Steven Carr

Casey claims that the ministry of Jesus was financed by relatively well-off women, who helped with practical matters and that the disciples (but not Jesus) were so poor that they had to scrabble for raw grain to eat in fields.

Casey also claims that mythicists disrespect the 'primary sources', while his whole schtick is that Mark is not a primary source at all, being based on Aramaic sources, long destroyed, that Casey can read better than the person who had them in front of him.

Casey also claims that we should not expect Paul to say too much about the life of Jesus, because Paul was addressing problems faced by particular churches.

This is a totally ad hoc 'explanation' which leaves a mystery why Paul quotes from Genesis, the Psalms, Isaiah, Hosea, Exodus, Malachi, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Joel, 1 Kings, Job, and Proverbs.

Why should we expect Paul to quote from Joel, but not mention that Jesus preached?

ApostateAbe

Good to know. Do you have the book, or is this coming from Neil Godfrey?

Vorkosigan

Thanks for this, Toto.

spamandham

I always find it interesting when scholars in this field lash out at their peers for lack of rigor....Casey is not the first.

You can definitely sense a desire among some in this field to at least bring the standards up to those used in other historical specialties.

Maybe someday, pulling crap out of your ass (while reading ancient dialects) will be seen as scholarly speculation, rather than scholarship.

DCHindley

What I see is a few scholars of history complaining that critics of early Christian history employ too many special methods for studying Christian history, methods that no one out of that fold would employ for a variety of reasons.

It is ironic, I think, that the critics who employ these special methods frequently take fundamentalists and evangelicals to task for asserting that because the events critical to early Christian development were, in their opinion, miraculous, then they are exempt from historical critical examination.

Why can't critics of Christian history just treat Christian history the same as Roman or Greek or Egyptian or Mesopotamian history? Because to them, Christianity represents an ethical leap over Judaism, just as Judean monotheism represented an ethical leap over pagan polytheism. The message of Christianity is more important than the history that produced it.

This romantic notion of a higher social message requires a little special pleading, no less special than that employed by fundies and evangelicals. My momma always says: "Special is what special does."

Gotta go run now ...

DCH