stephan huller

Our sources on the Marcionites always stresses this idea. It's in Tertullian, Ephraim and Eznik for sure. How could a Catholic source say this when it stresses that Jesus was born of Mary? There are no surviving Marcionite documents; just Catholic reports on the Marcionites.

The Marcionites argued that Paul wrote the gospel and the gospel was understood to start with this understanding:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius (for such is Marcion's proposition) he "came down to the Galilean city of Capernaum," of course meaning from the heaven of the Creator, to which he had previously descended from his own. What then had been his Course, for him to be described as first descending from his own heaven to the Creator's? [Tertullian Against Marcion 4.7]

I am sure that if I sat and thought about it for a moment I could come up with a parallel reference in our existing writings attributed to Paul (understood by the Marcionites to be corrupt through Catholic editing). But the aforementioned reference makes that unnecessary given the assumptions of the Marcionite canon.

And the heretics who venerated Paul as the 'only one' who had knowledge understood pleroma in exactly this sense. It is also supposed by the introduction of the gospel of John. The Marcionites must have interpreted the words in the same way - i.e. the fulness that was in Jesus which came from the heaven higher than the hebdomad of the Jewish god emptied itself into the Church.

Where? Mark 1:1? Why don't you check whether this assumption is true with all manuscript traditions. The Marcionites are witnessed by Tertullian as interpreting Jess repeatedly denying and rebuking those who call him 'Son.' If you are too lazy to research the references in Tertullian. I will provide them for you.

I don't understand the difficulties here you point to here.

judge

I'm aware that some mss omit this, but the earliest mss we have include it, dont they?
If later mss omit it then it seems reasonable to give weight to the earlier mss.

aa5874

Is agnosticism really a position or just a state?

It is not even necessary to investigate or search for any evidence of any matter to claim one is agnostic.

How does one present the evidence to show that they are agnostic about the nature of existence of the NT Jesus?

Do you just say you are agnostic? Is that the evidence for agnosticism?

People who claim to be MJers or HJers can present whatever evidence they think can support their theory but I don't know what agnostics can present.

It would therefore seem that agnosticism about the nature of Jesus is a state rather than a theory since no evidence can be provided to support agnosticism and we know that there are people who claim they are agnostics.

By the way there is enough evidence of antiquity to support the theory that there was no character called Jesus the Messiah, who was or believed to be the Son of God, equal to God, the creator of heaven and earth, Lord and Saviour with the ability to REMIT the sins of all mankind including Jews and Roman citizens BEFORE the Fall of the Temple c70 CE.

But, agnostics don't know that and they think no one else does.

How long will they remain in that state? No one knows.

stephan huller

But there were always prominent witnesses for the Jesus is the Father position (Patripassians etc.). Surely we can't follow the lead of the Church Fathers in just dismissing them as 'semi-retarded.' It's impossible to imagine that their New Testament didn't reflect their scriptural interpretation. In other words, one would expect those who held that 'the Father ended up crucified' did not have 'Jesus Christ, the son of God.' Or am I asking too much from people?

stephan huller

And by the way a few of the oldest manuscripts, including the Codex Sinaiticus, do not contain the phrase "son of God" in Mark 1:1, leading some scholars to think that the phrase was inserted at the beginning of the Gospel to refute a belief that Jesus was not the Son of God.

Chili

I think they say that Christ was born of Mary and they both moved to Rome while they left Jesus hanging on the cross. To them Jesus was just the image of the Jew who died to set Christ free so he could go to Rome.

Zaphod

I don't think so. Nothing wrong with staking a claim and defending it.

For me, the lack of archaeological artifacts, the argument from silence of historical sources, the incoherence and unreliability of the canon, and the mythicist argument make the HJ hypothesis untenable. Unless new evidence is uncovered, the burden of proof is squarely on the shoulders of those advocating the HJ, and taking the anti-HJ position seems to me to be much more reasonable than being agnostic.

I am not agnostic about garden fairies, and we actually have photographs, coherent dogma, and eye witness reports of them. I suppose if 3 billion people fervently believed in them, and had Constitutional protections for their right to believe in them, we would be discussing whether agnosticism was the proper position on the existence of Garden Fairies.

I think I might go so far as to say that agnosticism on the HJ issue was an abandonment of scientific principle, quite similar to agnosticism about the God hypothesis. Without any reliable evidence for the HJ, without a need for the existence of the HJ, and with a mountain of evidence against the HJ the only scientifically proper position is the rejection of the HJ. Just like any other scientific proposition that has those aspects.

youngalexander

On the one hand ..................
On the other hand ...........................

Eventually, like Tevye, we run out of hands!

I vote in the affirmative.

stephan huller

Well I guess that's true. I think it is healthy to engage in passionate debate. But at the end of the day - and I can only speak for myself - I can honestly say that I have been doing this long enough that I never cease to marvel at how immature my thoughts were even as recently as a few months ago.

It's not that I think my 'instincts' or 'hunches' were completely wrong a year or ten years ago. It's just staggering to think about what we don't know about earliest Christianity.

I can only speak for myself again but when for instance I read Hugh Lawlor's Eusebiana for example a couple of months ago I was amazed at how he managed to reconstruct a bare outline of a work I vaguely new about from reading Eusebius - i.e. the hypomnemata of Hegesippus. When I started to think about that text and the implications of the material that was contained in that text, it really changed me. No bullshit here. I was reminded of how we all tend to reconstruct the world in our minds as if it is full of all these firm 'things' when it is in reality a complete illusion.

Atheists typically attack religious people for doing this but we all do it. We all construct our version of the world as if we really know 'what's going on.' You know, your driving down a street and you're in a hurry to get somewhere and the guy in front of you who isn't in a hurry to get to where he is going is transformed into 'an asshole.'

But really if we don't have an accurate picture of the world that we are actually living in, right here in the here and now - how can we be sure about a world that existed two thousand or eighteen hundred years ago that we can only see through the eyes of another purpose driven moron who is yelling at the guy in front of him for being a heretic.

I don't know if you guys can remember being little kids and you and your parents got caught up in a big crowd, where you just happened to be so short that you could hear all this noise going on but you couldn't see past the heads or arms, legs and bodies of other people to know what the parade looked like.

I don't see how we ever get a clear view of Jesus from any of the existing evidence. I don't believe the gospels are immaculate. I think all the New Testament material has been heavily redacted and edited perhaps many times over before it gets into the hands of the bishops of the Roman centered Church at the end of the second century.

The bottom line is that having Dad tell you what the parade looks like when you've never seen a parade before doesn't do you much good.

Doug Shaver

Probably yes, very strictly speaking. At this point, I think the evidence is sufficiently inconclusive that reasonable people can still disagree. Those who claim that we can be perfectly certain one way or the other are arguing from dogma, not from the facts.

But of course, from this it does not follow that neither side has a cogent argument to make.