Amaleq13

Your process is clearly and fundamentally flawed. I can only assume you are not a professional scientist.

Where did you get the idea that you should start with a hypothesis? A hypothesis is a potential explanation for existing evidence. You have to consider the evidence first and then derive a hypothesis you think explains that evidence. You then procede to search for more evidence and see if it supports or contradicts the potential explanation.

And this isn't even a hypothesis. It is a description of part of the evidence followed by your conclusion.

As I said, you are starting with the assumption of the truth of your conclusion and including it as a premise. That is the definition of circular reasoning.

That is correct. Assuming the truth of your conclusion in your premise is how one engages in circular reasoning.

And that is an example of shifting the burden. The epistle describes Christ descending to become like humans and offers no other contrast than that between Heaven and Earth. There is no reason to think any other locations are involved unless you provide it.

But none regarding the location of his fleshy form or the sacrifice. You play fast and loose with the facts when you try to confuse those observations.

Since there is no reason to suspect any other location, there is no good reason to expect any such explicit reference. He took the form of earth-dwellers to be like earth-dwellers and to become a . Only two locations are explicitly described: Heaven and Earth.

There is nothing straightforward about reading the location of the sacrifice into a passage that says nothing about the location of the sacrifice.

There is nothing extra about it. Earth is where the sacrifices Christ's replaces happened. Earth is where the humans Christ descended to be like live. Earth is where the author says Christ could have chosen to take his blood. It is the only alternative the author describes.

That said, your position certainly cannot be said to avoid the "problem" since Christ had to move from the lower sphere to the one with the Heavenly Jerusalem in it.

No Robots

Incorrect. Copernicus got the heliocentric thesis from reading ancient documents. Likewise Newton and Kepler started with hypotheses which they subsequently applied to observations.

Newton deduced gravitation from Kepler's laws, and these were what he thought of. And Kepler? Do you know what Kepler said when he was pressed to indicate how he had discovered his laws of revolution? He answered: 'I guessed them!' That was a fine reply then, and even today, against all the empirico-simpletons and research-boosters who go about puffing experience as truth. Let them all be reminded of Kepler as one of the great architects of science who know well how the house is built and think of it not as do the hodcarriers.—Constantin Brunner, Science, spirit, superstition, p. 214.

kais

There's the Barrett Pashak we've all come to know and love! I was starting to get worried; it had been a full ten days since your last Brunner quote.

No Robots

Less chance of being edited out when you use a quotation to call someone an "empirico-simpleton.":devil1:

Toto

I think you are the only one hung up on the fleshly sublunar realm.

If Earl is not correct, an alternative mythicist thesis is that second century Christians created Jesus as a fictional character, perhaps based on selected characteristics of real people, none of whom inspired the formation of Christianity. Do you see a problem with that? It explains every inconsistent literary mention as forgery or interpolation, but I'm not sure what else there is to discuss.

GakuseiDon

Perhaps. It is certainly the fundamental flaw in Earl's theory, IMO and I suggest in the opinion of most mythicists as well.

That may well be possible. I've always said that HJ-agnosticism is a reasonable conclusion, though I personally think the evidence for a HJ isn't as bad as that. Still, a "fictionalized" Jesus is certainly possible. But the elephant in the room is the flaw in Earl's theory, and I doubt traction for any other MJ theory is going to develop while that elephant remains unaddressed.

Amaleq13

You are supposed to offer something contrary to support this claim.

Yes. A hypothesis derived "from" the evidence.

They "started" with explanations before they considered what they were trying to explain? Kepler was just guessing without knowing what his guess was supposed to explain?

James Madison

I agree Gurugeorge and this is actually one of the points I have been making. One can completely deny a historical Jesus and still read the book of Hebrews and discern the author of Hebrews is referring to someone who existed on earth. This does not make the claim "true" but only that the author of Hebrews is making such a claim.

gstafleu

So... I have shown that at least part of the statement is ambiguous (not well-defined), we seem to agree on that: we don't know "what" is to be stopped. However, if we ignore that, then the whole statement is not ambiguous. Yes, I can see that working! Let me summarize which parts of the statement I have so far shown to be ambiguous:

1. Stop: we don't know if it means to hit the breaks, to stop throwing eggs, to finish up with the lottery game...
2. Hit: We don't know if it means a collision between two cars, an egg striking the car, winning a car in the sense of "to hit the jackpot," ...

