James The Least

Casey: "(Robert M.) Price’s treatment of New Testament narratives has two other major features conventional among mythicists. One is to continue with conservative or even fundamentalist exegesis. For example, he discusses Mark 9.1: ‘Amen I say to you that there are some of those standing here who will not taste of death until they have seen the kingdom of God come in power.’ Price declares that ‘all interpreters admit that this prediction must have the Parousia in mind.’ All interpreters have not adopted this incorrect exegesis for the very good reason that the saying mentions the kingdom of God, an important feature of the teaching of Jesus, whereas belief in the Parousia was created by the early church after Jesus’ death."

A fine example of how "critical scholarship" easily elides into apologetics. The Kingdom of God can only come from the authentic teachings of the historic Jesus. There's no possibility that it, like the Parousia, was invented by evangelists, irrespective of whether or not a historic Jesus existed.

aa5874

Casey's ridicule of the "Internet audience".

Casey claims the Internet audience is NOT open-minded. Casey Ridicules the very Internet audience to which he writes.

It would appear that any opposition to the HJ theory will be ridiculed.

spin

Here's biblical scholarship at its most ubiquitous:
First we get the credentialism we come to expect from the insecure duffers. Then we get the overwrought errors. Doherty talks of "no evidence for synagogues ... in Galilee forty years prior to the Jewish War…." Casey talks of "Gamla, Herodium and Masada, and the Theodotus inscription (CIJ ii, 1404) which records the building of a synagogue in Jerusalem." At least Gamla is in Galilee, so that's 1 out of four for relevance, but then Doherty does say "forty years prior to the Jewish War". Has anybody actually dated the Gamla synagogue accurately? It was converted during, or perhaps prior to, the war, but when was it built? Casey appears to be flailing so early.

After some trivia about the gospel of Luke we come upon Casey's denial that Q as a source is the dominant theory in synoptic studies and has been for several decades, despite the strong interest in the Farrer Hypothesis of recent by such scholars as Mark Goodacre. Casey by his questioning of Q puts himself in the Farrer camp and his comments seem to reflect his bias rather than reality.

He then takes Doherty to task for using "Calvary" rather than "Golgotha". It is here that he makes this plaintive bleating: "Again, on the text of Gal. 4.4f, which is important for establishing that Paul knew perfectly well that Jesus was a historical not a mythical figure, he suggests that Paul somehow should have said ‘God sent his son to die on Calvary and rise from the tomb’." This man seems unable to be critical about such a source text. "Paul knew perfectly well that Jesus was historical", indeed! The best an unbiased reader can make of Gal 4:4 was that Paul believed his Jesus to have been real. The tone is not that of a scholar, but of a chiding Sunday school teacher, which is strange, as Casey--I'm led to believe--is not a christian. The Calvary complaint was because Doherty had the temerity to put an imaginary dialogue "between Paul and some new converts" into an appendix. He could have put it down to Doherty's Catholic heritage and got onto a more meaningful complaint.

He then wastes time on one of Doherty's sillier arguments regarding relics before getting into the more meaty matters of Doherty's thesis. Well, actually he never seems to take on Doherty's thesis at least in any depth at all. He is happy to continue to take potshots about datings of texts that Doherty uses. He seems generally correct about the datings (though feels it necessary to provide quite a lot of detail that just isn't relevant about the texts in the context). But on that note he leaves Doherty with a parting shot:

I hope it is clear from this brief account that Doherty, despite being thought of as one of the most important of the mythicists, is unqualified, incompetent and hopelessly biased.

It is clear from the tone of the comment that Casey's attack is not a rational one. He's got both barrels blazing.

He then trawls through D.M. Murdoch eventually getting into his fixation about the name βοανεργες as a transliteration. It's as much of a transliteration as Poon-jab (rhymes with "tab") was for the Indian region of five (panj, as in the first part of "pungent") rivers (ab, rhymes with "tub"). The original hokey transliteration, "Punjab", didn't help readers and so the pronunciation got garbled in transmission by people who didn't understand its significance. Clearly βοανεργες is not a "transliteration" of anything in itself, but a garbled transmission obviously by people who didn't know its significance. It got into Mark through a verbal chain of transmission. It's time that Casey got a grip on the matter.

Next we get the ra-ra about the far better survival of the gospels over other ancient texts. Doh! This is followed by muckraking over Tom Harpur. Then on to Neil Godfrey who he tells us once "belonged to a hopelessly fundamentalist organisation" which explains why he "holds critical scholarship in contempt". After more biographical data such as that "Godfrey claims to have 'a BA and post graduate Bachelor of Educational Studies...'" he gives a few hacked up examples of attacks on biblical scholars he found on Godfrey's blog.

And we're on to (our) Steven Carr who is cited by Doherty to do away with AJ 2.200, where Josephus "describes Jacob as ‘the brother of Jesus called Christ, Jacob his name’, which is as clear as could be." The italicized clause is an example of a scholar at the height of his critical faculties.

