gurugeorge

If one could be confident that it was "hardly controversial" because a thorough investigation of the matter had been made as the very foundation of the field of study, that would be fine, who could complain?

But this little bit of intellectual legerdemain you indulge in here:

where you slyly try an co-opt the JP as an attempt to do this very thing by begging the question (equating scholarship with HJ biblical scholarship, the validity of which comparison is the very point at issue), only goes to prove my point. Don't think we don't notice these things, we've got your number

No matter how you try and spin it, there simply have been no serious attempts from the field of HJ biblical scholarship, to prove the existence of this "Jesus" fellow. Trying to pooh-pooh away the burden of proof the way you do only digs you deeper into the hole. Something that's necessary to give the field a firm foundation and the intellectual respectability it obviously craves just isn't there.

I'll say here again what Doherty has said many times: if it's so bloody obvious that this "Jesus" fellow existed, if the evidence is so strong, so compelling, it should be no more than the work of a an afternoon to demonstrate it.

(And as for your no-money-in-it point, that's patently ridiculous, it's precisely scholars who write about the Jesus question who make shitloads of money, because at the end of the day it's a question everyone's interested in.)

So come on then, where's the argument? Show us the money!

JoeWallack

JW:
If I understand your position on HJ/MJ debate, it is:

1) The scholarly consensus is HJ.

2) It is the responsibility of scholarly MJ to deal with the argument behind 1).

3) Doherty is not addressing 1) in a scholarly way but is instead only presenting his argument for MJ.

4) HJ scholarship is justified in ignoring Doherty because of 1) - 3).

Is this what your are saying Zeichman?



Joseph

Zeichman

Apparently mostly just people who are not in the field and have only a cursory familiarity with NT studies. It's telling how few people like Doherty or Price out there who have clearly investigated the issues and are capable of some name-dropping.

I'm sorry, I honestly have no idea what your point is here. If it's important to your point, can you rephrase it?

Regardless, if JP is not representative of NT scholarship (which more or less constitutes HJ scholars), then I think your claim is unfalsifiable and probably invalid.

You mean no books approximately the same length as anything MJ scholars have written? Then you'd be wrong. If that's not what you mean, then I guess MJers have not attempted anything serious, either.
Conversely, if there is no evidence, then MJers should have no problems convincing the academy.

This is totally reversible and could just as easily apply to MJers. Besides, you're getting kind of close to a conspiracy for money, here.

Pick up the fall 2007 issue of the Journal of Higher Criticism and then you'll see some of my argument.

Kind of. Scholarship is largely ignoring Doherty because of #3; he doesn't do peer review, his books are written for popular consumption, he is working largely online, he is self-published, etc. I'm not saying these are great reasons for ignoring him, but if he wants attention from the mainstream, there are obvious ways of rectifying the problems. I think there's an element of #2, where Doherty's book largely sets up an alternate tradition-history for some early Christian communities, but does not refute existing opinions, let alone in an exhaustive way. With such grandiose claims, I think it is understandable why one would want him to be more all-encompassing with his criticism. Given what a small portion of the academy buys into BL Mack's work on Q, Knox's proto-Lukan suggestion, Kloppenborg's work on Q, etc. he should probably address the mainstream and not just fringe elements which are well-known to be problematic.

JoeWallack

JW:
Let me cut right to the point/problem. I think a big part of your complaint is that Doherty does not directly address the argument for HJ. Not just that his methods are amateurish (according to you). So regardless of the quality of his argument for MJ, as long as he does not directly discredit the argument for HJ he will not be professionally persuasive (according to you).

Here's the problem, what exactly is the argument for HJ? Where can we find a good summary? Can you provide the main points here? Right now this argument for HJ looks Mythical to me until someone can demonstrate a basic, consensual and persuasive argument. What exactly do you expect Doherty to respond to?



Joseph

Zeichman

I would prefer to avoid an adjectival professional/amateurish dichotomy here for a number of reasons not worth delineating (not least of which is my own status as a student). I think you're misunderstanding me a bit. You're definitely right in that proving the historical Jesus is a low priority, and that there doesn't really exist a "definitive" proof/case for it. My criticism is his characterization of early Christian communities and their belief systems. Doherty addresses only a few trajectories of early Christian history, those generally regarded as dubious, already. Again, such a far-reaching thesis call for far-reaching evidence. Picking Mack's work (which is generally shrugged off for various reasons, whether well-considered or otherwise) and going from there is not a great idea if he's looking to convince scholarship. Picking someone far closer to the mainstream would be ideal for arguing against the academy. I feel like I'm repeating myself a bit. I hope I've made myself clear.

Obviously, if I had argued it the way you suggested, there would be the huge problem that you pointed out. Who knows? Maybe soon there will be a definitive case for Jesus' historicity.

Probably the closest that there is to definitive cases for Jesus' historicity is work concerning the theologies/christologies of earliest Christian communities. I think it's safe to say that if one could demonstrate they all believed in a recently-lived historical Jesus (or all believed in a mythical Jesus), the case would be pretty well closed. The fact is, scholars see the historicity of Jesus assumed at nearly every corner; the assumptions speak far louder than explicit in terms of beliefs (think about the assumptions behind Bill O'Reilly's recent comments about that restaurant; his comments were nothing but complimentary, but what his assumptions were quite the opposite).

spin

You should therefore be able to see that the term "historical Jesus" means little more than the Jesus who one believes really existed. It's a modern tarting up of an old belief, which has shed some of its more obvious problems, and little to do with history at all.

