S.C.Carlson

Certainly, and it is a serious concern here. Information people give to avoid punishment ought to be viewed skeptically. However, when they give false information, they intend for it to be believable.

The value of the statement is not whether the accused had personally ceased being a Christian for a full twenty years, but that its credibility depends on, and therefore attests to, a conventional wisdom that Christianity had been in existence that long in that part of the Empire.

Stephen

No Robots

You have eliminated Christ, the disciples and Paul as the initiators of Christianity. Without them, I can't see what you can point to from the internal evidence as the source of Christianity. And, as we have seen, there is no external evidence for Christian origins. It seems that your process of elimination forces you to declare that Christianity never existed!

Doug Shaver

No, it forces me to declare that the actual origins of Christianity are lost to history. In other words, we don't know exactly how, when, where, or by whom it got started. We can do some intelligent guessing but no more than that.

No Robots

Can we not consider it to be an intelligent guess that a prophet arose in Galilee, that he was executed, that his am ha-aretz disciples proclaimed him and his message, that this message captured the will of the redoubtable Paul, and that the message ultimately spread throughout the world?

Doug Shaver

Sure. But there are plenty of others, and when all the evidence -- not just some of it -- is taken into consideration, I think some of the others are better than that one.

I am not arguing, and have never argued, that there could not have been a real Jesus of Nazareth. My argument is just that it is reasonable to believe there was not one.

No Robots

Brunner's position and mine is that the interpretation of the evidence basically as I presented it above is the only reasonable one. We believe that this position is fundamentally incontrovertible, and that all alternatives are easily demolished. What is not easily demolished is the will of some people to find an alternative. But that is another story.

Doug Shaver

Neither is the assumption some people make that any disagreement with them can only be explained by pure pigheadedness.

No Robots

Brunner calls mythicism a "misapplication of criticism" that is "damaging and dangerous" because it "will deprive us of all example and standards, and will take from us the lever which moves our freedom." He justifies the intensity of his attack on mythicists as follows:

We have not yet succeeded in finding any reason for speaking any better of the learned men than Christ did; we mark well their sheer nonsense, and we do not see that they have any claim to be spared. Learned criticism does not see Christ the Genius; criticism's express purpose seems to be to show that the genius is not recognized by the world. The way the Christ of the gospels is treated by the historicocritical method is the most grandiose demonstration of this.

Amaleq13

That is an example of the logical fallacy of an Argument from Adverse Consequences.

True claims can and do result in unwanted consequences so it is logically flawed thinking to assume that unwanted consequences require a false claim.

No Robots

Brunner's contention is that the mythicist position is both wrong and dangerous. It is like saying that it is both wrong and dangerous to drive on the wrong side of the road.