spin

For nazarhnos to be "in origin an authentic gentilic of Nazareth", one needs two, as you say, "somewhat unlikely linguistic events",

1. that the "-et" for some reason omitted -- the "-et" is seen as a feminine ending which is usually inserted before suffixes anyway (and I'd be interested now for any examples to the contrary before I rush to publish ); and
2. that the tsade in ncrt is never transliterated as it nornally is into Greek as a sigma (not one of the forms in this puzzle ever seem to have the sigma, yet one has to search far to find an example elsewhere of such a transliteration).

As Nazara seems to pre-exist Nazareth in the synoptic gospel tradition, it is Nazareth which needs more justification as the newcomer. That it is the source for Nazara should only be contemplated after dealing with its lack of appearance and the lack of phonological relationship with nazarhnos.

You may be right to be tentative, though back-formation is not strange. It is how Tertullian or one of his predecessors derived the eponymous Ebion.

The greatest linguistic hurdle for Nazareth as I see it is the across the board lack of attestation for the tsade from the original.

We also have to explain why Mk indicates not Nazareth but Capernaum as Jesus's home (just as Marcion has Jesus coming down from heaven first to Capernaum), a fact which the writer of Mt felt necessary to integrate into his version by moving Jesus from Nazara to Capernaum. (Yes, Mk mentions Nazareth at 1:9, but it is not attested to by the other synoptics and even more interestingly it doesn't get differentiated forms in the Alexandrian/Byzantine separation, so obviously it was added later, simply inserted between the apo and the ths galilaias.)

And we have to understand, if it were as you suggest, why the Mt writer omits all the Marcan examples of nazarhnos, as though its significance was too obscure for the writer, only for the Matthean tradition to later introduce nazwraios in Matthean material (2:23, 26:71). Lk on two out of three case has nazwraios for the Marcan nazarhnos, suggesting either it was written generally later than Mt or that nazwraios had spread to that part of the diaspora and not to the Matthean community. (The former seems more likely to me.)


spin

krosero

I began this thread to ask what was unconvincing about non-supernatural HJ models. The responses have filled me in a little, and I will learn more as I continue reading and posting at this site. But this thread would be incomplete without pointing out what is unconvincing to me about MJ models.

Calling the HJ models claimants is unconvincing because the MJ model is a claim also.

I am reminded of something that Frank Zindler wrote: "Although what follows may fairly be interpreted to be a proof of the non-historicity of Jesus, it must be realized that the burden of proof does not rest upon the skeptic in this matter. As always is the case, the burden of proof weighs upon those who assert that some thing or some process exists." This is a very strange thing for Zindler, as a "hard" scientist, to say: the burden of proof is definitely not on those who say that the process known as gravity, or something equivalent, exists. There is an analogy here with the historicity or non-historicity of a man. That a man lived and was deified seems like the most natural and believable process -- it even works as a skeptical claim, by invoking the pious imagination of believers. The HJ authors that I mentioned (Meier, Sanders, Wright) all invoke this same thing.

I do not grant that MJ is a simpler model; but perhaps HJ models seem unnecessarily complex because they describe the Bible as containing two things (which happen to be regarded as difficult to reconcile anyway): history and myth. An HJ understanding of the Bible has to account for real events, mythical events, and the constantly uncertain border between them. An MJ model, on the other hand, says that the scriptures in question are entirely mythical, with the exception of historical names added for window dressing. So I can see why MJ carries the appearance of simplicity. Of course, an MJ model then needs to explain how a Jesus originally conceived as unearthly came to be regarded as earthly, and I do not find Doherty's mapping out of this process to be any simpler than an HJ map of early Christianity.

