Doug Shaver

Wow! Thankyouthankyouthankyou for that link.

ApostateAbe

I am willing to defend it, and I have. My full quote was:

I was quoting Case, who was no Christian apologist. The sociological situation was the same then as it is today--when steeped in the us-vs.-them trenches of Jesus-minimalism, then reasonable arguments that you once heard from apologists will always seem like bogus nonsense when it comes from anywhere else. Case was alluding to that mentality in that quote.

Robert M. Price's fan base is made entirely of atheists, secularists, and anti-religious activists, and that should be taken as an obvious fact. Here is his complete list of published books on the topic of religion:

• The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny Society of Biblical Literature. ISBN 0-7885-0224-7 (Mar 1997).
• The Evolution of the Pauline Canon, in Hervormde Teologiese Studies, Number 1&2 June 1997, 36-67
• Mystic Rhythms: The Philosophical Vision of Rush Borgo Press. ISBN 1-58715-102-2. with Carol Selby Price (1 Nov 1998)
• Deconstructing Jesus Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-758-9. (20 Mar 2000).
• The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition? Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-59102-121-9. (20 Dec 2003)
• The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond The Grave Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-59102-286-X. with Jeffery Lowder (20 April 2005)
• The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger than Fiction Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-59102-348-3. (20 Sep 2005).
• The Reason Driven Life: What Am I Here on Earth For? Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-59102-476-5. (1 Sep 2006).
• The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-four Formative Texts Signature Books ISBN 1-56085-194-5. (30 Oct 2006)
• The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church was Left Behind Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-59102-583-4. (1 Sept 2007).
• Jesus is Dead American Atheist Press ISBN 1-57884-000-7. (30 April 2007).
• Top Secret: The Truth Behind Today's Pop Mysticisms Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-59102-608-3 (8 April 2008)
• Beyond Born Again: Towards Evangelical Maturity Wildside Press. ISBN 1-4344-7748-7 (30 Oct 2008).
• Inerrant the Wind: The Evangelical Crisis of Biblical Authority Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-59102-676-8 (1 Dec 2008).
• The Case Against The Case For Christ: A New Testament Scholar Refutes the Reverend Lee Strobel with editor Frank R. Zindler, American Atheist Press. ISBN 1-57884-005-8 (15 Feb 2010)

There are two books in that pile that would almost make Robert M. Price side with the general church-going Christian population: Top Secret: The Truth Behind Today's Pop Mysticisms and The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger than Fiction. All of the rest of them are designed to battle the Biblicists and rebut the apologists. That is the essence of his entire career. If you think the fact that he goes to church or whatever makes him the greatest atheist friend of Christianity, then I can't think of a starker delusion. Do you also think Richard Dawkins is a friend of Christianity? He must be, because of that t-shirt he once wore.



Richard Dawkins: greatest friend of Christianity except for Robert M. Price.

Toto

Not successfully.

But Case was a Christian apologist. Have you read anything about him? He was a liberal Baptist rationalist on the faculty of the University of Chicago and no drooling idiot, but still an apologist for Christianity.

Except that he wasn't. He was referring to the particular situation of him time, when there were academically respectable mythicists and the theologians were a bit more powerful than they are now.

Price is anti-fundamentalist but pro-religion. If you listen to his podcast, he has some liberal religious fans. He says nice things about religious practice. He goes to church. :huh:

What seems like an "obvious fact" to you may not be an actual fact.

ApostateAbe

Mr. Doherty, I wrote my opinions on the arguments of your website in a new thread here:

Shirley Jackson Case vs. Earl Doherty: on the attestation of gospels to Jesus

GakuseiDon

Looking through Case's on-line work, there are some fascinating snippets on his descriptions of the mythicist views of his time:
http://christianorigins.com/case/ch2.html

The Mythical Christ of radical criticism

Niemojewski finds that the New Testament writings are not altogether uniform in their representation of Jesus as a mythical personage, except in their consistent treatment of him as a deity. In the epistles he is nothing other than a variant of Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, Adonis. For Matthew he is the Sun-god. For Luke the supreme deity is the sun and his son is the moon. Again the Holy Spirit is the sun. Various gospel names and characters, as Arimathea, Cyrene, Galilee, Judea, have an astral significance; while Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Herodias, Salome, are the counterparts respectively of the constellations Hydrus, Scorpio, Cassiopeia, Andromeda. The cross of Jesus is the Milky Way, the tree of the world...

