ApostateAbe

I won't be able to give a good answer to that question until I know which quote from Paul you are referring to, but my guess until then is that Jesus really did not make that much of an impact on Jewish society while he was still alive. It certainly fits my own model of the origin of Christianity. That is the sort of detail, if only speculative, that mythicists need to explain the evidence.

Steven Carr

Jesus didn't seem to make much of an impact on Christians either.

At any rate, the Epistle of Jude and the epistle of James talk about Adam, Enoch, Moses, Job, Sodom, Gomorrah - anybody except Jesus.

ApostateAbe

You'll have to explain what you mean. I count exactly six mentions of "Jesus Christ" in the epistle of Jude, considerably many since it is so short. I count two of them in the epistle of James, which I suppose is relatively few considering its length.

Toto

Nonsense. You have lots of choices.

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Mythicists do not need to find a hypothetical person, other than the authors of the texts.

This is absolute nonsense. If there is no history, there is no history.

So far, you seem to have a built in belief that your theory explains the evidence best, based on ad hoc criteria that you have invented. This is what sounds like an intellectual dead end to me.

ApostateAbe

Mythicists do not need to find a hypothetical person other than the authors of the texts, you say--and yes, that's right, absolutely, and I didn't ask you to do so. I said that you need to find the history behind the mythology, and that is what it is all about. You can criticize the arguments and evidence in favor of the historical Jesus theory all day long, but such criticism will do little if anything if there is not a better way to explain the evidence. That is what Hoffman is telling you, that is what McGrath has written, and that is what I have been telling you endlessly.

aa5874

But, that is exactly what a mythicist expects.

You won't find any historical sources external of apologetics where Jesus had an impact on Jewish society.

The NT authors claimed Jesus had a massive impact on Jewish society and that Jesus had massive crowds following him on a daily basis and teaching and feeding thousands of people.

Even after the supposed ascension of Jesus, according to Acts, the assumed apostles continued to use the name of Jesus to convert thousands and Paul supposedly had Churches all over the Roman Empire and visited the Churches in Jerusalem.

Mr 6:44 - Mr 8:9 - Ac 2:41 - Ac 4:4 - But, just as the mythicists expected the supposed Jesus and his thousands upon thousands of followers had no impact whatsoever on Jewish society based on the writings of Philo and Josephus. None of these writers wrote about a Jewish man who was worshiped as a God by thousands of Jews.

But they mentioned that Jews do not worship men as God and it was also mentioned that one Jesus was declared a mad man for saying Woe unto Jerusalem

Jesus the son of Ananus the madman had more impact on Jewish society than Jesus, the offspring of the Holy Ghost.

And that is expected by mythicists.

Jesus had no impact because he was not in Jewish society , he had no thousands of followers before the death of Tiberius.

HJers need to explain why Jesus went from HERO inside-TO-ZERO outside the NT and Church writings.

Mythicists can explain. Jesus was really ZERO.

Toto

What history? We have the writers and the texts. The texts are the product of the writers' inspiration / imagination / hallucinations.

That is not what McGrath or Hoffmann have written. McGrath has just lobbed insults at mythicists because they are not part of the NT in-group. (Actually, I got tired of reading his drivel, so he might have said something more.) Hoffmann in contrast has virtually admitted that the mythicists have a strong case, but has intimated that he thinks a better case for historicism can be constructed, although it needs to be fleshed out by better methods than have been used so far. I don't think that McGrath and Hoffmann have much in common with each other.

Besides, you cannot maintain that historicism is the default until mythicism makes a better case, can you? Why isn't mythicism the default position until the historicists actually explain all the problems in their case and come up with a consistent picture of who the historical Jesus was?

You seem to forget that you started out just comparing mythicists to creationists, without seeming to understand much about either.

Zaphod

Really?! :constern02:


Can you point out any Biblical scholar who gets his paycheck from a Christian institution who is a MJ'er? Can you point out any Biblical scholar who gets his paycheck from a Christian institution who has even maintained that the MJ and the HJ are equally plausible?

Can you name any Biblical scholar who gets his paycheck from a Christian institution, who has ever said what you just stated above, that "Jesus is not presumed to be historical" ? Just one?

ApostateAbe

That would be a good start. Just flesh it out. Give the best guesses for who those writers were, or at least their rough profiles, the motivations for writing what they did, and how the writings or spoken myths were possibly communicated in their original forms. Make your decisions based on the evidence. See if it is more plausible than the most popular historical Jesus theories in secular scholarship. Send it to Rene Salm and claim $1000, then send it to the Journal for the Study of the New Testament for peer review, see it published, and become a celebrated revolutionary figure of critical scholarship. Well, you don't have to do all of that, but the point is that you need a theory with details and greater plausibility than the competition. You can't just settle on "inspiration / imagination / hallucinations" and pretend that is enough. If Jesus never existed, then the beginnings of Christianity have left clues that can be accounted for with a few educated guesses.
McGrath made the same point I am talking about in one of his deliriously insulting rants against mythicists, and I think it was his last one. He said that mythicists need to build their own case rather than focus on poking holes in the established theory. Because of that, he made yet another comparison to creationists.
There is no default position. We should simply go with the explanations that best fit the evidence. Throughout history, there have been characters that are apparently fictional or myth, and other characters that are apparently historical, and sometimes it isn't necessarily easy to choose between one or the other. Skeptics of a historical Jesus tend to treat the non-existence of Jesus as the default position, they project that their opponents must be assuming that a historical Jesus is the default position, and the projections come from either themselves or from Christian apologists. Either way, it is a fundamentally bad way of thinking, because it is dogmatic. In a field where the evidence is as fundamentally subjective and ambiguous as in this field, there is no way to strike down a "default" position.
I know. I decided to stop making the comparison, because mythicists are only more likely to miss my intended point when I do.

ApostateAbe

No, I can't, but I wasn't referring to Christian institutions. If we were including those people in the discussion, then, yes, Jesus is presumed to be historical much more often than Jack and the Beanstalk is presumed to be mythical, just because those idiots presume that the current Protestant Bible is absolutely flawless. There is a large sector of New Testament scholarship in academia, often funded by the public, where the established methodology is that of Biblical criticism, not dogma. The Biblicists don't have a place in New Testament scholarship, and I don't include them in the discussion unless I want to make a degrading analogy.