krosero

On a positive note, Gregg, you debate respectfully and that does a lot to keep the language of the debate from becoming bitter, an important goal for me too.

On a negative note, it is discouraging that you’re responding to arguments that I have not made, even after I just finished identifying them as arguments that you should banish from your mind when interpreting what I’m saying.

I do not know that the Emperors personally knew anything at all about Jesus, and I certainly don’t think that their knowledge of Jesus was a big or small reason for wanting to keep Christianity in check; the argument that they “feared Christianity partly” because Jesus himself was crucified in political sedition would be a weak argument, if I had made it. I did offer a weak line about not insulting the intelligence of the Emperor, though I can leave that on the cutting room floor. The argument is simply this:

The Roman state already knows about Christianity and has interrogated it; they’ve defined it with basic facts, such as the worship of Christ and the refusal to worship Caesar. All this is in Pliny’s letter. If the sect began with a crucifixion or with sedition in Judea, interrogations would have revealed it and would be included in any basic definition that the Romans had for it. But the basic definition of what Christianity was, how it began and what it believed, is of no interest to Pliny, because he is looking only for punishable, present-day practices. These he discusses with Trajan. The expectation that he would mention more is not strong. Pliny and other Romans all know that Christians worship “Christ”; if in the HJ model they were aware that “Christ” referred to a man, and possibly vaguely aware of the name of Jesus (though I don’t think they knew this name), Pliny would not, by mentioning this sort of information, advance the conversation beyond what the Roman state has discovered before his own interrogations; and this sort of information does not bear on Pliny’s questions about what practices to punish. He does mention certain practices – and you can respond that these practices must have been uncovered before Pliny, yet he mentions them. Yes, he mentions them because they’re present-day practices but he’s not sure how they’re punishable. He DOES NOT mention them because he thinks that he’s uncovered these things for the first time and needs to inform the Emperor about them. His interrogations, in short, are not comprehensive or new. He’s not INFORMING the Emperor about Christian practices or beliefs; he’s asking questions about them, and then only really caring about what he should do next. The whole affair, on any other level, strikes him as nothing more than superstitio.

So, Gregg, my arguments assume that pagan witnesses care about Christianity, the movement, not about Jesus himself. Yet in mythicist arguments, and in all your responses here, I've seen a heavy emphasis on Jesus: on what he had to do to get himself noticed and all that. How he could be worshipped by one set of people, yet be a nobody to others.

I find that whole line of thinking to be dicey, because we’re going to have a tough time deciding what people should have regarded as important or unimportant. All we can know about how other people view a man is what they tell us. Chris Weimer gave the example of David Koresh; you can also go with the example of any Hindu guru, like Sai Baba. It’s the most natural thing for insiders to view someone as divine and beautiful and for outsiders to regard him as a trickster, fool, and an undeserving nobody; for insiders to see light and sweetness where outsiders find quite the opposite, if it even holds their attention. The Gospel of John treats this theme a lot: how certain people see the light and others don’t. Yet we would not need John to tell us this; it’s a universal experience.

I have tried in my own arguments from silence not to base anything on intangibles like people’s subjective perceptions, still less on my own definitions of what would have constituted a “noteworthy” event, or what would have plausibly started a movement that eventually becomes a significant religion. All such line of thinking I find extremely vague and subjective. I have tried to be guided simply by this: if something is in the record, then why is something of the same class not mentioned in the record? I don’t need to talk about whether gnosticism, for instance, was really important enough or noteworthy enough to get mentioned; all I know is that it was mentioned. That’s the surest guidance.

That is not, by the way, an offhand attempt to dismiss Doherty’s arguments from silence; I have already said that they’re valid, and treating them involves more than these brief thoughts about methodology.

This is very encouraging:

Let’s start at the beginning of the evolution, then.

Where are you with the questions I posed to you about 1 John?

I’ll repeat them for convenience:

Gregg

The Doherty MJ thesis states that early Christianity was not a homogenous entity. So it could be that the Christians Pliny interrogated did not have these features. When Doherty argues that Pliny "should" have told Trajan about these features, he's saying that would have been the case if the HJ model were true. If Christianity begin with the worship of a man executed by a Roman emperor for sedition and that man preached apocalypticism or criticized society, it seems reasonable to assume most Christians would know that, and that Christian beliefs would be fairly uniform. On the other hand, if the belief in a historical Jesus was recent, coming from the gospels, then there would still be a variety of Christian communities and sects, not all of them sharing a social gospel or apocalyptic beliefs.

