LegionOnomaMoi

Not really. His paper is pretty much a light review of the discussion and evidence of others. But what is interesting is your response to Bryce's discussion of historicity in the Homeric myths compared to work of "religious studies folk" on the historical Jesus:


So when it comes to the Homeric myths, oral tradition passed on over centuries, we have an "epistemological quandary" because we have "material that may not cause complaint so cannot necessarily be discarded but whose veracity cannot be ascertained". How open-minded your approaches to the possibility of historicity over centuries of mythic story-telling compared to

spin

Looking at the wrong issue. The discussion about finding any "truth" in the Trojan tradition will still get nowhere unless external information is shown to shed light on the realities. You need fresh evidence otherwise you have no way of distinguishing if there is any "truth" and where it might lie in a tradition. So stop wasting your time and mine.

Did you think about that before you posted it? Traditions by their nature homogenize their sources. They provide no way in themselves of finding useful information. The Hittite texts give us new insight into the problem of finding some reality behind the traditions regarding Greek/Asian relations.

What's your key into the early christian tradition? You don't have one.

spin

Well, give up this loser crap about specialists and get on with the evidence.

Ya don't say. Perhaps you didn't register the comments about evidence based argument. You may have been too busy.

Oh, yes, you would. You're selling this faith in specialists stuff.

If you like I'll refer to them as "specialists".

You are not taking in the discussion. Perhaps you will never. But let me repeat the thing:

The claim is that the dogs who flog this historical Jesus nonsense trumpet the lack of qualifications of those who disagree with them, but don't have the appropriate qualifications themselves. Get it? Hypocrisy.

I really don't care about their qualifications if they'd shut up about others' qualifications and put forward a functional evidence based argument and not just the incessant sorry claims of best explanation based purely on opinions about plausibility. It's still ontology without epistemology mixed with credentialist ad hominem.

Most responses to Wells do. But I'm not Wells or a Wellsian, so you can keep the bait and switch.

If they are not too busy playing the credentials game and read the views it will depend on the quality of the views (evidence, etc.).

I mean the attempt to establish what happened in the past.

For some scholars in the historical Jesus business (take Casey's last stand) it is a matter of rehearsing evidence. There is no interaction with it to evaluate it.

I agree that we can as well: we just disagree on how. And scratch most of those who have problems with history and you'll find that they do admit to accepting the reality of people of the past.

You haven't got your finger on the pulse of hegemony. It doesn't imply some single-minded interpretation. It concerns setting standards and taboos, inclusion and exclusion of ideas.

To the parenthesis, there have always been those who imposed the present on the past. This is one of the reasons why traditions can't give their own secrets away. What is real if anything is lost within the tradition.

The relevance concerns hegemonic barriers to inquiry. Hegemony works wonderfully when you aren't aware of its shaping your thought and approach. This is where po-mo unwittingly does us all a service in its confusion.

Perhaps so. I took the statement as irony.

I will continue to attack religious studies folk as long as they hypocritically play the credentials game. (The bait and switch is not going to get you anywhere.)

(I couldn't divine your meaning here.)

It really is.

Especially in a political sense. Not so much in an academic sense. It is normal to rely on the experts in a field, frequently aided by not knowing anything useful about that field.

Classics is a hybrid discipline. It's partly history (though not necessarily), partly literature (though not necessarily, etc.), partly culture, partly anthropology, partly linguistics and philology. That warps your vision of the matter.

The "if" clause is superfluous.

I'd say both mythicist and historicist suffer from the same disease.

I gave up reading Ehrman seriously when he started publishing books that seem like he's treating the reader with the same techniques he would someone in his freshman classes. Putting out a book with a title like "Forged" is sufficiently tacky, titillating and manipulative to throw doubt on his seriousness. Perhaps I shouldn't judge him by his books.

LegionOnomaMoi

If you recall, this "loser crap" about specialists began with a comment I made that had nothing to do with whether specialists are/were right or wrong, merely what their responsiblites were in general in terms of engaging with non-specialists, whatever the field. I explicitly did not limit this to historical Jesus studies, or even history, but ALL fields.



That's certainly how you responded to my first post, however poor your assumption, and continued to demolish this strawman you constructed:
This "pedastal" bit and your diatribe about "religious specialists folk" touting credentials has nothing to do with the point I made in the beginning, as I repeatedly tried to point out, but apparently you were so keen on ripping apart and argument I never made you ignored that fact.


