aa5874

Your reply as usual is NOT a counter-argument.

Right now, I am dealing with the actual contents of the Canonised Hebrews and it clearly supports the other books of the NT where it is claimed Jesus Christ, the Son of God, born of a Ghost and a Virgin was in Galilee and Jerusalem, was crucified after a trial with the Sanhedrin and Pilate and was buried in a tomb by Joseph of Aritmathea.

One ambiguous verse in the Canon cannot ever overturn the teachings of the Church concerning their Jesus when no Apologetic source that used Hebrews ever claimed Jesus was never on earth and was crucified in sub-lunar.

maryhelena

And therein, Earl, is your downfall. You are reading your interpretations of other passages into Hebrews into 8:4. i.e. you are allowing your interpretations of other passages to "eliminate the ambiguity". Problem with that Earl, is that everyone else can do likewise - including the JC historicists.

Heavens alive, Earl. Don't be so presumptuous as to even contemplate comparing your Hebrews speculations to DNA testing. Your interpretations of other Hebrews passages, and the Pauline epistles, are no 'standard' by which anyone else is obliged to comply with.
The task, Earl, is to put all the NT story on the table.

There is no black and white problem here, Earl, it's grey all the way. The best that can be done is to try and search for early christian origins. Interpreting theological or philosophical ideas will not do that. All that does is provide a merry-go-around for threads like this. 'Truth', Earl, is a funny thing - it keeps running away the more one tries to catch it.....it's a never-ending search that keeps us all enthralled.

Roo Bookaroo

Just on cue for this discussion:

Word of the Day for Sunday, February 3, 2013

counterfactual \koun-ter-FAK-choo-uhl\, noun:

a conditional statement the first clause of which expresses something contrary to fact, as “If I had known.”

The ruse is so obvious, a counterfactual posing as a home truth.
-- Matt Feeney, "Michael Chabon's Oakland," The New Yorker, September 26, 2012

Nevertheless, a counterfactual conditional differs from a piece of fiction only insofar as in the first case the addressee is requested to cooperate more actively in the realization of the text he receives...
-- Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader

This word was born in the late 1940s from a portmanteau of two complete words. Counterfactual imagines a reality that is counter to the factual, or lived, experience.

thief of fire

I think Earl gets hostile because he is constantly on the defensive.

thief of fire

Why should anyone work on strengthening Earl's theory?
We should rather test is, and that may mean destroying it or weakening it.

maryhelena

Your right of course. No theory is immune to testing. And what fails the test has to be rejected, destroyed. That's the way progress is made. However, many a time supporters of a theory will fight to the death for it. It's not always easy to let go of an idea that one has placed great value upon. Ideas, to some extent, become us. We live and breath their 'essence'. We live, so to speak, in their world. And that's when ideas become dangerous things. "The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas" (Paul Johnson)

As for Doherty's ideas - it's not strengthening his ideas that will produce value, produce forward movement in the ahistoricist/mythicist debate - as though Doherty's ideas just need a helping hand and all will be well. There are elements in Doherty's ideas that are faulty and have to be eliminated, destroyed:

Hebrews 8:4 is ambiguous. In order to attempt to "eliminate the ambiguity" Doherty interprets other NT verses a certain way. He then uses his interpretations as a 'standard', as a rule, by which he then seeks to "eliminate the ambiguity" in Heb.8.4. The problem is that other people can use different interpretations as their 'standard', their rule, for interpreting Heb.8:4. Hence, Doherty's "smoking gun" and '"time-bomb" assertions re Heb:8:4 are nothing more than claiming victory by playing by his own rules....:banghead:

Check mate!

A third way, an alternative, standard or rule, needs to be found.

I've suggested a way out for Doherty. Not that he is likely to take it ...as he does not see the necessity for doing so....and, anyway, he thinks anything I ever say is "'gobbledygook'.

Big opportunity ahead for Doherty to demonstrate the caliber of his scholarship. No, not in linguistics - but in that scholarly demeanour that applauds 'truth', applauds insights, wherever it is to be found. George Wells rose to the occasion when it presented itself. I'm sure the ahistoricist/mythicist of this forum, and elsewhere online, will be wanting to applaud Doherty after he accepts the challenge that lies before him.

Roo Bookaroo

Thief of fire (What a great name! Prometheus again!)

It's the "should" that remains unexplained. It's the "should" that carries all the implicit biases and preferences, all the unsaid assumptions of underlying principles, methods or aims.

It's like Dorothy Murdock, who starts intoning: "mythicists" SHOULD support each other, help each other, and not criticize each other.
As if the denial of Jesus historicity was a movement, a party, a brotherhood, or a mutual assistance society. Which it is not, and has never been. They're all independent thinkers.
It's made up of individual brains that have each their ideas, preferences and biases.

Aristotle was trained by Plato. But he never felt he SHOULD support and defend Plato. On the contrary Aristotle used his own brains and experience to criticize and refute Plato to the point of building up a whole system opposed to Plato.
This "should" business always hides some kind of dogmatism in the background, it's an expression of control, of domination.

Grog

That is exactly how theory is strengthened!

maryhelena

Sure, but lets make sure we name names here - lets name the errors that have to be jettisoned.....just so everyone is on the same page...

And why just strengthen Doherty's theory? How about the theory of George Wells? Doherty has no claim re being the originator of the ahistoricist/mythicist theory.....:constern01:

Grog

Testing it and refining it is strengthening it. And, yes, of course, if it needs to be entirely tossed then toss it. My point is that theory is the framework within which we operate. It provides us with the assumptions and axioms through which we can make sense of our observations. There are 2 main competing, overarching theories (well maybe 3) of Christian origins. The theory one adopts leads to certain assumptions that are taken when approaching the evidence. If one assumes that Christianity must have started with a founder executed by Pilate (or Herod or some other first century despot), then the researcher will find confirmation of their assumption in Galatians 4:4 (for example). It is very difficult to reconcile the two approaches to the evidence at hand.

Testing Earl's theory...the fullest and meatiest theory available, I believe...refines it and improves it. In this I am not talking about his view of Hebrews 8:4, which is only one element of the larger theory, what I would call the evolution of the Christ myth theory (as opposed to the Big Bang of Christian origins, or the fabrication theory).

As far as completely rejecting the Christ myth theory, I don't see that happening. If there were a trump card out there, it would have been played by now.