mrunicycler

Actually, the problem is more that my post in question was only meant as a tease.

I should have known better :banghead: because I should have known that people would grab hold of my label of 'kook' and run with it, leaving me to defend my stance--a stance that I'll maintain--that people who espouse the bible and try to sell it as fact are not scholars.

They may be alot of things. They may be good people, overall.

But scholars they are not.

I'll say again, there is such a thing as a biblical scholar. I'll add that, if a person who has studied the subject in great detail wants to say that there is a strong chance that there was a man named Jesus who lived ~0 BC/AD, but that he isn't the man as the bible describes him, I have no problem with that. Jesus, in its derivatives and translations, I understand, was a common name even then, and I'm fairly certain that there was a man around that time with that name. (When I've said previously that 'there is no evidence for an historical jesus,' I was shortening, 'there is no evidence to support the idea that jesus, as described in the bible, was an historical figure.' Please don't think this paragraph is a retraction. It is only to expound.)

However, if scholars who assume the existence a jesus go on to say, in a published journal they expect to be taken seriously by the scholarly world, that three wise men followed a star and visited this particular child in its crib somewhere near Bethleham, then they have crossed the line that disconnects them from scholars, because there is no evidence outside the bible to validate that any such thing may have happened, and every reason to think that this is nothing more than myth. They have now made all of their scholarly work suspect.

Or, if they go on to say that, ~'only 22% of his quotes in the bible can actually be attributed to jesus,' they have gone too far, as well. The only reason they have to think that the biblical jesus said anything at all is the bible, and to use that as a source to proclaim that jesus said 22% of anything is circular logic whose propentants don't deserve to be called scholars for what little effort it must have taken to come to such an inane conclusion.

I'll freely admit that there is a chance these Jesus Seminar people actually said something like, "if jesus existed as described in the bible, then, at a maximum, 22% of the quotes he's attributed as saying could have come from him." If they phrased it in this way, they are not assuming the existence of the biblical jesus. They are saying something more like, because of the inconsistencies within the bible, he could only have said this maximum amount and been consistent with himself.

However, this was not how it was protrayed. The way it was protrayed, these are the same old apologists, playing the same old games.

And apologists, their ilk, and their offshoots, do not deserve the title scholar. Giving it to them discredits true scholars.

spamandham

Hold up now. There is at least one source other than the Bible upon which to base such a claim, the Gospel of Thomas. Also, although it might be argued that the canonical Gospels are all based on a single source (Mark or Q), there's enough difference between the Gospels/Acts and the "authentic" epistles to consider two separate traditions (although the "authentic" epistles don't directly quote Jesus!).

So, while I'm very skeptical about this conclusion, I couldn't go as far as to claim it's baseless.

dog-on

The only "real" Jesus is the mythical one from the book. All the rest are simply made up.

Of course, if solid proof that there is absolutely no historical core to the Jesus story, that is was originally, simply a myth, became available, what would that do to the 'liberal biblical scholarship' industry...

This being a rather serious issue, of course, the Jesus Seminar takes the actual historical existence of a first century Jesus as a given.

mrunicycler

Which, I for one will maintain, is not something a scholar would do.

mrunicycler

Accepting the beliefs of one group of early christians as evidence in the beliefs of another is just the same old circular reasoning apologists have used for centuries, wearing another disguise.

I'd need to see the works of respected scholars (ie, not apologists) who believed that the gnostic traditions, et al, aren't simply offshoots of the same traditions that yielded the biblical tradition before I'd even begin to move from my stance.

Unlike the council of nicea, I see no reason to exclude the gnostic gospels from the rest of the bible when I'm looking for historical evidence. The gnostic gospels, just like the rest of the bible, were based off of oral traditions and not written down for 90 years or more after the death of the supposed jesus. They do not include people who lived contemporary to the biblical jesus writing about him, and a man walking around raising the dead, curing lepers, and upsetting jewish money lenders would warrant a note or two.