Do we at least know what "car" means? Well, I could concoct a story about how John was working on his model railroad in the basement, painting his new boxcar. Betty and her cleavage come bouncing in, swirling around John in the--so far horizontal--expression of a certain desire. John, who obviously doesn't know what is good for him, asks Betty to stop her swirling before she hits the newly painted car.

Well, at least the car is still some sort of vehicle, you may think in temporary relief. Now have a look at my thread Similes, metaphors and pre-marital sex. As a thought experiment, let's say that the watching crowd of their most formidable friends decides to express its frustration by throwing objects at the couple. A sympathetic soul might then say "Please stop before you hit the car," with the idea that damage to the car is undesirable. But what is the car here? It is the thing that propels the couple towards the fulfillment of their desire. In other words, it is their love (we'll gallantly ignore the fact here that they may just be in lust, but given that their passports are in order that seems unlikely anyway). So that now our list of ambiguous terms becomes:

1. Stop: we don't know if it means to hit the breaks, to stop throwing eggs, to finish up with the lottery game...
2. Hit: We don't know if it means a collision between two cars, an egg striking the car, winning a car in the sense of "to hit the jackpot," ...
3. Car: We don't know if it is an automobile, a railroad car or love.

So, now that it is clear that the three major words around which the phrase is built are ambiguous, I would say that we have more than enough to call the whole phrase ambiguous. Mind you, I would say that a phrase is ambiguous once any part of it is ambiguous, but hey, I thought I'd go the extra few miles here.

Oh, BTW:
We move ourselves into a world like that of Asimov's robots, introducing a fourth (I think) law: Thou shalt not hit a car. A pair of robots is doing something that might endanger a car. One robot then metalically says to the other: "Please stop before you hit the car."

Actually, that is not a reason for its ambiguity: the statement doesn't refer to the sex of the parties, so who cares. It is, as by the list above, words that actually are in the statement that provide the ambiguity.

Now you said something to the effect that plain reading must be possible, because how else could we communicate with each other on this forum? Without plain reading it would be chaos. Yes, you have a point there, but that point is conditioned by what I've mentioned before: a plain reading is possible if there is a shared context that does not need to be established. To the extent that we use colloquial English here that shared context exists. For example, our discussions have touched frequently on the word "word," and confusion has not arisen because we are both using the same context, in which "word" means something like "dictionary entry."

But that doesn't mean that a phrase using "word" is by itself unambiguous. Take "the word was god." We could be having a discussion--I'm sure I don't need to concoct the details--where you thought I mentioned a dog, which then prompted me to say "No James, the word was god." But in the opening hymn of the gospel of John that phrase means something completely different, in fact the word "word" means something completely different: the logos concept rather than a dictionary entry. Now, if your set of concepts only contains the meaning of "dictionary entry" for "word," a plain reading will lead to a lot of head scratching!

And that brings us back to the meat of this discussion. In the 21st century we don't do heavenly spheres, we flesh and blood creatures all live here on earth. So we all share the context in which something that has flesh and blood automatically lives on earth. But the Hebrews did not live in the 21st century. They lived in a time with a completely different cosmology, which included heavenly spheres (e.g. Pythagoras, see also Cicero's Dream of Scipio for an example close in time to Hebrews). So we cannot do a plain reading against our current set of shared context when it comes to a text from a time that doesn't share that context. We are then reduced to laboriously figuring out what it all means, looking at the text and the surrounding culture for clues.

Hence again my challenge to you. Taking the first few verses of Hebrews, the heavenly aspect is clear and undisputed: Christ started out and ended up heavenly. Now, please show places in Hebrews that show with equal clarity that there actually was a time in between in which Christ was on earth.

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

You are confusing the intuitive and formal parts of the process here. You start by looking at something (reading Hebrews e.g.) and getting a bright idea: Hey, this all looks pretty heavenly to me. Then you curb your enthusiasm and get formal. You formulate your bright idea as a hypothesis (All action in Hebrews occurs in the heavens), and you start the verification/falsification process: go through the text and see how much of it fits. You have by now left your bright idea behind. In the formal stage it is only about the hypothesis and evidence pro and contra you find in the text.

Say I come up with the bright idea that all motion is relative, except for light which is always seen to move at the same speed. I then do a bunch of experiments, and lo and behold, light is always seen to move at the same speed. Is this then circular reasoning because I started out thinking that light might always move at the same speed, so that when I find that this is correct I have just circled back to where I started from?
OK, in order that we can discuss the details, can you please provide some quotes of where it does that?

Gerard Stafleu