ichabod crane

I think this is a very telling quote. What you are basically saying, Amaleq, is that anyone who is a believer in God and who writes down some of their thoughts is engaged in magical thinking, regardless of their historical or cultural context. So Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel and practically everybody else apart from atheists engaged in "magical thinking". Since, in your view, once you have established that someone engages in "magical thinking", you no longer have to take seriously the details of what they say or try to understand their own wordlview on its own terms, I doubt whether this approach is going to get you very far.

Your use of the example of the Trinity is a case in point. To you, the Trinity is merely incoherent "magical thinking". But many brilliant thinkers, from Thomas Aquinas to Karl Barth to Jurgen Moltmann and others, have had a great deal to say about the detailed nature of the Trinity. It we were to adopt your approach, we would never be able to understand what they were on about, because we would just dismiss them as incoherent magical thinkers.

That Paul had a coherent and comprehensive and very carefully thought out theological worldview seems to me as obvious as the nose on my face. But I'll leave the argument up to krosero, who seems to be doing a fine job.

And this is precisely the problem, NOGO. The fact is, many brilliant and educated people have and do believe it. Now that doesn't make it true, but it does mean that you should at least respect their point of view and be willing to concede that it has some logic to it. After all, I am not an atheist, but I acknowledge that many highly intelligent, educated people are, and I acknowledge that atheism has its own internal logic and is not a "whacko" belief system.

As long as you hold the attitude you do, you will never be able to understand the other person's point of view. And that is a great shame, both existentially for yourself, and for the cause of mutual understanding and dialogue between those who see things from different perspectives. As long as we are committed to the view that the other guy is just an idiot and their viewpoint is utterly without merit, there's only going to mutual antagonism and hostility and the culture wars. Of course fundamentalist Christians do this all the time. But do you really want to just become their mirror image, a fundamentalist atheist/agnostic?

Both the above responses illustrate, I think, that the MJ-position, when it comes to the magical thinking issue, is more a projection of the proponents' own negative stereotypes of religious people, than a real attempt to understand them.

Amaleq13

I assume it never occurred to him that anyone would think it was anything but a metaphor.

It is my understanding that mythic events are generally either considered to take place in some sort of timeless/eternal sense or to have taken place in the long distant past. Either scenario would appear to fit with Paul's claim that these events were hidden within Scripture. The only link to history Paul provides are the recent appearances of the risen Christ.

Yet, regardless of the specific issue about which he writes, does he not try to tie it in to what he clearly considers of primary importance (ie the significance of the sacrifice)? I see nothing to suggest that the fact of burial was anything close to being as centrally important as that.

I don't think it has been established that Paul made any such statement. We'll need someone with sufficient linguistic skills to tell us whether Paul is referring to the burial as of "first importance", "one of the first things taught", or "one of the things he was first to teach". YLT and KJV seem to suggest one of the latter.

I have to admit I did not understand this to be your point. I don't see how the idea of burial is contradicted by Colossians. It seems to me that burial is important only in that it implies "really, truly dead". The NASB footnotes Paul's reference to Scripture for the burial as Psalm 16:8-11. If that is truly Paul's source for "accordance", it suggests Paul believed Christ was raised before the fleshly form started to decay (IIRC, ancients considered the end of 3 days to signal the start of that decay) and possibly that he descended into Sheol prior to being resurrected. I think the Gospel of Peter even has the risen Christ (in the form of a floating cross) leading a procession of the dead from Sheol to heaven.

I don't understand why this is ironic but it does appear like a reasonable explanation to me.

Amaleq13

I would be very interested in reading it, if you were to lay out what you've found in a thread.

krosero

I’m going to lay out the basic contradiction I've been referring to in Doherty’s thesis, so we can see how specific the problem is.

