Chaucer

With respect to Hoffman, Toto remarked --

"he followed the liberal consensus that 1) the gospels and the character of Jesus described there were myth in the best sense of the word BUT 2) there was still a historic person that you can call Jesus who inspired the myth, even if you can't discover much about him.

If there is any secular. non-apologetic academic consensus, I think this sums it up."

Would some here say that there is arguably an identical consensus respecting each of the examples from Kapyong (my great thanks to Kapyong, BTW)? Or would some here say that there are varying "comfort levels" in academe generally going from figure to figure in Kapyong's list? If so, is it possible to grade these figures on a downward curve, going from more likely than not to highly improbable?

Thanks,

Chaucer

Chaucer

Now this is something that I couldn't agree with more. Trouble is, while I have at least encountered just a few historicists who have been willing to try and argue mythicism -- still too few -- I have yet to encounter even one single mythicist who tries to argue historicism in any way.

Chaucer

spin

What I like about certain aspects of this thread is that the skepticism necessary to make one an infidel has shown its head. For some people either mythicism or historicism is important in itself for whatever clandestine reasons. This is not acceptable for the modern infidel, who I believe understands that our knowledge of the world comes strictly from the evidence (therefore, with insufficient evidence in an area, one can only have at best a tentative knowledge of that area).

It should be clear that those who have to be mythicist or historicist are not infidel.


spin

spin

I'm not a mythicist, but I have failed to find one historicist who is capable of arguing for their own position.

I've seen the trite pretense of dealing with evidence, but they always seem to lack any critical facility for dealing with what they present as evidence. Take the gormless attempts at accepting yes there are accretions to the TF but most of it is sound. How banally idiotic: once you accept that there are problems with a passage, how do you arbittrarily decide which bits in the passage can be kept as veracious?? (You can get some marvelously entertaining rationizations.) Then you get those who refuse to deal with pagan authors critically: it's sufficient that pagan authors talk about christianity or christ. They dribble rubbish like "no christian could write such stuff" -- as christians being martyred and pagan onlookers feeling sympathetically towards them!

You, Chaucer, have trotted out the usual uncritical presentations of the christian maintained pagan literature and the apologetics of christian writers for Jesus historicity. You certainly are no infidel. I have yet to see you make a historical argument in favor of your preferred historicist position. But then, I know why.


spin

lpetrich

Chaucer, that is totally absurd. Discussions of their historicity has ranged all over the map.

Yes, one could possibly do that.

There has been a lot of discussion of who King Arthur's historical prototype had been, with several possibilities and no firm conclusion.

As to Socrates, he most likely existed, and even though he was not reputedly a miracle-worker or the son of a god and a virgin, telling fact from fiction about him has been annoyingly difficult. Was Aristophanes using him as a satire of philosophers in general? Was Plato using him as a literary sockpuppet? Did Xenophon understand what was going on with him?

Plato is our most detailed source, and he's almost hagiographical about Socrates.

Pythagoras? There are some contemporaries who mention a few details about him. Xenophanes made fun of his belief in reincarnation:

He once came across a dog that someone was beating. "Stop! Don't hit it! I recognized from the sound of its voice that it was the soul of a friend."

But aside from that, he was made into a big hero, complete with miracle-working and divine paternity, which makes one suspicious.

King Solomon? It would not be surprising if there was a historical one, even if he ruled only a little bit of area around Jerusalem rather than a big empire as the Bible describes.

Moses? He was likely mythical, since he's associated with some unsupported history. I like the theory that he was the result of storytellers filling in the blanks about who the "Brother of Moses" was, since that is what pharaoh Ahmose's name sounds like in Hebrew.

The Buddha? There might have been a historical one, even if one discounts the more garish details in the canonical accounts of him.

One can believe that there was likely a historical Jesus Christ while dismissing that TF and early pagan accounts as being totally uninformative.

Has any Jesus historicist been willing to go on record as asserting such a position?

As to the TF, that seems almost too hagiographical to take seriously; Josephus was anything but hagiographical about the self-styled prophets that he had discussed. I think that if he did mention a historical Jesus Christ, his mention would have been something like Xenophanes's making fun of Pythagoras for believing in reincarnation.

Chaucer

All this is so. My own inclination is to view the earliest Platonic dialogues as reasonably close to what Socrates said and did, including Euthyphro, Apology and Crito for the trial. But I place little credence in something like the Phaedo, which was written very much later, apparently. Same with the other late (unreliable) dialogues. In general, of the people you've been assessing, Socrates is one of the only three that seem to me more likely to be historic than not. The only others are Buddha and Solon. That's it. The rest seem highly unreliable to me.

Agreed.

I don't see you assessing Solon here. Any thoughts on him? He seems to me far more convincing than figures like Moses or Solomon.

I definitely place little credence in the TF, but that's not all there is to Josephus. We spent half this thread discussing his Antiq. 20, where I still see far fewer problems than with the TF.

Sincerely,

Chaucer

Kapyong

Gday,

Right.

So the claim that there is an in-consistency in there being scepticism about Jesus' existence, without scepticism of other figures - is shown false.

All stories and claims about ancient figures are (*) evaluated and tested with a sceptical eye (although the details, and level of doubt, may vary from case to case.)

There is no 'free-pass' given to names OTHER than Jesus.


K.

(*)
That is - according to objective scholarship. Of course there are examples where this does not happen.

Chaucer

I was quite deliberately addressing the list of figures OUTSIDE Jesus, as anyone following this thread would readily see. In fact, as I've made abundantly clear already, the evidence for a human Jesus of Nazareth strikes me forcibly as being on a par with the strong evidence for Buddha, Solon and Socrates, and considerably better than that for Moses, Solomon, Krishna, Robin Hood, Lao-tzu, and so on. (In fact, accord. to some scholars, the very name Lao-tzu could simply mean "Old man", which would appear to make it a dead giveaway that Lao-tzu is an archetype and not a particular individual.)

Now, I'm still waiting for someone to address Solon.

Chaucer

spin

That's because it is a lot shorter. You have tried to ignore facts such as

1) the familial connection of "brother" is unusual;

2) the word order is unjustified, as there is no recent prior mention of the familial connection;

3) more interest is given to Jesus than to James who the passage is ostensibly about; and

4) the TF and its reference to christ had already been inserted into AJ, so there is a good precedent for more interpolation and this one reference to christ, a term elsewhere avoided by Josephus. (I guess it's just coincidence that -- despite one such interpolation -- Josephus used it here for Jesus. ) With regard to AJ 20.200 you must agree that the TF shows that references to Jesus in Josephus must be held as suspect and are of no historical value whatsoever in efforts to bolster the historicity of Jesus.


spin

spin

You really have to be kidding. This is almost dereliction of duty. You've bitched on about mythicism from a historicist point of view and you'll talk about anything other than seriously making a case for your own position.

I have no problem giving latitude to duffers who want to investigate the possibility of a mythical christ. The opposing position has had the respectability of scholars working in a comfortable position getting paid to develop it and they've done fuck all other than assume their conclusions. And you bitch on about mythicism. That's pretty shameful.

Who gives a fig about Solon? You don't. It's just a change of subject.


spin