Freethought & Rationalism Archive

rob117 · 01-20-2010, 03:28 PM

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Originally Posted by aa5874

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Originally Posted by rob117

For argument's sake, let's say that Christianity died out in Roman times, and became a historical footnote. And let's say all we had were the few early Classical references to him (Tacitus, Pliny, Josephus with or without sectarian interpolations, possibly Suetonius), and no gospels.

But, that is not the situation right now. No need to speculate. The extant information of antiquity CLEARLY depicts Jesus as the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God, who walked on water, transfigured, was raised from the dead and ascended through the clouds.

No-one NEEDS speculate about Romulus and Remus being human. The extant information of antiquity CLEARLYpresented them as mythological entities.

Why is it not necessary to speculate that Achilles was human? Simply because he was presented as a mythological entity.

It is exactly the same with Jesus, those who worshiped Jesus as a God or wanted people to worship him as a God provided all the details of his mythological divinty.

It is only necessary to believe Jesus did exist since an actual existence as a mere man would still require belief that he was the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God born of a virgin without a human father.

The activities and events of Jesus as presented in the NT and Church writings only requires belief, a human Jesus is irrelevant. A human cannot be raised from the dead and ascend through the clouds.

The difference is that the stories about Romulus and Achilles take place in the distant past. Romulus is also clearly an eponym for "Rome," so it is reasonable to assume he did not exist. Achilles, on the other hand, may well have had a historical base. Classical scholarship has long recognized that the Iron Age Homeric epics contain much accurate information about the Bronze Age, and this may extend to some of their historical personages.

Contrast this to Jesus, who is depicted in extant literature as having lived just decades before the documents were written.

Your argument boils down to "Jesus's cult followers attributed to him magical powers. Magical powers do not exist, ergo, Jesus did not exist." Do we thus come to the same conclusion for every figure who ever lived claimed to have magical powers? Apollonius of Tyana for example?

Note that the case of Achilles is that of a deification of a human. The opposite, humanization of a deity, is what you are claiming for Jesus, and is quite unprecedented.

mountainman · 01-20-2010, 03:58 PM

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Originally Posted by rob117

Contrast this to Jesus, who is depicted in extant literature as having lived just decades before the documents were written.

The chronology of the authorship of the new testament literature is very uncertain but it is reasonably certain that it contains no history. The chronology of the authorship of the very first "history" concerning Jesus is quite specific - it was composed during the years between 312 and 324 CE (almost three centuries afterwards !!!) with substantial revisions in order to accomodate the all-important events surrounding the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE at which the divinity of Jesus was utterly and contraversially disputed by the academic Greeks.

ApostateAbe · 01-20-2010, 04:02 PM

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Originally Posted by Kapyong

Gday,

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

Take the biological theory of evolution.

It never fails.

When pressed about the existence of Jesus, the faithful ALWAYS bring up evolution !

K.

It seems to be a great comparison, because of its focus on history, its complexity, its battles with fringe theories, and it is a topic of debate that most of us are familiar with. I didn't mean to compare MJ advocates with creationists, though I am known to do that. I meant to illustrate a point about evaluating a theory.

rob117 · 01-20-2010, 04:03 PM

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Originally Posted by rob117

Contrast this to Jesus, who is depicted in extant literature as having lived just decades before the documents were written.

The chronology of the authorship of the new testament literature is very uncertain but it is reasonably certain that it contains no history.

Peer-reviewed sources please.

ApostateAbe · 01-20-2010, 04:14 PM

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Originally Posted by Kapyong

Gday,

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

There is no evidence that there was any question or dispute in early Christianity that Jesus existed as a human being (except among the Marcionites, who acknowledged that Jesus seemingly existed as a human being).

Rubbish.

The docetics thought Jesus was a phantom.

Some Christians claimed Jesus did NOT "come in the flesh" (e.g. in 1 John.)

K.

Yes, the Marcionites were docetists, and they believed that Jesus seemed completely human, as did other docetists (presumably) so it seems irrelevant to the theory that early Christians believed Jesus was merely spiritual. Docetism was meant to solve what seemed to be a big problem: that Jesus was both God and human. Docetists solved the problem by saying that Jesus was God and nothing else. The modern doctrine that Jesus was 100% human and 100% God is accepted today but it seemed like nonsense to many people of the ancient time. The gods and men were traditionally thought to exist in mutually exclusive realms.

Toto · 01-20-2010, 04:34 PM

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

... my thread was a rambling rant anyhow, .... The way I see it, the value of a theory is not estimated by looking at the probability that every single detail of the theory is true. Take the biological theory of evolution. It necessarily has an incredible amount of details, more details than you can imagine, encompassing a family tree with millions of species, billions of years, and an enormous library of genetic, morphological and environmental information. Despite the large relative uncertainty of my model of early Christianity, it is exponentially more likely to be completely correct than the entire model of the theory of evolution. That is not because I have so much faith in my own model--I don't. It is only because the theory of evolution contains so much more details.

