Malachi151

What you claim is not the case. There is no non-Christian commentary of any kind on the Jesus issue until the 2nd century, thus our questions have to be directed at the 2nd century.

We have little or no evidence that any non-Christians had even heard of the cult in the 1st century. There is really only talk about persecution from Paul, but we don't know that Paul or anyone in his time even made claims about a person that could have been contradicted in the first place, and the passage by Tacitus that talks about Christian persecution in Rome in 64 CE, but since he's writing in 109 CE we don't really know the degree which which he is back-filling details and if there was even a concept in 64 CE of a potentially disprovable Jesus in the first place.

Really, we again go back to Diogenes the Cynic's post:

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...72#post5068372

mens_sana

Someone within Judaism took notice that renegade Jewish Christians were polluting the established religion. Invoking the debated criterion of "accidental information," we have the Johannine community telling us that they had been tossed out of the synagogues. The birkat hammı̂nı̂m is thought to be evidence of that. Indirect, but still 1st century per the Council of Jamnia.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Malachi,

In regards to your statement "Likewise, the Sisyphus Fragment is from approximately 600 years prior to the time in question, so its really irrelevant anyway. The question is what techniques and criticism were being employed at this time and place, thus no matter was was being employed in the 5th century BCE it is irrelevant." I see your point. However, I think it is important in a certain way, in that it shows that the situation in that time period changed significantly in later times.

I think the article that Jeffrey Gibson pointed to (in post #5073299) from the Cambridge Companion to Atheism by Michel Martin is quite helpful here. Martin writes:

Even if we may assume that mankind has always known its sceptics and unbelievers, the expression of that scepticism and unbelief is subject to historical circumstances. Some periods were more favorable to dissenters than other times and later periods may interpret as atheism what earlier times permitted as perhaps only just acceptable theories about the gods or the origin of religion.

Martin makes this interesting historical division:
(1) The Classical Period
(2) The Hellenistic Period, which start to label earlier thinkers as atheists and developed a "soft" atheism that tried to save the existence of the Gods, and
(3) The Roman Period when the Christians were called Atheoi by the Pagans and vice versa.

Martin emphasizes that "Greeks, Romans, pagans and Christians, soon discovered the utility of the term "Atheist" as a means to label opponents."
It seems that the term "atheist" developed a derogatory connotation that could lead to criminal prosecution. We may take this as a third reason why the existence of the God/man Jesus was not question.

1) The scientific knowledge to determine the existence of mythological characters did not exist.
2) The concept of non-existence was not available or, at least, not generally available.
3) There were social penalties consequent to questioning the existence of Gods. One could be accused of atheism. Nobody wanted to risk this generally and nobody wanted to be accused of being an atheist by the Christians for denying the existence of their God Jesus.

All of these explanations are interlocking. Together they reinforce each other and give a reasonable explanation of the phenomenon in question.

Now, for me, the interesting thing is the concept of non-existence. Exactly how was this concept understood? How did it develop? How was it used. What did the Greeks say about not-being or nothing?

Dr. Michael Bakaoukas has an interesting discussion of the ancient concept of non-being at http://ancienthistory.about.com/libr...akaoukas2c.htm

Plato, in the Sophist, attempts to explain how falsehood is possible. As Denyer says, we need not rely on Plato alone to prove that ancient Greeks felt inclined to bizarre views that ruled out all possibility of falsehood. For example Parmenides identifies "the thing which is not" as the content of falsehood and error, with nothing or non-entity [frag. 8.10; cf. 6. 2] (Kahn, 1982, 13). Gorgias' disciple, Isocrates, Helen 1, says that: "some people have grown old maintaining that it is impossible to speak falsehoods, to speak in contradiction of someone, and to entertain two contradicting views about the same subject matters" (Denyer, 24). Not to mention Gorgias himself who claims that "a person who upholds one and the same thesis about the same things before the same audience does not deserve our trust if thereby he contradicts himself" (Palamedes 25). This is another clue in favour of the assumption that Plato's target in the Sophist was Gorgias the Sophist. As we shall see in ch. 3 in detail, in Gorgias' view, stating contradictory views and a falsehood is connected with stating non-being.

