alt.education

Al Klein wrote:
>>>>>Like the fact that the very first mention we have of a human Jesus is
>>>>>from over 100 years after he supposedly died?
>>>>
>>>>No.
>>>
>>>So where are earlier mentions?
>>
>>There are numerous mentions.
>>
>>Various gospels and letters
>
>I said earlier than about 100 years after he supposedly died. The
>earliest SCRAP of what may have been one of the books of the Bible is
>from around 130 AD.
>>
>> /
>
>Earliest ACTUAL PIECES OF MANUSCRIPT, not earliest Christian
>apologetic assertions.

A "Christian apologetic assertion" that quotes verses in the form that
we have them today is evidence that the document already existed in
that day.

>>>>>Like the fact that the Council of Nicea, 300 years after the fact,
>>>>>chose which writings from 200 years earlier were "right" and which
>>>>>were "wrong"?
>>>>
>>>>So?
>>>
>>>So how would they know what had happened 300 years earlier in
>>>Palestine?
>>
>>Oral tradition
>
>"Oral tradition" is a very specific form of storytelling

It is not limited to story telling. The Talmud was not written down
for centuries.

>- and Christianity has no history of oral tradition.

Wrong. Christianity started as a form of Judaism, which has an
enormous history of oral tradition.

/literacy/concepts/

One paragraph catches my eye, in light of what I posted in response to
Martin earlier today:
< be able to interpret it as he desired. This would lead to division
< and discord among people who followed the Torah in different ways.
< The Oral Torah, on the other hand, would require a central authority
< to preserve it, thus assuring the unity of Israel.

Martin thinks that not allowing people to interpret for themselves as
they desire is "deception". It seems pretty obvious that different
cultures think otherwise.

More importantly, Jesus Christ, so far as we know, wrote not a single
word. Therefore, ALL of His teachings are "oral tradition", in that
someone else wrote them down later, whether they did so a year later
or a hundred years.

/journals/sola/
/articles/
/

>Telling stories from
>one generation to the next isn't oral tradition, it's story telling,
>which ends in the story being unrecognizable to the original teller
>after only a few generations.

Sometimes. Societies with controlled oral traditions use mnemonic
tricks to ensure proper transmission.

>> passed by a continuous line of religious training
>
>There were so many sects of Christianity the first few centuries

Not really. There were many churches of Christianity. Each bishop
ruled his own nest, so to speak, and the divisions were therefore
along lines of authority and not on hardened sets-of-beliefs.

>(which was the whole reason for the Council of Nicea), that there were
>many "continuous lines" of training, and only one of them, at most,
>could be completely correct.

Obviously not. There were 11 apostles after Christ died, and a large
number of other disciples who were not named, and a few like Mary
Magdalene whose apostolic status is uncertain. Each of these people
went their separate ways and founded churches Obviously a church
founded by Peter will reflect what Peter understood of Christ's
teachings, whereas a church founded by Thomas would reflect his
understandings.

All of these churches could be "right".

Nicea was called to settle certain fundamental issues that were
causing contention between churches to the level of persecution.

>Which ones Nicea chose wasn't based on
>correctness, it was based on how closely the writing adhered to what
>Constantine wanted Christianity to be.

I doubt if Constantine gave a damn, though his support was probably
critical on the most important issue. Nicea was convened to fight-out
one particular dispute that was dividing the church in two, now called
the Arian heresy. Somewhere between 250 and 320 bishops attended
along with their "staff". Arius's position got only 2 votes, probably
because the strongest anti-Arians had the ear of Constantine. Yet
Arius's loss was only temporary because the next two emperors after
Constantine supported Arius, and Constantine himself was baptized by
Eusebius of Nicomedia, who was an Arian. That alone suggests that
Constantine merely went with whoever had his ear at the time.
/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea

>>And of course the criteria that matter were not "accuracy of reporting
>>history" but whether it met the standards of Thessalonians:
>
>You misspelled "Constantine".

No.

>>>> >>>> < correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may
>>>> < be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
>>and other concepts for what made something worst preserving.
>>
>>>History and archeology weren't exactly polished sciences
>>>in Palestine in the 1st century. They didn't - they chose books that
>>>agreed with their beliefs.
>>
>>Of course. Since their beliefs were ipso facto "correct", to them,
>>why would they choose otherwise.
>
>The discussion is whether what's in the books they picked is correct
>TO REALITY,

You have no more direct or privileged access to an objective reality
than I do, nor them. Everyone has beliefs about reality.

>not whether it was what they believed.

But of course what mattered to them was what they believed, not what
you wish to debate.

>>And where did their beliefs come from?
>
>Where do any beliefs come from? If they're the same as reality
>they're not called "beliefs", they're called "knowledge".

There are many different epistemologies for determining knowledge.
Each is useful for some purposes. None can claim to be "the same as
reality" because we have no direct access to "reality", only our
experiences of that reality.

>That's the
>difference - the Bible is what people want to be real - reality is
>what IS real. But there are things in the Bible we KNOW aren't real,

You may know it not to be real, and others may know that it *is* real.

Neither view is privileged.

lojbab