This is just bizarre reasoning. Evolution is a fact, explained by natural selection, a relatively simple theory. Nothing in biology makes sense without the theory of evolution. All of those "details" you mention are data points that support evolution and disprove creationism.

In contrast, the theory of the historical Jesus is more like intelligent design. It relies on accepting the validity (more or less) of scripture. It assumes that the Christian religion required a creator and cannot be explained as the product of natural human religious evolution. And the idea of a marginal Jewish prophet in the first part of the first century is not central to understanding the history of the time or the region. The growth of Christianity had little to do with the historical Jesus, whether or not he existed.

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But, I (and most intellectuals I presume) have a different way of evaluating ideas. It may be different if the details were dependent on each other. If one of the many essential details is wrong, then the whole theory collapses like a house of cards. That is actually a common mistake when people think about the theory of evolution--they think one change is either revolutionary or it is evidence that the entire theory is wrong or uncertain. But, actually, most relevant details do not underlie the entire theory.

I have no idea what this means.

ApostateAbe · 01-20-2010, 04:39 PM

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Originally Posted by Toto

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

... my thread was a rambling rant anyhow, .... The way I see it, the value of a theory is not estimated by looking at the probability that every single detail of the theory is true. Take the biological theory of evolution. It necessarily has an incredible amount of details, more details than you can imagine, encompassing a family tree with millions of species, billions of years, and an enormous library of genetic, morphological and environmental information. Despite the large relative uncertainty of my model of early Christianity, it is exponentially more likely to be completely correct than the entire model of the theory of evolution. That is not because I have so much faith in my own model--I don't. It is only because the theory of evolution contains so much more details.

This is just bizarre reasoning. Evolution is a fact, explained by natural selection, a relatively simple theory. Nothing in biology makes sense without the theory of evolution. All of those "details" you mention are data points that support evolution and disprove creationism.

In contrast, the theory of the historical Jesus is more like intelligent design. It relies on accepting the validity (more or less) of scripture. It assumes that the Christian religion required a creator and cannot be explained as the product of natural human religious evolution. And the idea of a marginal Jewish prophet in the first part of the first century is not central to understanding the history of the time or the region. The growth of Christianity had little to do with the historical Jesus, whether or not he existed.

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But, I (and most intellectuals I presume) have a different way of evaluating ideas. It may be different if the details were dependent on each other. If one of the many essential details is wrong, then the whole theory collapses like a house of cards. That is actually a common mistake when people think about the theory of evolution--they think one change is either revolutionary or it is evidence that the entire theory is wrong or uncertain. But, actually, most relevant details do not underlie the entire theory.

I have no idea what this means.

The post was a reply to DNAReplicator. He seems to think that a theory is best evaluated by looking at the probability that 100% of the details are correct. I brought up the theory of evolution to counter that methodology, and for no other reason.

Toto · 01-20-2010, 04:46 PM

DNAReplicator's point was that if the probability of a historical Jesus depends on 4 different independent facts, you have to mulitiply the probabilities of those facts to find the total probability. This is not how theories in general are evaluated, and not how natural selection is evaluated.

ApostateAbe · 01-20-2010, 04:50 PM

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Originally Posted by Toto

DNAReplicator's point was that if the probability of a historical Jesus depends on 4 different independent facts, you have to mulitiply the probabilities of those facts to find the total probability. This is not how theories in general are evaluated, and not how natural selection is evaluated.

Right. The method of evaluation would work only if the propositions are dependent on each other.

PhilosopherJay · 01-20-2010, 05:05 PM

Hi ApostateAbe

If a single strand of hair turns up at a murder scene, we may assume that the person who matches that strand of hair may be the culprit. However, if a second single-strand of hair turns up at another murder scene, one has to think that something very strange is going. It would be amazing if a single strand of hair just happened to turn up at two murder scenes. This would lead one to believe that the single-strand of hair has been planted in order to indict the suspect.

In the case of the phrase James, the lord's brother, we not only find it in Paul, but in Josephus too. Again the phrase only, with no other information.
How strange that the writer of Paul's epistle and Josephus both thought James so famous that they did not have to explain what the phrase meant.

Now if I brought home a friend and said to my wife, "This is Jimmy, the lord's brother," I could be certain that she would ask me, "What? What do you mean the lord's brother?" Since term does not seem to be a common one in ancient literature, it is highly suspicious that both the Galatian's epistle writer does not bother to explain it, nor does Josephus.

Weirder still is Origen's comment on the phrase. He writes against Celsus 1:47, "Paul, a genuine disciple of Jesus, says that he regarded this James as a brother of the Lord, not so much on account of their relationship by blood, or of their being brought up together, as because of his virtue and doctrine."

How do we account for Origen saying this:
1) There is some other unknown Pauline text that Origen had access to in which Paul says that James was not a real brother of the Lord. This seems a bad explanation because, Origen never quotes the unknown Pauline text again.
2) Origen is making up that he read this in Galatians. But anybody who read Galatians would know it wasn't there and realise that Origen is lying.