On p. 98 of The Jesus Puzzle he says,

In this higher world, the myths of the mystery cults and of earliest Christianity were placed. Here the savior god Attis had been castrated, here Mithras had slain the bull, here Osiris had been dismembered. (For more sophisticated thinkers like the first century Plutarch ... such mythical stories were not literal, but merely symbolic of timeless processes which the human mind had difficulty grasping.)

The unmistakable conclusion is that the unsophisticated commoners did take these stories literally. If we wish to say it less strongly, they believed in these stories to be somewhat less than literal if “literal� means exactly like their own earthly lives – but they certainly believed these stories were more than “merely symbolic of timeless processes�.

In support Doherty adds this on p. 103:

The lowest level of the spirit realm was the air, or “firmament,� between the earth and the moon. This was the domain of the demon spirits – in Jewish parlance, of Satan and his evil angels – and it was regarded as closely connected to the earthly sphere. The demonic spiritual powers belonged to the realm of flesh and were thought of as in some way corporeal, though they possessed ‘heavenly’ versions of earthly bodies.

By contrast with all this, he says on p. 122:

The Greek salvation myths ... spin stories about their deities, born in caves, slain by other gods, sleeping and dining and speaking. None of these activities were regarded as taking place in history or on earth itself. The bull dispatched by Mithras was not historical; the blood it spilled which vitalized the earth was metaphysical. No one searched the soil of Asia Minor hoping to unearth the genitals severed from the Great Mother's consort Attis.

I’m sure the ancients would have regarded at least some of the things in the firmament between the earth and the moon as taking place within the history of the material world that they lived in. They would have considered birds to be a part of that history, and would have also included, for instance, a rock that fell from space. So when Doherty says that the events of the salvation myths were not regarded as “taking place in history or on earth itself,� the only thing clearly stated is that these events did not touch the ground of earth. They certainly could have been a part of human history. Zeus copulated with human women. He took on a human form, even if he was not restricted to it, and could therefore be regarded as in some sense corporeal. By sight and by touch, and possibly other senses, he was in human form. But what does it mean to say that such a deity’s doings were not thought to be a part of history, if they took place in the air above the earth, where birds flew, and they sometimes touched human lives on the ground? Doherty seems to be saying in one place that these events were thought of as being corporeal, which seems to me correct, especially given that the genitals of a god could interact with the genitals of a human; in this last quote he is saying that these things were regarded as so insubstantial that no one associated them at all with human history and no one would have dreamed of looking for the genitals of a castrated god.

Doherty’s quote certainly seems to say that the bull’s blood was not corporeal, for if it had been, people would presumably have searched for it. They would have searched with their five senses, but they didn’t, so the blood could not be seen, tasted, smell, touched, or heard in its splashing on the earth. It was invisible, colorless, tasteless, soundless, untouchable. Certainly, “metaphysical� is the right word for it. But “in some way corporeal� is not at all the right phrase for it. This blood, per Doherty’s last quoted statement above, was in no way corporeal.

Now I certainly agree that the bull dispatched by Mithras was not historical. With our knowledge, we can see this. The ancients would have disagreed. What knowledge of theirs would have prevented a literal belief? How versed were commoners in abstractions, metaphors, and metaphysics? Per Doherty’s own statement, the sophisticated ancients did not regard the stories as literal, implying that commoners did. What’s more, Doherty says that the firmament was closely connected to the earth, and that the demons belonged to the realm of flesh: all of this would suggest to commoners a proximity or similarity between themselves, other material creatures living on the ground or flying through the firmament, and the remaining denizens of the firmament. The lower heavens were the air: and what ancient person could not conceive of seeing things in the air, or of other things dropping from the air to its adjacent sphere, the earth? They certainly conceived of the bull’s blood dropping to earth. Doherty says it’s metaphysical blood (which fell, however, suggesting the pull of gravity). But what commoner would have put it that way? He or she would, rather, say that the blood was physical or corporeal, but full of the kinds of powers that human or mortal blood does not have.

