Gregg

I didn't say Jesus Mythicism was a huge field. Ben C. Smith did. Ask him about it.

Gregg

youngalexander, I don't understand what "outlandish statements of fact and methodology" MJ'ers are making. There is nothing "outlandish" about what Malachi did in drawing parallels between Mark and the Old Testament, and his criticism of Biblical scholars trying to glean "history" from Mark is right on the money.

Practically every detail of Jesus' ministry and every detail of the crucifixion can be found in the Jewish scriptures. There is a point where this ceases to be mere coincidence and a point where you can no longer accept that all these events actually happened and the witnesses combed through the scriptures searching for, and finding, parallels. (If there really were that many parallels, we should all be down on our knees right now confessing our sins and accepting Jesus, because it would be a miracle!)

We know the ancients used Biblical "midrash" (applying/reinterpreting the scriptures as if they spoke to current events). We know that Paul and other epistle writers used passages from scripture that had absolutely nothing to do with their beliefs to "prove" their beliefs. What Mark did was not totally without precedent. "Mark wrote an allegorical tale about the Christ based on the Jewish scriptures and structured almost entirely from scripture passages." What is outlandish about this statement? I just don't get it. I don't understand how this is impossible or implausible. I don't understand how spending years learning Greek or text criticism is supposed to make me see how ridiculous it is. Without disparaging education, sometimes common sense really is right.

Gregg

So Malachi, Earl Doherty, and myself just don't have the mental discipline a superb education imparts that would enable us to dismiss the seemingly obvious parallels between Mark and the Jewish scriptures, attributing this mistaken notion to the propensity of the human mind to look for patterns. Four correlations with Mark in the same passage is just a coincidence, and if we had the mental discipline of a superb education, we would realize that.

With the mental discipline of a superb education, maybe I wouldn't have fallen for the moon landing, Kennedy, and 9/11 conspiracy theories either. Wait a minute. I didn't fall for those theories. I may not have years at university, but I'm not an idiot.

youngalexander

False.

Interesting! I have sometimes considered this analogy. It is however clearly false.

The essence of IDC is that it is religion and not science. I simply state this, but am quite prepared to debate it.
In addition, proponents of IDC, of varying degrees of acumen, will accordingly ignore or blatently abuse the scientific evidence. This is endemic.
Thus people who hold IDC positions are not advocating a scientific proposition, nor (as far as IDC is concerned) conducting scientific research.

A MJ position is historically arguable. It is not outside the discipline.
While some proponents may ignore evidence, or otherwise commit academic sins, it is not endemic to the position.
Thus people who hold MJ positions are advocating historical propositions, and may be conducting historical research.

You are juxtaposing two areas of debate where there is an overwhelming consensus for one position. It is a false analogy with regard to the disciplines.

"Taking Doherty's position" in biblical history, is nothing like the "position that ID has in biology".

Gregg

Where has Doherty misrepresented his work or his qualifications? While I respect the man and his work and generally agree with his arguments and his conclusions, I was never under any delusion reading his Web site and book that it was a scholarly treatise (he was clearly writing for popular consumption) or that Doherty was anything but an informed amateur scholar, and I'm not aware of any misleading claims he's made in this regard.

If a person's too dumb to figure this out about Doherty and his work just by reading it, I doubt explicit caveats would make any difference to such a person. But, you might write to Doherty and suggest this for the new edition of TJP.

Gregg

Thanks, youngalexander, you put the response better than I did.

Magdlyn

LOL

I often question drs. They often talk out their asses. Get a 2nd 3rd or 4th opinion. Do your own research. Take notes. Keep them on their toes.

youngalexander

As I sed, I could go thru the thread and pick out any number, however, one which comes to mind (in another thread) is theft & relocation

Is it? I'm beginning to sound like Gibson. However, perhaps he has a point. I have seen those parallels, Atwill's Caeseric parallels, MacDonald's Homeric parallels and been impressed by Rank, Raglan and Dundes parallel schemes. Maybe I'm paralleled out.

Not a lot.
However:
Perhaps it would make you more confident in its plausibility.

If you (but probably not some others) insist I'll give further examples. The thing is this - what got up my nose was the shear dilettantism of many of the responses to Z, W & J who seemed to giving (for BC&H) fairly sober responses in defence of a rigorous approach to scholarship. Then, I guess it is easy when you are on a winner.

I think that it was Zeichman who sed something to the effect of "knowing ones limitations". It was not a put-down, just sense.

Malachi151

It's not something that I follow closely. I'm not on staff in a religious studies department in a university. I'm aware of well publicized announcements and books on the subject and popular commentaries. I have read books and various bits from well known authors on the subject, and have a general idea of their views, such as J.P. Meier, Elaine Pagels, James Tabor, Bart Erhman, Robert M. Price, etc.