Clearly mythicism doesn't appeal to you, so where does that leave you, Zeichman?

Seen any signs for such a case (or wonders)?


spin

gurugeorge

No, what I'm saying is, nobody could reasonably complain if the matter had been investigated thoroughly. The reason people are complaining (whether they're "in the field" or not) is because there's no evidence of NT scholarship having taken the matter very seriously. Which you admit.

IOW you seem want to eat your cake and keep it: on the one hand you admit that nothing really has been done, but you try and make out that the reason it hasn't been done is because it's just so goshdarned obvious. But if it's so goshdarned obvious, why surely that must be because some work has been done on the question? Otherwise, we're not talking about "obviousness" which is the result of a serious intellectual endeavour, but "obviousness" that's the result of nothing more than a monumental exercise in question-begging.

Roger Pearse

This is not especially a matter for NT scholarship, but for ancient history in general, tho.

The Jesus-Myth story seems to have a tendency to destroy the sense of proportion of those who believe in it. That Jesus of Nazareth lived is evident from the footprint that he left in the historical record. To assert that all this evidence is bogus, and should be ignored, is a very strange position to adopt. To assert that, having found reasons to ignore all the data, that this is evidence of non-existence is fallacious. This is not rocket science, but simply common-sense. The JM is ignored precisely because it is evident nonsense. What piece of data *requires* the JM-theory in order to explain it? That Jesus existed is based on the same sorts of evidence that we accept for everything that we know about antiquity.

JM'ers undoubtedly do not realise that crank theories abound. When I was younger Eric von Daniken had a great vogue. They all rely on these same techniques -- ignore the data and then claim that silence=proof of their theory. Scholars have other things to do than go through them and debunk them all. The cure for all of them is to recognise that these are a genre -- that there *are* other theories -- and to acquire a good education.

I know that there is a standard excuse to ignore what I have just written -- that this is 'patronising', or such. But then this is why it's rarely worth the trouble.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

gurugeorge

Pure fluff Roger. The MJ idea doesn't come from pulp fiction like von Daniken but stems originally from the work of respectable scholars in Germany and Holland towards the end of the 19th century, who pursued the scholarly techniques that had earlier shown the bogosity of the full-blown God-man Jesus to their logical limits; and as Doherty points out in his reviews of Goguel, etc., the standardly-touted supposed "refutations" of those earlier JM ideas haven't even scratched the main issues. NT scholarship has just stuck its fingers in its ears and gone "NYAHH NYAAAH, CAN'T HEAR YOUUUU!" ever since.

I'll grant you that there is a problem here: because the whole issue of Christianity touches a raw nerve for many people (one way or another) lots of cranks have weighed in. But they've weighed in on both sides of the argument. It's all too easy to denigrate an idea because of the company it keeps, but that cuts both ways, and if I'm not mistaken, 'nuff cranks have believed in a historical Jesus.

The giant "footprint" in history is of the God-man Jesus. The NT canon is supposed to be proof of the existence of this God-man. Nobody who is intellectualy serious takes that idea seriously any more. But you don't get to just pretend that, while the purported evidence of the God-man Jesus is obviously not evidence of a God-man, it nevertheless must be evidence of some man.

That there is evidence of some man at the root of the myth, siftable from the God-man "evidence", has to be argued for, and it hasn't been.

Doug Shaver

I have not studied historiography yet as much as I wish I could, but I've gotten the clear impression that when historians have no primary sources, they make what they can out of sources that are less than primary, and not infrequently state their conclusions with just as much confidence as if they were working from primary sources. They probably should not be so confident when working from secondary or lesser sources, but they're not asking my opinion, either.

As I see it, any historical narrative is, or ought to be, in effect a theory, proposed to explain some set of facts, those facts being the existence of certain documents and whatever relevant archeological artifacts happen to have been discovered. For example, "A philosopher named Thales lived in Miletus sometime around 600 BCE" is an explanation of the fact that this is asserted in various documents that we're pretty sure were produced by Aristotle and some other people of that era. If the man actually existed, then those references to him are traces (evidence) of his existence. If there was no such man, then they are traces or evidence of something else. The trick is figuring out which is more likely to be the case.

That is what I have come to believe. I think the certainty with which apparently most historians affirm their existence is a mistake. In their defense, circumlocutions like "the idea traditionally attributed to ____" or "the philosopher ____, who according to several ancient writers . . . ." might soon get wearisome to read. But that only excuse so much. My intro-to-philosophy textbook clearly notes that we cannot be certain about what Thales or any of the other pre-Socratics really taught, but it concedes no doubt about their historicity. Of course, professors of philosophy are not themselves historians, but I assume they're getting some of their cues from historians.

Getting back to your original point about real people who leave no traces of themselves, it seems I agree with that and am just quibbling more over terminology than anything else. I do think that "no trace" or "no evidence" overstates the case with regard to Jesus. I think there is evidence for his existence, but I doubt his existence because I think there is also evidence against it, and I find it more persuasive than the evidence for it.

As for the pre-Socratic philosphers, my jury is still out on some of them.