Artemus

No and no. Paul has nothing to do with it as I am not making an argument from silence since I am not taking the mythic position. Instead I am trying to judge the evidence for the historic position. These are two very different positions. (For example, no belief in god does not imply belief in no god.) Paul's silence on the details provides no evidence for the historic Jesus, so is not relevant. (I'm going to re-examine some the few points where it is suggested that he is not silent, but I'm very busy right now.)

Amaleq13

I already have. If there is something I have written that you do not understand, ask for clarification. So far, all you've done is offer unsubstantiated assertions that the words mean something else.

Paul persecuted groups of unrelated messianists and then decided to accept their beliefs? You make less sense with each post as you persist in ignoring the text. Paul is clearly referring to a specific group of messianists whose beliefs he persecuted and subsequently accepted. As we've seen with your flight of fancy, no other scenario appears to make sense of the facts.

In addition, Paul uses the exact same phrase to refer to his own churches throughout 1 Corinthians.

You've got nothing but your hands over your eyes to support your position. Again.

In isolation and out of context, sure. But the rest of us know it is foolish to stop at such a point.

Not when the only alternative is your ridiculously absurd scenario of Paul persecuting groups of unrelated messianists, without knowing their beliefs, then deciding to somehow accept the unknown beliefs of the unrelated groups.

Paul uses the phrase to describe those he persecuted and, subsequently, accepted. Paul uses the phrase to describe his own groups. Paul considers himself "in Christ" and refers to both those who he persecuted and accepted as "in Christ". In addition, those who continued to harass him are described as fearing persecution because of the cross of Christ.

This is clear and explicit evidence of shared belief on precisely the point you wish deny any such commonality.

Yes, they would know it referred to the group of messianists Paul persecuted then joined and that it referred to themselves, as well.

Just when I get the irony meter fixed you go and say something like that? You've done nothing but blow smoke and this most recent post is, unfortunately, no exception.

I've changed nothing and you've offered nothing substantive to suggest otherwise. These unsubstantiated assertions have become tiresome. Do your work or quit wasting my time.

One need only glance at the text to know you are simply wrong. Again.

They "perceived the grace that was given unto" Paul and gave him "the right hands of fellowship" so that he "should go unto the heathen" (Gal 2:9, KJV) but they "added nothing" (Gal 2:6). Exactly as I said. :huh:

Something that resembles the actual text would be a refreshing change.

I only know what Paul tells me. You should try reading him, sometime. They discussed his gospel and approved of him preaching it to gentiles. Their representatives, however, continued to oppose his "gentile exception" out of fear of being persecuted for the cross.

There simply is no room for the unsubstantiated suggestion you have been unwilling to openly assert or defend (ie that Paul's belief in a crucified messiah was unique to his gospel).

Yes, he is clearly reluctant to talk about the fact that his messiah was crucified.

This is just more unsubstantiated criticism that can be ignored.

You don't appear familiar enough with the concept to say.

And the basis for this blanket assertion covering all messianists?

Except that they feared being persecuted for the cross of Christ.

Amaleq13

You referred to the absence of historical details prior to the Gospels but you were not thinking of Paul? :huh:

Artemus

Yep. Paul didn't write much about the historical Jesus, but neither did anyone else from the time. Paul's silence has no more relevance on whether the historical Jesus can be proven than anyone else's silence from that period. People on both sides can speculate as to what Paul was really trying to say and whether mentioning a historical Jesus would have furthered that goal. But in the end the only solid conclusion that can be drawn is that he does not provide substantial evidence for the historical Jesus.

Solitary Man

Why the qualifiers? If he did not write much, then he wrote some? What did he have to say? If he does not provide substantial evidence, what kind of evidence does he provide?

