aa5874

The statement is false.

It has not been established that a mythical Pilate was held by the majority of skeptics or that most of the books published by skeptics about Pilate considered him to be mythical at any time.

The word "skeptics" was used in a general sense and implied that it was commonly thought Pilate was mythical among skeptics, but no such common belief among skeptics has ever prevailed.

So far only one author of such a position has been named, this can hardly be representative of the position of the majority of skeptics with respect to Pilate.

It is false to claim that for years skeptics have claimed Pilate was mythical.

Roger Pearse

Indeed. Drews holds the view that there was such a person, and knows of the historical testimony to him; but that the Pilate of the gospels was fictional, and invented independently.

It's easy to see how "atheists believe that the Pilate of the gospels never existed" would evolve by shortening/flattening into the "atheists believe that Pilate never existed".

All the best,

Roger Pearse

No Robots

Indeed. Just like "mythicists believe that the Christ of the gospels never existed" would evolve by shortening/flattening into the "mythicists believe that Christ never existed."

Toto

Let's agree that this is a completely inaccurate claim by certain Christians, primarily American apologists. We still have no evidence of any skeptic who disputed the existence of a historical Pilate.

So what is the point of this exercise? To explain the claims of certain uninformed Christian apologists as mistaken but understandably so, assuming that they misheard or misunderstood some arguments?

No Robots

Isn't it about how mythicists take an element that is presented as history in the Gospels, spin it as some kind of elaborate pre-existing mythology, and then reattach it to some historical event?

Amaleq13

No, it is about how certain mythicist opponents turn a brief reference to an obscure and, apparently, rejected or ignored scholar's thesis into an argument skeptics have been putting forth ever since.

In actuality, the thread is about trying to discover the basis, if any, for this oddly popular anti-mythicist claim. It is the MJ/HJ version of creationists trotting out Piltdown Man as though it were somehow logically relevant to actual, current arguments. :huh:

No Robots

So, you don't see that there is in this whole Pilate/spear-chucker mythos the same kind of inane speculation that we see with all the fantasies about Christ being a myth derived from Osiris, Dionysus, Joshua, etc., etc., ad nauseum? How long will it be before Doherty's Christ of the ethereal realm is considered irrelevant to actual, current arguments?

Toto

:hijack:

This thread is not about Doherty or Jesus mythicism. Doherty has a well argued thesis that there was no historical core to the Christ myth; you disagree, as we all know by now.

Roger Pearse

Well, the research to confirm the matter to within a reasonable degree of certainty has still not been done, so I don't see how we can say.

What we can see already is a claim, in a book circulating in atheist circles a century ago, that the Pilate of the gospels never existed and is fictional.

It doesn't seem unreasonable that this could have given rise to people with limited education saying "Pilate never existed." (Heaven knows, we see much cruder misinterpretations by uneducated people about history every day, with the internet! We have people here claiming that Christianity was invented in the 4th century, after all.)

But... whether any such claim appeared **in print**, I don't know. Nor whether we can find it, 8 decades on. It feels to me like an *old* claim, probably pre-WW1. It might be found in US newspapers, perhaps, especially local ones. Is there any way to do a keyword search on these? After all, how often will these refer to "Pilate"?

Nor have we yet analysed the Soviet sources. English language versions of Soviet literature were being circulated freely in the 80's, even.

There is a late version of the Soviet Encyclopedia online. Drews has an entry in it, even so late as 1978. Unfortunately my Russian is pretty much non-existent, and I can't search for what we want to see. According to Wikipedia, a revised and extended version was translated into modern Greek (which may explain the Orthodox link that Don gave).

My gut feeling is that the claim is genuine; that at least some atheists did utter this claim. What we don't have, tho, is documentation for the claim. It's a claim that, therefore, I would not make unless or until this is forthcoming.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

IMHO it's precisely the same; and comes into being by the same processes of thought, and for the same motivations. Both would have the same constituency, among the ignorant.

All the best,

Roger Pearse