TedM

Getting back to the topic of 8:4, here is my response to Earl's latest post from over a week ago, which focused on the tenses used in verses 1-6:

'Something to offer', for him, very well could have everything to do with intercession and vice-versa. The reason this verse is ambiguous is that the author doesn't say "so too Jesus offered himself as a gift and sacrifice", or some variant. He could have, but he didn't. Instead the term 'has something to offer' begs the question: What? And When? Since the author used the same word in connection with Jesus' role on earth in 5:7 to refer to something other than offering himself --ie BEFORE performing his priestly self-sacrifice -- saying that Jesus 'offered up prayers and supplications', so too he may have been flexible enough to use the word in connection with his role of high priest AFTER performing his priestly self-sacrifice -- he would have 'something to offer' in his new and ongoing role of High Priest, as intercessor. The real problem with the verse Earl is that the meaning of the word 'offer' is not given. Thus, the verse is ambiguous but the context of 8:1-6 provides a clue and IMO 8:6 TELLS US what he 'has to offer:'


Likewise: Since the sacrificial duty of offering himself according to you was known to have taken place in the heavens and not on earth, there is simply no thought, opportunity or consideration of him performing this sacrifice on earth. So why would the writer even think of spelling out that he could not have been a priest in regard to his sacrificial duty of offering himself on earth, and certainly not because there are priests on earth performing sacrifices? It would be a complete non-sequitur and make no sense within his overall scenario for Jesus as having offered himself up in the heavens.

In the present tense scenario a reasonable question being answered is this: What role would Jesus have if he NOW came to earth from heaven?
In the past tense scenario a reasonable question being answered is this: What role would Jesus have had in the PAST come to earth from heaven?

Both are valid questions with the same answer: He wouldn't be OR have been a priest because .....
Note that it doesn't say HE WOULDN'T HAVE COME TO EARTH IN THE PAST. His purpose is to discuss the need for Jesus to have acted or to currently act as High Priest on earth, and not whether Jesus had or hadn't come to earth in the past. As such, the LOCATION of a hypothetical ROLE as High Priest on earth applies to either the past role as 'sacrificer' or the current role as 'intercessor'. Both are valid hypotheticals, and all you really have to hold onto is the meaning of the phrase 'something to offer' in verse 3. But I've showed that the meaning is ambiguous.



Ok, agree, and he has indicated WHERE that high priest NOW is: Sitting next to God. The verse begins with "Now the main point in what has been said is this:" He's about to say something important: We HAVE such a high priest. The implication is that he is now going to tell the reader the relevancy of this priest in the CURRENT time. The current situation was that priests were still on earth! Yet a new priest is now present, but is in heaven. He's about to answer: What does it all mean?


There is no suggestion of a past sacrifice in this verse. He is describing the high priest that they NOW have, as a minister in the tabernacle. He doesn't go back and say that he was a minister before he became a high priest. He's talking about the present high priest. A minister is one who serves. He now serves the people with a ministry of intercession. The way I read it Jesus and God are both inside the tabernacle, inside the sanctuary. God didn't get up and walk over and go inside a tabernacle. Jesus didn't walk OUT of the tabernacle when he was done offering himself:

So, AFAIK he stood in front of God in God's tabernacle in heaven, offered himself, and then sat down and began serving as minister. So verse 2 is just a continuation of the current status of Jesus the new High Priest.


But verse 3b does not clearly point to a past event as I've shown above. And, a present tense in 3a is NOT the 'only choice': "every high priest has been appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices" works, and even "every high priest was appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices" works in the sense that God himself designated IN THE PAST that all priests offer gifts and sacrifices. is appointed is optional, and if the writer was leading up to a comparison of past events in verse 4, he chose poorly in 3a. And, verse 3b should have been clearly past tense, EVEN IF 3a remain present tense:

Yet with all of these options available to the writer to make the verse clearly refer to the past in order for 8:4 to be made more clear, what do we have? Two present tense uses: is appointed, and also have. This, on balance, hurts your case and supports my interpretation of 'something to offer' as remaining in the present tense which was established in verse 1 as being 'the main point'.


