jjramsey

This depends. What you wrote certainly doesn't apply to the scholars who come up with a Jesus who was an apocalyptic preacher. That position leads to a Jesus who was wrong in crucial elements of his beliefs and who might easily be dismissed as a loony, or at least as deluded. That position is also not a big leap from the historical evidence, either.

jjramsey

Actually, it's an unflattering analogy, not an ad hominem attack. Of course, that doesn't mean that it isn't a fallacy; whether it is a fallacy stands or falls on the aptness of the analogy.

On the matter of mythicism and the fringe, say we subtract out Acharya S and Freke & Gandy. When we look at who's left, how good are their arguments? For example, Doherty's basis for the existence of an upper realm where Jesus could be crucified is tenuous. Robert Price sees Jesus echoing "dying and rising savior gods including Osiris, Tammuz, Baal, Attis, Adonis, Hercules, and Asclepius," but this has several problems, most notably that the parallels between these gods and the story of Jesus is vague (i.e. Osiris is really a god who dies, is briefly resuscitated long enough to beget a child, and dies again; Hercules doesn't resurrect, but rather his spirit ascends to Olympus when his body is cremated), and that Christian ideas on resurrection have a more obvious semblance to those in Judaism than paganism. How much better are Doherty and Price compared to those on the fringe of mythicism? They are more clever and more honest, but that isn't saying that much in their favor, considering those to whom they are compared. Is there really much of a comparison between the best of the mythicists and the best of the historicists? And how wrong does mythicism have to be before it is all considered fringe?

Zeichman

Not to mention such Fundamentalists as Bart Ehrman, Burton Mack, James Robinson, Raymond Martin, Donald Akenson, Morton Smith, and others who have strong ties to the church and the Christian faith.

Oh wait...

GakuseiDon

To formalise it then: I bet $100 (payable to the CCF) that Richard Carrier will say, a la GA Wells, that he can no longer be considered a mythicist by the end of March 2008. Not that I expect him to be a historicist, but rather more agnostic on the question.

Of course, I'll probably have forgotten by then (unless you want to make this a sticky). But does anyone want to match the claim? To give $100 to the charity of your choice if Carrier declares that he is no longer a mythicist by March 2008?

Jehanne

I don't think so. It's like a person being born, living their life here in the US, and not having a birth certificate, death certificate, society security card, etc. With Jesus, no artifacts of any kind whatsoever! Doesn't that fact amaze you? (It does me!) On the other hand, if Paul was an epileptic visionary who simply saw Jesus in the "heavenly realm" and everything else "came later," then yes, one would not expect any archaeological evidence from a person who never existed in the first place!

Now, as for relics, consider the fact that there were numerous frauds throughout the Middle Ages. For instance, there were allegedly three heads of John the Baptist. But, with Jesus, nothing, not even a fraudulent relic!

jjramsey

Hardly. What should we expect Jesus to have left behind? He wouldn't have had much in the way of possessions, and even his clothes would have been stripped from him at the crucifixion. The vast bulk of Roman records have been trashed or mouldered away. If there was even an empty tomb (which is debatable), the early Christians thought the end was coming soon, and telling people to be prepared for that would take precedence over pilgrimage, and Christianity's illegality would not have made a pilgrimage to the empty tomb all that wise, anyway.

Well, we wouldn't expect purported body parts of Jesus to be relics, now, would we, since he purportedly was resurrected? As for other kinds of phony relics of Jesus, there is the Shroud of Turin, fragments of the True Cross, and the nails from the Crucifixion.

Jehanne

You are kind of "having your cake and eating it, too!" Because, if there was some archaeological evidence for the existence of Jesus, then no doubt you would offer that as proof of his existence! And, I would count myself among those who would believe that Jesus was a historical person! But, alas, there are no secular sources within the time that Jesus lived who mention him. And, the reference from Josephus was late and was likely tampered with. To add to that, Paul and his contemporaries viewed Jesus in largely "spiritual" terms and showed no interest whatsoever in his "earthly" life.

Well, the Shroud of Turin was not "heard of" prior to the 14th-century, and the same goes for the others as well. If Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person and was truly crucified, then someone, somewhere, would have known him and would have preserved some relic, some artifact that someone else, somewhere, would have preserved or at least written about. Instead, the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, and Mark, on which the others were based, was written by someone (likely, from Rome) who was not even familiar with the geography of Palestine.

jjramsey

Why is that having my cake and eating it, too? The odds are against finding such archaological evidence, but if such evidence were found--and it wasn't a forgery--then those odds would have been beaten. The fact that I wouldn't mind that those odds were beaten does not mean that those odds really weren't high. You also seem to be changing the subject here. This is not a refutation of my argument.

I gather from the part that I highlighted that you mean that there are no sources documenting what Jesus was doing while he was alive. That can be said for a lot of first-century personages. Do you really want to engage in double standards?

There are two references in the extant copies of Josephus' Antiquities, not one. The one to which you are referring is the Testimonium Flavianum. There is another, about the "brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James," which is by far more likely to be authentic.

Yet Paul, for all his exalted claims, implies that Jesus was a human being who recently died.

Well, we were discussing medieval relics, no?

If I wanted to be cynical, I could say that you changed the subject to hide that you didn't rebut my refutation of the argument that you are recycling now.

Jehanne

If archaeological evidence would be found (say, an inscription somewhere or some earlier document that clearly attested to the earthly existence of one named "Jesus of Nazareth"), then I would believe that Jesus was a historical person. As far as my atheism, however, Jesus would be moved from the category of "mythical religious figure" to "1st-century religious loon."

No, not at all. Josephus mentions some 18 different "Jesuses" from the 1st-century. Numerous "Messiahs" existed from that time period. But, if Jesus was anything like he was portrayed in the Gospels, it is reasonable to suppose that secular historians "on the scene," so to speak, would have noticed him.

I do not know. Have read The Jesus Puzzle at

http://www.jesuspuzzle.org/


Maybe, but if the movie The God Who Wasn't There is to believed, then Paul wrote 80,000 words in the seven epistles that modern scholars have deemed (for over a century now) to have been written by him, and yet, he has so little to say about the historical Jesus. Why?

Yes, I wanted to offer what occurred in the Middle Ages as an example of how the religious pious and fanatics preserved artifacts from the founders of their religions. For instance, Muslims preserved independent lines of evidence to the existence of Mohamed.

Well, it really doesn't matter to me. If Jesus existed, then he was a loon who got himself crucified by the Romans. If he was a mythological creation of epileptic visionaries such as Paul, then that explains the lack of historical references and archaeological evidence for his "earthly" life and the tremendous diversity of opinion that surrounded his teachings. Either way, I am not a Christian.

Julian

Let's not get carried away. If you remove by far from your sentence above I could agree with it. There are, after all, some pretty decent reasons why that may be fake as well.

Julian