Crabsy,

Yes, I acknowledge the other definitions of faith and I would agree that most of the definitions you provide in your article are valid.

But most of those definitions are not usually what people are talking about when they say “faith”, and so they’re not what I was referring to when I asked the question of Boxgum as I suspected that he/she was using the word “faith” to simply mean religious belief in general, and faith in this sense is used as a permission slip to let us believe whatever we want without any good reason; because, as soon as we have good reason for our beliefs, there’s no more need for faith

This bow your drawing gets longer and longer, AndrewFindon.

<<Actually, [hearsay accounts written decades after the fact are] better than most historical sources.>>

Better? How could they possibly get any worse?

Most historical figures, where there are no contemporary accounts for them, at least have some sort of relics, documents that were known to have existed but have since been destroyed, known descendants, or a series of major events that directly intersect their lives enough for us to say, “Yeah, this guy probably existed”.

Jesus has none of this. Not one person even bothered to record the violent earthquake in the book of Matthew.

<<To suggest this makes them unreliable is, I think, somewhat ignorant of normal historical methodology, and how historians actually treat these texts.>>

Oh it certainly does make it unreliable and I think the historical method agrees with me there considering the evidence satisfies so few conditions... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_method.

<<Ad hominem is always fallacious.>>

Wrong.

An ad hominem is only fallacious when it attempts to link the validity of an argument to an unrelated characteristic of a person or people presenting the argument.

An ad hominem is not fallacious if it bares relevance to the possible motives behind a particular argument.

<<You can't just point and say 'Bible scholar = bias'...>>

Actually, considering the extent of the emotions behind religious belief that I had described when talking about biases, yes, I can. I’d know; I have first-hand experience with those biases.

<<...you have to actually show examples of such bias.>>

Okay then, how many Biblical scholars believe Hercules existed? The reliability of the evidence for Jesus is, after all, very much on par with the evidence for Hercules.

Aesop, Hesiod, Homer and Plato have written narratives on the life of Hercules. Heck, even Josephus and Tacitus mention him, and even more than Jesus at that! Of course, there are no eye-witness accounts, no relics, no accurate dates or even evidence for the purported events. It’s all hearsay after the fact, but that shouldn’t bother the scholars if they’re consistent.

Continued...

...Continued

Besides which, how else could we possibly account for the rapid spread of the Greek mythology without an historical Hercules?

Oh sure, ask your average person, or even historian or scholar (secular or not) and more will pass Hercules off as a myth sooner than Jesus despite the evidence for the two being equally credible. But this is hardly surprising considering Christianity is still so prevalent that the words, “Yeah, he probably existed”, roll off the tongue far more easily with Jesus than they would with Hercules.

Then there’s the fact that most prefer not to ruffle the feathers of large establishments like The Church; who, as you’ve shown, will scrounge for anything to prove an historical Jesus.

Pericles’ description of Jesus as a “putative prophet” was perfect, I think.

<<simply not true - you have to ignore the scholarship to say that [not a single event from his life that can be accurately dated or evidenced]. Indeed, I came across this via twitter only this morning:http://www.biblicalfoundations.org/bible/paul-maier-on-the-date-of-jesus%E2%80%99-birth>>

Gee, thanks for that.

Eighteen pages later and I saw so many ‘ifs’, ‘buts’ and ‘maybes’ my head was spinning and I didn’t know where I was at. If I was still a believer, I probably would have just taken if for granted that he knew what he was talking about and accepted the conclusion. But I guess that’s very much what apologetics amounts to for many believers.

Hardly a definitive enough explanation to warrant the “simply not true” in your response though.

<<If you're consistent with your standard, there's presumably many ancient figures you don't think there's sufficient evidence to believe existed.>>

Could you rattle off a few names? I can’t think of any off the top of my head and your Tiberius analogy was absurd. We have a bust of him, a family tree, archaeological evidence and no conflicting claims of who ruled Rome during that period.

But hey, even if you could, your arguments would still only suggest the possibility that there was a person (or people) whom the core of the Jesus narrative was base on.

On faith:
Karen Armstrong said, “Faith was not an intellectual position but a virtue: it was the careful cultivation, by means of rituals and myths of religion, of the conviction that despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary, life had some ultimate meaning and value”.

This appears to support Crabsy on the meaning of faith. It was taken from an article i happened to be reading: "Jesus and Muhammad (upon them be peace), brothers in faith"
by Shaykh Naeem Abdul Wali (Gary Edwards): http://muslimvillage.com/2010/12/22/jesus-and-muhammad-upon-them-be-peace-brothers-in-faith/

[Deletd. Hijacking thread. Poster suspended.]

[Deleted. Thread hijack.]