Plato admits that if stating a falsehood requires there to exist something which does not exist, then false statements could not be made. But Plato does not agree that we cannot state falsehood. Instead he proceeds to show that stating a falsehood requires no such thing (Denyer, 148). The sophist as a kind can be grasped only if falsity is possible. But the False in things and in words, that which makes them pseudo-things and pseudo-accounts (pseudos being the Greek word for "falsehood"), is shot through with Non-being. Just as imitations are not what they seem to be, so false sentences say what is not the case. Now if Non-being is unthinkable and unutterable, as Parmenides asserted, then we may conclude that all speech must be granted to be true for those who utter it. Perfect relativity reigns. This is exactly what Gorgias purports to be the case as follows: "All subjects of thought must exist and Not-being, since it does not exist, could not be thought of. But if this is so, no one, he says, could say anything false, not even if he said that chariots compete in the sea. For everything would be in the same category" (On non-being MXG 980a9-12).

Non-being has to be given a meaning; it has to be placed among the articulable kinds. When Non-being is specified by Plato as otherness, it becomes a powerful prin-ciple for regulating the slippery relativity that is the sophist's refuge. Non-being interpreted as the Other thus ceases to be mere nothingness and becomes instead the source of articulated diversity in things and in thought. However, an image or an imitation, because it has a share in Non-being, is not merely other than its original but also less. It is less in genuineness and may even fall further into falsity. The sophist can no longer claim that there is no intelligibile discrimination between true and false (Brann, 1995, 10-12; Cornford, 1970).

To conclude, according to Plato, the stranger, viz.Gorgias treats non-being as image. But for Plato an image or an imitation, because it has a share in Non-being, may be a distorted image and therefore being less than the original may even fall further into falsity.


We should consider the concept of non-being/non-existence in strict opposition to being/existence as being available to the intellectual in Athens in the fifth century, but perhaps unavailable, due to the spread of Platonic-Aristotelian thought, thereafter. The concept of falsity as phantasm seems to replace the concept of falsity as non-existences, as the concept of non-existence is placed in the dust-bin of non-existence circa 400 years after the first Olympics.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Jeffrey Gibson

It's Jan Hemmer who wrote the article I referred to and from which you (selectively) quote, not Martin. Martin is the editor of the work, not the author of the entry on "Atheism in Antiquity".

Hemmer


Hemmer

and he does not place any particular emphasis on this fact -- which, BTW, you've misquoted.

Is that what Hemmer actually says? Could you give the exact quote where he does so?

We may? Why? Who was going to prosecute Celsus for saying Jesus did not exist?

In any case, you are leaving out significant sections of Hemmer's work in which he not only documents that there was labeling that was also because the one who was called an atheist was an atheist (and not of the "soft" sort", but what he has to sat about the Critias fragment and how this demonstrates that there were hard atheists in Critias' time.

Bad form, Jay.

Jeffrey

Toto

Cambridge Companion to Atheism looks like an interesting book, available in paperback.

It appears that the author of the chapter on Atheism in Antiquity is Jan Bremmer.

Jeffrey Gibson

Appears? Is there some doubt about this claim?

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

FWIW, this statement from Jay that

does not contain a misquote.

But it is something that Hemmer says in the last paragraph of his article, in his summary of the data he's laid out, and not within the section of his article that I thought Jay was referring to, i.e., p. 12, given that that's where the material Jay had been adducing immediately prior his giving us the quote above is to be found.

More important, though, is the fact that there is nothing in Hemmer's article that support Jay's intimation that Hemmer somehow maintains, let alone demonstrates or gives grounds for thinking, not only that:

but especially that:

for fear of punishment.