May not the origins of Christianity lie hidden among the pledged members of these mystic communities and ascetic orders? Mead feels himself compelled to ask this question because of (1) the impossibility of historical certainty regarding any objective fact in the traditional narratives of Jesus' career, (2) the silence of extra-Christian sources in the first century A.D., and (3) certain obscure data which seem absolutely contradictory to the current Christian tradition. These contradictory data, found mainly in the Talmud, the "Toleoth Jeshu," and Epiphanius, are thought to indicate that the Jesus of gospel tradition really lived about 100 B.C. He was not, however, a very significant personage for the origin of the new movement. Practically all that can be known of him historically is that he was a contemporary of Alexander Jannaeus, that he was called Jeshu[1] ben Pandera (and sometimes ben Stada), that he had spent some time in Egypt, and that he belonged to one of the secret communities from which he was expelled for teaching its wisdom to non-initiates. The new movement would probably never have arisen out of reverence for this historical person, since the basal thought of the new faith was the "drama of the Christ-mystery." In its literature Jesus appears merely as one of the characters for a "historical romance" into which allegories, parables, and actual mystery doings are woven, as was common in the methods of haggada and apocalyptic of that day. The "common document" of the gospels arose about 75 A.D., but our present gospels are second-century products...

http://christianorigins.com/case/ch3.html

An Estimate of the Negative Argument: Its treatment of the traditional evidence


We are told at the start that no compelling proof for the authenticity of any of the letters can be produced, and yet from them a somewhat elaborate and confident exposition of alleged Pauline thought is derived. Anything in these writings supposedly pointing to the historicity of Jesus is explained otherwise, or is called a later insertion. Finally it is asserted that "the Pauline letters contain no compulsion of any sort for the supposition of a historical Jesus, and no man would be likely to find such there if it were not already for him an established assumption."

...

Again, the mention of "brothers" of the Lord, as in I Cor. 9:5 and Gal. 1:19, is to be understood in the sense of community brotherhood. Yet we are not told why Paul in the same context should not have included Peter and Barnabas in this brotherhood. Moreover brothers in the Lord, not brothers of the Lord, is Paul's mode of thought for the community relationship. These are typical examples of both the brevity and the method Drews uses in disposing of the Pauline evidence. It is difficult to take arguments of this sort seriously, particularly when they are presented so briefly and with no apparent ground of justification except the presupposition that a historical Jesus must not be recognized

...

The gospel evidence is disposed of in a similar manner. To take Drews's method as a sample of the radical treatment, the earliest external testimony to the gospels' origin is set aside on the ground of Eusebius' "notorious unreliability." Upon the fact, now widely recognized, that the evangelists combined interpretation with historical narrative, is based the broad generalization that all is fiction. The efforts of critical study to determine more accurately the real historical background are characterized as a "half comic, half sad performance" and a "horrible fiasco."

...

Tacitus, however, explicitly states that the Christians of Nero's day traced their origin to one named Christ who was put to death by Pontius Pilate in Judea during the reign of Tiberius. This is damaging testimony for the radical position, but its force is avoided in the usual way: either Tacitus is merely reporting from hearsay a fictitious Christian tradition, or the paragraph is a "Christian" interpolation.[1] Neither explanation is satisfactory...

Steven Carr

'This is damaging testimony for the radical position, but its force is avoided in the usual way: either Tacitus is merely reporting from hearsay a fictitious Christian tradition...'

I see.So Jesus was so obscure that nobody wrote about him during his lifetime, hence Tacitus must have been using non-Christian sources when he wrote about Jesus - except that he never uses the name Jesus.

I suppose if non-Muslims refer to the Prophet, this title can not be traced to Islamic usage.

GakuseiDon

Continuing:

http://christianorigins.com/case/ch4.html

An Estimate of the Negative Argument: Its proposed explanation of the origin of Christianity

No mention of the village of Nazareth, either before or in the early part of the Christian era, has been found anywhere except in Christian writings. Hence it is concluded that this place-name has been derived simply from the phrase "Jesus the Nazarite." Jesus was not, as is commonly supposed, called the "Nazarite" because his home was in Nazareth; an imaginary Nazareth was created because Jesus was called the "Nazarite."...

...

When all the evidence brought against Jesus' historicity is surveyed it is found to contain no elements of strength. All theories that would explain the rise of the New Testament literature by making it a purely fictitious product fail, and the arguments for a pre-Christian Jesus are found to lack any substantial basis. One of the serious defects of the negative procedure is the way in which the great bulk of testimony for the origin of Christianity is unceremoniously set aside in favor of a hypothetical reconstruction based upon obscure and isolated points. This results in a promiscuous forcing of all data into line with an otherwise unverified theory as to how the new religion might possibly have arisen...