He then attacks the Latin influence on the gospel of Mark, content to package the issue merely as loanwords, when obviously he should know better. The loanwords are merely the easiest indicators to point to, though more persuasive are the loan translations and the Latin syntactic forms as well as the strange lexical item "Syrophoenician" (7:26), which would only make sense to a Roman audience (and not surprisingly changed to "Canaanite" in Mt 15:22). Casey seems to be too enamored by his on hypothesis to consider alternatives with any rigor. He's too busy carving up Godfrey to give a level representation of the data.

Finally we come to R.M Price who gets the usual biographical assault, as though Casey, as a punter, would be more interested in his teeth rather than how he performs. His complaints about Price are 1) he relies on Detering for an analysis of Mk 13 that dates it to the time of Hadrian (which Casey doesn't like), 2) his interpretation of Mk 9:1 as having "the Parousia in mind" (which Casey disagrees with) and 3) that he uses a text of Mk 1:11 based on the Byzantine text tradition which he analyzes as derived from three old testament sources (which Casey doesn't agree with, preferring the version of Mk 1:11 found in the Alexandrian tradition).

It seems that Casey has a lot of aggression without having anything useful to do with it. No chickens to bite the heads off and no bugs to pull the legs off, so he viciously thrashes straw men.

tanya

Here's my comment, left at their web site:

Thank you Maurice. I am going to exchange one name, in this sentence, and ask if you have considered how intelligent, well educated people, living two thousand years ago, might have reacted, upon reading your same sentence, with the substitution:

One of the most remarkable features of public discussion of Heracles, in the twenty-first century has been a massive upsurge in the view that this important historical figure did not even exist.

Now, unlike Jesus, Maurice, we know that Heracles was "an important historical figure", because Philo of Alexandria describes his accomplishments, because of the enormous stone temples (for example, in Syria), constructed in honor of his numerous supernatural attributes, and because of the famous city in Italy, near Mount Vesuvius, site of the death of Pliny the Elder, who died in vain, as commander of the fleet, attempting to rescue those fleeing the volcanic eruption in 79CE. The library at Herculaneum was the foremost in the world, Maurice, when Vesuvius erupted. Why?

Why was the single most important intellectual resource in the world, named in honor of Heracles, Maurice? How is it possible that folks today have forgotten just how crucial the worship of Heracles was, in those days, a mere two thousand years ago?

So, Maurice, do those numerous temples, and the famous library in the city named for him, and the description of Heracles in Philo's texts, provide the substrate necessary to conclude that Heracles was indeed a genuine human, son of an ordinary human mother, but with a supernatural deity, Zeus, providing the paternal DNA, precisely as written in Mark 1:1, Maurice?

If Heracles, Maurice, was not a real human person, but rather, a Greek fictional creation, then, so too, was jesus, or, as I would call him, Heracles, part deux.

tanya

Steven Carr

http://vridar.wordpress.com/2010/09/...ake-look-like/

''I’m a librarian, but I never see or touch a book. I work in a field that seeks to deliver electronic or digital resources to users online.'

GakuseiDon

Do you make any distinction as to when the earliest sources wrote about the person? IIRC Hercules has traditionally been thought to have lived just before the Trojan war, with Philo writing a good 500 years or more after that. Would you equate their value to sources writing, say, 50 years after Hercules purported to have lived, if we had them? Or is your view "50 years, 500 years, it's all the same value"?

EarlDoherty

I've just sent Neil Godfrey a not-too-long rebuttal (only 1600 words) to the part about me in Casey's article. I think it should appear on Vridar in a day or two.

Casey is worse than Ehrman. He's virtually foaming at the mouth. I haven't read Fisher's piece because I don't want to be sucked into another response, but I've read others' comments on it here. Do these people not realize what image they are creating of themselves? (I'm always reminded of Charles Ives' little orchestral piece, The Unanswered Question, in which the flutes in answer to the calm questioning of the trumpet, descend into snarling bluster, contemptuous ridicule, derisive laughter, and other scholarly responses.)

Past anti-mythicist writers were never like this. This is the abandonment of all civility and semblance of professional conduct. (What would their mothers think?) We have entered a new phase.

But this is the typical process. The more the strength and quality of the opposition becomes evident, the more the traditional voice descends into the gutter to register its reaction, the more vociferous its denial of that strength and quality. I guess we should take heart.

Earl Doherty

manoj

Hoffman in a comment provides proof that gospels are not allegories.

-Manoj

stephan huller

Hjelm, Fisher. Old story. Women. Mythicism, historicism. It's all the same.

Toto

So the argument is that because the Gnostic gospels are over the top imaginative fantasies, that Mark must be straight history? There's no room for a less outrageous fictional tale?

This is what passes for proof?

I went to check out the Vridar blog and found a post on barking owls. Is this a sign? :constern01: