KaleriaStorm

OK, obviously I'm a newb, but what's HJ/ MJ?

Toto

Historical Jesus / Mythical Jesus

i.e., was the inspriration for Christianity a historical person who might have been known as Jesus of Nazareth, or did Christianity start with a mythical savior who was later turned into a figure who existed in history?

Roger Pearse

That is a lovely quote, particularly in the context of Mithras where you get all these depictions of a scorpion grabbing the bull's balls, again and again.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

DancesWithCoffeeCups

Historical Jesus. ( a real live person)
Mythical Jesus. ( not a real live person)

Basically.

ApostateAbe

It means welcome to the Armageddon.

Solo

Actually Bauer was a personal friend of Karl Marx, whom he taught at Bonn. It was Bauer who was the most prominent influence on young Marx'es Left Hegelian proclivities. After Marx hooked up with Engels, the relationship quickly cooled. Marx and Engels completely rejected the idealist ontology of Hegel, keeping only his dialectical method. The two switched to the materialism of Feuerbach and began criticize the Hegelians heavily. Bauer had been the target of their attack for his approach to the "Jewish question", in which he considered the abandonment of religion (Christian and Jewish) as a pre-condition of a truly emancipated state and its citizen. Marx in his reply argued that nothing but the overthrow of the capitalist system could guarantee true emancipation of Jews (as well as everyone else) and that the false consciousness manifested by religion would disappear once its material base of capitalism was destroyed.

Even though Bauer became an ideological rival, Engels continued to rely on him for his large speculations on the "laws" of historical process. (his 1882 euolgy of Bauer here)

An alternative to Engels for an approach was developped by Karl Kautsky who was much more open minded about the issue of Jesus' historicity: he declared himself cautiously for historicity and his position is very close to what I believe:

Unfortunately, Kautsky long remained seen either as a traitor to Marx's promise of the workers paradise, or in Lenin's words a proclaimer of social democratic cretinism. Therefore the MJ position of Engels held sway for most of the time of the communist era.

Well, I feel quite strongly that a statistical analysis would show significant correlation between MJ beliefs & atheism, and between atheism and left liberal (and/or looney left) politics. Toto of course would deny that. She denied that Madalyn Murray O'Hair was a communist. Yeah, the founder of American Atheists denied that herself - often angrily - but the fact remains that she pursued for months her quest for Soviet citizenship and that her admission of communist sympathies would have significantly reduced, if not her support base, then definitely her opportunity for media exposure.

The problem of course is that the realistic and reasonable paradigm is fooling you just as the Our Lady of Fatima fooled the Vatican collegium. In the country I grew up, the communists believed religion was the opium of the people, but themselves had no problem believing that all of History was anticipating and culminating inside a portly 19th century German philosopher whose cranium produced the perfect philosophical method that could thence be applied to every human intellectual endeavour and solve any problem scientifically.

I simply maintained that it was possible that Jesus was a historical figure that attracted a lot of fairy tales. I gave an example of Janosik, the Robin Hood of the Tatras, who was believed to have had supernatural powers even though there is a detailed historical record of him.

Jiri

Rick Sumner

Ed Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (or via: amazon.co.uk). Whether one agrees with his assessment or not, his appraisal of first century Judaism is a solid historical inquiry.

And Fredriksen, in case you missed the obvious, is an NT scholar.

What, specifically, do you think an historian would do that an historical critic of the NT doesn't? What specific training do you think would be different?

Do you actually know enough about either to make that assessment? Or have you just harped on the distinction (which is as arbitrary at an institution as it is here) so long that you've decided it's more substantial?

The question about Beck still wasn't rhetorical. If the distinction doesn't exist there, then I want some grounds for why I should accept that it exists as forcefully as you suggest it does here, and only here (OT exegetes are apparently still historians, since you had not a word to say about Lemche).

As it is right now, all it amounts to is a nice, albeit baseless, justification. "Oh, they don't count, they're not real historians."

Spanky

In all honesty JohnnySkeptic, what you call "feisty" I would call "civil." This sub forum Biblical C&H is one of the most sane and shall I say cordial places I have ever seen (when it comes to an internet chat forum). That said, of course there are times people pounce on each other and get "feisty", but for the most part those that post here are respectful--impressively respectful. It really does amaze me every time I come here (the level of mature discussion). Anyways, that's just my two cents.

ApostateAbe

Cool, I never heard of Janosik, and I am very much unfamiliar with the historical roots of Marxism. Janosik sounds like a pretty good analogy to Jesus. I favored comparisons to Prophet Muhammad, Buddha, Santa Claus and especially Rastafari (a cult leader that evolved into a miraculous figurehead of a religion). So it seems an argument for the historicity of Jesus given the pattern in the broad historical context, and the textual argument from Kautsky strikes me as nothing but reasonable.

Toto

You have two scholars, but neither of them has written on the question of the historicity of Jesus. Both assume that there was a historical Jesus and try to figure out who he was.

When people refer to the consensus of scholars on the question of historicity, they have to reach back to people like Shirley Case.

What do you think the Jesus Project was all about? For some of the participants, it was meant to fill that gap and find an intellectually respectable reason for assuming that Jesus existed.

I'm not going to go over all of this again. It's a side issue to the topic of this thread.