strongvoicesforward said:
I, and no skeptic for that matter, am under no burden to prove a negative.
Well, this is not the first time we have hit upon this logic flaw. The card has been played before. ( and I am aware of some details behind it, but do not have the resource material with me any longer--I think) [and to clarify, I am specifically saying the the
usage or
application here, is what is flawed.]
To reason that because there is no evidence outside a certain body of evidence within a certain genre of document, that a person written of, spoken about, or alluded to
in that document existed, you are free from having to refute that
such person
did exist, is flawed logic.
You seem to be looking at the wrong point. The task is
NOT to show evidence for Paul's (for example) not having existed, but to show evidence for the evidence in NT and the earliest Christian writings to be false on the general historical level.
In other words, to make any claim that a person named Paul did not pen or have the work that has come down to us dictated, you have to refute the claim within those works that such
IS the case.
And that, my friend, can simply not be done to any satisfactory degree.
I suggest that you acquiesce to that point of view so that we can move on; we are required to rely, a priori, on the general historicity that the documents in question were written by whom they say they had been written by. [the only ones which are known to be doubtful are 1 & 2 Timothy, Hebrews, and 2 Peter]