Thus we have two mysteries. Why does both Josephus and Paul mention the phrase "the lord's brother" without explaining it and why does Origen say that there was more to the passage then we now read in Galatians.

There is one solution and only one solution that I believe fits the facts perfectly. We must recall that Eusebius is the man who a) had access to Josephus, as he is the first to report the TF, b) had access to the writings of Origen, and c) is a man goes to great lengths to prove that James the Just whom Paul met is not the blood brother of Jesus, but a different James.

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3. But Clement in the sixth book of his Hypotyposes writes thus: "For they say that Peter and James and John after the ascension of our Saviour, as if also preferred by our Lord, strove not after honor, but chose James the Just bishop of Jerusalem."

4. But the same writer, in the seventh book of the same work, relates also the following things concerning him: "The Lord after his resurrection imparted knowledge to James the Just and to John and Peter, and they imparted it to the rest of the apostles, and the rest of the apostles to the seventy, of whom Barnabas was one. But there were two Jameses: one called the Just, who was thrown from the pinnacle of the temple and was beaten to death with a club by a fuller, and another who was beheaded." Paul also makes mention of the same James the Just, where he writes, "Other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother."

Here is one rational explanation, that clears up to the two mysteries stated above and fits all the facts:

Eusebius wanted to build up the authority of the Jerusalem church. He did this by forging the phrase "the lord's brother" in both Paul's Galatians and Josephus. Eusebius is the first of the ancient writers to notice the phrase there. Someone must have pointed out that this is a mistake, since Jesus' own brother became head of the Jerusalem Church, that would mean that the Jerusalem church should have more authority than the Church in Rome. After all, a brother should have more authority than a disciple. Eusebius had to backtrack. He did this by interpolating into the work of Clement and the work or Origen, that James was not really the the brother of the Lord, but a different James. This must have soothed Eusebius' conscience, although he made James into the brother of the lord with two interpolations, he denied the claim with two other interpolations.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

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Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

Hi Spin,

This is an excellent point by point and almost line by line response.

The crux of ApostateAbe's argument and the real textual part is the fact that in one of the twenty-one epistles in the New Testament, the author appears to interact with Gospel characters. It is not throughout the whole epistle where this happens, but in only one section, about 10% of the epistle where it occurs. This presents a problem because it is so exceptional. We can say that 99% of the epistles have no relationship to the gospels and thus does not support its historicity in any fashion. This leaves the 1% to do the work of testimony virtually alone. But even that one percent does not support it substantially. It is not like Paul says that he talked with James, Jesus' brother and James told him how they hung out together as kids and Jesus' would cure goats and bring sheep back from the dead, or how he was once lost in a temple and his parents found him. No the only connection is that we find the phrase "the Lord's brother" connected to the name "James." Likewise, with Peter, we don't have Peter saying, "Oh man, Paul, you should have seen Jesus that night in the Garden, he was really sweating, I ain't never seen a dude so sure he was going to die." Instead, it is the phrase "apostle" and "Chephas" which are matched to the gospel which appears to use the term "apostle" once or twice to refer to the disciples (Mark 6:30) and the term "Peter", which means "Rock," just as "Cephas" means "Rock."

In both cases, we have to do a small transformation. We have to transform "Lord" into "Jesus" and "Chephas" into "Peter." When we have made these translations, then the two references kind of, sort of, almost exactly match
the references in the gospels. Can it really lift the weight that it is being asked to carry? Can these two kind of, sort of, almost exact references really be the proof that the gospels are historical?

Imagine a poor person who wishes to believe in angels. They find hundreds of old photographs from the 19th century and one them is a faded picture of a beautiful child and if you look really, really close you can see that the child is dressed in an angel outfit. "Eureka," shouts the poor person, "Who can deny angels now?"
Who has the heart or lack thereof to tell this poor person the bad news?

Sincerely,

Philosopher Jay

I am not sure that your analogy fits, but maybe I am not understanding you correctly. All it takes is one isolated hair to make a difference between guilty and not guilty. And a passing a reference is all it takes to infer a connection to Jesus. Arguments are made that the passages are redactions, so maybe that is how the argument about 1% is relevant. "The Lord's brother" is an example. If the phrase wasn't written by Paul, then the evidence would be considerably weaker. But, there seems to be no reason to believe it is a redaction except to make a particular theory seem plausible. Same for the passage that identifies Cephas as Peter. They are passages that seem meant only to clarify, not to make any significant point. There is no evidence that there was any question or dispute in early Christianity that Jesus existed as a human being (except among the Marcionites, who acknowledged that Jesus seemingly existed as a human being).

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01-20-2010, 04:46 PM	#48
Toto Contributor Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Los Angeles area Posts: 40,549	DNAReplicator's point was that if the probability of a historical Jesus depends on 4 different independent facts, you have to mulitiply the probabilities of those facts to find the total probability. This is not how theories in general are evaluated, and not how natural selection is evaluated.

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