I wonder if we can say with any certainty where Mark or the other gospels were written or how they spread, or if there's any way to predict how belief in a historical Jesus would have spread geographically. Just because the gospels were written in a certain area and spread first in a certain area, doesn't mean that Jesus historicism necessarily started in that area and spread in the same pattern the gospels themselves spread.

Chris Weimer

Would you like to prove that he got his information from "gospel-believing Christians"?

Where would you expect them, and why would you expect them there?

Please demonstrate that they slipped the reference into there.

What else would you expect?

Who says that they feared Jesus' crucifixion? For that matter, who says that they feared Christians?

I already showed that there is no expectation for Pliny or Trajan to say anything. They didn't discuss the nature of the groups - that's beyond the scope of these official letters.

Please bear your proper burden by demonstrating that there would have been more references.

Evidence for this please?

Paul talked about an human Jesus. Q has a human Jesus. In fact, that's everything before Mark. What more do you want?

Luckily for us who have proof that he didn't, couldn't, rise from the dead.

You can dismiss it all you want, but that's all you're doing. You're just dismissing it. Deal with the evidence.

You still don't have it down. If Pliny was anything like a "fervent defender of public order and State religion", I think we'd expect him to be a bit harsher, rather than appealing to Trajan. Like Nero who killed Christians merely based on hearsay from other Christians. That's fundamentalist. Not Pliny. By comparison, Pliny is merely doing his job, and if you actually read Pliny, that's how he comes across.

GakuseiDon

This is what Doherty has tentatively suggested recently (my emphasis):

“Born of woman” would be a natural insertion in Galatians (let’s say around the middle of the 2nd century to counter docetics like Marcion and others) to make the point that Jesus was in fact a human man from a human mother.

Is that your understanding of what "born of a woman" means?

I've suggested a few times that we investigate Doherty in-depth together, by analysing the evidence rather than just what Doherty says. How about on the topic of where and when Paul placed Jesus? I don't want to drive this thread off-topic, though. Ben C Smith started an interesting thread on the "when" -- how about we continue this over there? (No hurry -- if you plan on responding to Kevin's OP, then we can take it up after that)
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=197768

andrewcriddle

Pliny was required to use torture in interrogating the slave women involved in order for their evidence to be legally valid.

With a few exceptions slaves under Roman law were unable to give valid evidence without being tortured.

Andrew Criddle

Solo

Andrew, my understanding is that torture extended under imperial law even to citizens in interrogating crimes of maiestas laesa/minuta, the wounding/diminishing of (imperial) majesty. True ?

Jiri

Chris Weimer

Not sure offhand, but for note Pliny send anyone who is a citizen back to Rome.

andrewcriddle

There are probably several issues.

1/ From the beginning some Emperors took brutal measures against citizens they suspected of plotting against them.

2/ During the 2nd century citizens became divided into humiliores and honestiores with almost everyone not a slave becoming a citizen 2nd class (a humiliore), but with humiliores legally liable to harsh measures including forms of corporal punishment previously reserved for non-citizens.

3/ By the late Empire (c 250 CE onwards) torture was legally available against anyone at all accused of Maiestas.

In Pliny's time torture was not IIUC something to which citizens were ever legally liable although this might not have been much of a protection if say Domitian thought you were plotting to kill him.

Andrew Criddle

Layman

The number of interpolations entertained by Doherty to support his theory seems to keep growing. This after he emphasized how few interpolations his theory considered.

Toto

I don't think that Doherty allows for enough interpolations. He has tried to work with mainstream liberal scholarship, which puts a heavy burder on proof on anyone claiming an interpolation in sacred text, even if that academic does not consider it sacred any more.

But it is reasonable to accept the possibility that there were many interpolations between the original document and what we have now. Certainly in a court of law, the burden would be on anyone claiming that a copy of a copy (many times over) of a disputed document had not been altered.

The more interpolations you allow for, the harder the case for a mythical Jesus is, so Doherty set his bars high. It would have been easy to dismiss all of Paul's references to "born of a woman" etc as interpolations. But that does not mean that all those references in Paul are not interpolations, does it? We have no very early copies of Paul's letters, the earliest possibly being the disputed reconstructed Marcionite versions or their orthodox counterparts.