Robert Tulip

I had quite a lively conversation with Neil Godfrey at Vridar on the relation between history and science. My view is that reliable historical claims are nested within a scientific worldview, which I define as an approach that relies on evidence and logic as the basis for opinion.

"Compatible with history" strikes me as a less precise and informative statement than "compatible with science". My interest is to renovate Christianity in terms of a moral story that is meaningful today. The central problem is the 'two truths' dogma, the persistent schizoid insistence that truths of revelation can somehow inhabit a separate magisterium from truths of fact. All true statements are compatible. Science is the ground of truth. Compatibility between religion and science is a more forward looking and encompassing statement than compatibility with history.

Chili

I agree with you on this, wherein metaphysics are the underpinnings of religion that so is not exactly science based but is just a step above science that extracts its knowledge from the same source that is called omniscience, i.e truth is.

So it is entirely truth based and for this 'insight' is needed that we called Peter, I guess, to be the rock of faith that gave rise to the seat of Paul to be occupied by a continuum called papacy.

I do not agree with this:
Christ is not the mediator but is both God and Lord God in Christendom as shown in the lineage of Luke (but not in Matthew), that goes past all the ancients right back to God. So Christ has no equal and is God with no second seat of anyone.

Jesus was mediator but not the Christ as mediator. In this sequence of events the name Jesus was 'plucked' out of thin air when Christ was born to be a name for this transition stage wherein he must die to set free the Christ in man now as Christ himself, to which later the name Jesus was a added in recognition of that fact in Christendom.

The name Jesus Christ is to identify his function, first as Christ Jesus and later as Jesus Christ in motion to remove the historic element now used as the transformer of the human mind in Christendom, to which Jesus also said that "you shall do greater things" that could not be possible inside the rigid history that surrounds his origin that is fixed in time.

So now Christ is truth and Jesus is prime mover of that truth.

Cheerful Charlie

We can see that ideas about Christianity have changed over the years. Thomas Jefferson
edited his own version of the gospels, removing the miraculous tales, making Jesus not so much as a divine being as a great teacher. This idea seems to have become common enough today.

We seem to be in an era where for many people they have become cultural Christians, ot the type of superstitous violent Christians of the middle ages, or the era of European heresy hunts and religious wars, but the era of enlightenment tolerate, polite latitudanarian Christians.

A cultural way of life that can live with the idea that the gospel Jesus was rather mythical.

A way of life apparently quite common in Europe, especially the Nordic nations, and deeply disturbig to may American Christians, the bogey man of 'Humanist-Secularism'. One of thhe things that seems to be happening in America is that more and more Americans are becoming indifferent to organized religion, and are dropping out of dogmatic Christianity.
Cultural Christianity on the march.

It looks like we will have a few interesting decades as this all cotinues to develope.

Cheerful Charllie

mountainman

Hi Robert,

Setting aside your dismissive criticism of my ideas, it appears to me therefore that your worldview is science-centric. I don't see a problem with this as such except in the case where you move your focus to problems of history and historical evidence. My take is that those who are doing the business of history have a world-view in which science is eminently applicable and useful but ultimately cannot bound the method of history. In other words I see science in the service of history, and not the other way around.


Well this is only completely natural simply because history and science are two different disciplines, although their spheres of influence obviously overlap and reinforce each other. In science the method is to perform experiments in order to predict outcomes. In history we have the outcome and we need to be able to reconstruct what actually happened. History is basically a massive WHAT-IF machine that uses Popperian falsifiability. I will have to dig out a great definition along these lines later.

But in the linked article you responded:

I tend to agree with this. NG had a problem with the term "historical science" which I will comment on below.

With respect to the field of history I think there is a further corollary to all this. Namely if the New Testament is in historical fact a work of fiction, then it follows that this may be investigated in the historical sense. In other words WHO fabricated the NT, WHERE and WHEN and WHY and HOW. This is an investigation into history, and an investigation which can be served by the scientific disciplines. But it must remain an investigation into the field of history, since ultimately it is within this field that all the evidence rests and it is the re-interpretation of this evidence that is required.

In summary I see that if the historical jesus is to be rejected then a revisionist history, compatible with ALL THE AVAILABLE EVIDENCE, must be sketched in order to surplant and replace the pseudo-historical rubbish that has been preached from pulpits since Nicaea.



RE: your term "Historical science"

IMO Neil is expressing a narrow view which most people examining "Christian origins" adopt by default. Namely that we are dealing with a literary phenomenom and therefore we need to study the literature. While this may be the case, such a view is narrow and restrictive when one approaches the problem from a totally objective investigation into the much broader field of ancient history. Evidence well outside the literary tradition is able to service such a broader investigation.

What I think you MAY mean by "historical science" is just the discipline of "ancient history" conducted in a thorough and objective manner. But I could be wrong. Thanks for the PM btw. As you can see, we may be in agreement on the necessity of expanding this focus on the "Literary Tradition" that features so centrally in "Jesus Studies". We have thousands of figurines discovered for the pagan gods and deified emperors, but we don't have a figurine of Jesus. This fact is not addressed from within the literary study field. ETC. ETC. ETC



εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Chili

Pete, religion is about metamorphosis only and is needed to create the feeling in the believer when it is time to spin his own cocoon. And so it also is not a social club or at least is not supposed to be.

And so what does history have to do with this?

And what does the sun have to do with this?

Robert Tulip

Hi Charlie, thanks for your comments. Your mention of Jefferson somehow reminds me of Schweitzer’s suggestion that every age imagines Jesus in its own image. President Jefferson was a key figure of the scientific enlightenment – inalienable life, liberty and pursuit of all that. So he scissored the material that was incompatible with scientific enlightenment. Science has advanced in the last two centuries, but in some respects our understanding of Jesus has regressed, since we are generally too timid now to reconstruct Christ in our own image. The image today is much more expansive, since Hubble discovered other galaxies. We also grapple with Sagan’s pale blue dot, the Copernican view that human problems don’t amount to a hill of beans, as Bogart put it. I once used this term “latitudinarian” to mean that Europeans and Americans have no concept of the vision of the world south of the equator, since they are biased to say that only what is visible from their latitudes is real, and they cannot see southern stars such as Argo and the Southern Cross. But you are using latitudinarian to mean cultural relativist, the Protagoras rubbish that man is the measure of all things and truth is in the eye of the beholder. Geert Wilders has critiqued this tolerance of intolerance as a capitulation to muslim tyranny. Relativism is for wimps. My experience is that Christians cannot cope with the idea that Jesus might not have been real. When I mentioned this to my pious aunty she totally flipped. I don’t like upsetting old ladies. Their Jesus idea supports their charity work. It is an interesting problem how to retain Bible ethics while exploring how Jesus was constructed as allegory.

We are now part of the third Christian revolution. The first Christian revolution was instigated by Copernicus, and the second was from Darwin. The current revolution, still confined to the internet, is the recognition that Jesus Christ was a myth and not a historical individual. It is disgraceful that the mainstream media censors all discussion of this topic, illustrating how religion is still constrained by irrational psychological blockages.Dogmatic Christians are idiots. The only hope for faith is allegory. Christianity is in an eschatological apocalyptic phase, a recognition that the fall from grace is putting homo sapien on a path to extinction, and that a new paradigm is needed for salvation. This new paradigm requires a scientific analysis of core texts such as the sermon on the mount, the last judgment and the apocalypse.