Yuri Kuchinsky

So you don't know when they were martyred, and you don't know why they were martyred... And yet you know that there was no HJ.

Hmm... OK.

Yuri.

Toto

It's more like - we see no evidence that there were significant early Christian martyrs and we see no evidence of a HJ.

NOGO

Loisy seems to think that the first martyrs were in the year 64 right after Paul's trial.

Like the communists Christians hated the society in which they lived and wished for its destruction. Even if Paul himself went to Rome to stand trial he tells his followers not to bring their disputes to the local authorities for resolution. Basically Roman law and justice was beneath him except to save his own skin.

You can see that in time as more converts were made, this sect of fanatics became a problem and would eventually be persecuted. I am with Nixon on this one (speaking on Vietnam) ... if you are going to give a blow make it a big one (or something like that). Put in the time and effort to knockout the sect before it spreads too far.

Eventually the church did exactly that for many Christian sects.
Pagans simply did not understand what was coming.

John A. Broussard

Yes, definitely. And the Christians killed by the pagan Romans, for whatever reason, were a paltry sum indeed compared to the number killed eventually by other Christians because they didn't adhere to a particular dogma involving a loving god.

Though it may have been a scant satisfaction to those early martyrs, none to my knowledge were killed because Jupiter loved them so much his fan club was just trying to save their souls.

John A. Broussard

I'm not entirely comfortable with that parallel, but there is something to recommend it.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, most--if not all--of the Christian martyrs were killed because they wouldn't do the equivalent of America's pledging allegiance to the flag. All they had to do was to burn incense in honor of the emperor. To pagans with almost as many gods as Catholics have saints, one more stick of incense for one more divinity seemed a trivial performance to partake in. Christians could get around it by buying documents saying they had performed the necessaries.

To the best of my knowledge, a refusal to pledge allegiance to the flag may lead to court cases, loss of a job, or some other ostracizing, but no one's been thrown to the lions because of that refusal--so far. Adult non-conformists can get around it by staying away from baseball games (if that's where the pledge is said.)

badger3k

Actually, the last that I knew, it's illegal to punish someone for not saying the Pledge. If that is correct, then there is always the illegal punishment which people can do, and the ostracizing that you mention.

NOGO

Yes but if refusal is associated with a groing group who call themselves XYZ and who teach their members to repudiate the flag and the allegiance to the nation then the matter is entirely different.

How long with this be allowed to go on? How big will the group be allowed to grow?

Steven Avery

A little comment.. I just want to say I think Yuri has raised a very interesting issue, the type of issue that allows us to view the whole panoply of a-historict/mythicist/skeptic thought while each one struggles to fit various historic evidences into their constructs. And we watch while they offer various approaches, sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory. One emphasizing late source dating, another fabrication, another myths and legends, another Christian interpolation of source material, another possible alternate religious analogies, another simply saying I dunno and/or I don't care.

Yuri seemed to get a smidgen of flak just for raising the questions, and yet such relatively simple questions can often be much more revealing than the big heavy-duty debate stuff. (I feel like I try to do some of that in the "text" realm, the paradigms of scripture text theory, and am often bemused and smiling at the response.)

Shalom,
Praxeus
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic/

Jobar

If you're addressing me with that, Yuri, I cheerfully admit I'm not qualified to give you a proper scholarly answer. I read Quo Vadis? a long time ago, and some of Wells and Doherty, and several Bible translations, and excerpts from numerous others, but I'd not even heard of Loisy until I read this thread. I don't doubt that you have read between ten and a hundred times more than I on this subject.

I have no idea if the early martyrs considered Jesus historical or spiritual; I can see your argument that a HJ believer might be more willing to give up his life in emulation of his lord. However, those early martyrs were ignorant and superstitious barbarians, from my POV. What they believed isn't a factor in whether or not there was actually a living, breathing Jesus, as far as I can see. Their beliefs are almost completely irrelevant to our own opinions today- and given the extreme paucity of the historic record concerning their beliefs, I don't know if we can ever decypher what they thought. (Though here I am quite willing to bow to your superior expertise, if you put forth evidence of which I am unaware, and organize it in a reasonable way.)

Amaleq13

You are mistaken but this has been a painfully long thread so you really cannot be blamed. Yuri was criticized for stating a question that didn't seem to make any sense to anyone actually familiar with the theories of contemporary mythicists and for appearing to ignore any answers that were given that did not match his (faulty) assumptions about the arguments of contemporary mythicists. We subsequently learned that the reason his assumptions about mythicists didn't match up with what mythicists actually think is because he was relying on two non-mythicists and a scholar from a century ago for his understanding.

With regard to his question, Yuri did eventually get more specific here:

"My challenge to the mythicists is to pick out from this list which of them they accept as historical, and which are not historical."

Toto responded directly to the question about the list and he did so as a mythicist citing specific scholars as references.

Rather than continue to directly interact with Toto's response as he indicated he would in the first post linked above (more specific questions were to follow), Yuri then reverted instead to repeating his original request despite having been told by many that it made no sense to them:

"But actually the main point is not merely to say that such and such mythicist says so and so about any specific possible martyr... The main point, rather, is to present a coherent unified picture of how Christianity emerged based on accepting some particular set of martyrs as historical."

Toto then presented a "coherent unified picture of how Christianity emerged" in a single paragraph:

Yuri replied by asserting that Toto’s attempt to answer his question was flawed because "...as soon as one does this, all sorts of inconsistencies and improbabilities begin to emerge in the mythicist alternative history."

Toto asked Yuri to be specific in identifying the specific inconsistencies and improbabilities involved in his description of the emergence of Christianity and Yuri replied:

In summary,

1) Yuri finally asked a specific question.

2) Toto provided specific answers.

3) Yuri changed the question back to the problematic OP.

4) Toto provided a specific answer.

5) Yuri asserted "inconsistencies and improbabilities".

6) Toto asked Yuri to be more specific so that he might respond.

7) Yuri refused and pretended as if Toto had not provided any attempt to answer his question.

As far as I can tell, this is the closest we've has come in this thread to a genuine attempt to conduct a rational discussion of whatever it is Yuri was thinking in the OP but he simply did not follow through. Personally, I found this very disappointing because it seemed as though Toto was actually obtaining some sort of sense out of the quagmire and it appeared as though a rational discussion might result. Unfortunately, Toto seems to have lost interest in pursuing this further and I assume this is because it became clear he was stuck on a gerbil wheel.