8:4a is ambiguous. That's all there is to it. That's why 8:3 is so critical. That's why 'the main point' in 8:1 is critical. But, 8:4b isn't. It is present tense. It didn't have to be. He could have said "he would not have been a priest at all since there WERE already those who offered the gifts according to the Law; 5 who already served a copy". But, he didn't. So far we have NO unambiguous references to the past, even though there have been several opportunities to make them.

I think it would be perfectly natural for people on earth to wonder about why priests were still operating on earth if Jesus was the new High Priest and why he wasn't down here on earth himself, and just what he is doing up there in heaven while priests are still on earth..It seems to me the author is acknowledging those issues but is more or less saying: Regardless of what is going on down here, he is SUPPOSED to be in heaven, doing what he is doing, and NOT on earth.


Yes, but what is present is clear, and the past here was used to explain the present. The readers focus then remains on the present.



You said it yourself Earl: In 8:6 he is summing up the present status of Jesus: But this summary began in 8:1:

8:1-2 starts off with the main point of Jesus' current role of High Priest, as a minister in the tabernacle of God. Verse 3 says that just like priests on earth this High Priest has to have something to offer in his ministry. Verse 4-5 talk about why he isn't on earth. And then Verse 6 finally says what he is doing in heaven.

SO, the whole passage reads as though he is discussing Jesus' present role of High Priest. All of the present tense uses (not 12 as I had thought), but ALL of the ones used are consistent with the idea that he is answering this important question:

What is Jesus doing for me NOW?

We'll have to agree to disagree. Thanks for participating.

TedM

Now that I have responded to Earl about the tenses used in 8:1-6 I am going on self-ban for a while. I have a website-based business I'm trying to start up and this has been getting in the way, so this is necessary. Thanks to all for the interesting comments. Ted

spin

Just had to get his last word in before self-banning. Really worthwhile reading, I'm sure.

stephan huller

Who says 'website-based business'? The same people I guess who say 'I know how to use the computer'

Grog

I can't read this thread anymore. What happened to display mode options on this thread? (Don't bother answering, I can't read it.) I am wondering if there are sub-arguments that can be sparsed out here in new threads? Or just start over?

I know how to use a computer and I have a web-site based business (not really, actually). I do use the internet a lot in my job. You?

DCHindley

Well, I am an auditor who visits one or two businesses every day. A lot of Cottege Industries sell merchandise via a web page. It used to be called "mail order" when folks actually used the mail to order things from catalogues.

I was at one a week or two ago that sold needlepoint kits (needles, yarn and templates) for hobbyists. Rather than try to sell directly to retail stores, they have a web page from which they make retail and wholesale transactions. Right now they are working from one of the owner's basement.

Another one was importing handicraft items from Asian rim countries and China (she was Taiwanese) selling them from a Web page. I remember their office was full of product. I asked them if they were there to prepare for delivery and they laughed. They were setting up marketing displays to photograph and use as illustrations on their web page.

DCH

Roo Bookaroo

DCHindley:

Your image is copied from the illustration I used for the presentation of "the Witness of Paul" in my Wikipedia article on Arthur Drews.

It represents Paul arguing with Jews, 12th-century champlevé enamel plaque - DISPVUTABAT CV[M] GRECIS (He disputed with the Greeks) REVINCEBAT IV[DEOS] (He refuted the Jews).
The plaque is kept at the V&A Museum in London, and its experts there helped me to correctly decipher the Latin inscriptions.

You've picked the seated head Jew pointing his left index at Paul (facing left in the original plaque). But Paul (facing right) counters with his right index, and in the picture his finger is (most significantly) higher than the Jew's finger.

However, you've reversed the picture of the Jew, so that he is now facing right and shown pointing with his "right" finger.
Noticeable too is the idiotic-looking face of the uncomprehending Greek behind the Jew's shoulder.

