Amaleq13

Let me guess. Any detail that denies your beliefs is irrelevant?

A declaration of the violence and disruption likely to result from his efforts isn't relevant to a claim that Jesus unambiguously preached peace? If you are kidding anyone, it is yourself.

I've only focused on the details which deny the specific examples you claimed demonstrated the lack of ambiguity. So far, you've backpeddled on one while trying to blame me for including it and complained that I focus on the details too much. Your characterization of the story has more to do with your beliefs than the actual text.

No, you introduced Jesus' preaching right along with the other specific examples you claimed supported your belief in non-ambiguity. You only tried to separate them out after I pointed to an example contrary to your claim.

Which, setting aside the details one must ignore for the claim, brings me back to my unanswered question: So what?

PhilosopherJay

Hi Gamera and Toto,


In our times there are only a few examples of fictional characters being widely mistaken for actually existing people. This is due to our easy ability to check and recheck facts. However, in ancient times, this ability did not exist. Thus all mythological heroes and Gods were accepted as real and historical.

We should ask if any ancient mythological hero has been found to be an historical person? Since Jesus of Nazareth closes resembles mythological heroes, we should assume that he was not historical unless we find evidence to the contrary.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Gamera

I don't think this is true. As early as 6th century BCE, Theagenes of Rhegium is specifically claiming (from what we can tell by references to him in other workds) that the myths were pure allegories (of natural forces, etc).
Palaephatus, a contemporary of Aristotle, sought mightily to historicize Greek myths in his On Unbelievable Tales, which suggests that there were many at the time who didn't take them as history.

Tacitus suggests doubt on the historicity of various legendary figures with locutions about how it wasn't his job to refute or proof the statements of superstitious people (namely the Germans) about them.

Furthermore I dispute your claim that we discern fictional from historic figures through cross checking of some kind. I doubt very many people go on a research binge to find out whether Sherlock Holmes was real or not. They don't have to. They understand the genre the stories of Sherlock Holmes are written in versus the genre of books on Abraham Lincoln. They know from the start what is being claimed.

Mythicists assert that the original genre was mythical (though all those documents are lost or redacted), and then people started writing histories about Jesus.

Unfortunately, this is a somewhat unprecedented claim. It's one thing to be confused about a figure is real or not, and write a history that is in essence based on false information. It's another thing to write a novel about someone, and then have that figure suddenly becoming the subject of historiography. It's an unlikely scenario in any age.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Gamera,


You apparently are making three points here:

1) Some people in classical times did not take mythological characters as historical.

2) People are currently intrinsically able to discern a real historical personage from an unreal literary creation and they always have had this ability.

3) Fictional characters were not typically perceived as historical characters in any age.

The first claim I can agree with. The vast majority did take made-up/mythological characters as real historical personages. A few philosophers and others, often risking death, claimed that the stories of gods were not meant to be taken literally. While absolute denial of the existence of particular Gods was rare, the actual facts of the case, what this or that God actually did, was often disputed.

It can be seen in the very beginning of the History of Livy how mythological characters were mixed up and how these deeds were disputed:

Livy is simply recapitulating poetical narratives here and thus turning poetical/mythological characters into history.

The second claim, that we know fiction from fact automatically, I disagree with. Polly Baker, an invention of Benjamin Franklin was accepted as a real historical person and included in college text books as such, up until the mid-twentieth century. Recently, Carlos Castenados' fictional shaman, Don Juan Matus was accepted for over six years, as a real person until Richard de Mille and Daniel Noel, after much research, revealed the fictional nature of his creation.

Nearly everybody for 2000 years, believed in the existence of Moses until the 1990's when archaeological evidence became sufficient to cast serious doubt on his existence.

There is no way that we intrinsically understand if a literary character is ficitonal or historical. Most children under the age of six believe in Santa Claus if they are from homes that tell them that Santa is real. Only when they are able to talk with peers and teachers and do research do they determine that Santa Claus is not real.

Even I, with a college degree in filmmaking was surprised to learn that the two lead characters, Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, in the movie Chicago were based on real historical historical personages, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertna . Conversely, I thought Michael Clayton, the lead character in the film Michael Clayton was based on a real lawyer and a real case, like Erin Brockovich, but he is a totally fictional character in a fictional story made up by the writer/director Tony Gilroy. I still am unsure if the character of Marie Charlet in John Huston's Moulin Rouge was historical or not.

In classical times people did not have the internet to consult to determine if a character in a story they heard was true or not. People were born hearing stories of Gods, they were to theaters where they saw stories about Gods, and when to Temples where priests and priestesses recited stories about Gods. Naturally, under these conditions, they accepted and believed virtually any story they heard as historical fact, no matter how supernatural, if it was embellished with enough realistic details, and they often believed even when it was not.

Ultimately, we have to live with the fact that History gets easily turned into fiction and fiction gets easily turned into History.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

badger3k

:thumbs:

Well said.

Gamera

I don't know how you can conclude this except by speculation. There is no polling data from 50 BCE. I suspect that people were generally as skeptical or as gullible as they are now, since we have little evidence to the contrary. In any case, if you have some evidence that shows "the vast majority" of people in antiquity believed what you claim, please provide it so we can examine it. I think in fact what you are doing is engaging in exceptionalism (we're different from those people). And I don't think there is any basis in fact for that.


It think this makes my point.

That's because Livy apparently took the Troy narratives as poeticized historic accounts. That's how they view the genre of epic poetry. This was not a situation of persons engaging in myth making and then crossing over to history. It was a genre issue: epic poetry was considered to be about real events. Now, as it turns out some of the events in Homeric epic poetry seems to have occured (like the rise of Troy). While others surely did not. But that's no different (in principle at least) from a biography of George Washington repeating the spurious cherry tree incident.

Needless to say, this is not my claim. My claim is people recognize textual genres. I think that is beyond dispute. This isn't mystical or require some a priori ability (as you seem to have claimed I claimed) -- it merely involves the conventions of the genre, not to mention the desire for profit. I think it's rare indeed that a person mistakes a novel for biography.

There is no reason to beleive that people in antiquity had any less an appreciation of genres. We know that Graeco-Roman biographies had certain conventions that were distinct from fictions of the time. I presume a literary class of people in the 1st century were sophisticated enough to pick up on the conventions, because that's why they were there, for the reader to pick up on.

Now, is is possible for uneducated people to mistake a fictional character for an historical character based on cultural dispersion (as opposed to actually reading the texts). Sure. But that's not the mythicist claim, as I understand it. My understanding is that a literate class of people took mythical texts and transformed them into historical texts.

An unprecedented claim, and hence highly dubious.

Again, I don't think you are identifying the process correctly. People don't get it into their heads that somebody is historical, and then research the veracity of that claim. They read. If they read a novel, and they have any sophistication, they don't confuse that genre with history writing. And vice versa. I can state unequivocally that I've never had to go online to determine whether a character I read about in a novel was historical or not, or vice versa with a history. The issue never arose.

And again, that doesn't seem to be the mythicist claim (or at least not Doherty's claim), which involves not gullible illiterates generating a historical Jesus, but a literate class of Christian clerics or exegetes. Let me suggest your construction of the process simply doesn't accord with the mythicist position, which is the issue at hand.

No, we don't, unless you can provide some real evidence that it does. As I have pointed out, the process of mythologizing historical figures is well attested. The process of historicizing mythological figures is virtually nonexistence.

Thus the weight of the evidence on this issue goes to the historicists.

Toto

Gamera - I think you are just repeating your points without reacting to the real life examples that Jay has given.

But let me ask you - is Zorba the Greek historical?

Amaleq13

Even when reading historical fiction? I don't believe you.

Gamera

Since the genre of historical fiction exists, to the extent that you can even name it, clearly you (and trust me, me too) can tell history from historical fiction. If you can't, why would you call it historical fiction?

Gamera

What do you mean by "historical" in this context?

Zorba the Greek is a Kazanzakis novel, and nobody would take it as history, even if (I presume) it's based on some real life experience of the author (which is different from the narrator of the novel), as most novels are. So while I'm sure the novel has some historical elements (like Cretan society in the 1940s or whenever it is set), it isn't history and doesn't purport to be.

As to Jay's examples, I did respond -- they are irrelevant to the mythicists' claims (unless I'm missing some subtelties here). My understanding is that the mythicists don't claim Jesus bumbled into history due to the misunderstandings of uneducated persons about the myth of Jesus, but rather that the historical Jesus is a textual construction of literate peoples, who transformed prior mythicist texts, such as Paul's epistles. It is a theory that focusses on textual transmission and transmutations, not confusions by illiterate folk who simply confused a myth with a real person (and didn't have the internet to check it out). At least that's Doherty's claim. So Jays' examples are off point.