The argument for [a pre-Christian (100 BCE) Jesus'] existence may sometimes have a semblance of plausibility but this is because the data offered in its support are obscure either as to context or content, so that generous reading between the lines, liberal etymologizing, and the like, become the main stock in trade for these theorists. They can, to be sure, claim a certain degree of immunity from the weapons of adverse criticism. This fact, however, is not to be taken, as they would sometimes have us believe, as attesting the strength of their theory. It is just because of the intangible character of its premises that their argument cannot easily be submitted to detailed scientific rebuttal. As Weiss remarks, it is the most difficult task in the world to prove to nonsense that it is nonsense.

GakuseiDon

Continuing:

http://christianorigins.com/case/ch6.html

The Pauline Evidence for Jesus' existence

Yet it is said, If he [Paul] had information about Jesus why did he not use it? How do we know that he did not? The occasions which called forth his letters were not such as to demand detailed exposition of the life of Jesus. Wrede takes Paul's failure to appeal, in his controversy with opponents, to Jesus' free attitude toward legalism, as evidence that Paul knew nothing of Jesus' antilegalism. This inference is hardly justified... Unquestionably his type of dogma in general, and the needs his epistles were written to serve, did not call for emphasis upon the life-history of the earthly Jesus, but to interpret this silence as meaning utter ignorance is not justified. A similar argument would make the author of Acts ignorant of Jesus' earthly career, but we happen to know that this same writer composed the Gospel of Luke.

And is Paul so completely silent? Drews thinks so, and goes to the extreme of saying that a reader who had not prejudged the question would not be likely to suppose that the apostle ever thought of an earthly Jesus. A few passages from the more important Pauline writings may show the impropriety of this statement. Sometimes "the Lord" is referred to in a way that suggests knowledge of events and teachings in the lifetime of Jesus.[1] Furthermore Paul speaks of Jesus as "born of the seed of David, according to the flesh."[2] In contrast with Adam, whose disobedience brought condemnation upon his descendants, Jesus is the "man" through whom God's grace abounds toward believers.[3] He was crucified, and this fact became for Paul the cornerstone of interpretation.[4] Specific events in connection with his death—the last meal eaten with his disciples and his betrayal—were remembered.[5] Paul also knew of a company of followers whose sadness was turned into joy by an experience which they regarded as evidence of Jesus' resurrection;[6] and these events had taken place in recent times, Paul having personal acquaintance with relatives and friends of this Jesus.[7] The reality of an earthly Jesus, according to these sample passages, seems to be an indisputable presupposition of Paul's thinking, a reality both for him and for his contemporaries.

Although he speculates boldly upon the question of Jesus' significance, emphasizing on the one side his pre-existence and on the other his heavenly exaltation, nevertheless Jesus' appearance upon earth in truly human form, the lowliness and naturalness of his life, and his submission to death on the cross are basal historic facts without which Paul's interpretation of Jesus would have been impossible.

GakuseiDon

Continuing (see also here):

http://christianorigins.com/case/ch7.html

The Gospel Evidence for Jesus Existence

...

The radicals uniformly contend that these documents are practically worthless witnesses on these questions. Or, in so far as their testimony is reliable, it even favors a denial of Jesus' historicity. Already we have remarked that this opinion is not defended by extensive argument but is affirmed almost as though it were an indisputable fact. This treatment of the subject gives no adequate idea of the actual results of modern gospel criticism. Although many perplexing questions have been raised, and much uncertainty is still felt regarding some items in the tradition, critical study has not itself reached the extreme of skepticism represented by the modern radicals. They, however, assert that the critics fail to push their results to a logical conclusion, which would mean, it is said, that the gospels and Acts would not be given any historical recognition.

...

The fact seems to be that many persons in this period prized oral tradition above written records, probably because the oral teaching represented not only essentially everything contained in the gospels, but being more fluid in character it was more easily adapted to individual needs and local conditions. Papias is reported to have said that in his youth he did not think he could derive so much profit from the contents of books as from "the utterance of a living and abiding voice." In the first quarter of the second century men were still living who had been personal associates of the apostles, and as tradition probably had not yet officially stamped the gospels with apostolic authority, it was not surprising that the "living and abiding voice" in the first generation after the apostles should have been more generally popular than written records which had originally been designed for some given set of local circumstances. But as time passed the "voice" became silent and the written word was allowed to speak. Marcion, by differentiating the notion of authoritative Christian writings, probably gave added stimulus to this tendency, especially since Christianity was compelled to wrest its valued traditions from the hands of the heretic.

