any extra-textual context which may differ. I'm more than happy to match one or two points here where you may not have heard this or that particular Krishna story, but expecting me to be sufficiently familiar with the evidence and story surrounding Jesus, and then expecting me to provide you with comparable education concerning the story of Krishna is both unreasonable and hypocritical. If you're content with an ignorant opinion on the subject, or no opinion at all, that's fine. I'm not going to waste my time providing you with the education you need to speak intelligently on the topic.