aa5874

What happens when the cops come a knocking based on the hypothesis that you stole the juice? Would the cops' hypothesis be valid until they get proof to the contrary?

mens_sana

Likewise for your mythical Jesus. The Christ Myth I understand. The Jesus Myth is not the most economical explanation.

mens_sana

Great example of a shaky hypothesis. We can follow this up a bit if you can suggest what their grounds for a warrant might be.

aa5874

Well, name me a religion that just could not have started without a human being worshipped as a God.

Even in the NT, Paul became a Christian and started seven Churches and he only got revelations. Paul never needed the HJ, he just needed to believe Jesus was a God.

And the hundreds of millions believers do NOT need the HJ, they just NEED to believe Jesus was a God.

The Jesus story was just fiction believed to be true, this is by far the most economical explanation.

With the HJ position one must assume that everyone in the Jesus story, including his mother, his disciples and Jesus himself lied about or embellished every event written in the NT with respect to the prophecies, the conception, the temptation, the miracles, the transfiguration, resurrection and ascension of Jesus.

For example, for the HJ to feasible, it MUST be accepted that Mary lied about the conception of Jesus. And if Joseph was the actual father of Jesus, then Joseph also lied that Mary was a virgin after Jesus was born.

Jesus would have lied when, in the NT, he claimed to have raised a man from the dead who had died four days before. Jesus lied about his resurrection and the author of Acts, Peter and the other apostles lied about seeing Jesus going through the clouds on his way to heaven.

If Jesus was just a Christian preacher with his Christian disciples and thousands of Christian followers, why would all these Christians lie?

The simplest explanation is that the Jesus story was written as a believable story, although fiction, and was believed to be true by many and was made the official religion of Rome in the 4th century.

mens_sana

I don’t think “Christianity” started with Jesus being worshipped “as a God.” The Ebionite tradition seems to bear that out. The Book of James also.

Why does Paul keep getting dragged in? It would seem obvious, because of his contacts with the Jerusalem church, that he knew something of the physical Jesus. At the same time, we know that his Good News was based solely on his vision. So while he can testify indirectly to a physical Jesus, his interest and his preaching was solely concerned with the risen Christ and the imminent kingdom. (That he thinks J & JC were “related” doesn’t bother me. I have no problem separating them.)

And why are the millions of believers here? Their religious tenets and what they NEED to believe should be shelved along with the notions of "miracle" and divine intervention.

The HJ position really does NOT “assume that everyone in the Jesus story, including his mother, his disciples and Jesus himself lied about or embellished every event in the NT.” This is a take-off on Fundamentalist theology and belongs in a KJV-Only scenario, not in a historical undertaking. Come on, get serious! Where does Jesus or any other NT figure “lie”? How could they lie if the words are only later editions of what the authors had on hand in a mostly oral set of traditions? And did these NT figures embellish? We don’t know whether they did or not! We know only that the traditions got embellished by authors and editors working from 40 to 70 years after Jesus’ death.

A question — if we were to say that the physical Jesus is a myth, how did this business start? Dropping all the KJV/McKinsey/Fundamentalist baggage, how is the MJ more economical than the HJ?

bopot

Technical aside: why does the above post have a mixture of curly and plaintext quotes?

Toto

If you type a pair of quotes "around some text" using MicroSoftWord®, it will automatically turn those quotes into smart quotes (curling towards the quoted words - “around some text”.) [Unless you are like me, and have turned off that feature.] So if you compose in MSWord and copy your text into the box here, the smart quotes will show up.

But if you compose directly in the text box here, there is no mechanism to turn your quotes into smart quotes and they remain plaintext.

And if you copy something from MSWord and then edit it, you get a mixture.

karlmarx

To continue your analogy, does that mean you have first hand knowledge of whether Jesus was historical? If not, your analogy falls over.

We're talking about hypotheses. A hypothesis that fits the evidence is valid until shown to be wrong. We're not talking about the hypothesis being right, only that it is valid. Following your analogy, if there is no first hand knowledge about the juice, then until shown otherwise, the hypothesis that it is yours is perfectly valid (as is the hypothesis that it is not yours).

In spite of the efforts of HJers, the MJ hypothesis has not been shown to be wrong. It remains, therefore, a distinct possibility, and perfectly valid. Additionally, by Occam's Razor, the sheer economy of the MJ hypothesis makes it more likely than rival hypotheses that require complex explanations to make the facts fit with their assumptions. That's a far cry from proving the MJ hypothesis true, but unfortunately the issue is probably never going to be proven one one or the other.

bopot

Yeah, I was wondering if it had been partially copy/pasted from elsewhere, but I couldn't think why anyone would do that.

patcleaver

The simpliest explanation for the belief in the Santa Clause from A Visit from St. Nicholas by Dr. Clement C. Moore is that it was fiction.

Assuming you're consistant in your historical methods, then your belief in the historical Santa Clause does not make any sense. You are trying to take A Visit from St. Nicholas, strip out the magical parts, and claim that there was an historical core - a man named Santa Clause who lived in New York city in 1860, dressed in a red coat and black boots, rode in a slay pulled by reindeer, and distributed toys to Children on Christmas. This is not a reasonable method for discovering history. It requires that Dr. Clement C. Moore, a man with a reputation for honesty, was delusional or that he was lying about flying raindeer and magical transportation through chimneys. Most of the narrative that has been written is fiction, and we should presume that A Visit from St. Nicholas was simply written as fiction until there is reasonable evidence for an historic Santa Clause in 1860 New York.