Vorkosigan

I live for the day when someone attacking the mythicist argument actually takes the time to understand it.

Vorkosigan

aa5874

And, I live for the day when the difference between probability and evidence is fully understood.

As I have noticed, those who claim the historicity of Jesus only do so on probability, not on evidence.

Anyone who has been a juror in a court proceeding will know that guilt or innocence is based on evidence not on probability or plausibilties.

To me, the HJ position is simple, and it is this: Even though there is no evidence to support the historicity of Jesus Christ, I believe in my heart and have faith that Jesus Christ lived.

youngalexander

Your day has come!

Perhaps an exposition of the difference would benefit us all.
Proceed.

The Bishop

I haven't been here for a while, but I can't really say that I ever noticed P being heavily promoted.

Historical reasons for claiming an existant Jesus do go a little farther than a conjecture that amounts to "Well, with four biographies, there must have been such a person!". For my part, I was convinced in an HJ when I realised that two different accounts of a birth in Bethlehem were necessary to shoehorn Jesus into Messianic Davidic-line prophecy, but there was no reason whatsoever to have him be a Galilean - not from Scripture, anyway.

This argument isn't hard to defeat at all. Just because every individual thing Jesus said was said by other people, doesn't mean there wasn't a real Jesus who said them all together. The same argument about someone who synthesised all the previous sayings of Jesus could be applied to Jesus himself!

You may as well argue that since all the building blocks of knowledge behind Relativity had been provided by Newton, Galileo, James Clerk Maxwell and Lorentz, then Einstein never existed!

It's nothing to do with chicken and egg, it's to do with the fact that very obviously somebody said all those things together, and you can't disprove someone's existence from the fact that all the things they said or believed were already said or believed by lots of different sets of people before them.

No, not if you put it that way. I haven't revisited here for a while, but a while ago I pointed out that every week there are thousands of words expended on Tony Blair and George Bush, nary a one of which will mention where they went to school, their significant career milestones or even, practically anything they've done while they're in office. Paul thought Jesus was God because he resurrected from the dead. As far as long term history is concerned, Bush and Blair were all about Iraq and almost nothing else. But all three of those people had lives and careers and an almost infinite sequence of events in those lives, about which their chroniclers are not at this stage concerned with.

I hope I've demonstrated the fallacies in that attitude. 3 wrong or weak arguments do not add up to a strong argument. What if there was a Historical Jesus in actual (unknowable from this distance) fact? Then all the different strands of argument that he never did are equally worthless!

spamandham

This is the best evidence I've seen for the HJ position. Thanks!

I'd love to see a consolidated list of arguments like this for the HJ position. Such summaries do exist for the MJ position. It'd be nice to weight them side by side to make a judgement.

(of course, I suppose the counter would be that if you are historicizing a myth, you have to have him come from somewhere. )

post tenebras lux

A simple mix up (whether accidentally or on purpose) of the word Nazarene would explain the belief that he had been 'from Galilee'.

The Bishop

post tenebras lux, it's perfectly plain from the skimpiest of readings of the gospels and the letters, that the principal followers of Jesus were all Galileans. It just goes far too far to believe that all the Galilean elements, the Nazarene origins and childhood, living later in Capernaum, much use of the Sea of Galilee for stories and parables, and Peter's regional accent, were all specially written in to account for one misprint of Nazorite.

Since he had to be born in Bethlehem, have him come from Bethlehem! That's the whole point.

gstafleu

True enough, but it misses the point. Several points. The first is that Jesus was supposed to be extra-special. You'd think that if so, he would have said some extra-special things. If he just repeats what others said, that doesn't point to any extra-specialty. Second, while you indeed cannot use his repeating things as absolute proof for his non-existence, you can equally not use repeated material as proof for his existence. So at minimum this removes all repeated material as evidence for his existence. And if after that nothing is left, you're left with a pretty thin case.


What is mentioned is what is seen as important by the authors. In Paul's case this means that he apparently did not think that the large majority of gospel material was worth mentioning. Similarly journalists may not think various non-Iraq milestones worth mentioning. I find that understandable in the Bush/Blair case, B&B are currently pretty well defined by the Iraq situation. I do not find it at all understandable in the case of Paul. So you are comparing apples and oranges here. Paul leaves out stuff that everybody else sees as essential, journalists leave out stuff that is of lesser relevance to how B&B are currently seen.



You state the crux of the matter very well: unknowable. Scientific method then forces us to shelf the HJ hypothesis. Given that we have evidence for the MJ hypothesis, that then becomes the most likely one. If anyone can come up with real evidence for an HJ, as opposed to pointing out the weaknesses in the MJ case, reevaluation may be in order.

Gerard

post tenebras lux

As far as I'm aware, the gospels came later Bish'. When do you think they were written, and by whom?

Oh, and I like that 'misprint' angle. We're not talking printing presses here, we're talking about the rants of itinerant roadside preachers passing on what they think they heard from another preacher (and/or what they were told personally by god in 'visions').

gstafleu

If so it is not doing too well.

Both the MJers and the HJers have to do two things: (a) present evidence for their position and (b) show why the other guys' evidence is weak. The 0-thread does (b) for the MJ position. The D and P threads then do (a). This constitutes a well constructed argument. You don't just say why the other guys are wrong, but you also present a model of the development of the NT that better explains the available data.

As far as I can tell, what The Bishop does is mostly saying why MJ is wrong, he does not present much evidence for an HJ. Except for the bit about Galilee. That is not uninteresting, but even if we take it at face value it doesn't constitute all that much in the way of evidence. In fact, I'm rather tempted to see it as a diversionary tactic ("let's see if we can discuss this Galilee bit instead of the whole MJ case"), but I'll concede that that is probably unfair.

Gerard

So would I .