bacht

Well, the undergrad texts I was assigned were Jesus and Judaism by Sanders and Jesus the Jew by Vermes. This was at a mainstream public university in Toronto, in the 1980s. Maybe you're the one who's out of date.

No Robots

My point in quoting Klausner is to demonstrate that nothing has really changed in Bible scholarship over the past century. Higher criticism is still, in effect, a vast de-judaizing project. There is a superficial acknowledgement of the New Testament as Jewish, and a few Jewish scholars are accepted as experts on the subject; but the New Testament as quintessentially Jewish literature and Christ himself as quintessential Jew, well, let's just say that these topics remain to be fully digested:

Jesus was a Jew. Everyone knows that, don't they? Well, it would seem that they do and they don't. It is certainly not the view of most Christians, nor is it common knowledge among atheists or even Jews, that Jesus was to the brim a Jew, not incidentally or as a matter of temporal accident a Jew, not, in Jonathan Miller's joke, Jewish, but a Jew by faith, by temperament and by spiritual ambition; a Jew in his relentless ethicising, in his love of quibbling and legalistics, in his fondness - frankly, to the point of tiresomeness sometimes - for extended metaphors and sermons wrapped in parables, and in the apocalyptic urgency of his teaching. A Jew, in other words, on unambiguously Jewish business.--"Behold! The Jewish Jesus" / Howard Jacobson.

What is actually happening in scholarly and popular circles is that the de-judaizing project initiated by Higher Criticism is proceeding apace, and coming to its inevitable conclusion in mythicism, as Klausner noted a century ago.

bacht

I'll leave it to those with links to academia to assess your claim.

We've already wasted enough bandwidth in this thread, which was another subject altogether.

Solo

I agree C.S.Lewis had issues, and his posturing was the kind of Christian pseudophilosophizing that Orwell found so objectionable and called "Salvation Army nastiness". We will give you soup but first you will have to get on your knees and renounce yourself as a sinner before your godly benefactors.

Lewis'es 'trilemma' stinks of this self-righteousness. Jesus was either a liar a lunatic, or lord. Couldn't have been anything else, for example 'a liar made lord by lunatics', or a lunatic made lord by lunatics. Notice the absolute, razor sharply reduced options Lewis uses. Lunatic: can it not be someone who had some temporary mental issues, one's that are more or less routinesly treated today ? Liar: can it not be someone who is self-deluded, someone who is temporarily injudicious ? Lord: who needs lord except people who want to hypnotize you with the suggestion they know him and you don't ? or people who like to lick boots and use the lord's authority to do mischief and rapine on his nickel. No other options available. Cannot Jesus be a friend ? Sorry, starts with 'f'. It has to be 'l' like in 'Lewis'.

The same with 'meaning'. Meaning is an ontological category. You could be the first Jesuit missionary to the Yanomani and preach to them Christ all your life, but they will never get it with the 'meaning' of a Spanish-born-and-bred soldier of Christ. To them the monks are Gods that came to the forest with magic and bad diseases.

My uncle Mirek was a great guy and a communist (in former Czechoslovakia). He was one of those 'true believers' in better humanity who despised people who lied, cheated, and hogged material things. For him , history had a meaning; it would end up in communism where idiots and assholes would be bred out by better social organization. He never believed in God. He believed in a German, cigar smoking philosopher, who knew everything, and who said religion was 'opium for the people'. There was no God, because he had no use for that belief. My uncle was the most moral human being that I ever knew. He was absolutely fearless, sincere, funny, and straightforward in speaking out his mind. He was jailed for seven years on some stupid trumped-up charge by some Stalinist hyena. Never bitched about it: when under Dubcek, he was asked to go on TV and tell about his experience, he told the producers to stuff it: 'You can't teach bastards to be communists, so what's the point. I have nothing to complain about."

I never met anyone else who was so comfortable with who he was that he did not have to preach to anyone about what he believed. He used to have this saying, which in translation goes something like: "It's not at all about what you believe, it's about not kidding yourself about what you believe".

