Featured A non-believer's case for the Resurrection

[AgnosticBoy]

people aren't going to die for a lie, especially an unpopular lie

Urban legend usually isn’t a lie. It’s more likely to be a series of small mistakes. A lie would be a big egregious something.

I think it's possible that their observations could've been wrong. All we have is a story, but I'm also reminded that history isn't a science. In some instances where does only one account, and barring any serious questions with the source, I think the account, being just words, would be accepted. It's all they got.

Found this explanation:

For reasons that are rooted in our intellectual history, ancient historians are often seduced into two unexpressed propositions. The first is that statements in the literary or documentary sources are to be accepted unless they can be disproved (to the satisfaction of the individual historian).

The historian of ancient documents needs first to study the nature of those documents and to try to understand what they are capable of revealing. That means literary criticism.

To quote A.J. Woodman . . . :
‘Our primary response to the texts of the ancient historians should be literary rather than historical since the nature of the texts themselves is literary. Only when literary analysis has been carried out can we begin to use these texts as evidence for history; and by that time . . . such analysis will have revealed that there is precious little historical evidence left.’ . .

Modern historians naturally dislike such views, because they challenge the very basis of ancient history as an intellectual discipline, since the ‘evidence’, at almost all periods, consists overwhelmingly of literary texts.
While most historians concede that ancient historiographical texts are in some senses ‘literary’, they nevertheless insist that this ‘literary’ aspect is detachable and there is solid fact underneath. On this view, ancient works of historiography are like Christmas cakes: if you don’t like almond icing, you slice it off, and you’ve still got a cake—a substantial object uncontaminated by icing.

Source: https://vridar.org/2017/12/10/the-evidence-of-ancient-historians/

 

[Multicolored Lemur]

To quote A.J. Woodman . . . :
“ . ‘Our primary response to the texts of the ancient historians should be literary rather than historical since the nature of the texts themselves is literary. Only when literary analysis has been carried out can we begin to use these texts as evidence for history; and by that time . . . such analysis will have revealed that there is precious little historical evidence left.’ . .

“Modern historians naturally dislike such views, because they challenge the very basis of ancient history as an intellectual discipline, since the ‘evidence’, at almost all periods, consists overwhelmingly of literary texts. . ”

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Maybe at times the writings are confirmed by digging up ruins and so forth.

But yeah, this is definitely an issue. Because you’ve got to figure that at least some people write history to show how heroic there society is / was , and not for the purpose of being honest and just laying the whole messy truth out there.

Meaning, a lot of what passes for history is “prettied up.”