In any case, Ockham's razor should be used within limits. It's invoked a lot in debates about this question, but if I hear it claimed or implied that Doherty's model is simpler because it reduces the Bible to one genre, I would caution first that the MJ model's greater simplicity is far from obvious or granted; and I would add that reduction is not the same thing as parsimony or simplicity. It may be indeed that the great HJ works are multi-volumed tomes of thousands of pages because they have a very daunting task which mythicism does not have: separating history, line by line, from its mythical elaboration. This task is time-consuming and, just maybe, not possible, due to the lack of data or the nature of the data; perhaps some of the complexity of HJ models stems from trying too hard and in too many ways to detect something unreachable. Yet lack of conclusive data would still not throw us to one conclusion or another. There was a time when scientists could honestly say that no one really knew whether life existed on Mars; but this ignorance was no cause to claim, at the time, that life did not exist there. Far from it: the nature and paucity of the data only stressed the importance of NOT making strong claims. We can only begin to make meaty claims about Mars today, because of newly available data (and every discipline forges, on top of this, new techniques for interpreting data).

I know that there's far more to MJ than the invocation of uncertainty; but uncertainty is often invoked in a kind of twin formula: "Jesus did not exist; and if he did, there's no way of knowing what he was like." The uncertainty of the latter half of the sentence becomes associated with the conclusion of the first part, perhaps only rhetorically, but often nonetheless. It's a fallacy: uncertainty does not produce a conclusion -- except for postmodernists

Finally, on the claim that historians are afraid to rock the boat or alienate others, I can only reply that this is a speculation. It may well be true, and certainly such things are real. But unpack the claim and see what it is made of. Judging one's own inner life is hard; judging that of another person, whom you don't know personally, harder; judging the inner lives of a large set of people, most of them still strangers, is that much more difficult; judging them all to fall one way is yet another jump. The claim also borders on ad hominem because it implies, essentially, that a set of people are less than courageous. There's an implication here that certain scholars would believe, or would be open to believing, something that would force them to re-evaluate countless small details and large elements of their life's work, but that they cannot bring themselves to do it, and remain politically correct, because they fear losing their jobs or they fear the opprobrium of religionists. All this sort of speculation is profoundly unscientific, and it's also self-flattering: Doherty and other mythicists sometimes plainly state that theirs is a courageous position that has not yet won out against conformity. That is deeply unconvincing.

And of course, if such claims about HJ scholars are on the table, then similar claims will be on the table about the motives and psychology of mythicists. Whatever place there is for such a discussion, I think historicists and mythicists alike can agree that such claims are not convincing (when they hear the arguments; not when they make the arguments).

MJ is less convincing to me when it dismisses or rationalizes the HJ majority view at the level of psychology. And the existence of a consensus running counter to mythicism needs to be accounted for, not because arguments from authority are valid, but because peer review is important. When Copernicanism was being born, a few scientists had to account for what criticism was being brought to bear upon their new model, and to some extent it was valid to point to the sheer weight of convention; but in that case it was also plain that the geocentric model fit common sense and probably would always agree with our basic senses more than a heliocentric model. The same is true of evolution: an earth thousands of years old, in which species that look quite different each have a distinct creation, fits human imagination far better than a universe in which time stretches to billions of years and allows for great diversity to be brought about by evolution. It's perilous to make an analogy between the hard sciences and the Jesus question, but I offer it as something to think about when asking why the historical Jesus still commands majority assent.

(I did not mean to pick on the replies of only one user; his replies just struck me the most. There are many things in this thread worthy of replies, but this post is already long enough).

Cheers

Toto

I infer from this that you have never talked about mythicism to someone who has devoted his life to the study of the historical Jesus, and gotten blasted with hostility. I don't have to speculate.

But I suspect that for most scholars, it isn't a matter of cowardice, it is just that there is no advantage in taking a position against the majority.

The motives of both HJ'ers and MJ'ers can be quite complex. Christians can feel that their religion requires a historical Jesus, and that any attempt to deny his history is a direct challenge to their beliefs. But Liberals and Humanists can also have an investment in a historical Jesus, as a great man who changed history through non-violent political action. Frank Zindler of American Atheists is anti-religion and anti-Christian. Robert Price is just following his scholarship where it leads him. Freke and Gandy are neo-gnostics who want to reform Christianity.