Who is "they" and where are they doing this? Perhaps the issue is that while I tend to avoid following the blogosphere debates (this being one of the reasons; too often the discussion becomes infantile banter regardless of the individual or their qualifications) you seem to read more of this (or at least as much) as you do discussions in the academic arena, where I just don't find specialists "playing the credentials game", even in religious and theological academic sources. For example, S. V. Betcher's "Resurrecting Christianities" published in Anglican Theological Review mentions Doherty alongside Dennis R. MacDonald without a single word on credentials. The footnote indicating the source (The Jesus Puzzle) goes on to include Harper's The Pagan Christ which "begins from a similar thesis" and again not a word is mentioned about credentials nor is their a negative word at all. In The Historical Jesus: Five Views the opening essay by Paul Rhodes Eddy and James K. Beilby more or less introduces Price and his view with the a paragraph begins "Finally, for some scholars today, the third quest is put in jeapordy not from the beginning, but from hindsight. Similar to Bruno Bauer of the old quest, they have embarked on the historical search only to conclude that a person named Jesus of Nazareth never existed." This line ends with a footnote citing such sources, which includes Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle. Again, not a word about credentials apart from the description "scholars" but Doherty is not distinguished from them (and in context is actually included). Even within highly critical evaluations of mythicist arguments outside of web 2.0 and the popular press I don't find the "credentials game" you refer to. Montague's review of Price's Deconstructin Jesus in the journal The Catholic Biblical Quarterly is quite critical. He also notes that Price "follows Earl Doherty in holding that the stories about Jesus are midrashic creations from OT precedents rather than actual events of Jesus' life that evoked the OT parallels." Not a word about credentials.

We do find this "credentials game" in blogs and similar sources of course, but not limited to PhDs. Doherty himself has played this game in his response to a history of scholarly refutations to the mythicist theory. In his response to historian Michael Grant's remark in Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels about the annhilation of the mythicist argument Doherty states: Grant himself, not a New Testament scholar, is prey to the same restricted and simplistic thinking that refuters of the myth theory often themselves betray."




First, "Casey's last stand" was an internet post, and stands in stark contrast in form, type, style, erudition, and just about everything else to the two monographs I have read by him. Second, I suspect much of this has to do with the fact that while views such as those espoused by Doherty and Price are (to say the least) almost completely absent within historical Jesus studies, they are nothing compared to some of the mythicist theories as expressed on the internet or in some books like The Jesus Mysteries which are so riddled with errors they are about as well-researched as Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Some mythicist views are so bizzare and so utterly filled with factual errors (and so oft repeated) that I can sympathize with the frustration of scholars who spend years researching only find their works critiqued by people who have no idea what they are talking about, and in their frustration they lash out and include within this category people like Doherty and others like him. Third, too few of those who castigate historical Jesus scholarship have taken the time to read more than a number of popular books on the subject (if that). Many start with something like The Jesus Mysteries and what is available on the internet and then read something like Ehrman's latest rag and take it as representative of the state of historical Jesus scholarship.



Yet it is within the works of those like Dunn, Wright, Meier, etc., that I find an comprehensive evaluation of how historical Jesus scholarship came to be, what epistomologies shaped various trends, how various philosophies of history and historiography effected the history of historical Jesus scholarship, and even how the authors themselves are not (and cannot) be free of biases.




History is a hybrid discipline. It's part sociology, part philosophy, part anthropology, and so forth. That's why I find your assertion 'Academia is happy with its separate competences" so odd. Most academics tend to have one or two areas they are really competent in, but a much wider range in they are quite knowledgable. And they rely on the interactions with others whose compentencies lie elsewhere to further scholarship.

aa5874

This is most remarkable. Ehrman writes rag and people should NOT THINK Ehrman represents the state of "historical Jesus" scholarship???

It is clear that you are highlighting the very fact the historical Jesus Schorlarship is RAGS.

Ehrman in previous books has ALREADY CUT off the Head and Legs of the historical Jesus by EXPOSING Forgeries and Fiction surrounding the Jesus story coupled with NO reliable and original surviving Texts about Jesus.

Ehrman has EFFECTIVELY "SLAUGHTERED" the historical Jesus argument in the Public domain..

