Ben C Smith

Jeffrey, Kevin, and I are surely fair game for you, Earl, but to bring Peter into it... that seems just plain wrong.

The parenthetical remark is, in fact, the reason I gave you for politely declining your offer. As I said before, you and I live in different conceptual universes. What you find immensely convincing I have trouble even raising my eyebrows about (and apparently vice versa). That may be my own denseness at play. Who knows? But I routinely back out of debates on this forum as soon as they reach the level where I feel I am defending the obvious; this particular debate with you reaches that level before it even begins.

Ben.

krosero

All of that was entirely clear; I've read your book and I know you have real arguments for concluding that "Jesus did not exist."

Concerning scholars on this board, I also agree that pressuring Peter is wrong.

How do you know that no one has read your article or even had a look?

It's because you read so much into silences that you can make plain mistakes like this.

I've read your article. I did so, as I indicated to you that I would, last summer.

Moreover, I found it readily critique-able; I wrote up more notes challenging your claims than I had with any single work of yours except The Jesus Puzzle. I disagreed with the article, but I found it a substantial effort; it refocused me on mythicism like nothing since your book.

So if what you're looking for is some indication that your article has had an effect and is not being ignored, you have that.

I only object in the strongest terms possible to your use of silence. Taunting readers with the conclusion that they CAN"T critique your work is manipulative and unprofessional.

You seem to have no idea, for instance, that because your work is, in fact, a substantial effort that needs time to respond to properly, that the silence means nothing more than that your work is being taken seriously. Instead for you the silence means that your work was so good that no critique is possible.

It took you, what, two years (or more?) to get around to making a thorough response to Chris Price's original article. He wrote 6,700 words. Your response was 43,000 words long -- and yet within a month of its publication, you were already pressing for a substantive reply.

I suggest that if you get a response within two years, you should feel pleasantly surprised. Considering that your article is so much longer than Price's original article, you should courteously allow that a response could take even longer than two years.

That is all I am going to say about your essay at this time. It is not my habit to tell an author that I found their essay to be full of points that I disagreed with and then not tell them what my counter-points are. That would not be fair. I thought it would be far more respectful, if I was going to publish any of my critiques of your arguments, to not say a word until my critiques were ready.

But your interpretation of that silence is wholly disrespectful and manipulative. So I am forced essentially to pipe up and say that your interpretation is wrong. End of story. Please wait patiently -- like a professional -- for anything that I might have to say about the arguments in your essay. It will not be a detailed analysis of the historiography you have covered (for all the reasons I laid out in the post linked above), but I do disagree with many of your key arguments.

You are free now to say that I won't say more about your essay out of fear (an emotion you attribute time and again to scholars both in your essay and in your book), but I think it's clear to everyone that your interpretation of the silence with regard to your essay was badly mistaken.

Kevin Rosero

Ben C Smith

:notworthy:

Ben.

EarlDoherty

Kevin, Ben, etc.

Like I said, you missed the "tongue-in-cheek" quality of my intial post. (I'm sorry, but I continually have to say that too many people here are devoid of a sense of humor, and much of the criticism being expressed to me over that post is a vast overreaction due to that lack.)

And I am not a mind-reader. Since my said Refutations article (unlike the situation vis-a-vis Price's piece) grew out of things that were being discussed on the IIDB with myself as a participant back in the spring, it was certainly reasonable for me to expect some kind of reaction to it within a reasonable length of time (it has now been 6 months). It didn't have to be encyclopedic. It could even have been a notice (by such as yourself, Kevin) that it was being read and a response was intended. Like I said, I don't read minds. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what all these rebuttals are to it that you have notated for future.

As for "dragging Peter into it" that too is an overreaction. Yes, Peter has a basic link to The Jesus Puzzle itself, but there has always been precious little there to represent the mythicist position (not just by myself) in comparison to a lot of all and sundry on the other side, some of it of very poor quality (such as Muller's stuff). When I asked him to post a link to my rebuttal to Muller, it got buried in the Muller piece itself, not on his home links page. If he is truly interested in presenting the pros and cons of this crucial issue, he wouldn't need prodding to give it equal billing. And I note that in his reply to my post, he said nothing about my request to post a link to the Refutations piece. But then, I guess that's a "silence" I'm not allowed to have any thoughts about.

I have a great respect for Peter, and for all the work he has done, and I've found him a likeable person in all my contacts with him over the years. But please, let's not be so thin-skinned around here that even a gentle criticism of someone's perceived attitudes or omissions brings down the wrath of the Lord upon my head. This is not Sunday School.

All the best,
Earl Doherty

No Robots

I guess it's okay then to point out that you never replied to this.

Ben C Smith

The use of emoticons would probably help pull off the tongue-in-cheek effect you are looking for. I find them a useful substitute for winks, nods, smiles, and some of the other thousand kinds of body language that convey abstract meaning in 3D.

Just for clarity, I find most outright historicist treatments of mythicism in the past to be not all that convincing. So a refutation of everyone from Goguel to Case to Van Voorst is not going to be of much interest to me personally.

Ben.

Iasion

Greetings No Robots,

I see you still beat Brunner's drum.
Well,
I read Brunner's Our Christ that you linked before.

Frankly,
I thought it was mostly nonsense and religio-psycho-babble.

Like H.P. Blavatsky on amphetamines, but without the refs and cites.

By the way - I don't recall (if) you answered my question whether you consider yourself one of Brunner's "Spiritual Elite" ?

Do you?

Does that make the rest of us here at IIDB, especially the sceptics, "The Multitude".

Who are these "Spiritual Elite" of Brunner, exactly?


Iasion

No Robots

Yup. Same old, same old.

You were a little more specific in your usenet comments.

You don't? I'm wounded. Here is my reply to you when you asked me before. It was under my old user name. Perhaps that is why you forgot. To summarize, I am not a creative genius like Spinoza, Christ, or Beethoven. But I do try to live my life in a way that reflects their spirit. In this sense, I participate in the community of spiritual people without being one of its creative geniuses.

My position is that anyone who believes in the community of spiritual people by that mere fact alone is a member of that community. The leaders of the common people have always both imitated and sought to destroy spiritually oriented people. I believe that sceptics are today's leaders of the common people, and thus they do pose a threat to spiritual oriented people. The attack on the historicity of Christ is one of the gravest threats, because it would rob of us of the very center of our spiritual lives. I am not arguing the fallacy of adverse consequences: I am just saying why I oppose mythicism so strenously.

Iasion

Greetings,

Whoops, sorry 'bout that :-)
Yes, it was answered under your old name.

So anyway,
if Brunner knows so much, why do you so rarely actually quote him, and cite him for specific arguments?


Iasion

No Robots

Here's why. I love you, Julian.