The Bishop

This is what I was talking about when I quoted Doherty in what seemed to be an obvious error, and it was so obvious I deliberately left it without comment:
I must say, I do apologise to all MJers here. I had always assumed they were critical rationalists who maybe had taken their skepticism a little far. I must have been wrong - obviously you guys are all Gnostic Christians! You deny Jesus was a physical human being, because you believe Him to have revealed Himself in visions to the first Apostles!

Well, as long as I know the terms of debate.....

The Bishop

Wish I could say the same. Didymus does not seem to have understood what I was saying about what constitutes a consistent argument in Doherty. And instead of making a coherent point against me, he dismissed me with laughter.I'm sorry, but I don't think my analysis deserved that kind of treatment. See, what I did was, I didn't make that much comment at all on Doherty, I simply posted up the points that seemed to me to be contradictory. What I did was assume everybody had the intelligence to see that for themselves. I gave everybody that respect. I did not receive any in return.

PS. I'm fully aware that I'm a pompous ass. I'm not asking for respect as a pompous ass. I'm asking the respect of being understood, listened to and intelligently responded to as a fellow forum member and seeker after knowledge.

J-D

Well if you don't want to respond to less-informed people like me, of course you don't have to. But I think you just did.A good point. Careless choice of words on my part. I apologise. I'd be interested in any analysis, however little exhaustive. I should have left that word out.

Saying that I would be interested, on the other hand, I still think the right choice of words. I don't demand it or expect it, nor will I consider myself justified in drawing any inferences if I don't get it. But I'll still be interested if I do.Why? What will I find if I do? Or is answering that question 'such a bother'?

J-D

If Paul took what other people started in an new direction, then clearly he wasn't the founder of the whole movement, just of a branch of it: as Luther was the founder of Protestant Christianity but not the founder of Christianity. If Paul took something in a new direction, that still leaves the question of how that something got started before Paul came on the scene.

So the model you are positing appears to be one in which a group of people participated jointly in what they themselves considered to be a shared mystical experience. I don't claim an extensive knowledge of the history of religion, but from what I do know I can't recall ever hearing of any other religious movement that started out like that. To my intuition, that seems less plausible than the idea that this original group had some sort of real live leader (repeating myself, not necessarily one who had anything else in common with the traditional accounts of Jesus). But my intuition's not a specially plausible guide, so I wouldn't be in the least surprised to receive new information that led me to revise my opinion.

Clivedurdle

This is a very common way that religions started! Try William James Varieties of Religious Experience!

The leaders commonly had ecstatic experiences. Persiger has shown that by puting some volts through the right area of the brain, anyone can have a full blown religious experience.

Paul is an example of quite heavy visionary experience - rumour has it a symptom was loss of sight, with quite good education, adding one and one and getting twenty seven, with a bit of some older rituals and alchemy and the chance of finding favour with an emperor, result a world religion.

Clivedurdle

Almost!

I think that is how the early xians saw it, and in fact how xians see it now, but they are stuck with an HJ blasphemy!

Why is rational thought to be equivalent to historical?

Clivedurdle

My point was not about what was revealed but the method - by the holy spirit!

How is that done? Someone called the holy spirit revealing it?

Or someone's imaginary friend (the holy spirit) revealing it - ie a completely imaginary process! Another vision no?

The Bishop

Could you just expand on this or otherwise explain it so that it doesn't look like you believe historical research should be on the basis of irrationality?

Clivedurdle

Is there a hidden assumption that to discuss myth is to be irrational, and therfore the converse, history equals rational. I was not going near your permutation!

The Bishop

No, I was actually giving MJers the benefit of the doubt. Of course there isn't an assumption that MJers are "irrational", certainly not by the MJers themselves, and for what it's worth, not by me.

MJers use irrational arguments, but they don't appear to know they are irrational. HJers, particularly Christian ones, do too. Saying, "Jesus wasn't real - the Apostles all saw him in visions!" not only defies the sense of why Paul would be considered a separate Apostle from all the others in the first place.... it defies sense altogether!

From the skeptical viewpoint, they cannot all have had the same vision. Neither is it very likely that they all had different visions but managed to come together (somehow!) and give their vision the same interpretation. At least, not compared to "the Apostles all knew a bloke called Jesus who had been executed, and told other people about him, and Saul knew the basic story from the people he persecuted, and one day he had a bad epileptic fit and came to believe Jesus was risen and consequently was divine and became a big Christian." I've never seen any description that doesn't rely on baselessly referring to any contradictory texts as "later interpolations", assuming all the early Christian fathers back to Paul were lying their arse off all the time. And like I said, Doherty keeps holding contradictory attitudes. The Gospels can't be relied on because they aren't attested early enough, but here, lets bolster the theory from a document which was never attested at all! Paul obviously saw Jesus in a vision - so all the apostles must have seen Jesus in a vision! Brother doesn't mean brother the way you think from reading the plain text, it can only mean what it means every single other time it's used. And obviously Jesus wasn't real because we can rely on 1 Timothy (a late-written Pastoral epistle) that describes him in not-real terms. On the other hand, we can't rely on 2 Timothy (another late-written Pastoral epistle) that does describe him as real because obviously it was written when the myth of a historical Jesus got going.


As an atheist, rationalist, critical thinker and skeptic, I fall on the HJ side for pretty much the sole reason that throwing Jesus out of history requires us to throw lots of other people out of history, for no better reason that they were only cited once or twice in unreliable texts of which our oldest copies are many centuries after the events they describe. This actually goes double for the rest of history, since the oldest Christian manuscripts are far more numerous than non-Christian ones of similar provenance. Basically, I'm HJ because I'm trying to save rationality and save history.