Toto

This is not available on the web, so it's hard to know what is going on here, but there is this from an online bibliography:

Sharon Betcher is at the Vancouver School of Theology where she gave in inaugural lecture

Sunday, May 08 VST was delighted to welcome The Reverend Dr. Sharon Betcher to the rank of full professor. Sharon’s promotion was celebrated through the event of her inaugural lecture. Weaving strands of thought between the genres of constructive theology, pneumatology and disability studies, Sharon gave a fascinating lecture on the idea of Spirit as prosthesis. With her usual breath-taking creativity, Dr. Betcher wove a poetic ode to the possible at the intersection of Spirit and corporality. This lecture provided an opportunity for the gathered crowd to hear Sharon’s thinking across the range of her academic work, noting her doctoral thesis which worked in pneumatology and her recent seminal thinking in the area of disability studies (Spirit and the Politics of Disablement; Fortress, 2007)

Thanks for pointing this out. It is clear that Christianity will be able to adapt to a mythical Jesus. But Dr. Betcher is not part of the Historical Jesus guild.

The authors here are evangelical Christians. They argue that miracles can happen. All of the authors here except for Price have a faith commitment to the existence of a historical Jesus. This book seems to be aimed at evangelical apologists, to give them an idea of the arguments that they will encounter.

But Price does have credentials, so that argument wouldn't work here.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove. Doherty is reflecting back a criticism that was made of him.

LegionOnomaMoi

That was kind of the point. Here's a scholar who isn't involved in historical Jesus research yet still references Doherty, despite his lack of "credentials."



You think John Dominic Crossan is an "evangelical Christian"? Seriously? The man who said that God doesn't exist apart from faith and revelation, and thus (when asked by W. L. Craig whether god existed before humans were around "Well, I would probably prefer to say no...") He's certainly religious, and I believe still calls himself christian, but this is the first time I've heard someone who believes that Jesus never even had a tomb which his followers could find empty (because crucified people were left for the animals) called "evangelical." Price, Crossan, Johnson, Dunn, and Bock. It's not a bad cross-section of current views in that the wish was for diversity of opinion and to get it from some of the "big names" in the field. But that's irrelevant. The point wasn't who was included or whether or not the book is any good, merely that the introductory essay references doherty without any discussion of credentials in the context of scholarship.

In what sense does Crossan argue this? After all, he states that god doesn't act directly in the world, that the supernatural (whatever he means by that) always operates through "the natural" and that the proper response to any claim that a miracle has happened (something we can't explain) is "I don't know how that happened" not that it is a miracle.

Price states in the book "I was for half a dozen years a pastor of a Baptist church and am now a happy Episcopalian. I rejoice to take the Eucharist every week and to sing the great hymns of the faith. For me the Christ of faith has all the more importance since I think it is most probable that there was never any other" (p. 56). Everyone has biases.


The point was that Doherty is also referenced in this critique, but there is no discussion of his lack of credentials or statement about why some non-PhD is being included in a discussion/review of a work of scholarship. He's simply included.

Not really (although perhaps this is just my limited experience with the apparently bitter battle of blogs). Doherty has been criticized for not being an expert at all (i.e., for having no real academic credentials which would make him qualified) not for having a doctorate which is supposed to be "higher" than a PhD, but in the wrong field. Grant had a Litt.D and had academic appointments.

outhouse

Bud, it sounds like they are pretty ignorant to the historical methods and those involved with the study going on. Complete failure to understand cultural and physical anthropology of the time period as well.



parroting myther fodder is so weak on their part.

spin

You should be able to relate to that.

You should be able to relate to that also.

You should be able to relate to that as well. Parroting any fodder is so weak, be it myther, hysterical jesusist or whatever. Your recycling undigested baloney is not helpful. You don't seem to be able to string a coherent argument of any depth together and you just keep belching your non-analytical disagreement. It would be nice if you could present something with a little developed thought, even if one disagreed with it: it would be a welcome change to burps like this latest informationless post of yours. Please try to give something more tangible than what you have so far.

aa5874

It is a complete waste of time arguing about credentials. One does NOT need credentials to PRESENT or EXAMINE written statements. Ordinary people do this on a daily basis throughout the world.

It is just mind-boggling how HJers can waste time.

The Jesus stories, if written in the 2nd century, was written for ORDINARY people to understand. The NT Jesus stories are REMARKABLY easy to understand. They were written before people had PH.ds and Doctorates.

Understanding Matthew 1.18 and Mark 6.48-49 does NOT require a College degree and further Ehrman has ALREADY explained the NT Canon contains Fiction and False attributions.

Why are people just going around in circles???

Ehrman has already EXPOSED that regardless of credentials an historical Jesus cannot be defended. See "FORGED" written by Ehrman.

Ehrman himself attempted to defend an historical Jesus but as expected was a COMPLETE fAILURE.

Credentials cannot help the HJ argument.