Jiri

No Robots

Here's something for you, Jiri:

Most Socialists are content to point out that once Socialism has been established we shall be happier in a material sense, and to assume that all problems lapse when one’s belly is full. The truth is the opposite: when one’s belly is empty, one’s only problem is an empty belly. It is when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation that we shall really start wondering about man’s destiny and the reason for his existence. One cannot have any worthwhile picture of the future unless one realises how much we have lost by the decay of Christianity.--"As I please" / George Orwell.

No Robots

Oh, yes, and to close the circle, here is Orwell on Lewis:

One reason for the extravagant boosting that these people get in the press is that their political affiliations are invariably reactionary. Some of them were frank admirers of Fascism as long as it was safe to be so. That is why I draw attention to Mr C. S. Lewis and his chummy little wireless talks, of which no doubt there will be more. They are not really so unpolitical as they are meant to look. Indeed they are an outflanking movement in the big counterattack against the Left.

GakuseiDon

Lewis never uses "trilemma" anywhere, nor does he present it as a logical argument. This was rhetoric that he used against Christians who believed that the Gospels represented accurately what Jesus said, but nevertheless think that Jesus was just a good bloke. Lewis' point was this: any man who went around claiming the things that Jesus claimed, e.g. the ability to forgive other people's sins, was either a liar, a lunatic or God himself. (Sometimes Lewis only presented two options.)

So you are right that Lewis provides razor sharply reduced options. For Lewis, those Christians who believed the Gospel accounts as accurately depicting Jesus but thought that Jesus was just a good bloke need to either accept what Jesus said about himself, or reject him as a madman.

Vorkosigan

Lewis borrow that Chesterton, who as I recall only used two options.

aa5874

So, Solo wants MORE options. Let us see how many more options we can muster.

1. Jesus was a LIAR.

2. Jesus was a Lunatic

3. Jesus was Lord.

4. Jesus was a LIAR and made Lord by Lunatics.

5. Jesus was a LIAR and made a LUNATIC by the Lord

6. Jesus was Lord and made a Liar by Lunatics

7. Jesus was Lord made a Lunatic by Liars.

8. Jesus was a LUNATIC made Lord by Liars.

9. Jesus was a Lunatic made a LIAR by the Lord.

10. Jesus was simultaneously a LIAR, a Lunatic and Lord.

There may be MORE options but I am restricted by time.

11. Jesus was a LIAR and a Lunatic.

12. Jesus was a Liar and Lord.

13. Jesus was a Lunatic and Lord.

Solo

I would agree if Orwell have written "Christian ethos" rather than "Christianity". Maybe he meant it that way.

The religion itself of course looks to be in big trouble and beset on all sides. The RC is getting beat up over rampant paedophilia but it won't budge on celibacy, which all but insures that the seminaries will cintunue to fill with sexual marginals and predators. John Paul II. apologized for the crusades in Syria to the son of the greatest mass murderer in the Middle East. The Anglicans are in schism on whether anal intercourse between two males should be a sacrament in their church. Here in Canada, the church has apologized to the First Nations (political umbrella of the Canadian native people) for waging a cultural war on them through parish schools. The speaker in Matthew 28:19 was evidently a cultural imperialist. It follows then that some churches now openly preach there was no resurrection.

But the problem I believe lies elsewhere. The churches themselves have become infected with the Culture of Narcissism (Christopher Lash), they themselves are being shaped by the social dynamics unleashed in the age of industrial revolution. They themselves follow the trend. Isn't that why the SNL character of father Farducci is so funny ?

The loss of transcendental Christian values animating the secular realm makes us rudderless. But the religion can't come back in any of its previous forms. It does not have the pull to reverse societal trends. It can do nothing to cancel the paradigm. Pathological self-absorption now rules. It is that which breeds the guilt complex of the West, the obsessive fault finding with our civilization. It's now much more acute than in Orwell's time.

Jiri