RavenSky

:grin: Thank you!

Sheshbazzar

It should be noted the first refers to the NT character,
while the second refers to a persons position with regards to that character.
So the terms are different in meaning.
Its simply a naturally evolving linguistic syntax thing.

Carry on.

EarlDoherty

I don't think I ever suggested that Paul communicated with his spiritual Son while the latter was in the sublunar realm. This would mean that Paul regarded the crucifixion as having taken place at the time he was receiving his revelations. That would be quite interesting, wouldn't it? Getting a live report from the heavens as events were unfolding! Or perhaps it was a reporter on the scene relaying "your salvation in action."

Of course, Paul suggests no such thing. But it's not as silly an idea as I'm sure the average HJer (Don comes to mind) might like to claim. Jewish sectarian writings contain prophecy scenes (as in the Ascension of Isaiah) which describe heavenly happenings that are the equivalent of such spirit world reporting. The Book of Revelation is one giant broadcast of a future apocalyptic end of the world with a prominent heavenly dimension. As I detail in my chapter "Conceiving the World of Myth" in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, writings like the books of Enoch contain many fantastic scenes of murder and mayhem in the heavens involving human and divine figures.

Alas, Paul apparently had no such spiritual pipeline to the great events below the moon, any more than he had reports about an event on Calvary, since even in the latter option he has absolutely nothing to tell us about the details of the greatest death in history. No heavenly reporter from the stratospheric home of the demons is one thing, but no sign of any traditions, authentic or otherwise, about anything to do with earthly events of that importance occurring during his own recent past and involving all sorts of people he was in contact with? (Not to mention the same situation for all the other epistle writers.)

Actually, Pete, I didn't get the joke either until about halfway through your post. It was a little too subtle to catch on immediately. As for un-evidenced assumptions a la Archie, I guess my 53 pages concluding no reference to Jesus of any sort for Josephus, and a clear rejection over another 35 pages of any authenticity for the Tacitus report were empty filler.

I too, along with Kapyong, would like to see one demonstrated "assumption" unaccompanied by evidence or deductive argument put forward by an MJer, and myself in particular.

Earl Doherty

Kapyong

Greetings Earl,

I'm glad you've dropped by :-)
If there is a 'The Jesus Myth theory' (*), yours is it.
I hope to see G.Don and archibald too.

Because I don't think it's a fair representation of The Jesus Myth Theory at all. Frankly I think 'un-evidenced assumption' is just the polemical phrase of the month. Certainly the examples given weren't that.


Kapyong

(*)
Maybe it's time to have a "Jesus Myth School" - it's more than a theory, it's several different theories - some overlapping, some competing.

The Jesus Myth School of Jesus Myth Theories (JMTs)
Modern mainstream JMT - Earl Doherty and the Sub-lunar spiritual Jesus
Traditional JMT - Jesus is a Jewish re-working of pagan dying-and-rising god myths
Starry-eyed JMT - AcharyaS' astro-theorising that Jesus and the 12 are the Sun and Zodiac
Conspiracy JMTs - Carotta, Atwill.

;-)

Doug Shaver

That is why I prefer "ahistoricism" to "mythicism" in debates about Jesus' historicity. Whether Jesus of Nazareth was a real person is one question, which can be answered (probabilistically) yes or no, and "If not, then what was he?" is another, to which "He was a myth" is only one of indefinitely many possible answers. As I understand ordinary English, the product of a conspiracy (e.g. Atwill), in particular, is not a myth at all, but simply a fraud.

"Myth" should not be treated as if it were synonymous with "untrue story."

Horatio Parker

Yes. After all, it's the mythic aspects of the story, historical or not, that appeal to people(or not).

Making historical arguments with theology and vice versa is an unsound practice.

ApostateAbe

Kapyong, I think that the positions of Jesus-minimalists are diverse enough that I can agree with you that there no assumptions common to all of them. The way they deal with seeming problems are likewise diverse. Robert M. Price and Acharya S may propose a set of insertions to make the evidence fit their positions, but other Jesus-minimalists such as Earl Doherty instead tend to propose creative interpretations of such evidence. The exception is the "brother of Jesus called Christ" reference of Josephus, where Doherty claims that this was a Christian scribal insertion. I don't think there is any other solution, except of course the solution that Josephus really did write it.

Proposals of insertions or strange interpretations are the two most popular methods of dealing with otherwise difficult problems, and it works for any unlikely explanation of ancient historical texts. Both liberals and Biblicists rely on such reasoning all of the time, because you can make the evidence imply whatever you want it to. So, while Jesus-minimalists do not have common solutions to problems, they do have common problems--big problems--and I think that would be a better criticism for archibald to take.

