aa5874

Please avoid the Rhetoric. I never said you wrote anything about the women.

I am DEALING with the OP. I am dealing with the claim that in the link that MARY WITNESSED THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

In the Gospel of Peter, it is FALSE that Mary witnessed the Resurrection of Jesus.

Please, please, please, refrain from your strange outburst.

Gorit Maqueda

It's the first time I laughed reading an HTML-abusing post in this forum... I was raised in the Usenet era and never liked text decoration in discussions... until now :-)

steve_bnk

Why does the religion forum have around 200,000 posts on a site with mostly atheits?

lpetrich

John Adams's argument, if you can call it one, is an incredibly bad argument for historicity.

The Gospels depict Jesus Christ as supporting positions that John Adams likes,
therefore,
there was a historical Jesus Christ that one could visit in a time machine.

Time machines are very likely to be physically impossible, but they do make for good thought experiments.

Mandelbrot

I aim to please

J-D

You're presenting this as an example of what? What's your point, actually?

Is your point perhaps that one person, or perhaps more than one person, assents to a particular claim (although you haven't made sufficiently clear the content of the particular claim you have in mind) on grounds that are logically flawed? If so, so what? Claims should be accepted or rejected (or held in suspense) on the basis of their merits. If some people have irrational motives for accepting (or rejecting) a particular claim, that doesn't affect its merits in any way. If John Adams, or John Dominic Crossan, or a billion other people, accept a particular claim irrationally, that fact alone makes the claim (whatever it may be) neither more nor less likely to be true.

spin

And, of course, neither more or less likely to be false--which needs to be stated rather than sublimated. Such sublimation is only to be expected in the prevalent cultural hegemony, which favors the longstanding dominance of the notion of Jesus being real and which sustains a generally believing bevvy of academics who give institutional credibility to the notion. Such institutions tend to be fronts for hegemony as noted by Ivan Illich. Reflecting the view that Jesus existed is natural for the believer, the person who knows nothing about it and for those who have been trained in seminaries for several years. In such a situation it is very hard for a non-hegemonic view to emerge with any coherence because there are no tools of conviviality to support it. Repressive tolerance allows the individual to think of any lunacy s/he may happen upon, but there is no convivial support to allow such ideas to be developed in a scholarly manner. There are no institutions or money to support the intellectual endeavor. The result is that individuals work away at their personal follies as best they can until they become too old or too alienated after years or decades of being treated as conspiracy theorists or the like. The lone gunman approach is bound to fail: there needs to be a real conspiracy.

Hanging on to the notion that Jesus existed generally has nothing to do with evidence. It is simply the most intellectually comfortable view to hold. And that is only natural--because of cultural hegemony. This is the reason why people can't give up on the historical Jesus. And it's easy to bash alternative views in a hegemony. They certainly have no institutional credibility--and can never get any in the current status quo.

You should know that I haven't been impressed with the evidence put forward by either side of the divide. However, I think that it is necessary to work collectively towards a non-hegemonic position as to the existence of Jesus. That requires the stimulation of alternatives to the prevalent position. How can one reach an informed opinion without having meaningful alternatives?

Toto

My point is that people in our culture, including completely secular people, have an attachment to the Jesus figure for emotional reasons. I'm not saying that is bad or illogical.

I think this is an interesting part of our current culture with no particular bearing on the historical question of whether a historical Jesus existed - but it is part of the background to the debates. Historicists are continually bringing up the question of motives on mythicists' parts - it might be worth examining all motives.

Some people are just a little touchy on this issue, I guess.

J-D

Maybe they are. I don't know. But if they are, again, so what?

Yes, it's true that in some instances people get emotionally attached to particular opinions as a result of the effect of cultural influences. Is there any reason to think that there are people posting here that don't already know that?

J-D

If the statement is not formulated in a version which has a clear meaning, it cannot meaningfully be asserted, denied, or even discussed.

I see here (as well as elsewhere) that people don't always understand how to formulate an existence claim so that it has a clear meaning.

As a result, I see people discussing, asserting, and denying, sometimes vehemently, statements which have not been formulated so as to have clear meanings. The discussion which results is therefore largely or even entirely meaningless, even though the participants don't realise it.