Answering Useful Charts on Moses and Criteria of Historicity

Answering Useful Charts on Moses and Criteria of Historicity · Historicity of Moses, continued

Did Moses Exist? | Applying the Historical Method
19th Feb 2021 | UsefulCharts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptYz-Vu0dxY

I

0:42 What evidence is available for each religious figure outside religious tradition?

What's historic about that question?

Religious traditions make contradictory statements and therefore in a majority of cases false statements about the invisible. But we do not see how they make all that many contradictory statements or all that many obviously false statements on historic events.

Therefore looking outside religious tradition is fairly pointless, as a test. And especially if you mean outside all religious traditions, since all traditions from back then are religious. Or if you mean looking outside all traditions merely at artefacts and texts cut off from such, since it is tradition that immediately differentiates Lord of the Rings as a novel of fiction from Declaration of Independence as not an essay of mere opinion, but an act historically initiating a system of law and a legal body.

For both, you have the original manuscript (even if you don't do that for Red Book of Westmarch). For both, you have internal evidence for taking it seriously, and also some internal evidence for taking it for flights of fancy (orcs in the one, idealism in the other). But you have external evidence from precisely tradition that Tolkien meant his work for entertainment, and Washington, Jefferson et al. meant theirs as a basis for a historical decision encompassing 13 states of actually living persons, either integrating them into US, or exiling them to Canada, or killing them.

II

2:00 None of the tests that the scientists made would have been anywhere near conclusive unless one had had a tradition of Richard III dying and getting buried in that location and that year, and of his being related to such and such other people.

Option A < = Tradition.

III

3:17 Babylonic cuneiform = tradition (since narrative).

The other evidences depend on tradition.

Portraits? We have tradition saying those ones were Alexander son of Philip of Macedon as opposed to a fictionalised very late rendering of Homeric Alexander son of Priam of Troy (supposing we have any portrait that says in so many letters "Alexander") and we have traditions about the actual people doing the portraits.

Similar observations may be made about coins. What says those coins do not represent a purely non-physical deity? Tradition.

Option B < = Tradition.

IV

6:14 Yes, this is why I prefer Gospels over Surah 5 when it comes to Jesus.

Now, here is a little further problem : how do you determine when a text was written?

Again, main answer is Tradition.

V

7:06 Literary tropes are of two types.

Verbal ones and content ones. Neither conclusively argues fictionality.

Historical reality certainly can coincide with literary tropes, and with historical realities that would involve God's revelation, it would even be surprising if they didn't.

Presence of literary tropes does not trump tradition of historicity.

Any pre-modern texts of history were more of stories than analyses of static conditions or complex non-obvious causalities for changes. These genre tropes do not have monopoly of factual history.

VI

7:40 My dear, you have revealed sufficiently to show you do not believe Moses as portrayed in the Torah is a historic figure accurately portrayed.

I come to remember John 5:46.

Jews not believing Jesus is Messiah and Lord God? Well, no surprise they ditch Moses as well!