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A work of fiction probably doesn't accurately report what some alleged brown/olive skinned dude thought

Let me guess, if I say that the Bible is not a work of fiction you’re going to say “I never said the literal words ‘the Bible is a work of fiction’”?

Dunno. Never read it. You do you. Praise jeebus

I heard guys can walk on water and turn water into wine tho. Sounds cool.

Right see this is why you’re a dishonest piece of garbage. You can’t stand by anything you say so you hide behind implication and just asking questions.

For what it’s worth, the Bible is not a work of fiction because it’s an anthology. There are multiple books in the Bible. Some of them are actually letters written to real people about real things, so those just can’t be fiction. Others are fake letters written to fake people, those could probably be better understood as forgeries rather than works of fiction.

So if someone writes a letter to Santa Claus that makes it non fiction?

Awesome, cool. Never knew that about your bible. Never cared about it. Keep reading. Keep believing. Praise.

wtf are you going on about?

you're just a lying scumbag, i never wanted any money from you - i knew you'd never see it from my perspective, that's why i said donate something to the human fund you absolute moron

If they think Santa Claus is real, and they write a letter to him asking him for stuff, that would obviously not be a work of fiction. If they thought Santa Claus was not real and wrote to him as a way of mimicking real letters, it would be a work of fiction.

I don’t think that a letter is inherently one genre or another, and I’m not sure if experts on literature consider all letters to fall into the genre of literature.

But by the way, Paul is considered by the vast majority of scholars to be a real person, and the authentic letters of Paul are thought to also have been written to real people, so it’s not exactly the best analogy.

Where did I say I believe in the Bible?

Actually I explicitly said that the words in the Bible attributed to Jesus are not likely to have come from Jesus, so I’m not sure what even indicated I believe in the Bible.

Liar!!!! You believe in the Bible and all its tellings. The onus is not on me to prove it you dumb **** liar.

Sure, and I already did that. So that was easy enough. As on the other topic of illegal immigration, not sure why you commented if you don’t actually know anything about the topic.

Yes, not a good analogy but I'm sure you got my opinion.

Yeah I get what you’re saying. What I would caution against is trying to see ancient texts as neatly falling into the genres of literature we know today. Although there are some ancient historians that took great care to try to make their works as accurate as possible, even those in the nonfiction genre of historiography would take certain liberties that we would not take today in modern academic writing.

That doesn’t mean it makes those works more excusable for inaccuracies, quite the opposite it would mean that we should just expect that a lot of what goes on in ancient historiographies isn’t going to have the same precision and accuracy as modern historiography.

But then there are clearly works of literature in the Old Testament such as the psalms that aren’t serving the purpose of history. It’s worship poetry. Poetry that sometimes tries to convey opinions about real events and sometimes doesn’t. And there is the attempts at writing down oral tradition and mythology, often for apologetic or pastoral reasons that don’t fit neatly into the camp of fiction either, such a Genesis, Deuteronomy, Exodus…

Yeah, especially when the writer's goal is promoting a new religion.

If we want to isolate the gospels as works of attempted ancient historiography, we should definitely take into account their polemical underpinnings. The point of accurately classifying them into the right genre isn’t to try to lend them credibility, it’s to try to understand what rhetorical devices are being used.

The scholarly consensus is that the four gospels are works written by educated Greek speakers trained in varying degrees in Greek rhetorical practices, that had varying levels of training in the Greek Septuagint. Aside from their historiographical and rhetorical training, they also each had a unique thesis on Christianity, which is what makes them distinct. Seeing it all as a contiguous work of fiction rather than allowing the authors to be evaluated on their own works and what theses they were trying to advance can lead to a misunderstanding of what the author(s) are trying to say.

update

I suspect a lot of what we accept as "true" about history prior to modern communication and mass education probably aren't actually true. Can you imagine how different the "truth" would be if we were a Bronze Age (or whatever) society and the Trump administration controlled a tiny minority of literate people, and dictated to them what to write the truth was?

And situations like this were probably common for most of history.

You were not willing to take action on a bet, but were willing to take the terms of winning the bet here under the assumption that what I initially said about the posts were incorrect. In the quoted bit (yes I cut out a bit, the rest is unnecessary. Yes I am cherry picking this bit from your rant, your walls don't provide any meat and tend to drag on forever.) you say exactly what you said you didn't say. I don't know how you can look at your post and these posts and interpret them any other way

Glad you don't have any outstanding action in this forum. I'm not saying what occurred was a scam. I'm saying you're a liar

Fiction and non fiction are not always clear distinctions in ancient literature. Like the earliest biographies of Alexander the Great, which undoubtedly describe real events, also take place in a world where soldiers have divine visions before battle eclipses seem to happen all the time before major events etc.

It depends on what you’re talking about. In general historians aren’t just taking ancient sources at their word, they have criteria for something being better attested than other things. And there’s other evidence that you can use other than textual evidence, such as artifacts, architecture, human remains, and trash. The strength of these inferences is going to depend on the volume of data we have, and generally the further back you go the worse the data are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Musl...

And obviously contemporary political realities also play some role in determining what history is "true."

For example, for the "history" of Arabia the Koran and other religious texts are used as primary historical source material. But if you dig into the history of how those documents actually came to be, you realize there is as little chance any of this is as true as the Old Testament is.

Could you imagine if you went to look up the history of the Levant, and Wikipedia used Genesis and Exodus as the main source material?

But in this case (and many others) political realities make any serious historical exercise impossible.

I didn’t see any citations of the Koran in what you linked.

There is no citations at all. Wikipedia just accepts as "truth" the gospel from religious texts. There is no anthropology, no archaeology, no forensic history, no study of non religious texts. Nothing.

The main text documenting the Life of Mohamed and early Islam and essentially the history of Arabia circa 600-800 was written in the 800s, which itself was based off an earlier "lost" manuscript, which itself was based off of oral traditions.

No ****ing way in hell you can play that many layers of telephone over centuries (with contemporary politics of the time playing a huge role in what is said and why) and expect to come up with anything resembling the truth of what happened.

That Wikipedia article states the first Islamic State was created in Medina in 622. There is no cites, because there is no real history documenting this. Just religious texts written decades if not centuries later, based off oral traditions.

We have no ****ing clue what was actually going on in Arabia until very recent times. As any honest examination of history has been completely blocked for political/religious reasons. It is the equivalent of using the Old Testament as the main historical source document of the Levant up until Roman times.

There were over 100 references, none of them being the Koran, at least not as the source that Wiki is citing. I’m not sure if it’s indicative of scholarly consensus or not as it’s not an area I’ve had much interest in. If you say that our earliest extant sources come from a couple hundred years after, that’s not unbelievable to me, but I don’t know if it’s true.

I can’t comment on the political situation in academia surrounding Islam but I find it dubious that it would cause academics to simply republish in whole statements from the Koran and the Hadiths as if they were facts, because there is already a good amount of disagreement in the Muslim world on how to interpret them and which hadiths to accept anyway. Also there will be scholars of the Middle East that specialize in different time periods, including pre-Muslim scholarship, so getting them all to agree on the context surrounding the rise of Mohammed and Islam seems unlikely prior to evaluating the data.