yalla

I have asked if they believe Thor, Hercules, Narrungdjeri, Ameratsu, Krishna, Mithra, Eostre, Baal......whoever I can think of at the time...were real historical persons.
That gets them saying Christianity is different cos JC WAS real and then I can ask what the evidence for that assertion is and away we go.
I try to slip in references to the "good book''...where does Paul mention Mary/Pontius etc?
I try to get the Synoptic Problem into the conversation and dredge up "let the reader understand". Not one of the Christians involved in about 5 dialogues had any idea of that at all at all.
Basically its use their book against their position. Not difficult.

rlogan

Geez, spin - that's pretty savage.



I dunno clivedurdle. I just learned that when you come out of the gate with "he never existed" and the other side was not prepared for the onslaught that screaming will ensue shortly.

Choosing the timing and venue seems to be important.

Clivedurdle

But the list of didn't exist is pretty long! Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses.....

I can't remember about David and Solomon - what is the evidence there?

Why not add in Jesus?

An emotional reaction is to be expected - same as about the earth going around the sun, and evolution.

The heresy needs to be spoken to get everyone to realise that 'Houston, we have a problem" and for some positive evidence of Jesus' existence to be found, if it can! Otherwise I follow Sherlock Holmes on this!

rlogan

Well, I agree on the list. I think a lot depends on where your "audience" is as far as literal belief in the menu of characters and the preposterous miracles of junior.

If they have bought the whole package then the starting place is very different from that where they have skepticism on a good deal of it already...

Zeichman

I think the differences between the Patriarchs, the pagan deities and Jesus is pretty obvious:
The former served primarily an etiological purpose originally, while the latter is the sole unifying factor of the diverse churches of early Christianity. I think Doherty's biggest weak point is linking all of these different traditions together by means of... what? Why are these sects all identifiably Christian (however one cares to define it)? Why would the Q group have any identification with the martyrological/soterological Jerusalem church or the miracle traditions which went into Mark and John? I'm convinced that Mack provides the most plausable explanation: these are all groups remembering individiual aspects of Jesus' ministry. Doherty's explanation? As far as I could detect, there wasn't one. Instead, we're lead to believe that Christianity arose as a unification of wildly different sects with absolutely no connections to one another.

Correct me if I'm wrong, please.

spin

If you're interested in penetrating the shell, you've gotta grab 'em by the throat. The shell is very thick and they are usually not capable of much reasoning, when they are door-to-door. They're psyched up to handle most things with resilience.

It's a door through which you can examine the attributes of god, and about what one can know about the world.

No, I don't think it's savage. The shock allows you to have a chance at talking to the person, not the persona.


spin

Zeichman

No one? Come on.

Just tell me I overlooked something.

Amaleq13

IIUC, his argument is that the "link" between these disparate sects is a late fabrication to create the illusion of a single tradition.

Again, IIUC, Doherty's position is that they are not all "identifiably Christian" if one carefully examines what they say and avoids reading beliefs expressed elsewhere into them. IOW, one has to apply a fairly non-specific/broad definition of "Christian" to include everyone.

Actually, he addresses Mack's explanation directly in his review of Who Wrote The New Testament? and I believe he argues that it makes more sense to find these different beliefs coming from an esoteric idea (dying/rising redeemer;descending/ascending savior) rather than the historical activities of a single guy.

Zeichman

I'm not sure that Doherty meant that it was a fabrication. He accepts, after all, that Q3 attributed sayings to Jesus. Why connect these documents to each other, anyway?



They are all identifibly "Jesus groups" at some point before their combination into the proto-orthodox Christianity, according to Doherty. Wildly different Jesus groups, but little more so than that which Mack supports.


I'd say that Doherty and Mack are guilty of a couple of the same errors. Neither of them actually argue that Thomas knew Q, Mack merely supposes it and Doherty devotes all of one endnote to it, IIRC. If they did not stem from the same community, then the idea of multiple attestation has to be dealt with. I don't recall Doherty ever dealing with the problem of multiple attestation at all, as he, like I, does not believe that Mark knew Q.

Doherty's objections to Q1 and Q2 stemming from the same group are the main topic of another book, and instead of addressing all of that, he simply dismisses it based on Mack's brief explanation in his overview book. I don't recall ANY explanation from Doherty in his book as to why these two documents would come together. In fact, because he says this,
I am lead to believe that either Doherty has not read Mack's Q book, or is intentionally misleading his readership. Mack's reconstruction of Q makes great use of Q, despite never having argued it. Doherty suggests Mack should do exactly what he did. Regarding Q, I am unconvinced by Doherty's speculation as to why John the Baptist would not be identified as the main character in the Q3 layer. Doherty rightly notes that Q2 seems to be leading up to the idenfication of the Son of Man with JtB, should Jesus have not existed.

Regarding Mark, what are the plausable origins for this group for Doherty? A buncha guys who like giving snappy answers to stupid Pharisees and make Jesus their own miraculous Alfred E. Newman? Doherty identifies the chreia as Cynic-like, yet the he does not believe that Mark knew of Q. Just a coincidence- that's all. Are there non-Christian examples of a Cynic-like thinking style in Judaism contemporaneously? No, instead, Doherty wants us to believe that these stem from groups with no connections to each other. I'm certainly not proposing that all of both Q1 and the Markan Chreia go back to Jesus, but Doherty fails to explain the similarities. And neveryoumind the Markan Q overlaps (notably the interest in JtB, also shared by Thomas). Or the fact that Paul and pseudo-Pauls explain a death which sounds like Jesus' in Mark, despite the fact Doherty does not believe they knew each other (which Mack would also agree with).

I do agree with Doherty that Mack fails to appropriately justify the existence of so many groups which lead into the Markan creation. Like Doherty argues from the epistles, Jesus was almost assuredly not identified a miracle-worker in His days. However, I do think Mack correctly identifies the miracles as an eschatological construct/statement, in addition to a christological one: Jesus as the final, ultimate and eschatological prophet. I fail to be convinced that the miracles attributed to Jesus were originally performed by members of the proto-Markan community. And why relate the miracles to members of the Jerusalem community, with whose traditions Mark seems to be conspicuously otherwise unconcerned with?


For the Jerusalem community, Doherty fails to convince me that Paul equated the risen Christ with the Father, though he is right in criticizing Mack for claiming the Pillars were only a "Jesus community" (for which evidence is clearly missing). He clearly distinguishes between the two in the greetings in his uncontested epistles. While I speculate that Paul had I higher christology and soterology than the Pillars, that Peter and the others would identify Jesus as a salvic martyr is nothing out of line for first-century Judaism (cf. 4 Maccabees), and the raising of his status to supra-human post-ressurection, as Paula Friedrickson (sp?) pointed out to Doherty, is also visible in first-century Judaism. Dohertyargued that Paul uses Psalms which undoubtedly refer to YHVH as "LORD" are reinterpreted as referring to Jesus, means that Paul identified the risen Christ as the Father. However, Mark does the same thing with Psalm 110, and almost no critical scholar would believe that Mark's christology is anywhere near that high. Paul was not, in my opinion, infringing on monotheism by expounding what seems to clearly be a subordinationist theology.


My question is, what reason, however speculative, can be used to explain the eventual unification of these specific groups which Doherty identifies if Jesus was not a historical person?

mata leao

The overwhelming majority of both secular and nonsecular experts sophisticated in middle eastern studies support the position that Jesus was a historical person.