Freethought & Rationalism Archive

spin · 10-08-2007, 05:23 PM

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Originally Posted by Gamera

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Originally Posted by spin

As you refuse to get your brain dirty with facts, you seem bound not to represent reality. We are talking about what can be said historically. Is that so difficult for you? Instead you gush with what juicy bits you can extract from later literature. Really useful.

Oh, yes, please, find another strawman that at least looks a little like what you are supposed to be dealing with.

And it's obvious. It saves dealing with evidence.

You still haven't grasped the evidence. What value would even one of your scenarios be? Yup, no value whatsoever.

Just as wrong as you said this sort of thing the first time. I've given you enough data to cause you to reflect. All you have done is ignored it. Remember the comments about mints??? Naa, you're too busy talking rubbish.

You wouldn't know. You have no criteria to judge.

spin

Reduced to invective,...

Appeal to being ad hominemed is a waste of energy. Deal with the content and don't ignore it.

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Originally Posted by Gamera

you still can't connect the numismatic Alexander to Alexander the Great of the narratives that are at issue.

Been there, done that. In one word.

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Originally Posted by Gamera

And everybody can see it.

Yeah, sure. You're the believer.

spin

Toto · 10-08-2007, 05:24 PM

Hi folks - it's time to end this exchange. We all know what you think and why, and the same arguments are being recycled.

Please stop, or I will just lock this thread.

Gamera · 10-08-2007, 05:24 PM

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Originally Posted by spin

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Originally Posted by Gamera

I have challenged you to show us that the numismatic Alexander is Alexander the Great (the person whose historicity is at issue) without reference to the (very late) narratives that constitute Alexander the Great.

I see you're not going to take me up on the challenge. And I understand why.

All you've done is to say that you don't want to know. We are dealing with a need to know basis. You don't want to know, therefore you don't need to know, therefore you'll ignore the evidence thus far given to you.

You simply refuse to look at the coins. You simply disregard the importance of the mints. You simply don't care about the iconography. Ignorance is still bliss.

I'm not going to spoon feed you, but I will supply more if you really prepared to argue the stuff you've been spouting. (Just show a little preparation.)

Once we've dealt with the coins, we can look at the epigraphy.

spin

I love those coins. I'd look at them day and night if it would help.

Now, tells us what in the coins gives us the narrative of Alexander the Great, the man who conquered Persia, fought elephants in India, claimed a diviine birth, and died in a barrel of honey?

It seems to me no matter how long you gaze at the coins, you will never be able to construct the Alexander the Great of history, whose historicity is at issue -- that is without reference ot the narratives that are 1000 years after the fact and hence suspect.

I've given you chance after chance and you still can't produce the historical Alexander the Great who we are all hoping will emerge from the coins that have beguiled you.

J-D · 10-08-2007, 05:27 PM

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Originally Posted by spin

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Originally Posted by J-D

So? How is that a reason not to use the name 'Jesus'?

For the founder of the religion? If there was no Jesus or Jesus figure or whatever, then it makes no sense to insist that there was.

I am not 'insisting' on anything. It still seems to me that the most coherent and plausible explanation for the origin of Christianity is that it had a founder, and I still haven't seen anybody produce an alternative explanation which is any better, or even as good. And everybody knows that 'Jesus' is the name people use to refer to the founder of Christianity, and I can't see any reason other than tiresome pedantry not to fall in with this usage.

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Originally Posted by spin

Paul claims to have been a conservative Jew. He of his own admission gave trouble to those who weren't. Our trouble is that we don't have enough information to clarify this, do we?

Are you seriously suggesting that when Paul used the expression 'church of God' he was referring to anybody who wasn't a conservative Jew? Do I really need to explain how implausible that is? The plausible interpretation is that when Paul wrote about his own persecution of the 'church of God' he was referring to the religion of which, by the time of writing, he had become a member: that is, Christianity, which he was thus attesting had existed before he joined it.

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Originally Posted by spin

Paul was a messianic Jew, but his variety of messianism didn't appeal to those apostles before him. That's understandable: he didn't listen to them. In fact he gives no respect to them, so we have apostles but we don't know much about them other than their irreconcilable religious views and their insistence on circumcision and other Jewish ritual in their version of messianism.

We know that Paul recognised them as 'apostles', and I take that to mean that he recognised them leading figures in the religious movement to which (at the time of writing) he adhered: that is, Christianity. And if there were 'apostles' of Christianity before Paul, then he is attesting that Christianity existed before he was himself a Christian.

