Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Clivedurdle · 09-27-2005, 07:54 AM

from Toto

Quote:

GDon - I keep meaning to spend more time on your argument, so forgive me if I have missed something.

It seems to me that the basis of your claim is that some clearly historicist Christians write the same way mythicists do; therefore passages by possible mythicists that make no reference to a HJ cannot be used as proof that the author is actually a mythicist or a non-HJ'er.

I think something is missing here. I can find passages from later Catholics that speak of Jesus in purely spiritual terms and interpret what might be viewed as historical facts in very mythical-gnostic sounding terms. I think that these Catholics have a fairly mystical view of their own religion but still affirm the historicity of Jesus as church dogma.

I don't know if this is the case with Tertullian, but I suspect it is. The early church fathers adopted a historicist stance as a matter of dogma, not because they had skeptically reviewed the available evidence and concluded that Jesus was a historical person, but because that fit their theological needs. But that didn't mean that they gave up the earlier spiritual language about Christ. So you might have a church father who clearly held to a historicist position for theology, but still wrote about a spiritual Christ.

It was only the rationalist post-Enlightenment Protestants who tried to ignore the supernatural Christ and find a historical Jesus compatible with modern science.

Does this make sense?

Quote:

The early church fathers adopted a historicist stance as a matter of dogma

If this can be clearly shown, the myriad pieces of this fascinating jigsaw begin to fall into place.

Why would this have been an important dogma? What is the unique selling point it gives xianity?

What problems are solved?

Toto · 09-27-2005, 11:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

. . .
If this can be clearly shown, the myriad pieces of this fascinating jigsaw begin to fall into place.

Why would this have been an important dogma? What is the unique selling point it gives xianity?

What problems are solved?

The purpose of this item of dogma is to provide for an "apostolic succession" that legitimates one particular faction of the early church. If you can claim that you got your beliefs from, say, Mark, who heard them from Peter according to Papias, who got them directly from Jesus, the human part of the triune god, then you have what political scientists call legitmacy and you can tell other people what to do.

The alternative to this source of legitimacy is the Gnostic belief that each person has to find his own truth. If everybody is off finding their own truth from the Christ who is within, no one can tell anyone else what to do, and it is a lot harder to build a coherent organization.

This is an explanation for why the church in the late second century decided that Jesus was a historical figure and set about tracing lines of authority from Jesus to current church leaders, why Luke has to keep Jesus on earth for 40 days to instruct the disciples in Christian doctrine that he couldn't (according to Mark) get into their rocky heads before he died.

My source for this is primarily Robert Price's Deconstructing Jesus.

Clivedurdle · 09-27-2005, 02:10 PM

My pentecostal background's legitimacy is of course directly from another part of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit talking directly to the believers in the Church.

A gnostic plus method?

Fundamentalists use the Bible.

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09-27-2005, 02:10 PM	#3
Clivedurdle Contributor Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: London UK Posts: 16,024	My pentecostal background's legitimacy is of course directly from another part of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit talking directly to the believers in the Church. A gnostic plus method? Fundamentalists use the Bible.

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