If Doherty is saying in one place that the commoners did not think deities in the air could be apprehended by any human sense, and in another place that these deities were “in some way corporeal,� I don’t know how to square his two arguments.

There is one way available to someone who can conceive of metaphysics: the blood from the bull, while not having any material properties, had a mysterious effect on matter such as the earth. This can certainly be believed. By moderns, or ancient philosophers. But what ancient commoner would have been able to conceive things this way? They thought the blood, as I put it, was corporeal, but filled with mysterious powers that could not, themselves, be apprehended by humans.

Now I don’t object if someone says that ancient commoners regarded the denizens of the firmaments as having some corporeal qualities but not others. That has been believed of the resurrected Christ, and it was believed of the pagan gods: they appeared in material form, and could interact with matter or flesh (like Zeus impregnating women), but they had supernatural powers. A close analogy we might use is Superman.

What I do object to is flipping back and forth between arguments, letting one completely forget the other one, for whatever purpose happens to be at play. You can’t say in one place that commoners believed things literally or that they took them to be corporeal in some sense, and in another place that they did not regard the blood as having any material properties that human senses could apprehend. If a human can’t apprehend it in any way, then it would never be regarded as corporeal in any way.

Doherty makes the first of the above statements, as noted, on p. 98. He has just finished arguing that “the time and place of mythical happenings had, in the minds of the philosophers at least, been shifted from the distant primordial past to a higher world of spiritual realities.� Here the pagan gods did their thing, and here Jesus did his thing. Sophisticated thinkers, Doherty says, did not believe these spiritual realities to have any literal reality, so commoners believed these things to be corporeal and possessed of great power beyond the human. If this is all true, Christ can be seen as one more myth of the kind that the ancients moved to the firmament. Jewish salvation history, instead of looking to Abraham or Moses, looked into the air between the earth and the moon. Commoners, who looked to this air, bought the myth of the Christ literally; they regarded these events as having some corporeal properties that humans could perceive.

But what if Doherty did not use this argument here? What if he used instead his statement from p. 122? Instead of saying that myth had shifted from the past to the heavens, and saying, “In this realm, the gods played,� he would say his peace about myth shifting to the heavens through the insights of philosophers and follow with, “None of these activities were regarded as taking place in history or on earth itself. The bull dispatched by Mithras was not historical; the blood it spilled which vitalized the earth was metaphysical. No one searched the soil of Asia Minor hoping to unearth the genitals severed from the Great Mother's consort Attis.�

The problem then would be: did commoners really buy Christ in this manner? Did they really think of Christ as descending to the heavens and taking on a form that “was like unto us� and yet was completely a formless spirit? How is that possible? Human likeness, to be regarded as a likeness, needs to be apprehended somehow: through the human senses. Doherty can suggest that commoners bought Christ more easily if he relates Christ to the pagan stories, which were literal to the commoners, and corporeal in some way, because Christ’s story is about a spirit that took on human likeness and came down toward earth. The ancients depicted him crucified: plainly a scene of the kind that many senses could apprehend. Doherty cannot suggest his mythicist theory with any ease if he says that the commoners did not search for the bull’s blood because it just didn’t have any likeness to matter, and because while it may have impacted history it clearly did not belong to the history of material objects between earth and moon. That just doesn’t lead into a story about the Son taking on human likeness in such a way that he can be crucified in a fleshly realm. The mythicist case could not really get off the ground like that. So Doherty places Christ in the fleshly realm and says that the commoners bought this picture, instead of saying that the commoners just weren’t thinking of flesh at all and were thinking about formless spirits that they could never look for.

On p. 122 he does make the statements implying formlessness, and concludes that no one believed these things to occur within the history of material objects between the earth and moon. These statements support his purpose there, which is to describe Hebrews as presenting a purely immaterial portrait of Christ. This he uses to interpret all the Pauline references to “blood,� as if to say, “none of the blood in the NT, outside the Gospels, was regarded as material.� The mythicist case flies much better this way than if Paul is referring to blood that is in any way corporeal. All the meanings of “corporeal� that I know refer to things that can be seen, touched, heard, smelled, or tasted.

