Talk:Historical Jesus/Archive 3

message: I'm not sure why the article Jesus is devoted to religious accounts and views on the man, rather than this article which contains factual and historical information exclusively.  Facts and history come before religious lore and legend in an encyclopedia especially when there are numerous takes on the man which vary greatly from one to the other.  This article's name should be changed to Jesus, while the information contained in the current article of Jesus, should be renamed to reflect it's religious context.
An Encyclopedia, however, has a responsibility to reflect on all information that it reasonably can, Historical accounts of Jesus should be mentioned, (And I think this article and it's counterpart do a reasonably good job of showing the sides of the debate) and the most popular beliefs in Jesus, as He is the central figure of one of the world's largest religions. Homestarmy 23:44, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historical Jesus should be the main article on Jesus 

message: So I guess I can start a page about a historical Hercules, citing Greek mythology? DoItAgain 05:44, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Your comment is POV.  I suggest you start your "crusade" with the articles on Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and every other classical personage, since they are far less well-attested by manuscript evidence than Jesus.  As purely historical documents, the New Testament texts are several orders of magnitude more reliable than any other ancient texts.  Where with most Classical texts we have at most a handful of ancient mss. that date to within a thousand years or so of the events they describe, the New Testament documents exist in thousands of ancient copies, the oldest dating to within less than 100 years of the original "autograph" text.  All of the NT texts can be found in mss that date to within ~300 years of the events.  No other ancient texts come anywhere close to that.  It's perfectly valid to treat the NT documents as evidence for the historical Jesus.   Brendano 15:48, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You are correct, but your comment comes a little late. This is a fairly old debate and this point has been made to Robsteadman before. Notice that Rob's post is dated two months ago. Robsteadman has recently left Wikipedia, and he requested that his user page and user talk page be deleted. Grigory Deepdelver of BrockenboringTalkTCF 16:05, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Thanks, Grigory.  I didn't note the date on his post; I did not a fairly recent date on the "Neutrality Questioned" section below, where I said something similar.  IMO it's a fairly crucial part of the discussion, since the NT docs provide the most detailed picture of Jesus. Brendano 16:29, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The New Testament As a Source of Historical Information 

message: This section had no support whatsoever, and is the purely personal hypothetical speculations of one person (probably User:Das_Baz) who has also been making a big nuisance of himself over at the main Nonviolent resistance article (look at the history of that page...) AnonMoos 14:35, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Deleted Jesus and nonviolent resistance section

message: Or as uncyplopedia would put it, Jesii. Seriously, though, I understand that the articles Historical Jesus and Historicity of Jesus, are meant to cover different perspectives, but the titles are close enough as to cause confusion. The distinctions between the articles may have blurred through later edits. The other article, after being forked from Jesus, was originally titled "Jesus and textual evidence." I believe that this article is textual evidence plus Cultural and historical background of Jesus. Is this the correct interpretation, or is the distinction different? Also, does anybody have less confusing titles? Arch O. La 07:46, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Historical and Historicity of Jesuses

message: We're working on such citations in the main Jesus article. Also see Talk:Jesus/Cited_Authors_Bios. Arch O. La 02:26, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: "Citations needed" tag

message: The name Yeshua was pronounced with a tsere, a long e as in "neighbor"
(but not diphthongized) not with a schwa (as Y'shua) or segol (Yesh-shua).
It would be nice if someone would transcribe this using IPA so that it might make sense.  How much dialectical variation do you think there is in the pronunciation of "neighbour"?  Jimp 07:36, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation 

message: I noticed that the Critical scholarship and the miracles of Jesus section of the Miracles of Jesus article needs some work. I am asking editors of the Historical Jesus for help. I have attempted to rework the section a bit, but would like someone more familiar with Biblical criticism to give it a once over. I'd appreciate any help! --Andrew c 18:04, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Check some of the authors and Wikipedia editors listed at Talk:Jesus/Cited_Authors_Bios. This may help. Arch O. La 18:07, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Help with [[Miracles of Jesus]] article

message: The German Jesus article, which focuses on the historical Jesus, is a featured article. As such it may have ideas that help with this article. Jim62sch is working on a translation: User:Jim62sch/German-English_Jesus Arch O. LaTalkTCF 06:21, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Can someone with a knowledge of German help Jim finish the translation? I'd really like to see the whole article. Arch O. LaTalkTCF 21:10, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Jesus von Nazaret

message: A large chunk of this article was missing with no reference to an archive. The removed material not only started in the middle of a comment, it started with the letter "H" in "there. If the comments were meant to be archived, it was a rather poor archive. Grigory Deepdelver AKA Arch O. LaTalkTCF 05:42, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Not sure, but here are the edits 144.134.7.144. --MonkeeSage 18:00, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: What happened?

message: There has been a long discussion of the Historical Jesus at Talk:Jesus/Historical Jesus. It's divided into three subpages: Jesus as moral teacher; Jesus as apocalyptic prophet or messiah; and Jesus as Pharisee or Essene. Grigory Deepdelver of BrockenboringTalkTCF 08:13, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Jesus article and sources

message: The current format of this article is less like an encyclopedia article, and more like an FAQ.  I'd propose some sort of massive overhaul to make it organized along more historiographical lines, except that I'm sure I'd be too lazy to carry it out.  But does anybody else have any thoughts? john k 03:07, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I concur. There is a separate article for questions of historicity. I think this article should be about scholarly conclusions of the historical Jesus. There seem to be several schools of thought on the subject. Grigory Deepdelver of BrockenboringTalkTCF 11:03, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

text: I brought this up several weeks ago by referring to "metahistoricity." I agree that we should say how the models change over time. Grigory Deepdelver of BrockenboringTalkTCF 18:28, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Q&A Format 

message: I think I will delete the photo of the reconstruction of a dead person that lived in Palestine in the supposed time of Jesus. Is it there to imply that if he existed he must have looked like that? What far fetched nonsense. Is like saying all people in an area look the same? what sort of bogus science is this? I leave this for comments and will proceed in few days. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.100.174.72 (talk • contribs) 
:I think the photo is helpful because it shows a historical reconstruction of an aspect of the culture from which the historical Jesus came. I have no idea why you are calling it bogus science. If you could explain that part more, maybe I'd understand your position.--Andrew c 22:28, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The technique is not bogus science — it is a valid tool of forensic science, used by law-enforcement agencies. All people from a location and period don't look the same; and that picture isn't meant to be exactly what Jesus looked like; but it is the closest approximation we can garner, and it contributes to the article by breaking the stereotypical image of Jesus as a caucasion hippy and by giving us insight into what a person from the same time and place would have looked like. » MonkeeSage « 22:55, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I will note, just to be a contrarian, that a) people from the Middle East are and were just as "Caucasian" as people from Europe.  Arabs and  Sephardic Jews are considered White or Caucasian under most definitions I've ever seen, and the same would apply to the people of Roman Palestine; I assume what is meant is "Jesus wasn't Nordic" rather than "Jesus wasn't Caucasian;" and b) the hair and skin color applied to the reconstruction surely cannot come from an analysis of the shape of the skull, and must be based on other factors. john k 23:11, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I was meaning "White-European" (see Caucasian race). Thanks for the correction. Hair-type and color and skin-color (and eye-color) are somewhat subjective. I assume they are based on historical descriptions of peoples of the region and-or current peoples of the region, but that aspect is much more subjective and variable than the structural aspect. » MonkeeSage « 01:44, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: a meaningless picture?