That only works as an argument against the Gospel Jesus, whom all mainstream scholars admit doesn’t exist.

The mainstream view is that Jesus was a far more mundane and unremarkable man, and therefore did not get outside mentions because nobody of note noticed or cared to mention him.

If we adopt that theory (which is the mainstream consensus currently, which rejects the Gospels as mythologies and try to reconstruct who the “real” Jesus was buried under all that myth), then the silence of outside sources no longer is evidence. Because then that silence is expected.

In my formal study (On the Historicity of Jesus) I only compared the nonexistence (total myth) theory against the barely existed (almost all myth) theory, i.e. “minimal mythicism” with “minimal historicity.”

Because the latter is the mainstream consensus. No mainstream scholar believes in maximal historicity, so I don’t even consider it worthy of bothering to test.

Oh, I thought it would have some interesting implications. Perhaps it would be the final blow to the argument from resurrection. But anyway, thank you very much for taking time to respond to my question. I’ll try to download the audiobook (which I prefer) that you mentioned in your text.

Be safe and fine in these trying times!

Cheers!

No. The Nazareth inscription has no connection to Christianity at all.

I have a chapter on it in Hitler Homer Bible Christ, summarizing the scholarship on why it is not connected to Christianity at all (and probably even predates it).

The paper you are referring to is at Science News. It does not really contribute much to that conclusion; all it argues is that the stone it’s carved in was sourced from the Greek isles. I’m not convinced of its underlying logic, i.e. that a small marble slab must come from local marble. I’d need to see a good control set, i.e. is that assumption generally true of Palestinian inscriptions on small slabs (as opposed to blocks, for example)? A Greek settler could easily have arrived with his own supply of small slabs, or this one could have been sourced as scrap from damaged or discarded imported marble from some unrelated project (there was a lot of long-distance marble trade all across the ancient Mediterranean). The question is, how precedented is that, is it common? Etc.

I suspect the answer will not help.

We have much better reasons to remove this item from the list of evidence pertaining to Christianity.

“The Nazareth Inscription’s origins may refute ties to Jesus’ resurrection”

I know you’re an expert on this subject, so you’re the best person to ask.

Alas, wildly convoluted speculation is even worse than the Q hypothesis.

We’re going in the wrong direction along the probability scale here. As if we never heard of Ochkam’s Razor or don’t know why it’s a valid instrument.

No more a delusional fool than every scholar in Biblical studies, as they all entertain some crackpot theory they insist should be mainstream. The entire Q hypothesis itself is such, and yet became mainstream. But even then each scholar who writes on Q has their own pet theory as to what was in it, where it was written, its redactional history, and so on. In that context, there is nothing unusual at all about MacDonald here. He is fully mainstream, doing exactly what every mainstreak Q scholar does.

I just point out that if every Q scholar is coming up with completely different answers about Q, we have no reasin to believe any of them have the correct answer. They clearly don’t even have a working method to find out! (This is the point of my entire first chapter in Proving History.)

However, I’m not sure you were paying attention to what he is doing in Two Shipwrecked Gospels. Yes, he wants to use his observations to reach additional connclusions “about” Q, but almost everything he actually does is show how stories about Jesus (particularly in Matthew) are all contrived rewrites of Old Testament narratives. And on that thesis, he is quite right, and his evidence often (just not always) quite good.

His only mistake, really, is in not simply admitting that he’s simply discovered how Matthew composed his expansions to Mark. There is nothing else going on here.

Not a total write off per intertextuality.

I cite the following at “Gospel of Mark (intertextuality)”. Wikipedia.

• MacDonald, Dennis R. (2000). The Homeric epics and the Gospel of Mark. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-08012-4.

“[Per Seneca] Skilled authors were bees that took the best nectar from many blossoms to produce textual honey.” —(p. 6)

[…]

“Like the proverbial bee of ancient rhetoric, Mark harvested nectar from several blossoms — some Jewish and some Greek — and transformed them into gospel honey.” —(p. 96)

And at “Jesus myth theory”. RationalWiki.

• MacDonald, Dennis R. (2012). Two Shipwrecked Gospels: The Logoi of Jesus and Papias’s Exposition of Logia about the Lord. Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). ISBN 978-1-58983-691-4.

“[There is a] profound influence of Jewish Scriptures, especially Deuteronomy, on the Logoi of Jesus [ca. 60-70] . . . [and the Logoi has a] pervasive influence on all three of the Synoptics [Mark ca. 75-80] . . . Paul’s authentic epistles predate the composition of the Logoi of Jesus…” —(p. 543)

I abandonded reading the transcript not half-way through. In writing I’m afraid to me the man comes across as a delusional fool. Is he an actual historian by training or just another theologian in drag?