My degree is in biology and I'm a software engineer, but look at my website, I write about economics, history, religion, the war in Iraq, etc.

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/

I'm sorry for you then. I had strong views on Iraq as well, and I wrote a 250 page paper on the subject in 2003 and it's what started my website.

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/index.htm

The thrust of the paper was that the Bush administration was manipulating the facts to sell the war in Iraq, there was deliberate deception involved, and my analysis of why I felt that the American public was buying the lies that the Bush administration was selling.

I wrote that paper at a time when having an anti-war or anti-Bush bumpersticker on your car could have gotten your tires slashed. The media didn't start addressing the issues I was addressing until about 2 years later.

Am I a journalist? No. Do I work in Washington? No. Did I have any credentials? No.

Why weren't the "professionals" properly addressing the facts about Iraq? I don't fully know, but the fact is that they weren't.

I wrote to a New York Times journalist who was covering Rumsfeld in early 2003 with a basic outline of the info in my paper before I had started it telling him that the Bush administration was a war cabinet, that they were waging an ideological war, pointed out information in his own reports about Rumsfeld's prior service that indicated that Rumsfeld and his group were likely intentionally manipulating the UN, and told him that I had no doubt that the Bush administrations performances at the UN, going on at the time, were staged decoys and that they crafted their UN presentations to intentionally prevent the UN from being able to support them, because they wanted to go against the UN.

There was a lot more to my e-mail, with various facts and citations included. He wrote back that that was the most interesting thing he had ever heard, but it sounded totally unreasonable.

Well, guess what, over the past 2 years pretty much all of that has been confirmed. I was seeing something on the news a couple months ago saying that the Bush administration's appeal to the UN was a cover-up tactic to allow them time to position the troops for the invasion and that even though they offered several things that would prevent the war from happening, there was never any intention of not invading, etc.

As far as I was concerned, the writing was on the wall and these issues were as plain as day. It was obvious that the Bush administration was simply making up false claims and moving the goal posts for the invasion, and that they wanted to undermine the authority of the UN on purpose.

No one in the media talked about that until years later.

You are over simplifying. It's not just a matter of a few random similarities, and there are enough well known parallels to establish that the author of Mark did indeed work in this fashion.

Depends on the scenario. Can we conclude that the crucifixion didn't take place simply because the crucifixion scene in Mark is based heavily on OT parallels? No, but ti tells us a lot. Can we conclude that people casting lots for the garments of Jesus is probably not a real historical detail because the casting of lots in Mark, from which all the other accounts come, is clearly based on Psalm 22? Yes.

True, but I go into this in my MJ article. It's not just a matter of a few parallels. The extent of the parallels is important, and the fact that of all the parallels that we can reasonably attempt to confirm against the historical record, such as the Star of Bethlehem, the Massacre of the Innocents, the earthquake, the darkening of the sun, etc., are contradicted by the historical record.

There isn't one single potentially comfirmable parallel that is born out by the historical record. In ever single case where there is a parallel with the OT that refers to an event in the NT that we could reasonably expect to find evidence for, there is no evidence to support the NT claim.

This is very significant in building a case that the passages built on OT parallels do not have an additional historical basis.

I was just picking on him as a well known person who has recently been in the news. I believe that Tabor has participated in the Jesus Seminar as well.

He is a university professor with a chair position who I don't think is a Christian, who asserts the historical reliability of the Gospels quite strongly.

He takes a secular approach to the Gospels, yet I don't see this helping his case any.

Look at Elaine Pagels, she takes a critical secular view, and produces some useful information, but her works are nevertheless irrational and nonsensical in their totality. She points out all of these flaws in the traditional view of Christianity, yet still affirms that she is a believing Christian.

How about this. How about some of the defenders of the establishment in this thread cite some of the scholars who they think are reliable and accurate and whose views on the New Testament they agree with.

I should note that aside from Robert M. Price, I haven't read any work on the New Testament by anyone that I didn't find significant problems with and that I didn't disagree with on many points.

And again, Biblical studies, like any literary or historical study, is not like the natural sciences.

Studying nature is different from studying what someone wrote.

Every single human work on nature is an interpretation.

When I study biology I am studying other people's interpretations of nature.

The primary source for biology is the natural world. In order to study the primary sources I have to dissect animals, collect specimens, run a lab, perform tests, etc.

In order to study the Bible I can read the Bible. There are various pitfalls and caveats, but for the most part I can access all the same information that the best scholars access and view it myself. I don't need to read everyone else's commentary on the Bible.

Stuff like Bart Erhman's Misquoting Jesus, etc. are good and useful because they clarify the primary sources or further illuminate the primary sources. Showing that a certain word or phrase was added later is important tot know, etc., so this type info is important, but people's commentaries on the Bible are mostly a waste of time.

I've run into this issue in dozens of other cases.

