Doug Shaver

Sure, but it is not the only means by which that can be accomplished. The notion that any theory must be presumed worthless until it has been peer-reviewed is a pure argument from authority, nothing more.

Doherty's book has been out there -- on the Web as well as in print -- for several years now, and I'm still waiting for an expert to find a critical flaw in it. If not one of the experts can be bothered to even read the thing just because it wasn't published by a university press, that is a very sad commentary on something.

I'll check it out when I get a chance. Are you saying, though, that knowledgeable people in that forum are presenting counterarguments to Doherty that have never been presented anywhere else, including this forum?

RUmike

Can you please demonstrate why the bold text is "weak scholarship"?

You're right, the JS doesn't question the historicity of Jesus. But that's because that's not the point of the JS. Its purpose is to create some sort of a consensus on HJ issues. But ALL of the JS fellows already agree that Jesus existed. Every single one of them. There would not be a single person who could deliver a "con" piece for debate. If you understood the purpose of the JS you would not have made this mistake.

gstafleu

For the sake of discussion let's assume for a moment that this is indeed the case, let's call it scenario A. In what light does that put the HJ-MJ discussion?

It is, I would suggest, immediately clear that under scenario A a very important part of the standard Jesus has become mythical: the son of god crucified to atone for our sins is a myth.

I also rather suspect that the people who subscribe to scenario A will see the miracles as myth (with the possible exception of psychosomatic healings aka demon expulsion). So walking on water, changing water into wine, multiplying bread and fishes are all myth as well.

However, Scenario A keeps a historical person as a basis for the mythical part.

Aren't we then in a situation where the HJ-MJ question is one of degree and not of absolutes? The question is not whether Jesus is mythical or not, it is how much of him is mythical. And that at least some of him is mythical is agreed upon by all except the evangelicals.

That then makes it much easier to answer questions like "which version of MJ should historians address?" The answer is that it is not a version that has to be addressed, but specific issues. There are obviously aspects of Jesus that the Jesus Seminar thinks are historical while Doherty thinks they are not. These can be addressed on an issue by issue basis.

Finally, under Scenario A we should stop making sweeping statements like "professionals don't accept MJ." That is misleading, because they do accept that Jesus is at least in part mythical. The question is how many parts are mythical, not if any are mythical because that has already been settled.

No Robots

gstafleu:

A very helpful, positive, constructive contribution. Merci bien!

gnosis92

exactly, for example, it seems clear that second century apologists do believe in a historical jesus, for example papais, iraneous, marcion, etc.

i would be facinated for doherty to publish in a peer reviewed journal or academic press, and see what respected historians from elaine pagels to bart ehrman have to say

EarlDoherty

A few comments on your various comments:

Your obvious a priori judgment that my work is “junk” (no doubt without reading the book) illustrates that such knee-jerk reaction is widely to be expected in the conservative mainstream community and would more than likely be the reaction to any submission of mine. Someone else noted that the Fourth R, the magazine of the Westar Institute (Jesus Seminar), turning down an invitation to not only present the mythicist position but to challenge it, is a good illustration. Their reasons for doing so were certainly of the ‘knee-jerk’ variety. If they were not automatically indisposed toward having the mythicist position voiced, mainstream scholarship would invite it to be so, considering its strength and popularity in more public circles, like the Internet. To close their minds and pages to it is simply an expression of haughty insularity and is hardly to be commended.

Even Robert Price, who is a member of the Jesus Seminar (when last I looked), has not published anything in “peer-reviewed journals” on an openly mythicist subject. I’m not sure whether that is because he tried and they refused, or he simply didn’t bother, knowing the closed-door attitude that they have. Price, to all intents and purposes, is a mythicist, yet I don’t hear anyone here ranting about his lack of exposure in such journals.

Incidentally, I have been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Namely, The Journal of Higher Criticism. At the time (1997), it was published out of Drew University, edited by Robert Price and Darrell Doughty. It boasts quite a few major and respected scholars on its masthead, including Robert Eisenmann, Andrew J. Mattill, J. C. O’Neill, David Seeley, Hermann Detering, etc. Not all lean toward ultra-radicalism. Doesn’t this make my contribution “peer-reviewed”? Or is it really a question of defining the term so as to include only those who are already pre-disposed to rejecting the mythicist theory or regarding it as crackpot?

