Reply #30: Not it isn't. It's called historical methodology.

[HamdenRice]

It's taught in all the best history departments around the world as a way to recover histories of people who don't leave written records. To call Van Onselen's work anecdotal is borderline insane. He spent 10 years working on the book and interviewed hundreds of people, matching their recollections against each other, and against the written records in government archives.

Obviously Kas Maine existed. Half of the small core of advanced graduate research students who worked with van Onselen interviewed Kas at one time or another, and there are hundreds of photos and thousands of hours of recorded conversations deposited with the University of Witwatersrand.

As for my research, I was fortunate to find that between 1910 and 1940 there were dozens of court cases about the issues I was studying, and hundreds of rural Africans were brought to court to testify and their testimonies were translated and transcribed into English and Afrikaans. There were also Christian missionaries who wrote memoranda about their long experiences in these areas and government bureaucrats who wrote about what was happening. The facts adduced in those written testimonies and memoranda closely matched the facts that certain elderly people told me in my tape recorded interviews, which meant that I had a very high degree of confidence in the facts my informants told me that were not covered in the court cases.

That's called historical methodology.

That's how we write histories of non-literate societies around the world. You may think that this methodology doesn't meet your standards, but the historians who wrote the Oxford History of South Africa and the Cambridge History of Africa, as well as many historians of rural America and Europe disagree with you. On this point, I'll have to go with the Oxford and Cambridge folks.

The main documentary evidence of the historicity of Jesus is the synoptic gospels. Atheist fundamentalists often dismiss the gospels because they are "in the Bible" and are "the gospels," without realizing that at the time they were written, there was no Christian Bible or gospels -- they were simply written records of oral memory of events of a few years prior. Because they agree on certain non-supernatural factual assertions, the overwhelming majority of historians of antiquity agree that there was an historical Jesus.