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Originally Posted by spin

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Originally Posted by J-D

Both of them seem to me to fit most simply with the view that some sort of Christianity existed before Paul's revelation, and that Paul acknowledged that fact.

I have no problem with the idea that Paul invented new doctrine and that Christianity is closer to Paulinism than to pre-Pauline Christianity. What I don't see is how a version that denies the existence of pre-Pauline Christianity is better attested in evidence or more plausible.

What pre-Pauline christianity? I mean, you have some evidence for such a beast? Or do you just have the gospel stories and assumptions about the pillars in Gal. who contributed nothing to him?

spin

See above.

spin · 10-08-2007, 05:36 PM

The argument that Gamera has put forward several times is that we are using a double standard treating the Jesus of history as we do any other figure in history.

Modern historical research into the ancient world no longer doggedly relies on the whims of literature that has survived from long ago. Texts by themselves have no direct claim on the past. We need to ground the claims of the literature in archaeology, numismatics, statuary, and epigraphy. These things allow us to connect the narrative with the past it is supposed to deal with. Without them the narrative is adrift, unattached to any past reality. This doesn't mean that there is no factual content in them, but that we have no way of knowing if they do or not.

What Gamera actually wants is that we apply a double standard such that we should negate the criterion of primary evidence from the past to give a factual basis to the content of narrative in the case of Jesus, as it is lacking.

spin

spin · 10-08-2007, 05:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gamera

I love those coins.

How can you when you haven't investigated them? And this is my beef: you won't get off your ass to look at them.

spin

J-D · 10-08-2007, 05:43 PM

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Originally Posted by Toto

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Originally Posted by J-D

...How does a movement 'grow up' without somebody starting it? How can a 'creative reading' exist without a 'creative reader'? Who was this Galilean sage? How were his teachings popular? How were they preserved and why were they adopted by this new movement if there was no other connection between them?

The someone who started it need not be the object of worship. (Ramtha does not exist; Ms Knight is his Paul.) We don't know who the Galilean sage was, and he might not have existed - the sayings might have been a compiliation of collective wisdom. If you identify this sage as Jesus, you have a Jesus, but you haven't explained Christian origins. Why were they adopted? I don't know that this needs an extraordinary explanation. The Analects of Confucius probably do not go back to a single sage, but were preserved as useful wisdom teachings.

You still haven't answered the question: 'how does a movement "grow up" without somebody starting it?' I have no views on the textual history of the Analects, but I would say about Confucianism, as I said about Christianity, that the simplest explanation for the origin of the movement is that somebody started it: a teacher around whom a group of disciples gathered.

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Originally Posted by J-D

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...I didn't say that the new religion's explanation was necessarily true. Christianity's explanation of its own origin is that Jesus was bringing a message from God, which is obviously not true. But although the emergence of new religions is a recurrent phenomenon (I'm not sure about 'all the time'), I know of no clearly substantiated case of a new religion emerging without a founder. If you say that the founder might have lived at a different time or in a different place from that attributed to Jesus, then you are positing a hypothetical individual for whose existence there is even less evidence than there is for Jesus, and I see no reason to prefer such a hypothesis.

The founder is not necessarily the god of the religion. Most new religious movements are started by a charsmatic individual; some secular historians who tried to reconstruct Christian origins assumed that Christianity must have started the same way, and that Jesus was the charsimatic originator of Christianity. Others have identified Paul as the founder, whether or not they thought Jesus was a myth. If Christianity existed before Paul, then there was probably some other person - John the Baptist? James? But not necessarily the Jesus who is described several generations later in the gospels, or anyone who was crucified by Pilate.

I don't suppose that everything that is said in the Gospels about Jesus is accurate. Some of it obviously can't be. Let me use the parallel with Alexander the Great again. I don't suppose that the fantastic supernatural stories about Alexander the Great are true. But I do suppose that the people who told them were telling stories about Alexander the Great. Is it really not clear what I mean when I say that? It is in exactly the same sense that I suppose the Gospel writers were telling stories about Jesus.

Paul's own account attests that Christianity preceded him. The idea that he is entirely fabricating that part of his account is more plausible than the idea of a child conceived by the Holy Spirit, but less plausible than the idea of a real human Jesus.

spin · 10-08-2007, 05:51 PM

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Originally Posted by J-D

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Originally Posted by spin

For the founder of the religion? If there was no Jesus or Jesus figure or whatever, then it makes no sense to insist that there was.

I am not 'insisting' on anything.