Artemus

There is a tiny bit in Paul that may be evidence of a historical Jesus (e.g. "on the night he was betrayed", "brother of the Lord"), or may not be. I'm going to try to take some time to look it over again, considering both claims of the historical camp that it is indeed compelling (if not conclusive), and the mythical camp that claims it is not. Honestly, there is so little evidence at all, and so much that does exist has been tampered with (Josephus, for example), that it may be impossible for either side to make a real case without a new major discovery (James ossuaries not withstanding). But that doesn't mean it isn't fun to look in and see where things stand every once in a while.

gurugeorge

1 Corinthians 15:1-11 for all your requests for evidence - or rather, lack of evidence (for an HJ) - with the addition of 1 Cor 2:8 re. the Archons. But this is the same evidence you've got in front of you, and the same evidence everyone else has. We're obviously interpreting the evidence differently. To me it seems that you, like nearly everyone else, reads those texts with HJ spectacles. My interpretation comes from my reading of Doherty, Price, Wells, Walter Bauer, Detering and his summaries of the Dutch radicals.

Since there's no unambiguous evidence for an HJ in Paul (or anywhere else), an AJ or MJ trajectory can make better sense of the evidence, given that ambiguity: IOW, I don't think an HJ is totally ridiculous, but it's not as strong or likely as an AJ or MJ, and the degree to which you try to pooh-pooh the AJ/MJ idea seems a bit like you're "protesting too much". It's not daft, it's a reasonable and possible alternative.

That the Messiah should have been born of a women and be a descendant of David are part of the mythical requirements for a Messiah candidate. Their mention in a text is not proof of the existence of someone called Joshua that these Jerusalem people thought was the Messiah. The "James" thing is nonsense, "Brothers of the Lord", as 1 Corinthians 9:5 shows, is a "term of art", "adelfoi tou kuriou". James is simply "adelfon tou kuriou." (Galatians 1:19), the Brother of the Lord, i.e. the leader of the group. That people could take this seriously as meaning sibling brother shows how deeply ingrained it is to read these texts with historicist presuppositions.

No. If you have the idea that someone existed historically, then there has to be some reason to believe that in the texts. Outside the traditional reading, there is none - for whatever reason, there is none. It may be, as some people think, that the information just wasn't thought important enough to mention. That's sort of vaguely plausible, but it's not as plausible as the notion that there isn't anything explicit because there wasn't anything explicit to say, because he didn't exist in that way - of course he was thought by those people to have existed at some time in the vague, probably recent-ish past, it's just they didn't know him personally. In this case, the non-mentioning has a perfectly reasonable rationale (it really wasn't all that important to them), under the HJ hypothesis, the rationale is strained (because if they'd known him personally, details of his recent existence jolly well would have been important to them).

Of course he was born a human, what else would they have expected the Messiah to be born as? That's totally non-responsive to what I said, which was that there's no hint in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 that any of the people mentioned knew the Messiah personally as a human being. Deal with it.

I don't think they thought of it as a long time; it's not really clear when they thought of him as having been and done his stuff. But they thought they could see it in scripture (again, it's all there in that passage - "according to scripture", i.e. just the same ordinary meaning as saying "according to the BBC, x was born, died for our sins and rose on the third day"). There's no hint of any of these people personally having witnessed these events; so far as that passage is concerned, their entire knowledge of the Messiah they are talking about (this Messiah in the past) comes from scripture.

See Doherty's discussions of the Platonic accent in these writings. They are talking about an earthly event, for sure, but elsewhere in Paul, and in some of the early Christian stuff (e.g. Hebrews) it also looks like a spiritual or archetypal event, sort of like the Aborigine idea of "dreamtime" - something that's enacted out of time, of which the earthly form that happened once and once only is merely a symbol.

What's a non-sequitur? What else are you supposed to think, when you see proto-orthodoxy preening itself on converting heretical churches, other than that those heretical churches were already established before proto-orthodoxy came on the scene? You should read Bauer. Ehrman has a good bit on Bauer's work in his "Lost Christianities".

Rubbish, none of the scholars Price is talking about in that context have been "overturned", they're all perfectly respectable HJ scholars, not MJ - it's just that each has a special area where they see problems, but nobody puts all their work together (except Price) to show that there's nothing but problems in the whole field.