...

Thus the genetic units of synoptic tradition are: (1) The Gospel of Mark, mainly concerned with a narrative of Jesus' career, and (2) other tradition which did not necessarily ignore Jesus' deeds but which was especially interested in reporting his teaching. Although many details are still uncertain, it is certainly hyper-skepticism to maintain that we have not a fairly clear idea of this stage in the literary history of the gospels.

How near do these results bring us to the Jesus of history? The fact that Mark is a source for Matthew and Luke, the explicit statement in Acts 1:1 that this work is a sequel to the Third Gospel, and the belief now current that the author of the Fourth Gospel was acquainted with the Synoptics, supplies the relative chronological scheme for thinking of the rise of this literature. Since Mark stands at the beginning, and the non-Markan source of Matthew and Luke seems to be earlier than Mark,[1] the justice of gospel tradition's claim to be heard in testimony for Jesus' existence will depend ultimately upon whether these earliest elements in the tradition may reasonably be assigned to a time and a situation in which personal knowledge of a historical Jesus was possible.

...

More specific evidence for the dating must be sought in the gospel itself, and this is found in chap. 13. Here Jesus is credited by the author (or by his source) with predicting in emphatic terms the end of the world in Jesus' own generation (13:30 f.; cf. 9:1). Would a tradition of this sort be put into circulation for the first time after everybody who had been of Jesus' own generation was dead? A writer would not be likely to invent for Jesus a saying which history in the writer's own day had shown to be false. A later editor or transcriber might preserve such a tradition, either unconscious of its incongruity, or because he felt it could be explained by some device of interpretation, but he would not create it de novo unless he wished to disparage the individual of whom he was writing—an inconceivable thing for a Christian biographer of Jesus to do. This prophecy about the end must, therefore, represent either an original saying of Jesus, or a saying first ascribed to him while certain of his own associates were still alive.

...

Finally, one of the strongest arguments for Jesus' existence is the existence of the primitive community of believers. The new faith at the very beginning emphasizes its loyalty to a personal founder who soon after his death is accorded divine honors amounting practically to worship. We have been told that this reverence on the part of the disciples necessarily excludes the possibility of Jesus' historicity; it is inconceivable that men should worship one who had been actually known to them in his human limitations. Whether this principle was strictly binding in the ancient world may be questioned; nevertheless if Christians had rendered worship to the man Jesus as such, the above objection might be plausible. It was, however, the exalted Messiah to whom godlike homage was paid. The transition of thought from the earthly Jesus to the heavenly Christ was not a gradual process requiring centuries of growth; it was effected almost in the twinkling of an eye by the tour de force of the resurrection experiences. Believers were now confident that God had done something for Jesus which had not been done for any other man—Jesus had been miraculously raised from the dead—and those who believed this honored Jesus accordingly. Doubtless a high estimate of him while on earth has to be presupposed as the antecedent of the latter attitude, but the notion of deification, so far as the early believers were concerned, rested upon faith in his resurrection. And this faith, in turn, needed an earthly Jesus quite as much as a heavenly Christ.

...

This forceful individual, who impressed his own and succeeding generations with his life of loyal service for humanity and his plain yet profoundly significant religious teaching, started Christianity on its way. To find this ideal without a historical Jesus, as to create Paul without Paul, is practically impossible. The Christ-idea alone is not equal to the task of producing Christianity, it is not sufficiently real, human, vital. The new movement was certainly influenced by ideas of various sorts with which it came into contact from time to time. It even adopted current notions and ritualistic practices in the effort to give tangible expression to its inner life, but the starting-point of theology and ritual, as well as of literary activity and religious impulse, was the memory of an earthly Jesus.[1] He was the great source of inspiration for Christian living. Just as Paul is found harking back to the type of life exemplified in Jesus, so must many Christians have seen in him the personal embodiment of their ideal.

Steven Carr

'It was, however, the exalted Messiah to whom godlike homage was paid.'

So why weren't they stoned as blasphemers?

'Just as Paul is found harking back to the type of life exemplified in Jesus, so must many Christians have seen in him the personal embodiment of their ideal.'

Really? I thought we were told Paul's letters somehow only ever covered topics that had little to do with the life of Jesus, so he hardly ever referred to the life of Jesus, as the life of Abraham was much more relevant to the problems addressed by Paul in his letters.