Sorry, this is the impression I got from your comments.

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Originally Posted by J-D

It still seems to me that the most coherent and plausible explanation for the origin of Christianity is that it had a founder, and I still haven't seen anybody produce an alternative explanation which is any better, or even as good.

We are not debating that it had a founder or not. Of course it had a founder (at least one).

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Originally Posted by J-D

And everybody knows that 'Jesus' is the name people use to refer to the founder of Christianity, and I can't see any reason other than tiresome pedantry not to fall in with this usage.

Because it is only assumption.

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Originally Posted by J-D

Are you seriously suggesting that when Paul used the expression 'church of God' he was referring to anybody who wasn't a conservative Jew? Do I really need to explain how implausible that is? The plausible interpretation is that when Paul wrote about his own persecution of the 'church of God' he was referring to the religion of which, by the time of writing, he had become a member: that is, Christianity, which he was thus attesting had existed before he joined it.

This makes sense as long as you inject the religious accretions written after the time of Paul into Paul's writing.

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Originally Posted by J-D

We know that Paul recognised them as 'apostles', and I take that to mean that he recognised them leading figures in the religious movement to which (at the time of writing) he adhered: that is, Christianity. And if there were 'apostles' of Christianity before Paul, then he is attesting that Christianity existed before he was himself a Christian.

You are merely assuming here that the Jerusalem religion is what became christianity. This is not derivable from Paul. The task before us is to try to understand what Paul meant from what he actually says, not from christian hindsight.

spin

Toto · 10-08-2007, 05:52 PM

Some people call the founder of Christianity "Paul." Some call him "Peter." Or maybe it was "Mary Magdalene." The gospels were written well after the founding, and there is no particular reason to assume that there is any history there.

All of your problems would be solved if you formulated the problem more carefully. If you want to pick some random guy named Jesus from 1st century Palestine, it's easy to find a historical Jesus. But the real question is did Christianity start with the worship of a mythical Savior, or did it start with a human charismatic leader whose followers preserved his words?

J-D · 10-08-2007, 06:14 PM

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Originally Posted by aa5874

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Originally Posted by J-D

The historical data are the emergence of Christianity. If you have a better explanation of the data, go ahead and offer it.

The emergence of Christianity does not confirm your speculation about how Christianity was founded. You need to show, with specificity, that there was a Jesus, rumored to be the son of a ghost, with thousands of followers during the time of Tiberius and had a trial under Pilate that resulted in his execution.

No, I don't need to show that. I see no reason to suppose that the founder of Christianity was (in his own lifetime) rumoured to be the son of a ghost, or that he had thousands of followers during the time of Tiberius, and I don't see why you attribute those views to me.

In fact, I don't need to show anything. I have offered a possible explanation for the emergence of Christianity: that somebody started it. If you, or anybody else, has a satisfactory alternative explanation, I would be interested to see it.

10-08-2007, 05:36 PM	#115
spin Contributor Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: nowhere Posts: 15,747	Double standard The argument that Gamera has put forward several times is that we are using a double standard treating the Jesus of history as we do any other figure in history. Modern historical research into the ancient world no longer doggedly relies on the whims of literature that has survived from long ago. Texts by themselves have no direct claim on the past. We need to ground the claims of the literature in archaeology, numismatics, statuary, and epigraphy. These things allow us to connect the narrative with the past it is supposed to deal with. Without them the narrative is adrift, unattached to any past reality. This doesn't mean that there is no factual content in them, but that we have no way of knowing if they do or not. What Gamera actually wants is that we apply a double standard such that we should negate the criterion of primary evidence from the past to give a factual basis to the content of narrative in the case of Jesus, as it is lacking. spin

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10-08-2007, 05:24 PM	#112
Toto Contributor Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Los Angeles area Posts: 40,549	Hi folks - it's time to end this exchange. We all know what you think and why, and the same arguments are being recycled. Please stop, or I will just lock this thread.

10-08-2007, 05:52 PM	#119
Toto Contributor Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Los Angeles area Posts: 40,549	Some people call the founder of Christianity "Paul." Some call him "Peter." Or maybe it was "Mary Magdalene." The gospels were written well after the founding, and there is no particular reason to assume that there is any history there. All of your problems would be solved if you formulated the problem more carefully. If you want to pick some random guy named Jesus from 1st century Palestine, it's easy to find a historical Jesus. But the real question is did Christianity start with the worship of a mythical Savior, or did it start with a human charismatic leader whose followers preserved his words?

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