No Robots

Seek and ye shall find.

Chaucer

And you have still not retracted your blatant distortion of what I first stated about Atomism -- the fact is, I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH ATOMISM. And you implied I did. It is precisely because I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH ATOMISM that I deem it very odd that it should have first been advanced by over-imaginative and anonymous chroniclers putting such spot-on speculations into a mere concoction's mouth -- Leukippos's -- rather than by a fully historic person called Leukippos, to whom we owe our ultimate understanding of the atom 2,500 years later.

It could very well have come from after the writing of Mark. So? That does not affect at all my setting the record straight on your other distortion: "Jesus himself was the message, not anything he said". That is a distortion. You even refer to the "Christian epistles". Well, Corinthians even has a detailed chapter where Paul actually elaborates on Jesus's sayings on divorce, sayings that are also attested elsewhere. Jesus, whether a concoction or not, is just as much what he said as what he did.

I can see that your method is deliberate distortion of whatever your opponent says, and I can guess that you'll deliberately "misread" whatever I say here as well. But to make this very plain for the rest of the readership here:

SINCE I have no problem with the confirmation of Atomism in the 20th century, I therefore wonder how come the first advancer of Atomism, Leukippos, could possibly be a mere concoction of over-imaginative chroniclers;

and the impact of Jesus as a figure to be worshiped, whether a mere concoction or not, had just as much to do with what he said, as recollected in Corinthians and elsewhere, and regardless of whether or not "Q" was before or after Mark, as with what he did or was.

You're just a time-waster, and I advise others here to only pay attention to your points when they are in reference to your own ideas, not when they are attempts to sum up others' ideas, since for the latter you only engage in distortion, which is best ignored. Chasing after your distortions is obviously a dead end, and I will not engage in that any more, because it wastes my time as well as yours. I will confine myself to reaffirming this warning to others here that whatever you say of others' ideas is totally distorted and misleading. If people want to understand what you say about your ideas, they can confine themselves to what you say; if people want to understand what I and others say about our ideas, they can confine themselves to what we say. I'm done with correcting your constant distortions. They're just your calculated way of distracting others and using up others' energy.

Chaucer

Chaucer

I never once expressed hope that it might be scuttled! Never once implied that in any other way. You are also distorting my remarks, I hope not intentionally. Sincerely, I would really like some acknowledgement of this post. Any efforts by any scholars to place Scriptural texts under the scrutiny of modern research can only be to the good. The notion that I would hope to see such efforts scuttled in any way is frankly vicious.

Please acknowledge this correction of the record.

Thank you,

Chaucer

No Robots

Mythicists may be a little sensitive about the Jesus Project because the man heading it up, R. Joseph Hoffmann, seems to be moving away from mythicism. See this blog entry, for example.

Toto

I am happy that you are not wishing ill of the Jesus Project. I interpreted your "please" as some sort of hope, but I see that it did not need that interpretation.

Misunderstandings are common on the internet where we don't have the social clues that we rely on with face to face communication. It's best just to realize this and try to be clearer and overcommunicate, otherwise calmly correct any error - rather than work yourself up into a righteous dander.

Toto

Hoffmann has never been a mythicist. Most of the participants are not. But they are going to evaluate the evidence rather than just provide a rationalization for the assumption that Jesus existed.

Chaucer

You know .......... you're right.

Cordially,

Chaucer

No Robots

I do not think we are dealing with a man who became god, but a god who was made man.--Hoffmann

Toto

You can't take Hoffman out of context. He is writing about literary analysis, not history:

When Hoffman says "I do not think we are dealing with a man who became god, but a god who was made man" he is talking about the literary texts, not history. As he says, You will find numerous scholars who look at the texts and see a god and no possibility of deriving a historical Jesus from them, but still think that there was a historical Jesus, or decline to say that Christianity started with a myth.

It is part of Earl Doherty's frustration that so many liberal academics seem on the verge of mythicism - but they are not.

No Robots

I agree that Hoffmann flirts with mythicism without fully avowing it. Look at this passage:

The acts of Jesus, the words of Jesus and the deeds of Jesus befit someone who is God incarnate, the word of God. That’s also, more or less, the Christ of Paul’s Philippian hymn. It is fair enough for theologians and biblical scholars to say that this is the cultural ornamentation through which the significance of Jesus is being expressed by one social group who’d heard the Jesus story (yawn), but the story is the datum, not that guess, and the story is a myth.

He completely ignores what many prominent scholars, among them many Jews, have to say about the Gospels depicting a man.