Toto

Is there any point of view that can NOT find enormous encouragement in contemporary scholarship? Even mythicists point out that contemporary scholars poo poo mythicism even as they systematically dismantle the case for identifying a historical Jesus.

jakejonesiv

Bleat! :hysterical:

jakejonesiv

Circle jerk? Why you have offended by sensibilities!
:talktothehand:

No Robots

That was my point in an earlier thread: that mythicism is the logical progression from what Bultmann called demythologization, but in reality is dehistorization. This move by Christian theologians is an attempt to save some aspect of Christ that is not Jewish. Mythicists have blindly followed the theologians down this path. Fortunately, we do have Jewish scholarship as an alternative.

jakejonesiv

Mythicism is the result of taking an unbiased looked at the historical evidence without prior commitment to a conclusion. The Jewish scholarship you have produced on this subject is just another agenda driven approach, in this case :to subsume Jesus (and often Paul) into normative Judaism.

With the result that Judaism is now top dog again in the heirarchy of relgions. :clapping:Yippee!

No Robots

You may certainly rail against the Jews all you want. Nothing new in that.

Perspicuo

Are you suggesting antisemitism? I would think it's more like putting Jews in a realistic focus, as mere humans, with all the shortcomings as well as the potentials of any human ethnos.

No Robots

Gentile scholars and Jewish scholars have always quarrelled over the nature of Christ. Gentiles insist that we have to do with a godman, whether historical or mythical. Jews insist that we have do with a historical man who has been mythologized. Most Gentile scholars now have at least one foot in the mythicist camp. Thus the work for mythicists lies chiefly in contesting current Jewish scholarship in this area. Good luck with that!

jakejonesiv

I think you are guilty of a very serious offence, a false charge of anti-Semitism. Disagreement with one area of current Jewish scholarship is not equivalent to railing against the Jews. Indeed you have not produced any evidence that the scholars you mention even address directly the question of the existence of Jesus. You are acting like a big crybaby who started slinging filth when you were disconfirmed on a minor point in an ongoing debate. :angry:

No Robots

I quoted Klausner. Here is something more recent:

The German nation could not be represented through a Jewish Jesus, who was both Jewish and mortal, but only through a historically transcendent, unique Christ. German nationalists' representation of Germany in terms of the Christ story grew stronger in the twentieth century. Some divorced Christ from the Jesus of the Bible, making him instead an "eternal idea" not limited by biblical history, just as the they presented the German nation as a transcendent idea unbound by political conventions.--"Theology as a vision of Colonialism: From supercessionism to dejudaization in German Protestantism" / Susannah Heschel. In Germany's colonial pasts / ed. by Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, Lora Wildenthal, p. 150.