DCHindley

Based on what Arnal has stated on Crosstalk2, I do not think he believes the "historical" Jesus is recoverable, and what is recoverable is only what others say about him or used what they thought about him in narratives. Arnal is a kind of reactionary radical-left opposite of the conservative-right critics he assails as reactionary. I'm rubber and you're glue ... Oh yeah? Yeah!

DCH

bacht

I guess technically this is a variation of the ad hominem fallacy, which is attacking the arguer rather than the argument. We're all familiar with this from politics and general internet bs.

It's similar to trade relations: participants have to believe that their contacts are acting in good faith, otherwise the system collapses. The general bias in this group is against the academic establishment of biblical studies, and their continued insistence on historical reliability for Christian literature. Mythicists have been and seem to continue to be a minority, which has its own emotional profile (eg. the embattled underdog or misunderstood truth-teller mentality)

No Robots

I contest mythicism for reasons of enlightened self-interest. An accurate approach to Christ is necessary for the well-being of human culture. The persistent tendency to de-Judaize Christ is a significant threat to the values and stability of civilization. This was most obvious in the early part of the twentieth century, with the rise of theories about Christ being an 'Aryan'. Many Jewish voices were raised against this distorted pseudo-scholarship. Notable among those voices was that of Rabbi Stephen Wise. On December 20 1925, Wise delivered a sermon in which he exclaimed, 'Jesus was not only a Jew, but he was the Jew, the Jew of Jews.' Wise’s view was, and is, controversial, but it struck a responsive cord among some Christians:

[L]iberal streams in American Protestant theology shared Wise's view that a tolerant, enlightened modern society jeopardized its own values and stability by condoning distorted accounts of Jesus' Jewish background.— "A Jew's view of Jesus: Stephen Wise, Joseph Klausner, and discourse about the Jewish Jesus in the inter-war period" / Matthew Silver. In Siyywn 70, no1 (2005): 31-62.

Distorted understanding of Christ’s relation to Judaism is a persistent cultural problem. It seems to me that mythicism is another such distorted understanding. As such, were it to obtain widespread popular and instititutional support, it would present a significant threat to cultural stability. In fact, the mythicist claim to represent science and rationality makes it even more dangerous in this respect than even the old religious claim to represent truth and morality. The old religion condemned its opponents as deceitful and immoral; the new superstition condemns its opponents as unscientific and irrational, which is a far graver charge nowadays.

Toto

So if mythicism emphasized the Jewish roots of the myth, would it pass your political test?

No Robots

It would be a good start in the right direction. I know that one poster here has put out a book called Jesus - A Very Jewish Myth. I am quite confident that anyone who goes down this road to the end will find the real human Christ.

bacht

How about a Jewish gnostic saviour or revealer? What about the return of the original god of the Jews usurped by YHWH? (Margaret Barker's The Great Angel, A Study of Israel's Second God (or via: amazon.co.uk))

Atheos

Did someone throw a rock through this window?

If I were sitting here staring out the window when someone walked up just outside it, wound up and heaved a rock through it I'd know for certain that someone threw a rock through the window.

If I were in the next room and heard a crash, then I went into the room to see someone running away outside the broken window and I saw a rock sitting inside the room surrounded by broken glass I would be reasonably certain that someone had thrown a rock through the window.

If I came home and found the situation described above but didn't actually see someone running away I'd once again be somewhat certain that someone threw a rock through the window, but it would be reasonable to consider other possibilities. Could the rock have fallen from something nearby?

If it's someone else's house and they tell me that someone threw a rock through the window yesterday I might believe them, but what if that person had a history of making things up? All I see now is a window that appears to be in good order. There are no signs of broken glass and no rock.

If my great aunt tells me that 40 years ago someone threw a rock through the window I might believe her, but once again my belief would rest on my willingness to trust her memory and veracity.

If I heard a rumor that once a rock had been thrown through the window but nobody knew for sure who started the rumor it would be reasonable to wonder if perhaps it was nothing more than a rumor.

If 100 years after the alleged event I had nothing but anonymous documents saying that at one time a house had been on this spot and someone had thrown a rock through it, if I were curious enough I might look into some historical records to see how plausible the story was. If I discovered that there were no records of the house actually existing there, and there were no records of any contemporary people making claim to the house existing there or the stories of a rock being thrown through the window I'd probably be quite justified in being very skeptical about the whole thing.

Is it ridiculous (or ludicrous) to be skeptical about the "historical Jesus?"

As it turns out there is no physical evidence that such a person ever existed.

When one looks for evidence that the story behind such a person happened one is more often than not met with no evidence, even when evidence should reasonably be expected.

For example, if everyone in the Roman Empire had been forced to travel to their hometown for a census around the time in question one would expect to see mounds of evidence in support of this massive shuffling of people. There is nary a sausage.

