bacht

Heh, you flatter me. It's such a long thread, and lots of personal stuff towards the end. I wanted to see if I understood what Elijah's conjecture boils down to. He proposes the self-sacrifice of Jesus and Stephen as key to drawing in believers who wanted to institute a real kingdom of heaven on earth (?) He seems to interpret the resurrection and divine titles as philosophical rather than religious (?)

I don't have a worked-out scenario, I'm roughly following Doherty's. I don't know what happened to first-generation gentile believers. One would think there were Syrians and others who carried on after the revolt (?)

Amaleq13

He also assumes the authors of the texts thought the same way he does.

I don't think you'll find the answer in anything Earl has written.

One would also think there might be some tension between this first generation of "mythicists" and the first generation of "historicists" and that this conflict might leave some evidence.

No Robots

That's like telling a carpenter to stop using a hammer, and instead invent his own tool.


You are confusing philosophy and science. Here is Giovanni Gentile on the difference between the two:

Again, every science presupposes its object. The science arises from the presupposition that the object exists before it is thought, and independently altogether of being known. Had science to apprehend the object as a creation of the subject it would have first to propound the problem of the position of the real in all its universality, and then it would no longer be science, but philosophy. In presupposing the object as a datum to be accepted not proved, a natural datum, a fact, every particular science is necessarily empirical, unable to conceive knowledge otherwise than as a relation of the object to the subject extrinsic to the nature of both. This relation is sensation or a knowing which is a pure fact on which the mind can then work by abstraction and generalization. Science, therefore, is dogmatic. It does not prove and it cannot prove its two fundamental presuppositions : (i) that its object exists ; (2) that the sensation, the initial and substantial fact of knowledge, which is the immediate relation with the object, is valid.

Philosophy, on the other hand, proposes to prove the value of the object, and of every form of the object, in the system of the real, and its why and how. It gives, or seeks to give, an account not only of the existence of the objects which the particular sciences dogmatically presuppose, but even of the knowing (which itself also is at least a form of reality) whereby every science is constituted. And therefore philosophy, in being systematic, is critical.--The Theory Of Mind As Pure Act

We don't often have the luxury of choosing our critics.

Elijah

You seem to be tracking pretty well bacht. Yea I think the self-sacrifice meme that went from Stephen to Paul to Rome to the world is what put Christianity on the map. In Christianity there is the belief that there is like a bonus on the resurrection if you martyr yourself or it’s a way to guarantee getting in. The idea got transferred to Islam but it was also popular early on in Christianity before it became incorporated into Rome.

As for interpretation; some of it may just be legend that was added onto the story and some of it may be allegorical meant to express a philosophical religious concept more than an actual event. Like they seem to take the resurrection literally but it’s hard to see it as a full resurrection and not a vision type appearance phenomenon from the story in the gospels. But Paul may have just been using the story of his appearance to try to help sell him as the messiah and understood their seeing of Christ was like his vision after killing Stephen but it sounds like he was taking it literally to me.

The point I’m trying to make is that to interpret the texts under the context of reality and an educated mindset. The concepts or stories have to be understood by what they are trying to express not as two dimensional cartoon entities or magical occurrences. You may be wrong and try to find symbolic meaning in something that was just urban legend but that’s better than missing the meaning in something you disregard as nonsense.

spin

I see it as removing the training wheels before you end up stuck with them.

I don't think so.

True, but ultimately you have the luxury of choosing who you ignore, though scholarly criticism is ignored at one's peril.


spin

eheffa

I'm not sure that we should expect to see evidence of this sort of conflict. After all, apart from the undated writings of the authors calling themselves "Paul" which may be from the mid first century, we have no other evidence of the first century existence of "Christians" (in the followers of Jesus Christ sense of the label) prior to the fall of the temple. i.e. we have nothing that can be reliably dated to a time before the fall of the Temple unless one accepts that some of Paul's epistles harken back to this time.

One can see that if Paul's writings are the earliest "Christian" writings, they would fit the Mythicist understanding of Jesus with no real connection to the Gospel Jesus and a very platonic, scripture-based ethereal or spiritual "Christ".

The Gospel of Mark though (written after the fall of Jerusalem to explain God's judgment of his people) tells a much more concrete midrashic or allegorical story that should be interpreted as allegory but would also be easily (& mistakenly) understood as historical biography by later readers. The fact that gMark is not referenced specifically by any extant authors until the late second century (at the earliest) would mean that any earlier understandings of it as allegory or midrash would have had plenty of time to have gone out of fashion or lost to the average reader as the historicists were already in control of the orthodoxy and the church was a largely gentile movement unfamiliar with the genre of midrashic allegory. A concretized or literalist understanding of gMark & its synoptic derivatives would be much more acceptable to the uneducated masses & the church of the second century than the subtleties of a fabricated teaching allegory loosely rooted in the Pauline sect's ethereal Logos Messiah.

There is plenty of evidence for conflict over the divinity of Christ in the second century what with competing Docetic, Gnostic & orthodox understandings of the true identity of this Jesus Messiah. By that point, it would seem that Jesus Christ was assumed to have been a real flesh & blood figure of history. It is not implausible though, to think that the Christian movement started off as a Pauline, scripture-derived spiritual Messiah sect that, under the influence of a well-crafted allegorical biography and popular orally transmitted Jesus stories, the movement later morphed into the worship of a more concrete real flesh and blood Messiah with the story set in a lost time prior to the fall of Jerusalem. One can imagine an evolution of thought where an ethereal Logos Messiah becomes more palatable to the average believer when presented as a real flesh & blood character of history - someone "just like us".

This might strike the reader as idle speculation, but the fact that there is no corroborative evidence to support the "Acts" version for the history of the early church history leaves us looking for alternative hypotheses. I would suggest that this hypothesis fits the data better than many Historical Jesus based versions.

-evan

No Robots

You seem a little conflicted: you want scholars to pay attention to the mythicist case; yet when scholars like Grant reach negative conclusions about mythicism, you dismiss them. In fact, you claim that making use of scholarly work is like using training wheels.

spin

One of the consequences of not thinking for yourself is that you often reheat others' dead ideas.

I have no problem about using scholarly work, but the work has to be about the primary materials and ultimately it is the primary materials that are important and you need to deal with them, not the opinions that you claim to be scholarly.


spin

No Robots

It just seems strange to me that someone demands more scholarly attention be paid to mythicism, and yet insists that "there is no such thing as a 'NT historian'; and then when one historian does comment on mythicism, says, "I don't know why Grant bothered to leave his comfort zone and meddle in the historical quagmire surrounding the nt." It hardly makes for an invitation to these supposedly sought-after scholars.

spin

Grant was not a historian of the material dealt with in the bible. He was not a scholar in the field. I don't know why you have to try to foist him as your token historian every time. One person's opinion without facts to back it up is of little concern.

Scholarship is about methodology in dealing with a subject. When you can't examine your own presuppositions and withhold them, you are invalidating your methodology. If you cannot question the validity of anything in your subject, then you have an untested presupposition that invalidates your methodology.

I'm not seeking after scholars. I'm asking people here to employ scholarly methodology and deal with evidence. Methodology requires you to leave as many of your presuppositions out of your analysis as you can. It requires you to learn as much contextualization of the material to be analyzed as you can. It requires you to work from what is known and substantiate new evidence from beyond what is known. It's like building a path from where you can safely stand, placing the roadwork before you so you can step forward.


spin