Ramsey suggests lurking and searching on Crosstalk2. I would suggest (although it’s no longer possible) doing the same to the original Crosstalk, to which I contributed quite a bit around 1998-99. There I was attacked on all sides, insulted and ridiculed. One called me an “ass” in Spanish (without bothering to address my case). There were a few exceptions. Stevan Davies (a recognized scholar and writer on the Gospel of Thomas), commenting on my new paradigm, said that he had learned more from me (without necessarily accepting my conclusion) than all the retoolings of the old paradigms by commentators like Crossan. (I still have a record of that posting.) And I can honestly say that I was never bested; none of my arguments were ever shot down (vilified and stomped on is one thing, proven erroneous by demonstrable argument is another). Mahlon H. Smith withdrew for a time after a particularly devastating post from me about his pervasive fallacious reasoning (I also have a record of that). Jeffrey Gibson did the same after I discredited his claims about the grammatical structure of Romans 1:1-4 (something I posted here again recently). This is not simply idle boasting. But in the face of pre-judged deprecation by such as Ramsey and others here, there’s no reason for me to adopt the shy ingénue attitude.

I’m quite willing to acknowledge that I don’t know everything in this field (as can no one). Bart Ehrman certainly commands vast amounts of knowledge in the field of textual criticism; that’s his specialty. At the same time, he can be guilty of some pretty blindered interpretations of certain texts. Two leapt out at me, for example, in his Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. He says (p.131) of the opening of the epistle 1 John, that the “‘Word of Life’ was revealed and perceived by the senses: he was seen and heard and touched (1:1-3),” to show that he (supposedly Jesus on earth) was a real human being. But the pronoun throughout that passage is neuter, not masculine. It’s an “it” not a “he”. And verse 2 goes on to talk further about “seeing” and “witnessing” eternal life, not a human being. Ehrman makes no attempt to explain this anomaly. He has simply forced the passage, and the pronoun, into a reference to the earthly Jesus because that’s the way he wants to see it. He similarly forces other passages in the epistle into meanings they don’t obviously have, and which in some cases contradict the text. In another spot (p.160) he translates Romans 15:8 as “he came as a minister to the circumcision,” a passage often thrown at me by anti-mythicists. But the verb here is in the perfect tense, “has become.” Most translators follow Ehrman, though some preserve the perfect, as of course do interlinears. The perfect is much more in keeping with the mythicist interpretation of Paul as speaking of Christ who is now an operating (spiritual) force in the world, and in keeping with his pattern of never speaking of Christ as a human figure who lived in the recent past. Ehrman also shows no awareness of the deep problems involved in the majority judgment that the Gospel of John preceded the epistles of John. (For those interested, my website article A Solution to the First Epistle of John covers this material.) When you have this kind of universal interpretation of texts which consistently skews the record to conform to a Gospel-based preconception, it is perhaps no wonder that mainstream scholarship has a knee-jerk reaction against anything which would completely overturn this established applecart.

A simple search of a Greek grammar would point out that it’s kata sarka.

I have written more on this subject than probably any other, and no one has demonstrated the impossibility of my reading; some, such as Carrier, have more or less supported it. I have already written the draft of an extensive analysis of the term which I will be including in my second edition of The Jesus Puzzle.

To the first question, no. To the second, briefly: yes, I think the odds are that John is historical. We can’t altogether trust Josephus’s text (Frank Zindler made me come close to doubting its authenticity), but I think Q witnesses to his existence, if not the accuracy of his preaching. As to why the “Christianity” that went into the Gospels did not adopt John, I ‘speculated’ on that in TJP, but I’m not going to pronounce on it. (I hope no one expects that I am going to offer definitive views on everything in this field. I’ve only had one lifetime so far.)