This "Witness of Paul" was part III of Arthur Drews "Christ Myth II" (1912), which was translated as "The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus" by Joseph McCabe. All the fundamental ides of Doherty as expressed in his initial "Jesus Puzzle" article of Fall 1997 were borrowed from Arthur Drews's two books, "The Christ Myth" (1909) and "The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus" (1912) which showed that the initial figure of Jesus was an ideal, mythical figure that never existed on earth.

Doherty supplemented Drews's initial epoch-making presentation with borrowings of all the ideas from the books of G.A. Wells, "The Jesus of the Early Christians" (1971), "Did Jesus Exist?" (1975), and "The Historical Evidence for Jesus" (1982).
The names of Arthur Drews and G.A. Wells were never mentioned once in the article and never revealed as the fundamental sources of those ideas. (Neither was mentioned the famous alleged "B.A. with Distinction in Ancient History and Classical Languages", which appeared on p. ix of "Neither God nor Man'' in 2009, and led some to speculate that this BA could have been obtained in the 1999-2009 decade).

This "Doherty silence", a key piece in the "Doherty Puzzle", was in total violation of historical principles of authentic scholarship. He has not openly identified, at the very outset of his 1997 article and 1999 "Jesus Puzzle" book, the original sources used in his compilation. In Germany this non-disclosure of sources is condemned as an absolute violation of critical scholarship rules and has led to the revocation of Ph.D. diplomas.
Professional historians like R. Joseph Hoffmann have spotted in Doherty's writings the systematic use of the scholarship of G.A. Wells and Arthur Drews.

Contrast this with the real scholarship approach of Arthur Drews. In his Preface to the "Christ Myth", the second word shown is the name of David Strauss, the first page also immediately mentions the contributions of Bruno Bauer and John M. Robertson, and in the first 6 pages, Drews mentions the names of 37 key scholars with a short description of their significant contributions to the subject.

No wonder that practically all professional scholars have preferred to stay away from Doherty's writings altogether. Since 2009, no thorough, complete, critique has been presented by any academic scholar.
The only tentative reviews I could find were some fragmented comments by two well-informed amateurs, Bernard Mulller's own site, and the 4-part, 34,000-word review by GakuseiDon on his own "Homepage" site.

By comparison, when Arthur Drews published his Christ Myth back in 1909, a tidal wave of nearly 80 scholars worldwide published violently negative reactions, the bulk until 1914, resuming after 1918 until WWII, and a small trickle afterwards. (As established by Peter De Mey, a professor of "Systematic Theology" at the Catholic Un. of Leuven, Belgium, in a comprehensive paper "On Rereading the Christ Myth Theological Debate", ca. 2004, which has exhaustively tabulated the extraordinary number of refutations by "fundamental" academic scholars and theologians in Germany, Britain, the USA, and France, selected from the immensity of the literature sparked off worldwide by Arthur Drews's Christ Myth.)

So, why is Doherty wasting his time discussing with amateurs on interesting, but still obscure sites unknown by the wide public?
Who cares about his childish analogies like sugar is sugar, salt is salt, and both are white stuff? Who wants to be reminded that if it sounds like a duck, if it walks like a duck, hey guys, you've guessed it, it's a duck. What powerful analogies which might even bore a high-school student! Who wants to remember comparisons of GakuseiDon with Hamas, and even better, with Hitler?

Which scholars are going to put up with this kind of childish rhetoric?
Doherty convinced himself that he's made important discoveries that have escaped the attention of 2,000 years of biblical studies and tries to convince the vast ignorant public.
Then why does he not start a real discussion with the professional experts, who have spent all their lives since their late teens, studying all the texts of antiquity?

Since he claims extraordinary novel findings, why has Doherty never addressed the community of scholars in articles for the professional journals like Classical Philology (Un. of Chicago) or The Classical Review (Cambridge Un.). There are about 100 trained scholars with published (or in publication) books on Hebrews. They're just waiting to lay their hands on any article by Doherty on the subject of Hebrews 8:4.
For failure of raising his voice in professional journals, this has condemned Doherty's claimed findings to remain on the fringe of established scholarship.

