Toto

I have heard Richard Carrier talk about this, and he has written about it. There is a methodology to historical research that is different from the theological or textual criticism that some scholars do. And he thinks that the methods NT scholars use are appalling.

aa5874

This is the sort of BS that engulfs the HJ argument. It is most absurd to declare virtually all of the NT was myth and little or nothing went back to an historical Jesus and still PROCLAIM that the 'DATA" fits an HJ.

Your reply is just like Ehrman's logical fallacies.

Please, you must surely understand that people here can see the baseless empty absurdities and contradictions of the HJ argument.

We deserve better.

The NT is virtually ALL MYTH with liitle or NO history and that PRECISELY FITS a Mythological Jesus.

This is so very basic.

Mythology FITS Mythology.

NO history FITS Mythology.

Let us REASON.

The Mythological evidence with little or NO history FITS a Myth Jesus PERFECTLY.

spin

When all else fails you try to brave it out with empty rhetoric. You can blab on to your heart's content about specialists, especially when they aren't.

Does any of this rigmarole matter to you? You are just performing a little bum covering ritual.

Much of the literature published under the aegis of history in religious studies has been utter drivel. Just look at the stream of rubbish under the title of "History of Israel" for example, people who have the authority to write such drivel. The so-called minimalists who show some understanding of methodology get treated with the utmost contempt by the hordes of old testament scholars, but then they've been saying--rightly--that writing a history of Israel with the major evidence being the old testament is totally dysfunctional. The fools who inject the Essenes into the Dead Sea Scrolls seem clueless of historical methodology, which explains why no progress has been made in the are for a very long time. Writing a history of Jesus requires a knowledge of what can be achieved by merely pushing paper from one place to another without attaching the content of what's written to the real world. Now that the third quest for the historical Jesus has failed, we can only look forward to another quixotic adventure with the same lame lack of understanding of history as all the previous loads. There's money and prestige at stake. History is not. And few are doing any in religious studies. It's fundamentally text criticism and exegesis. You can't expect history here.

LegionOnomaMoi

A line that doesn't exist, except for "mythicists." You can call Jesus gay, eaten by dogs, a failed messiah, etc., but somehow "mythic" is off the table? Right.



For example?


And you wonder why mythicists aren't taken seriously.


You claimed you read all the responses. So you'd know.


Because they are designed to demonstrate which saying/teachings/etc. go back to the historical Jesus. Not whether he existed. All we need for that is Paul, Josephus, and the synoptic references to James. It's still more than we have for just about every historical name which comes down from ancient history.




Have you read Bultmann?

He had no evaluation of how a historical Jesus was a better explanation for the origins of Christianity than a mythical Jesus - and since the origins of Christianity lie with the followers and not the historical Jesus, it is not clear how a historical Jesus fits into that better explanation of the data.


Yes. Mostly by people who can't even read Greek. Thankfully, though, both Josephus references have been addressed in depth by actual experts, from Feldman to Vermes. I'm sure these scholars, being Jewish, are somehow forced by the christian conspiracy to...whatever it is you think forces them to come up with their "fictional" analyses rather than face the "truth."


The possibility of two people named James doesn't make any sense to you?

LegionOnomaMoi

Right. You can't define who is, but "they aren't". I'm so glad we have you to tell historians who historians are.
So what? This has nothing to do with whether or not one has a degree in history. Akenson does have such a degree, and his work is worse than Meier's. Either you have no clue whatsoever concerning what degrees are generally considered by historians to be sufficient to enable one to speak authoritatively about history (or the historical Jesus), or (more likely) you are caught in your own rhetorical BS. Most of what is written about ancient history comes from people with degrees lacking the word "history" (in any language). And "bad" historiography can come from one with or without a degree with the word "history" in it. Only idiocy, blindless, ignorance, or dogmatic rhetoric would make one claim that historical Jesus studies should be restricted to those with a "PhD in history".

Toto

Yes, it makes no sense, but that has been the observation of a number of people. If you followed the debates here when this was a big issue, or the discussion over the formation of the Jesus Project, or the discussions in the Jesus Seminar, it appears that Christian believers can deal with all sorts of uncomplimentary references to Jesus, as long as he existed. Another group of secularists cling to Jesus for his alleged humanistic values. They join together in a chorus of repeating that everyone knows that Jesus existed, but you won't find a peer reviewed article that demonstrates this using historical standards.

What does this comment mean? Do you dispute it?


I know that there is nothing more, except other equally bogus criteria which are even now being abandoned by mainstream scholars. But I was giving you a change to point out something I might have missed. I guess you don't have anything.

This is false. For many historical names from ancient history, we have their original writing, pictures, coins, artifacts, descriptions from contemporaries and enemies. For Jesus, we have late and inconclusive references in theological stories and a forged document preserved by Christians.

You need some methodology to derive the existence of Jesus from theological documents like Paul and the synoptics. You need some methodology to derive the existence of Jesus from a corrupted manuscript like Josephus. You don't have it.


I've read bits and pieces. You copied this without responding:

He had no evaluation of how a historical Jesus was a better explanation for the origins of Christianity than a mythical Jesus - and since the origins of Christianity lie with the followers and not the historical Jesus, it is not clear how a historical Jesus fits into that better explanation of the data.

My impression was that Bultman did not in fact claim that a historical Jesus was the best explanation for the origins of Christianity. But I could be wrong.

Not true.

I am quite aware of extensive references to both passages from a variety of experts, and there is a vast array of opinions. But the best opinion is that the first longer reference has been extensively interpolated by a Christian hand and no one can be sure about the original.

I have no idea what you mean by "fictional."

Er, that was my point. Jesus didn't have two brothers named James. If these are two different people, part of your analysis is lacking.

I'm not sure if you are taking this seriously as a discussion, or if you are just taking the opportunity to vent your frustration with something.

spin

You still don't get what's going on here. These people put tickets on themselves for their qualifications and parade them, except for the fact that most of them don't have them when they write so-called historical Jesus books. And you're just dumbly going to defend these elitist jokers. Hey, that's your burden.

I don't mind your tokenist bullshit. So you've got a guy who usually writes Irish histories. Fine. As I've said, you're really scraping the barrel.

When it stoops to both italics and bold you're at the intellectual bankruptcy court, a fact that is stressed when the words are "no clue whatsoever". You're just parodying yourself.

And now you're going in for self-irony. Keep it up. That's entertainment.

:hysterical:

Wave the flag for the poor maltreated religious studies folk. Now you'll put a cork in the rubbish about qualifications. (You've gotta have them until you don't gotta.) You're backing a loser here, boyo, and all this closing the gate after the horse has bolted lameness of yours won't help the futility of your action. Idiocy! Blindness! Ignorance! Dogmatic rhetoric! Your bullshit meter is on the blink. But it's entertaining.

The claim is that the dogs who flog this historical Jesus nonsense trumpet the lack of qualifications of those who disagree with them, but don't have the appropriate qualifications themselves. Get it? Hypocrisy. You put these jokers on a pedestal. Glorified creation scientists. The only thing that is relevant is the evidence based arguments. When you play the qualifications game you don't look at the evidence and you don't consider the arguments. You just trivialize the opponent.

So do you really want to defend these guys again? Perhaps they can pay you to do so.

LegionOnomaMoi

So far, your basis for this assertion is some member who claimed to be a graduate student quoting some professor. So where does the claim about "a number of people" fit in?

1) The debates here are pretty much meaningless as far as this issue is concerned.

2) I did follow comments, news, etc., about both the Jesus Seminar and Project in the popular media, by members, by critics, and so forth.

3) Books like The Jesus Mysteries or The Jesus Puzzle are widely read, yet are written by people without PhDs and are published by companies which are not known for publishing scholarship. Apparently, there is a market for this sort of work. An otherwise unknown scholar of German studies, an individual with an undergraduate degree in classical languages (or was it classics? I think it was classical languages), a then graduate student who eventually received his PhD in ancient history, etc., all become well-known and widely read. More people know Doherty's name and are familiar with his work than the work of Lakoff, Quine, Grice, Feldman, etc. In other words, people can spend years studying and establishing themselves as the foremost authorities in a particular field, and not attain the following that Freke and Gandy have, despite the blatant errors of their books. The mythicist argument seems to be a path to success even if you don't have the background of a specialist.



Yet among the foremost critics of the historical Jesus quest are christians. Why? Because history is about what most likely happened, and miracles are by definition unlikely. A historical Jesus will never be a christian Jesus. And the Jesus we find in so many historical accounts of his life is anything but christian. He may has well never have existed. To say that one can say anything "as long as he existed", and that this explains why virtually nobody with any expertise believes that he didn't exist, is fantasy. Why would it somehow not matter to christians if Jesus existed but was a cynic philosopher eaten by dogs who never rose from the dead, but that he never existed at all is off the table? What possible logic could be behind such an explanation of the utter lack of virtually any specialist arguing that Jesus didn't exist?

How do you find such articles? I have access to JSTOR, academic search premier, project muse, and many others (apart from actually having the harvard library to go to). How do you judge what one can "find" in "a peer reviewed article"?


\

Such as? And what "mainstream scholars"?

That's one explanation.

We have coins of depicting mythical figures. We have forgeries of ancient authors. We have busts which have no relation to the figures in question. What do we have for the majority of figures from ancient history that makes our evidence for the mere existence of Jesus so problematic?

According to Bultmann "we can know enough of his [Jesus'] message to make for ourselves a consistent picture."

Vast array? How many experts think that the reference to James, the brother of Jesus, has been altered, interpolated, etc?

Best according to whom? Mythicists? The consensus is that Josephus (in the first passage) did indeed say something about Jesus and virtually no experts think anything was altered in the second reference. That's almost entirely an area where mythicist explanations come in to play.



Or there was a disciple named James and a brother named James. One was the "pillar" and the other was the brother.

Steven Carr

Perhaps he said that Jesus didn't exist.

And then referenced the death of James, by back-referencing to a Christ he had not called the Christ (according to the consensus of experts who doubt Josephus wrote that bit about 'Christ').

You can ask the consensus how they managed to cast doubt on Josephus using the words 'Christ' while still claiming that Josephus managed to produce what would then be a non-existent reference when referring to James.

Or how (according to you), Josephus thought of the two James's as the same person when you have proclaimed that they were different people.

But as the academic consensus can't even tell us whether or not Q existed, you really are going to face a major battle trying to convince us that they are experts who get results.

Because they are not.

See Larry Hurtado's blog where he complains about the bogus methodologies used by NT scholars...

mountainman

A perfect explanation for why we find idiocy, blindless, ignorance and dogmatic rhetoric, not to mention the use of illogical and invalid historical criteria, evidenced in the positions of many Biblical scholars. They are privy to the certitude of the truth of the historical hypothesis that Jesus existed: they are the insiders.

The insiders are running with the HJ as their default hegemonic and given-as-true historical hypothesis, as they have since Nicaea. For how many centuries have the theological colleges issued certificates of attainment?




WARNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This statement by the one of the planet's foremost ancient historians of the 20th century is not for the irony-impaired.