If such a decree had been issued, with all the archaeological attention that has been focused on those events surely some documentation of that decree would be forthcoming. Once again there is nothing but deafening silence.

If Herod had ordered all male children two years and under "throughout the coasts" to be killed one would rightly expect there to be documentation about such an atrocity. Again, only the sound of crickets are heard.

Do people make stuff up? History is filled with records of myths that were believed by large numbers of people for many decades or centuries. Some such myths were quite popular.

Could "Jesus" be a myth? Born of a virgin, never making any errors in judgment or doing anything wrong, turning water to wine, talking with dead people, miraculously healing people who were blind, deaf, paralytic, amputees and other diseases. Turning small quantities of food into enough to feed thousands of people, causing fierce storms to dissipate immediately, walking on the surface of water, appearing and disappearing at will, raising dead people and floating off into the sky.

Certainly these sound like the characteristics of hundreds of mythological beings invented by people over the years. To date there are no real people running around capable of doing these things.

It really doesn't matter how many people believe a myth, that doesn't make the myth true.

That's a really important point, and I'm going to say it again: It doesn't matter how many people believe a myth, that doesn't make the myth true.

Is it possible to remove "emotion" from an evaluation of these claims? Certainly not. It can be argued that even the desire to be completely objective is itself an emotional state.

Did a man named Jesus exist? I'm pretty certain that's true.

Was a man named Jesus the son of a carpenter living during the time in question? I have no problem accepting that this could be true.

Was this man able to wow people with his thoughts and wisdom? Wouldn't be the first time someone was able to do that.

Could such a man have offended the wrong people and got his ass tossed in jail and killed? Again, it wouldn't be the first time something like that happened.

Was this man born of a virgin? Is it really that unreasonable to be skeptical about such a claim?

Was this man capable of walking on water? Is it ludicrous to doubt such a claim?

Was this man able to raise dead people back to life? Is it ludicrous to doubt such claims?

Was this man capable of floating off into the sky? Once again, I just have to ask. Why is are people who are skeptical of these fantastic claims considered "ridiculous" by anyone?

Personally, I have a feeling the whole story was a fabrication. I think it probably evolved over many decades and even centuries into the forms most people accept today. But if I were to be presented with compelling evidence that there actually was a historical nugget of truth behind any of the claims made by the four anonymous documents most people call "the gospels" I'd be just fine with it. But unless someone can show real evidence of the fantastic claims made in the stories I just can't help feeling like it's reasonable to dismiss these claims as fabrications.

Just like I dismiss claims of Santa Claus.

No Robots

Indeed.

Barker's book looks like quite a good read, and an excellent place to start on the subject of the relation between Christ and Judaism. Of course, you may eventually want to get around to something written on the subject by Jewish scholars.

bacht

Well, you're welcome to stick with your flesh-and-blood Christ. If there was such a person I'm persuaded he was not the character described in the New Testament, who seems to be stitched together from prophecy.

Do you accept the idea that the Deuteronomic reform was a top-down imposition of monolatry on a previously polytheistic culture? It's one way a new deity could have re-entered Judaism two millenia ago, an underground eruption so to speak.

No Robots

Possibly. I’m by no means an expert on the subject. Here’s what Constantin Brunner has to say on the matter:

Paganism had been entirely destroyed by Judaism as it had developed since the days of Ezra, by Pharisaic, rationalist Judaism. The ability to absorb pagan elements was extinct in the Jews of that time; all pagan thoughts were weeded out and their roots destroyed.

Brunner goes on to speculate that Ezra also suppressed much of the prophetic/mystical elements of Judaism.

Are you saying that polytheism persisted underground within Judaism? In light of Brunner’s statement, I don’t think so, no.

Early on we see a High Christology, where Christ is called “Lord,” the word reserved for Jahve. This is a mark of the enthusiasm with which the earliest Christians exalted Christ. But all this takes place within Judaism. As Brunner puts it:

So Paul put forward this Christ against the whole of pharisaic Judaism, as the real fulfillment of Judaism against a Judaism gone astray, as blessing against damnation. Henceforth he knew no other love but love for this true Judaism through his love for Christ. For him, Christ was "in the place of God." Thus—and here we are faced with the immensity of his overflowing enthusiasm and his unprecedented revolutionary daring, at the very heart of the problem—he applied the name "Lord," which the Jews used instead of the word Jahve, to Christ (1 Cor. 8:6; and the Pauline Gospel of Luke follows him in this); thus he calls himself "a prisoner in Christ" (Eph. 4:1) and was obliged to say: "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." As far as the other Jews were concerned, this made him no longer a Jew, since he was no longer a pharisaic Jew; as far as he himself was concerned, however, in the depths of his conscience, it made him a proper Jew for the first time.

The fact is that we have a case where a man is fit into an existing framework of spiritual thought. That he fits that framework so well is most wonderful. The framework without the man, however, is just sad, a pathetic sidenote to history.