gurugeorge

I doubt that's what most mythicists would say, they'd say (like e.g. Price) that a text's cribbing from older stuff makes it problematic to claim historical validity for the text (without some further information). One can't be confident that one is reading history, it could just as easily be made-up crap.

The fact that there are a few cases where history is embellished with cribbings from older stuff doesn't change this. (The only reason we would know this has happened is if we had other, more certain historical facts to triangulate against, e.g. archaeology.)

So, for example, it may well be the case that the NT is based on a historical person, even if the actual text is chock-a-block with cribbings from the OT and other sources. But absent some independent evidence to suggest that it's plausible to look at the texts that way (e.g. independent evidence of a human Jesus) there's no reason to take the "it's based on a historical person" hypothesis as first port of call, and there's no reason to view the embellishments as embellisments of some historical core. The "it's made-up crap" hypothesis is the most obvious port of call, until and unless some independent evidence for a historical person turns up, only then can the embellishments be plausibly viewed as embellishments of a historical core.

Adam

Well then,
If the criteria for possible historicity is that a text is not cribbed from some earlier source, the same would apply to source texts within a document. In my thread Gospel Eyewitnesses I have detailed a number of sources. Here's my main list:
#1, 18,#38, #52, #74, #132, and #144
as seen in the last of the prime list at
Post #170
Particularly consider #1, 74, 132 as unlikely to be found as cribbed, and also John 13 in Post #144.
These are very simple tales or sayings more to be presumed factual than not.

maryhelena

In particular, huge implications for the Josephan writer. If that writer, like the gospel writers, was embellishing history - thereby creating pseudo-history alongside history - then, without independent confirmation for what is being asserted - it's storytime. And, in the case of Agrippa I, it's the whole Joseph type story that needs questioning - not just the half of it, the release from prison.

Clivedurdle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daughter_of_Time

maryhelena

Loved the quote from Frances Bacon....

So, in the case of the Josephan writer, and Philo, the motive for any embellishments is more likely to be interpretations of OT messianic ideas than political propaganda. Not of course, ruling out any political interests - but a people living under foreign occupation need to be very circumspect with any notions of political messianic interpretations. Storytelling the far safer route to go...

Clivedurdle

Tey is fascinating, she links Covenanters with the IRA, and notes Glencoe. The Covenanters and the Taliban is another link that should be made. It would seem we have centuries of experience of these issues!

lpetrich

I was thinking of starting a thread on this issue, but I checked and I found that Ted Hoffman had beaten me.

One has to ask why some people in mainstream academia are now starting to take Jesus mythicism seriously. Could it be that consideration of Jesus mythicism is due to the failure of historical-Jesus questing to achieve very much?

I've discovered Against Mythicism: A Case for the Plausibility of a Historical Jesus - Butterflies and Wheels by Edmund Standing at Ophelia Benson's site
All this mythmaking happened while Haile Selassie I was still alive.

If one is reduced to arguments like that, then one is not very far from mythicism.

lpetrich

From what some theologians say, one gets the impression that they believe in some theological Jesus Christ who is separate from the historical Jesus Christ that one could visit if one had a time machine. Indeed, I think that that's a good thought experiment for helping to clarify what one considers historical. What would you have seen if you had gone back in time?

But it can be hard to interpret their rhetoric. It's a bit easier to understand the more conservative and fundamentalist ones, because their "die for a lie" argument implies that one could have gone back in time and watched Jesus Christ rise from the dead.

I'm reminded of John Haught in The atheist delusion - Salon.com
So he's claiming that Jesus Christ's resurrection was too noble and holy an event to be captured by something as crass as a camera. The trouble is that our eyes work like cameras, so he's claiming that that event would not be visible to us using normal sense perception.

outhouse

sounds like he is full of beans to me.


theres real scholarships on the subject, and those of theologians claiming to be scholars, and they do know there limits, and have nothing really to do with HJ research.



spiritual, dreams, folklore, mythology, take your pick, it still gained a following and was percieved as a actual event, even if at a much later date.


Id go back to passover that year, first hoping I had the year right.

Im positive I'd see a crucified raggedy looking jew nailed on a short cross that probably looked like a T made out of rough timber dark on color from years of blood stains.

given a chance to browse

A poor oppressed traveling jew who taught and healed in small villages in Galilee for table scraps just to survive, who later got his butt in trouble in the temple and was put on a cross for it.

I view himn as heavily zealot influenced and ticked off at not only mainstream judaism, but the corrupt jewish governement due to the roman infection

not much can be said with certainty beyond that, without your time machine.



For me jesus isnt the mystery here, its creepy ole paul and his intentions and motivations is what id like to see, as he is the one responsible for shaping christianity as we know it

Sheshbazzar

In my view, if we could go back, looking for an identifiable Jesus of Nazareth in the first century CE would be like looking for the original Paul Bunyan, or 'Uncle Sam'.
I do agree with outhouse that 'Paul' as presented within the NT is one very creepy character.
Jebus if he was anything like described in the NT was weird enough, but 'Paul' with his brain-fried overheated theological interpretations really takes the cake for the Loony bin Awards.