Thank you. I might be misunderstanding the point here. If there were a great deal at stake in our daily life had Churchill said this or that, he was truly like this or that, and we as a civilization constructed a worldview based on that, then would we not likely indeed have by now held the Churchill Seminar, and argued vigorously over what is really likely true or what is not likely true about his words and actions? It just seems that like it or not, The Gospels, come to us inherently charged in a way that most of History does not.
What I am trying to refute in this post is the binary between material that is 'made up' about a figure (and therefore has no value for understanding the person) and things which are historically authentic and therefore do have historical value.
Given that we do know a number of things about Jesus, we can see that those apocryphal stories nevertheless can reflect the historical Jesus, even if they are not themselves historical.
Thank you. I might be misunderstanding the point here. If there were a great deal at stake in our daily life had Churchill said this or that, he was truly like this or that, and we as a civilization constructed a worldview based on that, then would we not likely indeed have by now held the Churchill Seminar, and argued vigorously over what is really likely true or what is not likely true about his words and actions? It just seems that like it or not, The Gospels, come to us inherently charged in a way that most of History does not.
What I am trying to refute in this post is the binary between material that is 'made up' about a figure (and therefore has no value for understanding the person) and things which are historically authentic and therefore do have historical value.
Given that we do know a number of things about Jesus, we can see that those apocryphal stories nevertheless can reflect the historical Jesus, even if they are not themselves historical.