The gnostics do not validate the historocity of the bible. If it weren't for the council of nicea, there would be no reason to differentiate from the gnostic tradition and the 'biblical' one. You even admit that it's thought the book of Thomas was written by 'Mark'. How then does that make it anything but a lost book of the bible, excluded on nothing but whim and avarice?

Two separate traditions does not mean that one isn't based on the other, or that they aren't both based on the same oral traditions and each splintered from that tradition when those traditions went to print. Before the council of nicea, christianity was very fractured regionally, each region with its own holy books. The differences in the gospels and the epistles are easily explained by this regionality. None of those holy books should be taken as historical evidence in another, anymore than that ancients worshipped both Zeus and Mercury should be taken as proof in the Olympian gods.

I'd point you to the many branches of christianity we have today. All based on the same traditions, each going about it in their own way. That there are protestants does not in any way up the validity of catholocism.

In fact, there are more similarities in the two (or more) early traditions than dissimilarities; certainly enough to think that they are based on the same oral traditions, and no real reason for anyone but apologists to think that otherwise.

Though, I appreciate you skepticism. I'm not trying to convince you of anything here, but only explaining why the gnostics do not sway me from my stance.

Doug Shaver

How so? Show me the circularity in this argument:

• The New Testament asserts the historicity of Jesus.
• Therefore, Jesus probably was a historical person.

mrunicycler

In the example you're giving, you're not, yet, 'using the bible to support biblical claims.'

You're only making an assertion based on the bible.

The circuity will come in as soon as your assertion is challenged.

So, you say, 1) The NT asserts the historocity of jesus.

2) Therefore , it is probable that J existed.

I say, "Prove it. Show me evidence that he existed that isn't based on the ramblings of the religious." [the reason you can't take their word for it is, among other things, that their motives are in question...religion is a very neat, profitable racket...another being that there is no corroborating evidence, when there should be.]

The only response that can be given is a) "Oh, well, there is none," in which case the person making the assertion admits that his assertion is baseless, or b) "Well, it's in the bible. It says so right here, see. In the gospels."

Whence, circuity.

spamandham

I certainly won't deny that. However, to me at least, there appear to be multiple early competing traditions (at least 3); the pseudo-gnostic Paul, the catholic Gospels, and the Gospel of Thomas "sayings" camps. I'm not arguing this is evidence of a historical Jesus, but merely evidence of divergence that seems presently poorly explained. And I'm also arguing, however weekly, that the Jesus Seminar did have more to go on than just the NT.

mrunicycler

I think it's very well explained by provincialism. Oral traditions, by region, changed and developed to meet-the-needs/satisfy-the-desires of the local populace. Later, what became the catholic church tried to reconcile these by incorporating what they liked into what we call the bible, and making a concerted effort to burn what they didn't like.

This also helps explain the contradictions you'll find in different books of the bible. One group had one tradition, another group had another tradition, and they didn't mesh on the specifics.


I'll repeat that accepting religious texts as proof of other religious texts is circular.

To say that the gospel of Thomas should be treated by historians as something different from the NT, and certainly if we're going to use it as further evidence of the NT, we need to understand what makes it different from the NT.

And the answer is, very little of substance. As I've said, the gnostic gospels were, for the most part, excluded for reasons of avarice. They held ideas that the 'bishops' at the Nicean council felt dangerous (such as the lack of a need of a church, a slight empowering of womens roles in the bible, etc).

There is certainly not enough difference between the gnostic gospels, etc, and the NT for them to be treated as separate entities when we ask whether the gnostic gospels should serve as independent sources from the NT in the search for evidence of the historocity of the biblical jesus.

They were not, for instance, written by people who lived at the time of Jesus. They were written in exactly the same fashion as the NT, by exactly the same sorts of people (who held slightly different opinions on spirituality).

Doug Shaver

If you presuppose that anything at all from a religious source is prima facie doubtful, then it's pointless to try reasoning with you any further.