Professional scholars don't want to touch Doherty's writings. Truth be told, there is nothing unusual in this attitude.
Professional scholars, as a rule, stay prudently away from fringe ideas coming from amateurs outside their professional field, who usually pass as popularizers catering to the unlearned public, and nearly always carry a claim of some sensational breakthrough.

It's not worth the scholars' time — refutation is useless when dealing with fanatical amateurs convinced of the supremacy of their "findings" ("I AM THE LEADING JESUS MYTHICIST OF THE WESTERN WORLD") — nor the aggravation from cultish followers happy to find another object of enthusiasm and who fall passionately in love with the new-fangled ideas.
It's a futile, exhausting, and unrewarding, task to try to rectify the warped conceptions of an untrained public.
Scholars, wisely, prefer to watch from the sidelines and not get involved. They save their powder for articles in the peer-reviewed journals where the real debate is going on, among a community of top experts.

Look at Hebrews 8:4, discussed here. It took 9 pages of Doherty's "Neither God nor Man" to explain his version of his reading, that is 4,700 words, plus 6 notes of 1,100 words for a total of 5,800 words (including the puerile tales of a 1888 visit to Paris Expo, the Ron Reagan presidency, and the hair-in-the-soup tale of "Bob & Jim"). In his discussion in January 2013 with Jake and Hermann Detering on the JesusMysteries site, another few thousand words. In this thread right here, probably tens of thousands of words more.
Who is seriously going to believe that understanding this simple verse of 8:4 in Antiquity required so many mental gymnastics and acrobatics to make sense of ten words?
Hebrews is only 7,300 words, but Doherty's explanations in his articles cover 66,400 words, and still the world has not got it.

So who in his right mind is going ever to tackle all the digressions and verbosity of the 444,000 words in "Neither God nor Man"? Nobody, ever.
Bart Ehrman, who is a diligent researcher, and can enjoy the assistance of a team of undergraduate and graduate students to help him, panicked at the immensity of having to deal with all the twists of what Doherty call "logic" in his latest book (and which I feel is only the application of Irish gabbing and blarney equipped with dictionaries and grammars to prolong the discussion until the cows go home and everybody drops of exhaustion or drowned by his opening the gates to his famous "Flow of a collapsed reservoir".)

Bart throws up his hands, in his evaluation of "Neither God nor Man, which he dismisses as a quagmire of unfounded speculations:

"It is an 8oo-page book that is filled with so many unguarded and undocumented statements and claims, and so many misstatements of fact, that it would take a 2,400-page book to deal with all the problems...Not a single early Christian source supports Doherty's claim that Paul and those before him thought of Jesus as a spiritual, not a human being, who was executed in the spiritual, not the earthly realm." (Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, p. 252 -58)

And Bart is probably not correct. Judging from the tidewater of comments released on Hebrews 8:4, it is clear that 2,400 pages won't do the job. Even 10,000 pages won't do it. This is a loser's game. Doherty is locked in his idiosyncratic "logic" and best is to leave him in there. Anybody wise has better things to do in life. GakuseiDon prudently self-banned, so did TedM, and probably Bernard Muller has already finalized his own presentation. No point in discussing further.

So, what is in store, except the continuation of the same inane, endless game, a sterile discussion leading nowhere? Challenges where the new supreme pope will remain uncontested in his dogmatic mental cell, and all professional academics stay away. Sometimes, the policy of "Das Ignorieren" is the better part of valor and the safeguard to sanity.

aa5874

Please, please, please!!! You ought to know that Bart Ehrman himself made many mis-statements of facts in "Did Jesus Exist"?

Examine "Did Jesus Exist"? page 180 by Bart Ehrman.
Bart Ehrman is a disaster far worse than Doherty. Ehrman cannot be trusted.