But what if on p. 122 he did not use the statements implying incorporeality, but instead used his statements from p. 98 and p. 103? Instead of arguing what he does about Hebrews and the Pauline references to blood and saying that no one on earth could possibly think of apprehending blood from a god, he makes the arguments about Hebrews and Paul and follows with, “In this higher world [that Hebrews and Paul speak about], the myths of … earliest Christianity [like the shedding of Christ’s blood] were placed. Here the savior god Attis had been castrated, here Mithras had slain the bull, here Osiris had been dismembered … For more sophisticated thinkers like the first century Plutarch ... such mythical stories were not literal….[but commoners did think that such stories about the blood of the bull and the blood of Christ were literal].� Then both Paul and Hebrews seem like they’re talking about literal stories in which corporeal blood was spilled somewhere. Hebrews might be reporting a literal blood-spilling or referring back to such a scene with its own metaphor, but in either case it would be referring in some way to corporeal-like blood. The literal sense cannot be, because a priest entering a sanctuary in the lower heavens just doesn’t look like a crucifixion in the lower heavens. Hebrews must be metaphorical: but along with Paul it is referring to a story that was in some way regarded as corporeal (in some way able to apprehended by the senses) if Doherty uses his statements from p. 98 and p. 103.

The mythicist model can live with this, if “in some way� means that the blood could, perhaps, be seen but not touched: it is therefore a spiritual thing, in the visible form of corporeality, but no more. But “in some way� opens up the door to other forms of corporeality; and commoners who see things tend not to stop themselves from believing that their other senses have also apprehended what they saw; so it’s better for the mythicist model if Paul and Hebrews are referring to stories that no one in the ancient world took literally.

To support his model, Doherty is switching between incompatible statements. He uses the first set of arguments to get his theory flying, and the second to keep it flying. I wonder what would happen to his mythicist model if he switched between compatible statements, or better yet, kept to a consistent, synthesized picture throughout.

Amaleq13

I agree it is a "telling quote" but I don't think you've accurately received what it tells you.

So far, though, you are correct. I don't understand how anyone could consider anything written about a god (a magical entity if there ever was one) as not involving magical thinking.

If they believed in a magical entity, you really can't call their expressed views on the subject anything else. It is, of course, a very broad description that offers no details of their claims.

This is where you go wrong because this is clearly not my response to recognizing the involvement of magical thinking. I have to question how closely you've read my posts because I clearly indicated that the only implication I'm taking from recognizing that involvement is that it is foolish to expect an absence of ambiguity.

It is incoherent to anyone approaching it from a purely rational position. It is one of the "mysteries" of Christianity that cannot really be understood or explained. It must be accepted on faith.

"The Vatican Council has explained the meaning to be attributed to the term mystery in theology. It lays down that a mystery is a truth which we are not merely incapable of discovering apart from Divine Revelation, but which, even when revealed, remains "hidden by the veil of faith and enveloped, so to speak, by a kind of darkness" (Const., "De fide. cath.", iv). In other words, our understanding of it remains only partial, even after we have accepted it as part of the Divine messege. Through analogies and types we can form a representative concept expressive of what is revealed, but we cannot attain that fuller knowledge which supposes that the various elements of the concept are clearly grasped and their reciprocal compatibility manifest. As regards the vindication of a mystery, the office of the natural reason is solely to show that it contains no intrinsic impossibility, that any objection urged against it on Reason. "Expressions such as these are undoubtedly the score that it violates the laws of thought is invalid. More than this it cannot do."
(Catholic Encyclopedia)

I didn't say you couldn't be detailed, I said you shouldn't expect an absence of ambiguity. Are you claiming that any of these men offers an explanation of the Trinity, rather than an analogy, and that it is totally unambiguous? I think the Catholic Encyclopedia would like to know that.