Kapyong

Gday all,

So, Doug pointed out the well known problem with the word 'myth' (thanks Doug :-) ) but I don't like the term 'Jesus-minimalist' much either. Because Earl's JMT's Paul's Jesus is a pretty major character - a god even.

How about Non-Historical Jesus Theory?
'Ahistorical' is too prone to abuse.
I like Spiritual Jesus Theory - but I guess that sounds 3/4 to religious belief itself.

Phew.
I wouldn't put Robert M. Price and Acharya S in the same category at all :-)


Well - it's my view that Earl's interpretation is correct, I don't think it's any more creative, often less so, than mainstream orthodox explanations of all the odd silences and strange wordings and differences etc.


It's pretty clear that many of these works were interpolated to hell-and-gone. Doherty is hardly out on a limb with his claims here.


Well, any constructive criticism of Non-Historical Jesus theory is welcome of course.

But my point in this thread is that I often see claims of 'un-evidenced assumptions' when it comes to a Non-historical Jesus.

I mean OFTEN - so much so that it seems arguers, having heard the handy phrase 'un-evidenced assumptions' now seem to be repeating themselves with this phrase 'un-evidenced assumptions', as if 'un-evidenced assumptions' have been proven by mere weight of repetition of the term 'un-evidenced assumptions'.

The few examples given so far just aren't so

Seutonius e.g. - he gets the archibald broad-brush tar-stroke of 'interpolation'. But Doherty's page on Suetonius actually dismisses interpolation!
D'oh.

That list was an off-the-cuff joke. So I look forward to hearing archibald's real list of un-evidenced assumptions of The Non-Historical Jesus Theory (*).

K.

(*) AKA The Jesus Myth Theory

ApostateAbe

Cool. My flavor-of-the-month phrase "Jesus-minimalist" is sort of a compromise between highly insulting but accurate catch-all phrases such as "Jesus-birther" (which was struck down by the local mod) and the non-insulting but narrowly-applicable phrases such as "mythicist." Many of the key members of the Jesus-minimalist camp seemingly do not actually believe that Jesus was myth, but they are agnostic about it. Robert Price and Toto fall into that category. There are those who propose that Jesus of the gospels was a conglomeration of many historical people, and there are those who think that the Jesus of the gospels was almost nothing like the historical Jesus. Their common orientation is to prove that the New Testament has minimal historical value, and their common enemy is the conservative Christian Biblicist perspective. This us-vs-fundies mentality tends to underlie their reasoning.

That is what Robert Price has in common with Acharya S, and indeed they closely associate with each other, they review each other highly, and they sell their books to the same groups of people. I actually did some research on this.

I know this is an offensive thing to claim, and I do it because the Jesus-minimalists tend to be unaware of their own prejudices. They tend to take themselves to be the smartest and most objective-thinking people in the room. Most of the time, they probably would be. They tend to underestimate the effect of the prejudices that remain.

For example, you say:

Well - it's my view that Earl's interpretation is correct, I don't think it's any more creative, often less so, than mainstream orthodox explanations of all the odd silences and strange wordings and differences etc.

The problem is that the "mainstream orthodox" reasoning is not the standard. You can do better than the orthodox reasoning just by claiming that Jesus was a space alien who wrote all of the New Testament himself in order to inhibit the science and pacify the planet Earth. Instead, your position needs to compete with the best explanations on the table, which is not the orthodox explanation.

I propose that the best explanation on the table is the model inspired by Albert Schweitzer and presented by Bart Ehrman, which is seemingly shared by most qualified secular historians of the New Testament. They call this model of Jesus the "apocalyptic prophet." To use my own words, they think Jesus was a doomsday cult leader.

They use criteria to justify this model. They find multiple signs of doomsdayism in all of the earliest sources, and they find apologetics for failed doomsday deadlines in later sources. They find attestations in the texts dissimilar to known early Christian interests, and these attestations seem to fit the doomsdayist model. And this model is a highly plausible explanation, elegantly fitting the known historical context.

Contrast this approach with that of Earl Doherty. Whenever Paul writes of Jesus seemingly as an earthly human being, Doherty does not interpret it that way. For example, when Galatians 4:4 says that God's son was born of a woman, born under the Law, a normal reader would think that Paul thinks Jesus was born a human being on planet Earth--not because of religious indoctrination, but because that is the meaning following very much from what the Greek words actually very much tend to mean. But, Doherty actually thinks this means that Jesus was born of a spiritual woman in the sub-lunar realm of heaven. Doherty takes that sort of approach over and over again, with each time that Paul seemingly means a human Jesus.