I've read ton's of commentaries on the works of Karl Marx, I've read commentaries on Adam Smith, I've read books about Thomas Jefferson, I've read books about Thomas Paine, etc., etc., and for the most part, most of these commentaries are crap, and indeed misrepresent the facts about these people and their views.

Reading books about Marxism isn't a very good way to understand Marxism, indeed its pretty much a good way to be totally misled about Marxism.

If you want to learn about Marxism and 20th century Communism, read the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and various other Marxist/Anarchist/Socialist writers. When you do this you find that what they say is typically vastly different from what most people say that they say, hell even what Lenin says that Marx said is different from what Marx said, and what Trotsky said Lenin said is different from what Lenin said, etc.

I find that much history is crap. Historians tend to take very small bits of information and then amplify them. This is often essential to create a narrative, but it also often gets things wrong. I'm a historical minimalist in general.

I've read countless books on Rome and Greece, where I know for a fact that major statements in the books are based on one tiny passage by one person, for which there is no other confirmation, and people take these statements as authoritative and accurate and give a level of confidence to them that they do not merit.

I'm not very happy with how history is presented in general, much less Christian history, which is totally fraught with errors and exaggerations and lies.

Of Christian scholars, J.P. Meier seems pretty good to me. I disagree with him, but at least he is clear and I can see where he is coming from and the information is plain and his arguments are generally sound and he is intellectually honest, at least from what I have seen.

But lets face it, there aren't any major facts that Jesus historicists are aware of that people like myself are not aware of that changes any of this discussion.

And, I am aware of the fact that so much of the historicist view is based on flimsy evidence and that claims made by them are often, if not usually, inferred and based on assumptions and traditions, often even on single passages.

How many historicists will tell you that Jesus' father Joseph was a carpenter?

Most if not all, from what I have seen.

Where does this whole claim that Joseph was a carpenter come from? One passage in Matthew where the author of Matthew clearly altered a sentence from Mark which said that Jesus was a carpenter. Perhaps "Matthew" didn't think that the Messiah should be doing manual labor, or perhaps is was just a copying error, I don't know, but whatever the case there is no real basis for the claim that "Joseph" was a carpenter.

And where does the claim that Jesus was a carpenter come from?

From Mark, but my reading of Mark is that Mark is allegory is Jesus being a carpenter is an allusion to the role of the son of man in the creation. So here we are going from theological concepts, Jewish mythology, and allegory into historization, etc.

How many books written about Jesus, but secular scholars and Christians, assert with confidence that Jesus was a carpenter, and make this claim as though it is a well established fact? Pretty much every one that broaches the subject at all.

I can see for myself, though, that this whole claim is based on the most tenuous of information.

So, forgive me if I don't take New Testament "scholars" seriously, but it is a product of their own doing.

People here complain about the scholarship of mythicists, and I do myself as well, hell the whole preface and introduction in my "book" is against the poor quality of JM scholarship, but look at the field of Biblical scholarship in general.

It's a field with an inordinate proportion of total crap to quality. It's probably one of the lowest quality fields of scholarship that there is when you take all persons in the field into account.

Obviously a lot of good scholarship has been done, or else we wouldn't be where we are today, with the synoptic problem, Q, textual criticism, etc., but there is still a lot to be desired, and aside from a period during the Enlightenment, Biblical study is dominated by Christians and true believers. I think that the field is less critical now than it was 100 years ago.

Go to any bookstore and go to the Christianity section that deals with early Christian history or NT scholarship or the "life of Jesus" and randomly pick a book from the shelf.

Now go to the shelf on science related topics and pick any book off the shelf at random on a topic of biology or astronomy or chemistry or nature in general, etc.

The chance that the book you picked from the Christian section is full of crap and the book you picked from the science section is accurate and well supported is pretty darn good.

Have a look at this thread:

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=189494

What is the best Pro-HJ book Peter Kirby asks....

Some of the offerings:

Jesus Outside the Gospels by Robert Van Voorst

Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament by F.F. Bruce

The Historical Jesus by Jesus in Theissen & Mertz

A Marginal Jew by J.P. Meier

I haven't read all these books, but I can see that they all deal with basically the same information, the same documents, the same source materials, etc., and these documents and material are also dealt with by the JM people as well, and I address them in my JM article and "book".

There isn't anything here that is earth shattering or that proves any case, as some of these authors themselves admit.

Solo

Hear, hear...twenty-three years ago I was threatened with abyss of madness and speedy death if I did not get on lithium and antipsychotics.

It was professional consensus: I did get the 2nd 3rd and 4th opinion. I was scared witless of relapsing into madness. Finally, after it settled somnewhat, I went to a neurologist. He ran a battery of tests: found nothing of significance. No epileptiform, some signs of depression which he offered to treat optionally. He told me I should be worried if I had another one of those (manic fugue) within a year.

I did not.

Seek wisdom and it will find you.

Jiri