From the perspective of those who had faith, I certainly agree. But even Paul wasn't convinced as an outsider. He had to have a profound, personal experience to change his position.

ichabod crane

OK, so what you're saying is, anyone who believes in God is engaged in magical thinking, and it is foolish to expect an absence of ambiguity from someone who engages in magical thinking. Personally, I think you've just fully validated my criticism. Suppose I approach atheism as follows: Anyone who doesn't believe in a God of some description is irrational; it is foolish to expect an absence of ambiguity from irrational people. Would it then be surprising if I couldn't fairly appreciate what they wrote? If I dismissed much as just "atheistic ambiguities" where really, if I approached them a bit more sympathetically, I might find there was a logic there after all?

Let me start out by saying that I'm not a believer in the Trinity. However, I would say that a great deal of sophisticated and interesting philosophical/theological systematization has gone into the thing. The problem is that your approach seems to be "people who believe in magical thinking don't care too much about consistency so let's not expect it from them". I just don't think that's a fair assessment of Thomas Aquinas, or Barth, or, for that matter, (in relation to other matters) Paul. And I think it is easy to see why someone with your attitude would utterly fail to understand what these writers were on about.

Yes, everybody has a perspective and everybody has reasons that they hold to that perspective, not all of which someone else might consider reasonable. BUT all I am saying is this: it is a great virtue to be able to vicariously put yourself in the other person's shoes, and try to understand their perspective from within their own framework. Religious people are no more willing to accept ambiguities, as you put it, then non-religious ones; that is purely and simply your prejudiced stereotype. Yes, there are stupid religious people. There are also stupid non-religious people. But when we come to leading thinkers like Paul, we are not in the same ballpark. If you think there are ambiguities in Paul's thought, it just means that you haven't understood it. If you aren't prepared to put aside biased stereotypes like "religious people are happy with ambiguities in their thought" (which is a polite way of saying that they are happy being illogical), then you are never going to contribute usefully to Pauline scholarship. You're also never going to convince anyone.

krosero

I wrote that I was not going to have much to say about general debates concerning magic, but these are very nice summaries, I think, of what "one side" of the debate has been arguing here. I'm not saying that they're necessarily exact summaries of what Amaleq has been saying; I'm not sure he would state that the ancients didn't care too much about consistency. If I may, I think he's been saying that ambiguities are to be expected in the magical thoughts themselves, such as the Trinity. I agree that ambiguities are present in mysteries, or in anything that cannot be grasped by logic or common sense alone. In that way, we might say that religious people are in fact willing to accept ambiguities in their religious concepts, just like poets accept them in their work, and people accept or commit morally ambiguous things in their lives, while scientists are not willing to accept ambiguities in their scientific work. But religious people are no more willing than everyday non-religious people to accept ambiguities in things that they regard as everyday, corporeal, or physical. Those things they just judge by common sense, like the non-religious. The Christian story, I have been saying, is something that common people would judge with common sense -- to the extent that they regarded it as a corporeal thing. From a story about corporeal-like things, they would want consistency in the basics of the narrative, and some measure of resemblance to what they knew themselves about corporeal things. How willing, indeed, were they to believe and preach a corporeal-like cross staked in the lower heavens? Doherty has already said that the inhabitants of the lower heavens were in some ways corporeal, so that's why I'm asking.

Amaleq13

Yes. Ambiguity is, I think, a natural consequence of attempting to explain something that cannot be perceived by the senses. It is similarly foolish to expect an absence of ambiguity from someone trying to explain a given theory of quantum physics unless their explanation is purely mathematical. I don't dismiss attempts to explain such theories because of the ambiguities but I do question any expectations of coherent specificity. When you are dealing with subjects outside the perceptions of our senses, appeals to what those subjects are "like" or "similar to" seem inevitable.