Jeffrey

Toto

You appear to have some doubt, since you call the man "Hemmer" :huh:

Jeffrey Gibson

Ha! You got me there!

Jeffrey

PhilosopherJay

Hi Malachi151 et al.,

The Sophist is a terribly difficult, but terribly important dialogue. I advise people to go through it very slowly to catch all the amazing twists and turns in the arguments.

In the Sophist, the lead character, the Eleatic Stranger, at first agrees with Parmenides on the issue of non-being and its non-existence. He says, “Do you see, then, that not-being in itself can neither be spoken, uttered, or thought, but that it is unthinkable, unutterable, unspeakable, indescribable?

He subjects this argument to a critique as he notes that sophists use this argument to suggest that nothing is false in the world.

The result of this critique is that the Stranger agrees with Parmenides that non-being does not exist in opposition to being, but he admits that non-being can be spoken about, but only in the sense of false speech or false image within being.
Simplifying the dialogue a bit, we can say that speaking about non-existence as an alternative to existence is portrayed as a sophistic trick. The only two non-Sophistic positions are 1) The Parmenidian position that non-being cannot be spoken about and the Stranger’s correct Philosophical position that 2) non-being is a false speech or image that actually exists.

In this dialogue, the idea of absolute non-being in opposition to absolute being is evaluated as a sophistical trick. It is denounced in the most emphatic terms:
At the same time, non-existence as false speech or image is evaluated as a philosophical (anti-sophistical) bedrock truth.

Some views of the discussion of being and non-being in the Sophist may be found at http://www.formalontology.it/plato-sophist.htm.

While some of these formulations on that page are quite rough, and only marginally pertinent (not to mention only marginally correct) note how Nicholas P. White links Russell’s On Denoting to the Sophist.

"Plato's Sophist has held special significance in recent decades. Of all of his works it has seemed to speak most directly to philosophical interests of modern American and British philosophers. Much of the most sophisticated Platonic scholarship has been aimed at interpreting it. (...) In 1905 Russell published his article 'On Denoting'. In it he claimed to show how the notion of nonexistence could be expressed without the paradox that had often appeared to afflict it. His answer to the problem seemed to provide a lesson in how explaining a bit of language could unravel a metaphysical tangle. The problem arose because, for example, when one says 'Pegasus does not exist,' one seems to indicate that one is talking about a certain thing, Pegasus, and yet at the same time to say that it is not there to be talked about. Russell tried to show how this appearance of paradoxical conflict could be eliminated.

If we have Immanuel Kant to thank for teaching us that existence is not a predicate, we have Bertrand Russell to thank for teaching us that non-existence is not a predicate either.

We may say that along with the other reasons listed, fear of being labeled a sophist by Platonists, also played a part in the restriction of the use of the concept of non-being after the 4th century B.C.E.

To use the masculine hunting terminology of the dialogue itself, Parmenides and the Eleatic Stranger trapped non-existence between them and tamed it.

Thus our list of reasons for the absence of ancient culture proposing the non-existence of heroes and Gods expands a bit.

1) The scientific knowledge to determine the existence of mythological characters did not exist.

2) The concept of non-existence was not available or, at least, not generally available. After Parmenides, circa 485 B.C.E., it was considered bad form to utter it. After Plato’s the Sophist, circa 365 B.C.E. it was considered as designating a false speech or false image. Most writers would have been frightened that Platonist philosophers would label them a “sophist” for using the term “non-existence” in opposition to “existence.” In their eyes it would be tantamount to denying that the false existed. Caught between Parmenides and Plato, the concept became problematical to use. One could say that it was unofficially censored, politically incorrect speech.

3) There were social penalties consequent to questioning the existence of Gods. One could be accused of atheism. Nobody wanted to risk this generally and nobody wanted to be accused of being an atheist by the Christians for denying the existence of their God Jesus

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay