GakuseiDon

A "Jesus agnostic", surely? I'd have thought that a Jesus mythicist was someone who said "Jesus didn't exist, instead this is how Christianity started..."

gurugeorge

Thanks for the clarification Z, but are you kidding here? You can't seriously mean that!

Zeichman

I didn't mean that it would satisfy people like those on this board. This is just how I've seen it dealt with when I was in undergrad.

ChristMyth

Thanks again Z. I just want to make sure I'm getting this straight, please correct me if I'm wrong:

According to scholars, Jesus must have existed because the texts of the Bible states it so (i.e. some of the quotes comes from a source assumed to come directly from Jesus).

This, to me, seems to be on just as much shaky ground as a pure JM's ideas. If this is the case as above, then neither side has any right to question the others stand because it really could go either way.

As for me, I consider myself a JM'er only in the sense that I don't think that any of the sayings in the Bible are traceable back to a real person named Jesus while at the same time believing that a man named Jesus might have really existed in the first century and actually taught something or another that was probably lost in the retelling and translations throughout the ages.

Now, since I'm no scholar, this opinion holds as much weight as me saying that Rocky Road ice cream is better than Butter Pecan, and I will admit that I might be completely wrong if the evidence is shown to go that way. Still, I cannot see stating that the Jesus of the NT must have existed based upon the assumptions of the scholars who are doing exactly what I'm doing without every bit of information they have, guessing.

Christmyth

Zeichman

I would nuance it significantly from that point. It is not a matter of stating that he was a historical figure, but more along the lines of the following.

1) there were pre-gospel traditions about Jesus, generally consisting of sayings
2) these provide insight into beliefs earlier than the gospel tradition. Some MJers claim that the gospels fabricated a historicizing version of Christianity found within later Christianity and is not representative of the wholly spiritual Christ (or Sophia) that made up the beliefs of, say, Paul or the Jerusalem pillars.
3) if these free-floating sayings can be shown to presume a historical Jesus, devoid of their narrative context, then this seriously undermines the MJ claim. It means that Jesus was assumed to have been a historical person before this tradition. From there, there is little reason to assume the ahistoricity of Jesus, as is essentially speculation without evidence. E.g., the saying contrasting Jesus' and John's behavior mentioned in my earlier post ONLY makes sense if the author assumed a historical Jesus existed. Since this saying is almost universally regarded as having a tradition before being incorporated into Q (or Matthew, if you prefer Goodacre's approach), it means that pre-Q Jesus people believed Jesus to have been a historical person (and thus no more than a decade or two beyond the time Jesus was asserted to have lived).

This is not to make claims about ultimate provenance (e.g., authentic to the historical Jesus), but to point out that beliefs in a historical Jesus precede the gospel traditions. Similarly, this is not a matter of question-begging (e.g., Jesus existed because we assume sayings come from Jesus). Rather, looking at pre-gospel traditions and assumptions made within those traditions (not ABOUT them) is probably the best way to go. Generally, what isn't said is what is most important for historians.

I hope this is more clear. If not, let me know.

gurugeorge

Wow, I find that ... absolutely incredible. So this is all there is "behind the curtain" of NT scholarship, a series of "chinese whispers" throughout a student's career, the vague notion that somebody, somewhere has dealt with the matter to such an open-and-shut level that nobody need bother their pretty little heads with it at all.

It really is as dumb as that: HJ is just "the done thing".

Just ... wow. :banghead:

Zeichman

I think you're still misinterpreting me. Keep in mind the following:
1) Scholars who do not spend a large amount of time online are not going to encounter MJ firsthand. This is a fact. MJ has almost no presence offline, let alone in the academy.
2) Those who reiterate the positions of MJ advocates or near-MJ advocates are not going to formulate the arguments as well as did their sources. E.g., a student familiar with Doherty is not going to remember everything about Doherty's argument, making it easier to refute.
3) The students who are familiar with MJ advocates are generally primarily so with the un-scholarly end of the spectrum, such as Pagan Origins of the Christian Myth. Anyone with a PhD - or MA for that matter - in biblical studies could probably refute everything on that site in the course of an hour.


Thus, students probably 1) are not familiar with the "best" of MJ scholarship, 2) if so, they will probably not argue it as well as did this "best of," 3) most MJ students probably aren't going to take a biblical studies class anyway. I'm going to sound like a jerk, but look at the elitism on this very board. Has ANYONE on this board taken a biblical studies class since they became an MJ student?

Simply said, there is little reason for a scholar to be familiar with the likes of Doherty or Price who have a familiarity with recent scholarship.

I sound like a broken record, but if MJ wants attention, then advocates NEED to go through peer-reviewed journals instead of doing populist publishing for the masses. I would have few reservations about faulting MJ advocates for its lack of attention within the academy.

*shameless plug* If you want to know what I identify as the most fundamental flaws in Price's and Doherty's works, check out the fall 2007 issue of the Journal of Higher Criticism.

gurugeorge

You don't see the flaw in this? As I understand the concept of serious academic scholarship, NT scholars should themselves be looking out for possible "Ahistorical Jesus" (I agree with spin, let's keep the options open) arguments, and should have at their fingertips a variety of pro- and con- positions. That seems to me to be how scholarship worthy of the name normally works.

If the AJ hypothesis were sort of akin to perpetual motion machines for a physicist then I could understand the blithe scholarly disregard; but it's clearly not - there is nothing intrinsically irrational about the ideas that the NT isn't actually testimony of anything - that it might be (for example) a) mere literature, b) fraud, c) myth, etc., etc. And to my mind, if you're going to be serious, then at least some attempt has to be made to eliminate these reasonable possibilities, before plumping for reliance on the NT as historical testimony.

But how it looks from the outside (e.g. cf. Doherty's review of supposed critiques of the mythicist case etc.) is that there's this promissory note that's passed from NT scholar to NT scholar - "Mythical Jesus? Stuff and nonsense, X dealt with that long ago," and when you look at X, X says, "What are you, some kind of retard? As is widely known, Y exposed that particular fallacy many years ago," and when you go to Y, Y says, "Oh no, contemptible rubbish, Z has blown that to smithereens", and when you turn to Z he tells you, "Oh that's sheer nonense and piffle, X trashed that one yonks ago."

Yes I agree, this is a valid point.

"Probably" - here again we have a bit of a "promissory note" don't we? As the point has been made countless times, it's easy enough for scientists to refute creationism - any scientist can toss off a refutation in an afternoon. If the AJ idea is oh-so-dumb, it should be no more than the work of an afternoon to refute it convincingly and finally, in the same way that any decent scientist can refute creationism convincingly and finally.

Don't tempt me

Well of course that's necessary, I agree, and it will come in time I'm sure, but at the same time, as per my point above, one would expect that in terms of sheer logic, the possibility that the NT isn't any sort of evidence of a historical person at all would have to be dealt with before there's any reliance on the NT as historical testimony. i.e., one would imagine that NT scholars would feel it incumbent on them to review all the logically possible options (fabrication, fraud, myth, plays, etc., etc.), and one would imagine this process of review of options would have to be undertaken by any serious scholar before they went on to confidently use the NT as evidence (in the sense of testimony) of a historical person in any major scholarly undertaking; and that this process would have to be recapitulated for students.

I'm sure it will be good, you're one of the HJ-ers I respect here. I just think that maybe you're a bit too starry-eyed (so to speak) about the intellectual status of your chosen field of study (i.e. its right to be respected as sound scholarship based on a foundation of done-and-dusted arguments in which all the reasonable possibilities have been canvassed and the most rational options selected as a foundation for the extended project of nitty-gritty, detailed study).

Camio

Only available in printed form I presume?

No Robots

This is a very good point, and is really one of the main reasons I hang out here: as someone who believes in the historical Christ, I believe it is my responsibility to familiarize myself with contrary arguments.