Then you still don't really understand the position because your criticism is entirely false and your attempted analogy completely misses the point. That discussions about God necessarily involves magical thinking is required by the definition of magical thinking. It is not a subjective judgment nor necessarily synonymous with "irrational".

I agree. If you are implying that my position denies this, it is only further evidence of your misunderstanding.

I don't understand why, despite my explanations to the contrary, you persist with this faulty understanding of my position. It is difficult to engage in a discussion of my position when you refuse to accept what I state my position to be and, instead, insist it to be a straw man caricature. My actual position with regard to the above is:

People who engage in magical thinking shouldn't be expected to be unambiguous in describing processes or events that are not accessible to the physical senses.

I think it is pretty clear you do not understand my position sufficiently to offer an informed opinion about what I do and do not understand. All of the men you mentioned took on a task that the Catholic Encyclopedia acknowledges is not actually possible and I familiar enough with Aquinas to say that, IMO, he has probably done as good a job as is possible given the circumstances.

I agree and I've found accurately understanding the fundamental nature of their framework to be quite helpful in being able to do just that. I don't understand how one can take on the perspective of another without appreciating the fundamental assumptions involved yet you seem to want me to ignore what is arguably the most fundamental.

It is one you have created in your own mind. I have never said this nor implied it nor is it a position I hold.

You don't think there are ambiguities in Paul's letters!!?!!

I would have hoped you had read my admonition to krosero but I'll repeat myself here. It is misleading, at the least, to put words in quotes that were never written by the implied author. Please do not attribute your false caricature of my position to me as a direct quote.

I don't hold the position you attribute to me so nearly all of your responses to that non-existent position have been a complete waste of time. I suggest you confine your responses to actual statements I have made because your paraphrases of my position have, so far, been entirely off base.

Amaleq13

Yes.

I agree up to the reference to scientists. I think they accept ambiguities all time though they continually try to resolve them and reduce them.

I agree but, as I've been trying to explain, things that are somehow corporeal or somehow physical and certainly not "everyday" must be placed in a different category entirely. They are in some sort of middle ground between purely/entirely spiritual and purely/entirely physical. Unless those holding the beliefs are explicit in their descriptions, we don't know whether any given "rule" applies.

krosero

I would have added the following to my long post (#44) about a contradiction in Doherty, but I think too much time has passed:

I wrote in post #44 that, per Doherty, the ancient myths were regarded as in some sense corporeal. Christ was one of those myths, he says. So commoners in the ancient world, who thought more literally than their philosophers (per Doherty), would have taken the crucifixion with near or full literalness. Per the MJ model, this semi-corporeal event took place in the lower heavens, so it requires the ancients to believe that a cross (presumably a cross that was material in some way) was staked into the lower heavens and that its victim was buried in these same heavens. A fairly magical thought.

The most outlandish belief in the HJ model might be said to be the resurrection of human beings. The sense of outlandishness is evidenced in Paul's letters: the Corinthians doubt the resurrection of human beings. Another NT passage, Acts 17:32, presents Paul encountering more doubt on this point.

But where in the MJ model is the evidence, from the epistles, that people doubted the implausibilities of a cross staked in the heavens and a crucifixion victim buried in the heavens? Those doubts are nowhere to be found.

The resurrection was doubted and Paul dealt with the doubts, offering proofs, per the HJ model: this Christ was believed to be seen alive after his burial. The crucifixion and burial in the heavens were not seen by anyone, per the MJ model, and so people should have doubted them at least as much as people would doubt the resurrection. But there are no signs of the doubt.

Was the belief taken for granted between Paul and his audience? Why not, then, allow that Christ's earthly death and burial were taken for granted?

And if common people believed the Christian myths, like the others, to be literal or near-literal, how did they know when Paul and the other epistle writers switched, without warning, to speaking about cross and burial in metaphorical, abstract ways? Is there any sign of such a switch in the epistles, something that common folks would understand? Was the switch, if there was one, also an understood thing between writer and audience?