MrMacSon

such as ??

in what aspects??

what do you mean by "criterion of authenticity"?? with respect to what, exactly??

metacristi

Well I think it's a huge difference between saying that Christianity appeared in a specific judaic context in the 1st century (very probable apocalypticism and the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead is the main cause) and the version involving strong syncretism, euhemerization, the idea of a dying messiah pre date the beginning of the 1st century and so on. It's one to say that in the 2nd and 3rd centuries Jesus was depicted as osiris, adonis (the hellenization of Christianity) and totally another to claim that the dying and raising gods are the models for Jesus.

It's one to say that the New Testament Studies remained without a valid methodology and totally another things to accept that the conjunction of more criterions of authenticity can nonetheless give us strong heuristics (happily the situation is not so bad as some claim).

It does not seem to me that the changes will be trivial, even in textual criticism there are enough many claims of interpolation made by mythicists (not supported by a majority of scholars at the moment). Probably you wanted to say that many will have to change their works. Except mythicists of course.


Precisely that. And Paul talks also of Jesus blood and many others. I think mythicists will have to 'patch' a lot more of passages in Paul epistles, each time when one will point out that they are not really talking of a celestial Jesus. Really there is too much mental gymnastics and ad hocness here, basically on a par with the epicycles which had to be added constantly to the Ptolemaic astronomy.


Well for me it offered a much stronger argument than any of the parallelisms with dying and raising gods. It is far from being weak. And think how strong will become when Bayesianism will show that Jesus existed


This is rara avis among mythicists unfortunately. Ehrman never hit the authors he considered serious as mythicists do usually with him ('officially sucks' and so on, it was Carrier and his lack of intellectual modesty which made be doubt even more his 'genial breakthroughs'; now i tend to agree with Ehrman that it is even dubious to talk of a general category of dying and raising gods). I read for example that the authors of 'Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth' engaged more in ad hominems than in substantial arguments. The approach in my view should be totally different even at the level of epistemology: one can made a reasonable enough argument that Jesus was a myth but a paradigm shift is far from being rational at the moment (more or less what Dawkins said). Maybe in the future.

Vorkosigan

No, actually, mythicism really calls for a single revision to NT methodology: the relaxation of the assumption that the NT texts contain historical data about a historical figure named Jesus who is the founding figure of Christianity. That is an assumption built into the criteria and other approaches used in NT studies. Once you give up that assumption and attempt to get the texts to demonstrate the existence of such a person using rational methodologies used in historical and literary research, then you fail. HJ studies ride on that assumption.

I used to think that about Ehrman until he came out with this line about Aramaic going back to Jesus.

Vorkosigan

outhouse

Not exactly.

Anything and everything that can dispove the historical Jesus at any cost.


It is not built in as much as the most plausible explantion of the evidence we are left with.


Every attempt at a replcement hypothesis that explains the evidence we are left with falls short to the point of laughable.

spin

Claims of "most plausible" are purely subjective and of little value until you can give substance to the claim. Plausibility is not a sufficient condition for historical research as most works of fiction aim to be plausible. You need more than plausibility and your personal feeling as to what is most plausible. You need..., ummm..., e v i d e n c e , not rubbish criteria of christian hermeneutics.

It's certain that the stuff you support is laughable. That's just what you'd expect from people who don't know much about history because they learned their stuff in seminaries rather than in history departments at universities. This is amateur hour, when biblical scholars without training pretend to do history.

yalla

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_source




"In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called original source or evidence) is an artifact, a document, a recording, or other source of information that was created at the time under study. It serves as an original source of information about the topic ......In scholarly writing, an important objective of classifying sources is to determine the independence and reliability of sources.In contexts such as historical writing, it is almost always advisable to use primary sources if possible, and that "if none are available, it is only with great caution that [the author] may proceed to make use of secondary sources"

MrMacSon

and, secondary sources are writings about primary sources; with references.

Without a proper/true primary source, in good context, something cannot ought not be called a secondary source.

Toto

But where's the political revolution? This is just the normal scholarly revision of theories.

You accept this on faith?

I cannot think of a single claim of interpolation that is made my a mythicist that is not also made by at least one historicist.

You act as if the Pauline letters are historical objects that are entitled to some sort of presumption of validity. I do not share this assumption.


Nah - it was weak and undeveloped.

I think you need more punctuation and paragraph breaks there, since I can't quite follow this - but it appears you are just giving your subjective feelings - which are ok, but not persuasive.

Take care.

aa5874

What?? Please!! You display a lack of knowledge of the Pauline Corpus.

Paul talks FAITH. Paul talks of a resurrected Jesus. Paul talks of mythology. Paul claimed Jesus was a Spirit and the Creator.

Paul was seen of Jesus AFTER he was raised from the dead.

1. 1 Corinthians 15:17 KJV2. 1 Corinthians 15:45 KJV3. Romans 10:9 KJV4. Colossians 1:16 KJV5. Galatians 1:1 KJVApologetics writers of antiquity that mentioned the Pauline Corpus also admit Jesus was born of a Ghost.

See ALL writings of antiquity that make reference to the Pauline Corpus and the nature of Jesus and NONE will claim anywhere that Jesus was human with a human father.

There is simply no evidence that the Pauline Jesus had a human father.

For over a thousand years the Jesus cult preached and documented that their Jesus was the product of a Holy Ghost.

The HJ of Nazareth is without a shred of corroboration.

The Jesus cult preached a Jesus of Faith--a Jesus that was born WITHOUT sexual union.

Justin's First Apolgy 21Jesus of Nazareth is pure unadulterated Myth--Pure Faith.

Jesus of Nazareth is a product of Jewish, Greek and Roman Mythology.

Grog

I would recommend that you move beyond bland assertion and into some kind of evidence-based form of argument. Let us see your "weighted arguments" instead of making an unsupported assertion. If you did that, maybe you could convince us. Why you think that your weighting of the arguments should hold more water than our own (many of us have "weighted the arguments" and come to different conclusions), is, for the moment beyond me. From Hair, "What makes you, 1968, so damn superior?"