Amaleq13

This is an example of a flawed analogy since it compares a "wrong" established by law to a "wrong" established by Brunner's personal preferences.

Brunner's argument against mythicism, as you've described it, is logically flawed.

No Robots

Let's back up. Doug was criticizing Brunner for insinuating that mythicists operate out of pigheadedness. I responded by quoting Brunner's reasons for being particularly intense in his criticism of mythicists. You may not like these reasons for criticising mythicists, but you must remember that these reasons are not in and of themselves his reasons for rejecting mythicism. Let us return to my analogy to clarify this. I say that the law requires us to drive on the right hand side, so we should do so. That is my reason. I can also say that I insist on making a point of this because I am afraid that someone who drives on the left side will kill me or others. You are free to reject my fears, but my reason remains.

Amaleq13

It is not a question of whether I "like" Brunner's fallacious reasoning in defending his attack on mythicism. I am simply recognizing it.

And continuing a poor analogy clarifies nothing. :wave:

Doug Shaver

He can call it whatever he likes. His argument for Jesus' historicity is weak, and reasonable people can disagree with its conclusion.

No Robots

Here is a quotation from a contemporary of Brunner who shares his basic outlook on mythicism:

And when we look afresh into all that has been said of these three [Gospels, Jesus, and Christianity], during the first twenty years of this century, we come to the conclusion that nearly all the many Christian scholars, and even the best of them, who have studied the subject deeply, have tried their hardest to find in the historic Jesus something which is not Judaism; but in his actual history they have found nothing of this whatever, since this history is reduced almost to zero. It is therefore no wonder that at the beginning of this century there has been a revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth century view that Jesus never existed.

Jesus of Nazareth: His life, times, and teaching by Joseph Klausner (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925), p. 105

The difference between when Klausner wrote and today is that scholars have now generally accepted the wholly Jewish origins of Christianity. Mythicism has revived in what one could call the para-scholarly sector. It is the last attempt to attach a non-Jewish component to Christian origins.

No Robots

It gives me plenty of ammo.:devil3:

Toto

Harold Leidner (The Fabrication of the Christ Myth) is Jewish, relies on Jewish scholarship, and finds evidence that Christianity started with a mythical Christ. This is a red herring.

No Robots

Jew or not (a reviewer at Amazon identifies him as an atheist), Leidner is just another bog-standard mythicist. Here he is:

Now of course it’s impossible to prove the non-existence of a non-person. If Jesus never existed, then the only way I can show that he never existed would be to have some kind of a time machine to go back to Judaea 2,000 years back. I can’t really prove that Jesus never existed, so all I can come up with is my own scenario as to how this character came to be invented. And my own scenario was that he is basically a Christianisation of the Jewish figure of Joshua, the lieutenant and commander who succeeded Moses. That’s my own private scenario, and I show that there is a very large duplication of Joshua being used to build up the biography of Jesus of Nazareth.

There is no pretense of scholarship here, only "my own private scenario". Bah!

What's more, I don't see how any of this contradicts what Klausner says. This is just the new wrinkle that atheists, and perhaps even some Jews, have picked up where Christians left off a century ago: trying to prove a non-Jewish origin for Christianity.

Toto

Leidner wrote his book specifically to absolve the Jews of the charge that they killed Jesus (the deicide libel). He relies on previous work by a Rabbi. He finds Jewish origins to Christianity, with no need to posit an actual person named Jesus. If you want to attack the book, you need to read it, rather than just an excerpt from an interview in the popular press. The idea that Jesus was modeled on Joshua son of Nun is not Leidner's alone.

In any case, he finds the origins of Christianity to be thoroughly Jewish.

No Robots

The introduction, first chapter, and epilogue of Leidner's book can be found here. I don't see anything that contradicts what Leidner said in his interview.

I assume you mean Hyman E. Goldin, whom Leidner mentions here (or via: amazon.co.uk). Leidner says that his own book was inspired by Goldin's The Case of the Nazarene revisited. Goldin does not deny Christ's historicity. Here is an abstract of a review of Goldin's book:

This article presents information about the book "The Case of the Nazarene Reopened," by Hyman E. Goldin. The purpose of the book is to challenge the contemporary Christian conscience to do something about the Christian-Jewish tragedy by confessing and proclaiming the innocence of the Jewish people on the charge of being instruments of the crucifixion of the Nazarene. The strength of the study lies in its acute arraignment of the discrepancies in the Gospel's account of the trial; the divine preordainment of the necessity of the death of Jesus over against the accusations of Jewish guilt and the fulfillment of the Old Testament "predictions concerning Jesus" when originally they were not at all concerned with the Nazarene.

It looks to me like Leidner has just spiced up Goldin with a little mythicism.

In that case, he is one step up from bog-standard. But, yeah, I'd have to look at the rest of the book to find out how he figures that a group of Jews invented Jesus. Which Jews? The sinners, tax-collectors and harlots?