Here is that list of passages in Paul that fans of Earl Doherty hate. As a courtesy, I will put the list in hidden tags.
N/A
In order to make this model fit the evidence, secular scholars like Bart Ehrman don't need creative interpretations of the texts. Their interpretations, in fact, are much more direct, following the golden rule of hermeneutics ("If plain sense makes good sense...") than the conservative Christian interpretations. When Mark 9:1 quotes Jesus as saying that "the kingdom of God" will "come with power," it means exactly that, not make a cool show that is a metaphorical kingdom. When Mark 13:30 quotes Jesus as saying that this generation will not pass away until the doomsday events have taken place, he actually meant "generation," the same way the word is most often used. Such scholars need neither the creative interpretations of orthodoxy nor the all-new bizarre interpretations of Jesus-minimalists.

Nor do they need to propose unusual insertions. All writings were interpolated, or they all were possibly interpolated, but a sign of a bad theory is one that needs to propose specific interpolations to make the theory seem true, where the evidence is otherwise lacking. This reasoning is known as "ad hoc." It is not enough to say that Josephus was interpolated to hell and gone, because that is true for all ancient writings, and actually we know of only one interpolation of Josephus that exists in all of our early manuscripts. Instead, we need to make the decision for each proposal of interpolation on a case-by-case basis. In the case of the proposed interpolation of Josephus of "...called Christ...", it stands as little more than seemingly ad hoc, because it does not fit the language of the known interpolation of the TF ("...was the Christ...").

Like I said, anyone can propose any interpolation to make the evidence fit their own strange theory. It is a problem when you are going up against a theory that does not need to do that.

Sorry, for that huge wall of text, by the way.

EarlDoherty

Strangely enough, Abe, outside the Gospels, in all those “earliest sources” we find everything about this subject and its “historical context” EXCEPT the fact that such doomsdayism was preached and presumably inspired by an earthly, recent human god-man identifiable with the Gospel Jesus of Nazareth. (Even Q, with its supposed focus on Jesus’ sayings, fails to include a founder Jesus as such a preacher alongside its reference for such to John the Baptist.) It is glaring problems like this which scholars like Bart Ehrman conveniently and stubbornly ignore, even when it is called to their attention (just as you do). It is only by ignoring such considerations of this type that one is able, like yourself, to claim that there is a clear and straightforward interpretation for given phrases and statements which ought to be automatically adopted. As in several of your itemized list:

Then why, alone among every other reference to normal human birth in the epistles, as well as to Jesus’ birth in the Gospels, does Gal. 4:4 use a less direct verb (ginomai rather than gennao) to describe this ‘birth’? We also have reason to think, based on certain witness to Marcion’s version of Galatians, and common later tinkering with this passage by orthodox scribes, that the phrase “born of woman, born under the Law” was not in the original. Not so clear and straightforward after all, is it?

The original Greek is not “descended from” (a biased translation), but “of the seed of David,” and Paul elsewhere can use the phrase “of the seed of” to describe a mythical relationship and not a human-descent one. Not so clear and straightforward after all, is it?

And

And the language of such remarks indicates that Paul received such ‘teachings’ directly from Christ in heaven through spiritual channels, an interpretation common in mainstream scholarship. Not so clear and straightforward after all, is it?

And Paul introduces this ‘belief’ by telling us he got it directly from the Lord, implying through revelation, a rather silly claim to make if indeed this was an historical event being passed around through oral tradition. Not so clear and straightforward after all, is it?

With “rulers of this age” being a common phrase for the demon spirits, something many mainstream scholars have acknowledged. Not so clear and straightforward after all, is it?

Considering that Paul’s appearance was courtesy of a visionary experience, we can reasonably conclude that all the others were, too, something quite applicable to a spiritual deity, just as God himself (who was never on earth) was capable of appearing to people through visions. And no historicist has ever demonstrated that gods were not capable of dying, being buried and resurrecting in the heavenly sphere, something I provide proof-of-concept for in writings of the time. Not so clear and straightforward after all, is it?

Only by begging the question that Paul means a sibling of Jesus and not a ‘brethren’ within a sect. And it’s “brother of the Lord” not “brother of Jesus”. Not so clear and straightforward after all, is it?

Your other two items have no evidentiary value whatsoever as pointing to a human or once-human figure, and don’t see your reason for including them.

I go through your same tired old list once again, not because it has not been done umpteen times by mythicists, but to demonstrate how historicists like yourself are utterly impervious to mythicist argumentation, which you consistently ignore and simply parrot the same old claims. That’s not scholarly debate.

Earl Doherty