Is Jesus History? John Dickson discusses at Georgia Institute of Technology 

The whole world "all at once"? Or in batches?

BecomingMike Are you seriously arguing this or did you not hear what he was saying? "We've known where Siloam was for ages... They found some ancient steps, those Herodian steps, which clearly dated to the first half of the first century and they found the largest Jewish bathing pool ever found. It is without doubt the pool of Siloam; it was just deeper than they thought to look." His claim is easily verifiable, look it up most anywhere and it will say the same things, even Wikipedia. And be careful the next time you say something is "terribly and stupidly unreasonable", it might come right back at you.

Vitold Chernatinski Yea, I did hear that. Are you seriously wholely unaware of the minimalist, maximalist debate?

How does the minimalist/maximalist debate prove your point? Also, how much of a minimalist are you? Because if you are a true minimalist, then you can't even prove that the universe truly exists in the first place. The evidence from the pool of Siloam is just one of many evidences that point to the Bible being based on real history. Why are you treating the Bible with such an extraordinary degree of skepticism that most actual historians don't take?

Theo Mast You are right that I don't know much about the min/max debate, nor have I studied all that much about the fields of archeology and history. But regardless, I am still skeptical of your view that most historians who deal with the Bible are extraordinarily skeptical. You could give me a list, but that doesn't make them a majority. And even if there is a majority, that doesn't automatically make them right. One clarification I could really use is what you think Biblical minimalism means exactly; I can't seem to find a good, all-encompassing definition on the internet. Assuming minimalism is simply a hyper-critical approach to Biblical archeological evidence, as you seem to use it, why arbitrarily stop there? Must only evidence dealing with the Bible have such a high standard? Why not everyday existence? Despite demanding an extraordinary degree of certainty, you ironically seem to be arbitrary with it when it comes to other things. Certainty quite clearly deals with truth, and truth is clearly the realm of philosophy. I am also curious, exactly what "facts" of history do you accept? E.g., do you accept that Abraham Lincoln was actually assassinated? Or that Julius Caesar really existed? Perhaps they are no better than myth as well. Since your demands for the pool of Siloam are so high, even compared to the evidence we have, I don't see any reason why you would believe other such things no matter how much circumstantial evidence there is. I would hate to use our court system if minimalists were in charge: nothing would ever be proven and nothing would be fixed. Minimalism aside, I find it hard to believe that you would actually believe that the coincidences for the archeological site being the pool of Siloam aren't strong enough. Whats wrong with simply accepting things as they seem to be until new evidence comes along? I have no intention of derailing our topic, so you can take this as a bonus: Not only can we not prove that the universe exists, but we can't even prove that "I think therefore I am" is true. How can we know that our personal existence is not some New-Age-y "Greater Consciousness" expressing itself? Or the random fluctuation of quantum mechanics in a multiverse? As far as I understand it, the chance that a brain with your false memories would temporarily pop into existence is far more likely than our seemingly fine-tuned universe being a reality.

Vitold Chernatinski _"Why are you treating the Bible with such an extraordinary degree of skepticism that most actual historians don't take?"_ Are you kidding me? There's essentially a consensus among historians today that all the patriarchs are myths for example. However, beyond historians being extremely skeptical about the bible as a historical source you also have a historical phenomenon called "biblical archaeology", which involved going to the middle east, grabbing a shovel and digging till you found a ruin, then you'd stick a biblical label on it and say you found some ancient biblical site. Virtually all of that has been overturned as serious historians have come in and tried to create a global picture of the history of the region. This doesn't mean that everything the bible says is historically false, for example Jerusalem almost certainly existed. =) It does mean that we're not dealing with a historical document in a sense even remotely connected with the modern sense of the word though. The archaeology of course mostly has to do with claims in OT. There's nothing substantiating any significant event in NT. And worse, there's massive internal evidence of the gospels being creative reinterpretations of OT, being a kind of religiously motivated allegory. One example of this is how Matthew describes Jesus riding into Jerusalem on two donkeys. This absurd image of course does not correspond to a historical event, but we also know why it exists in Matthew - it's because Matthew was written by a guy who had OT in one hand while writing his gospels and he failed to understand OT idioms. In this case using repetition to emphasize things. So Matthew then made up his ridiculous narrative to fit what he thought OT said and claimed he had a perfect fulfillment of prophecy. This methodology may be viewed as that of being a lying conman today, but it may actually have had a religious justification as the Jews actually have a tradition of creatively reinterpreting their scriptures to make points about current events. The entire gospels can be seen as allegories in this light and perhaps they were just misinterpreted as history by later gentile Christians far away from Jewish culture. In any case, it's clear that "made up" is an appropriate description for the gospels. Mostly, it's the motivation that's somewhat unclear and it's really not a very interesting question if they happen to be mentioning actual historical sites or not. It doesn't lend the stories any credibility if they do given how transparent the fabricated Jesus is.