Examine page 182 of "Did Jesus Exist"? by Bart Ehrman. Examine page 184 of "Did Jesus Exist"? by Bart Ehrman.
In the very same chapter of the very same book, Ehrman blatantly contradicts himself.

Ehrman knew that it was completely erroneous that the Gospels are well attested and even claimed that many events in the Gospels did NOT happen or were implausible in the very same chapter.

In fact, not one account of Jesus of Nazareth has been attested by a single non-apologetc writer.

The Gospels are NOT attested at all in their accounts of Jesus of Nazareth and are sometimes internally contradictory.

Ehrman cannot be trusted. We only needed a couple words to describe Ehrman. Ehrman is NOT credible.

Iskander

Interesting post, thank you

EarlDoherty

Once again, Roo has subjected us to another round of his verbal diarrhea against me. (I think he has simply reprinted one of his many “comments” attached to an Amazon review.) I think by now he has convinced all of us that he suffers from some personal anti-Doherty derangement, the source of which is too buried in his psyche for us to understand. Fine. But I have to call him on two of his longstanding accusations.

First, I took absolutely nothing from Arthur Drews. I did not even read one of his books (and it’s to date the only one) until my research was well advanced and I had already written much Jesus Puzzle material. Whether he is willing to believe this I don’t give a crap. It is also the reason why I did not have any occasion to acknowledge Drews in any “disclosure” of my sources or inspiration.

As for G. A. Wells, it is absolute nonsense to think (as Hoffmann accused me as well) that I have simply copycatted Wells when we disagree on the most fundamental interpretation of Paul and the location of his Christ Jesus’ sacrifice. I broke entirely new ground over Wells and even any other previous mythicist. (If Roo or anyone else chooses to adopt the stance that new ideas deserve rejection simply because they are new, they are only demonstrating their intellectual vacuity.) I have pointed this out before, but he refuses to even acknowledge it and continues to repeat his false accusation. Anyway, just about every mythicist writing today owes some kind of debt to Wells, since he was the primary if not only writer on this subject for decades in the latter half of the 20th century (and I do acknowledge him on some minor points). So this too is a pile of crap from Roo.

The other complaint is that he not only takes statements of mine out of context, he alters them to make them sound as bad as he can make them. A good example (and it’s not the only one) is in the above posting:

"I AM THE LEADING JESUS MYTHICIST OF THE WESTERN WORLD"

He puts this in quotation marks, deliberately falsifying what I said, because I did not say this. He puts it in caps to create an image of some wild-eyed fanatic. I never used the phrase “of the western world”, I never made the Johannine declaration that “I AM the leading Jesus mythicist…” I said that I was regarded or acknowledged as.... I was reporting a general outlook by many mythicists, which automatically does not include mainstream biblical scholarship, who generally regard mythicists as cranks. That goes without saying. And I don’t care if a thousand scholars have published commentaries on Hebrews and overlooked the real meaning of 8:4 (though Ellingworth recognized with some trepidation its grammatical possibility). None of them have attempted any rebuttal to my analysis of it (and that includes Ehrman, McGrath, Casey and Hoffmann), and the few who have attempted them here on FRDB have failed miserably. (Ted’s latest attempt before departing was pathetic, and had been previously answered more than once.)

Roo has made a career out of misrepresenting and outright lying about what I say and what I claim. As I said, he suffers from some kind of dispositional aberration toward me, one far outdoing anything displayed by any other opponent, from Jeffrey Gibson to Hoffmann & Co. I urge him to seek psychiatric help.

Neil Godfrey has called him on much of this stuff in the comments to Roo’s reviews on Amazon, but to no avail. It is a scandal that Amazon allows this kind of endless vituperation against one of their authors and publishers (and I’ve complained about it to them, also to no avail). It is also questionable that FRDB allows it, especially when they say they are seeking a higher road in discussion. But I should also be allowed to call a spade a spade in defence of myself. I have used these words before here on FRDB in regard to Roo, and I will assume I will be allowed to say them again: the man is disturbed, and he is a weasel, pure and simple.

Earl Doherty