I would recommend Charlotte Allen's book The Human Christ, which I wrote about here. Allen is a (politically conservative) Catholic; her thesis is that the Historical Jesus is a construct from the Enlightenment, an attempt to find some natural basis for Christianity compatible with modern science; she judges the attempt to find him as a failure. (She prefers her Jesus to be a mystery and part of the trinity.)

spin

I don't argue for MJ. I am agnostic on the matter. My comment is just as valid however. The claim is for authenticity. It needs to be justified.

As it requires nothing incredible, it is plainly the simpler model.

Here I'd invoke it because HJers have to do better than rest on unearnt laurels.

For me it is sufficient that there is a plausible explanation for the phenomena under consideration to require a serious justification of the status quo claims.

I don't bother.

You cannot reply such a thing, which is in itself speculation. My statement may be an over-generalisation, but that doesn't change the problem.

Which don't interest me in the least. The existence of a coherent MJ requires that HJers have to go beyond the accepted assumptions. I'm interested in history and HJism is a farce as it stands.


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Kosh

"There s no gravity, the Earth sucks! - Einstein (?)

nit: Only Pauls scriptures are claimed to mythical. The gospels are claimed to be people who mistook that for historical, and wrote a story around it.

Straw-man.

Argumentum ad numerum.

krosero

As long as we're on possible Einstein quotes, there's one that's relevant: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.� Not that it provides much help here.

That's understood, and I spoke of Jesus coming to be regarded as historical. I used "mythical" and "historical" in the sense of whether something occurred, not in the sense of the genre and the beliefs of the authors.

The original argument I was trying to describe did speak of kow-towing to religionists and not alienating one's audience as a historian. I used perhaps overblown language, but I did not use new straw; the points were already there.

The argument from numbers is not my argument. I have been speaking not about what is conclusive logically, but what people find convincing. The arguments and counter-arguments about the majority view were already on the table, and I offered why the counter-arguments account for the majority unconvincingly. I'm in agreement that invoking or dismissing the majority, whether or not it's convincing, is not logically conclusive; that kind of argument has no logical power.

krosero

These arguments I do find convincing, because they account for diversity and division within the camps.

krosero

If by incredible you mean supernatural, there is nothing incredible about naturalistic HJ models. If you mean farcical, well the same has been said about MJ. I believe that neither model is farcical.

I stand by what I offered at the start of the thread, namely that the lack of a comprehensive HJ model addressing the existence of Christ needs to be remedied.

I actually agree that there's a problem wherever the question is barred from being raised profitably or even at all. Mythicists do not show these tendencies because they are not "in power" so to speak. I just think that over-generalization is more serious than a question of whether 40% or 75% of HJ'ers are being referred to. At one end of the HJ spectrum are agnostics and atheists (or just pious religionists outside Christianity) who reject Jesus mythicism; generalizations about people following the HJ model because of the pressure of religionists, or the desires of a pious Christian audience, don't account for those who stand on the margins or outside of traditional Christianity and yet subscribe to the HJ model. Given our society's diversity, and the diversity within Christianity (the diversity within Jesus questers alone is amazing), judging the existence of Jesus as an unchallenged bit of received wisdom has very little persuasive power for a historicist.

spin

"HJ modelling" is based on arbitrary criteria. I see no value in cherry-picking. First you manipulate the source texts to say what you'd prefer them to say, then you use your result as though it has some significance. The MJer approaching the same starting text, ie before it is bowdlerized by HJ modelling, and come to very different conclusions.

You give no impression of being interested in history, but you do of historicising the gospels' central figure. Given the texts we have, as they are, I see no justification of your approach.

Why treat tradition literature as though you can coherently extract history from it, when all you can do is apply an arbitrary set of value judgments that intimate what may be historical to you on the material? This is no method of doing history.


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freigeister

What would that be, and how did you come to classify the NT under it?