Further on this:

If by “early Christians” you are referring to Paul & Co., they didn’t know anything about John the Baptist. He wasn’t on their particular radar screen. Paul had nothing to do with the Galilean scene that produced Q. Again, as to why John wasn’t adopted by Q as their founder and original teacher, well, he was to some extent, as Q shows. He was a kind of “mentor” but then got shunted to “herald to Jesus” status. I think Q shows that John originally was not seen as any such thing, but only as the prophet of the coming Son of Man, an entirely heavenly, apocalyptic figure who would arrive at the End time (which is not to say that an historical John actually preached that). There could have been any number of ‘political’ reasons why an invented Jesus took precedence over an historical John that we could only speculate on. As for when the Gospel was first written, I’m quite prepared to suggest that, although he didn’t regard his story as historical per se, Mark may have regarded (mistakenly) his Jesus figure as representing someone who had been.

Spin points out that John was not a messianic or saviour figure, but one who advocated ritual purity of the body. They had different appeals. But I believe, and I’m going on uncertain recall here, that it has been suggested that John did have his own ‘messianic’ following, if not originally, then later. But I’d have to review that. But I agree that the basic answer is that the two figures (even if one was only imagined to be historical) did have different appeals.

Perhaps not. But then they might be missing something significant. And when they continue to ignore ‘amateur’ work which gets the kind of exposure Jesus mythicism is increasingly getting today, and simply dismiss it in knee-jerk fashion, they don’t create the best of impressions.

I would say that the recent dismissal by the Fourth R was an example of an attitude which does not encourage mythers to “address academia”. It certainly doesn’t encourage me to undertake the work to prepare something and go through the submission process with “peer-reviewed” journals. It seems to me that when a market has a significant number of publications on a subject which gain attention, such as books by myself and Robert Price and others, it is encumbent to some extent on the discipline they address to respond to them in something more than haughty dismissal.

Well, I do have some action sequences, and puzzles (as well as something Dan Brown doesn’t, some sex scenes!), and lots of ‘talk’ on the various subjects. Perhaps a non-existent Jesus isn’t as ‘sexy’ as one who marries Mary Magdalene. But Korean and Spanish publishers liked it enough to publish it in those languages, entirely from seeing it on my website.

Finally:

“Experts” who are already so prejudiced against the idea that they cannot be trusted as dispassionate “vetters” of those facts? This, of course, is the problem, and why I have addressed myself principally to a lay audience. We cannot afford to entrust views on such a critical topic to an insulated, self-interested, peer-pressured group who have every reason to hold basically to received wisdom. Yes, it does expect something of the layman, but as the Internet has shown, laymen are often up to the task. And those who do take the trouble to do their own investigation (as well as dispassionately weigh the case as presented by myself and others) usually come away realizing that something is rotten (or at least suspicious) in the state of Denmarkian scholarship.

All the best,
Earl Doherty

RUmike

Earl:

In fairness to Mahlon Smith, I hope you remember that on his Jesus Seminar Forum site he put a link to your site as the first under a heading which reads, "The critiques selected here are those that raise substantive issues that merit an intelligent response."

ETA: Also, please check your PMs.

dog-on

Are you kidding? This is Gospel Lite. I do not mean to imply that the JS members are weak scholars. I do, however, believe that to come to such a conclusion one would have to presuppose Jesus as a historical figure. That being the case, how much scholarship does it then take to just remove all the supernatural aspects from the story? Skeptics have been doing the same for years.

I'm sorry if I don't see anything amazing in their conclusion. Maybe you can enlighten me as to why I should.

RUmike

I never said you should see "anything amazing" in their conclusion. The term "weak scholarship" was a poor choice of words if that's the idea you meant to convey.

jjramsey

I didn't find everything that you mentioned, and in particular, searching for "Doherty Mahlon" did not find the exchange with Mahlon H. Smith of which you spoke. Feel free to point that out to me, though. I did find these:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk/message/5243
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk/message/5076
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk/message/5065
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk/message/5035
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk/message/5046

There actually was a fair bit of engagement with you, and a mix of the polite and impolite.