Right, that's it, I don't have the time or patience to deal with you any more - there's something fishy about the way you, a self-proclaimed atheist/rationalist, are so all-fired keen to do down any AJ/MJ idea, and I don't trust your motivations: I think you've got some sort of bee in your bonnet that isn't about the historical truth but about how you think people should be behaving in some sense. If the AJ/MJ idea were totally irrational you might have some point, but since it so obviously isn't, that shines the spotlight on you. I've said my piece, you're welcome to the last word.

Amaleq13

My apologies. You are clearly just starting out in understanding the evidence involved.

Yes, that is why people who are familiar with the evidence might think you are talking about Paul when you refer to what isn't present in writings prior to the Gospels.

Carry on. :wave:

Solitary Man

Would you explain how I Corinthians 15:1-11, in context with the rest of Paul, fits the MJ trajectory better? (And you'll have to refresh me of what the AJ means again.)

It can make better sense...but it doesn't. It's possible, but not probable, given the evidence. And I'm not working with just Paul, but the whole shebang. I don't think the Jesus Myth has reached anything near as encompassing as standard historical Jesus scholarship. You have a few internet amateurs and a couple of radical scholars who don't interact enough with different opinions, thus isolating themselves and their scholarship to self-promoting journals, and thus a cult of the ignorant follows behind them.

Perhaps I see the MJ through the lens of Doherty and R. G. Price, the former of which has twisted the evidence to fit his interpretation, and the latter of which interacts mainly with apologists, and uses the criterion known as "paralellomania". Now, I'm not suggesting that no scholars don't use that baseless criteria, but in my opinion, R. G. Price takes it far beyond normal allowance. It dominates. There's not a single good work on the MJ. And yet we have uneducated folk telling the educated crowd that their theory is better? Please, get some scholarship first, set down a real methodology, interact with the scholarly community - you know that one time Biblical Studies believed that the miracles were real, then later they tried to explain the miracles in terms of natural events, following which they explained them in literary terms, and now through cultural ideas which permeate the authors. Refusing to interact with scholarship reflects poorly on you (or whoever refuses to do so), not scholarship. Darwin didn't reject the establishment, he changed it. But JMers are not as willing.

How so? My son will be born of a woman - does that make my son mythical? Do you know what mythical means? How are you using it in this context? How do scholars use it? What does the Messiah show us about the nature of the world? If Democrats hope that one day there will be a candidate who brings about great changes for Democracy and liberalism, is that Mythic? What is the parallel? How do they elucidate each other?


Why not?

Perhaps some would buy into your hypothesis if you provided evidence for it.

You mean, besides the fact that all early Christians actually believed that he existed historically, that certain parts of the gospels can be traced back before they were written, and are attested multiply, and the HJ fits all the evidence better than the MJ? Besides those reasons?

Or perhaps you just hand-waved the evidence away instead of actually dealing with it?

Do you have evidence for your assertion? And what do you make of Paul quoting "the Lord", especially when he quotes the Eucharist?

But 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 isn't the only thing we have that Paul wrote. You still haven't provided any evidence that James's title "brother of the Lord" isn't supposed to be taken literally.

Can you demonstrate this more clearly using the text and parallel examples?

I've seen it, and he's very unconvincing. Hasn't really read much of recent scholarship, which was later verified by his "bibliography" of his discussion on Hebrews.

So when Cicero has Scipio going up to the heavens, does that mean that Scipio didn't exist, or was thought of as purely mythical?

Paul's definitely proto-proto-orthodoxy, and in opinion, your heretical churches statement doesn't take into account the Jewish Christians, or the Judaizing Christians. See Ignatius.

Specifically which scholars?

Hey, if you can't defend your theory, bye bye. You can have all the time in the world, but I think I responded honestly and critically, but I guess you just want pandering to. Sorry, that doesn't fly in any scholastic environment. You think that you overturned Einstein? Expect criticism. If you can't handle it, resign yourself.

youngalexander

God, I may have to read this thread - how tiresome!:frown: