jgibson000

Even if true, there are no passages in Mark which claim explicitly or otherwise, that Jesus was the product of a union of Mary with a "ghost".

Does the expression of EK PNEUMATOS absolutely rule out the participation of a human father in the conception of Jesus, yes or no?

Um .. once again, where does this claim appear in Mark, in James, in Acts, in Hebrews, in John, in 1,2,3 John, in 1 & 2 Peter, in Jude, in Revelation and in each of the Paulines? For your clam that "the NT claims that Jesus is the product of the Holy Ghost and Mary" to be true, some notice of Jesus conception by Mary and "the Holy ghost" (is that the correct translation of PNEUMATOS hAGIA?) has to appear in each of these writings. So please point out to me where it does in Mark, in James, in Acts, in Hebrews, in John, in 1,2,3 John, in 1 & 2 Peter, in Jude, in Revelation and in each of the Paulines. Again, put up or shut up.

At least? Could you please point me to the third or fourth (or fifth or sixth, etc.) time where this claim is contradicted in the NT?

Tell that to the Talmud.

Let us assume that your premises are true and (against great evidence to the contrary) that your reasoning is sound. , we must also conclude that Augustus never existed.

Apollo (a "ghost") and a female cannot produce a human child. Augustus is said by Suetonius (and Asclepiades and others) to be the product of such a relationship. This cannot happen. Therefore Augustus never existed as described in Suetonius.

Hmm. What's wrong with this picture?

JG

Febble

Well, given that the ovum was not discovered until 1827, I'd have thought yes. Whoever wrote those words would have assumed that Jesus was planted as a whole "seed" in the "fertile" womb of Mary. The idea that "fertilisation" involved the fusion of two gametes would have been completely unknown. Two fathers would have been as odd an idea as two parents.

The only other kind of PNEUMATOS would have been the first breath, but that can't have been meant here.

Malachi151

I've done the same and gotten the same response. I think that the case against historicity is pretty well developed at this point, but the opponents choose to simply sit by and snipe at it, while not presenting their own case FOR historicity.

Every discussion I have seen of historicity, including recent scholarship, such as J.P. Meier's has flaws and statements that can be reasonably argued against. The majority of reason that people give for historicity can be shown to be totally bogus.

Oh well....

jgibson000

This has nothing to do with knowledge of the ovum. Please review the evidence on the meaning of the use of EK in contexts which speak of generation/conception that is gathered in the Robert Miller article I pointed A what's his name to earlier in this thread or in Miller's book Born Divine?.

JG

Rick Sumner

I am unaware of any instance in which Meier discusses historicity. Perhaps you could indulge me with a reference?

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Febble

Are you saying that contemporary scientific understanding is irrelevant to trying to figure out what a writer meant?

ETA: it's a very long thread. Any chance of repeating the link?

ETA II: OK, I found it. So you are suggesting that Matthew could have meant that Mary had had sex with someone other than Joseph, but that the angel told Joseph that it didn't count as fornication because it was EK PNEUMATOS? Sounds a stretch to me.

Johnny Skeptic

Where did Richard Carrier say that? There is more to what Richard Carrier has to say on this issue than you quoted. Consider the following:

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...suspuzzle.html

Johnny: Richard does not agree with everything that Earl says, but he agrees with most of what Earl says.

I guess that if the Ten Plagues happened you wouldn't expect that there would be any historical record of it, right, even though if they happened they would probably have been to most unusual and unexpected events in human history, easily the news story of the millennia?

Zeichman

First, you obviously HAVEN'T read it that carefully since this cannot he does not claim that the Q and Thomean communities were mystical revelatory communities.

Secondly, you obviously aren't familiar with Q scholarship, or with other scholarship at points where he makes sloppy mistakes that undermine his credibility.

Thirdly, how are you an expert?

Lastly, even if you were an expert, how is this anything other than a fallacious appeal to authority?

spin

I'm an agnostic on the issue. I don't know (yet) how anyone can divine what is real and what is not in the Jesus traditions. Traditions may or may not be based on transparent reality.

Let's assume for a moment a tradition is based on some real event, rather than on fears, fantasies, or rationalizations. What happens to the early tradition in the telling? If you know about the game I know as Chinese whispers, you take a line of people, whisper a message in the ear of the first, who whispers it in the ear of the second and so on down the line until you get to the end and the final person must communicate the message to everyone. The result is invariably unrelated to the original message. The longer the line the more distant the result. The listening skills of the hearer, the person's attention, their disposition, their other thoughts and presuppositions all affect the transmission.

Consider the historical event which gave rise to the 18th Dynasty in Egypt. The native Egyptians had been dominated for many generations by Asians and Theban princes led a successful war to liberate Egypt from these overlords known to Josephus as the Hyksos. The Hyksos were a bitter pill that the Egyptians didn't want to have to deal with again, so the story was passed down generation to generation. By the time the story had reached the ear of Manetho, the Hyksos had become a band of lepers, violent people, led by one Osarsiph, who led the lepers off to Jerusalem. This Osarsiph changed his name to Moses. Now, is this the birth of the Jewish exodus tradition a thousand years after the Hyksos were driven out of Egypt, or is it just one strand of an earlier exodus tradition? The former for me is the simpler explanation. There is no need for a second massive group leaving Egypt chased by the pharaoh. This seems clearly the better explanation of the tradition to me.

The Jesus tradition, which we principally derive from undatable texts which among themselves show signs of developing and conflicting tradition, may derive from reality: there may have been a real Jesus, or at least a real messianic figure or at least a charismatic figure who initiated a tradition about himself. Then again, there may have been a more arcane source, analogous to the Hyksos in the exodus story (if my analysis is correct), a tradition which dealt with some other figure but, through Chinese whispers of reality, the figure became disfigured into something apparently unrelated to the original. Jesus may have walked the paths of Galilee, but the first gospel, Mark, was written in Rome or the Italic peninsula, so however the writer got the tradition much water had already passed under the bridge before the tradition reached him. We know from the Didache that there were itinerant preachers who moved from one christian community to another sponging off their hospitality by telling them christian or christianizing stories. Paul tells of other gospels which he didn't want his flock to listen to. Paul himself was from Tarsus, where there was a strong Mithras cult (Pompey had sent Cilician pirates to Rome as slaves and these spread Mithraism among the Romans). Mithras had come to earth and performed his deeds before returning to heaven, though naturally he would return at the eschaton. How much of the Mithras cult was assimilated by Paul, if any?

Despite the fact that traditions can be derived from reality, they are notoriously difficult to relate to any reality. And once a tradition had lost its original context it was up for reinterpretation, as can be seen with the "prophecies" of the Hebrew bible. When the late Judean political environment in which the Emmanuel prophecy was delivered had been lost (the prophecy was related to the arrival of the Assyrians to take away Israel), it was free to be reinterpreted and we know it now as supplying the "prophecy" of the virgin birth.

Traditions can survive through thousands of years, changing with the times. Elements from the Epic of Gilgamesh have made it into the Arabian Nights, while elements of ancient mystery cults have made it into the Arthurian traditions. We can see how Gog of Magog can be reinterpreted in the middle of last century to refer to the Nazis during the holocaust.

As the Jesus traditions have come down to us in a series of related works written at different times in different contexts, we can see a little of the development of the traditions. Jesus's birth was apparently unknown to Mark, but both Matt and Luke have birth traditions and these share almost no common features beside the principal characters. The earliest copies of Mark have no enunciated resurrection, though Matt and Luke have different traditions of a resurrection.

If we strip away the birth and resurrection, can we get any closer to a real origin to the Jesus tradition? We can see that Mark has signs of artificial content. A feeding of 5000 and a feeding of 4000 told in settings that are parallel. That suggests literary effort and not something based on reality, though perhaps one feeding was in some way, but one looks like a variation on the other or both on an earlier tradition. How do we get a real report of Jesus being taken onto a high mountain to see all the world? Who could tell us that? How could it have been based on reality? Jesus praying in Gethsemane while his three disciples slept. Where did that tradition come from? Does it offer hope that it was based on reality?

So we can discount all sorts of subtraditions, but how does it help us with a figure who may have inspired such folk traditions. Chinese whispers alienate us from any reality in the tradition. I can't really see any way to reclaim the Jesus traditions in this day and age.


spin

aa5874

If it can be established that there is no credible independent extra-biblical information about the character called Jesus, then the NT is the primary source of information about Jesus.

If it can be established, using the information of the NT, that Jesus could not have been born, then all the information in the NT, post birth, is false.

There are no known credible independent extra-biblical information about Jesus.
The NT's description of the birth of Jesus is a biological impossibilty.
All the information, post birth, in the NT is false.

Now, in order to established historicity of Jesus, a person will have disregard the NT, the primary source of information about Jesus, and fabricate there own 'history'.

They will assume they know how Jesus was born.
They will assume they know his parents.
They will assume they know what Jesus did while on earth.
They will assume they know how he died.
They will assume they know how he was buried.
They will assume they know how his body disappeared from the
tomb.
They will assume they know what is true in the NT.

All of these assumptions cannot be verified by any independent source, they are all unsubstantiated 'history' and are mere imaginations.

It is unprecedented for an unknown person, doing unknown acts to be deified, except of course in the mythological world.

I ask any HJer, a simple question, who is the biological father of Jesus?