LegionOnomaMoi

Alas, your's is the bait and switch approach here. You are asserting something exists simply by claiming it does. Your only defense for your claim is your claim itself. I'm not "defending" any hegemony, but denying its existence. The entirety of your claim rests simply on the fact that virtually all specialists in any field which potentially relates to historical Jesus studies rejects your view. But this can all be swept under the rug by an appeal to an unfalsifiable construct: hegemony. It needs no defense, no evidence, because any critique of the notion can be dismissed as a product of the very hegemony claimed. How wonderful circular logic must be.

spin

And now the famous "it's not me, it's you!" defense.

:hysterical:

Now you are trying the mythicist argument against hegemony. It's inappropriate (you are merely misrepresenting what you are talking about), but if it weren't, you'd just as easily argue the historical Jesus into its grave.

Hegemony is a complex notion, but here's an attempt to give a cobbled-together definition:

Hegemony is the means of social control within any society by the imposition of cultural values reflective of the society's empowered hierarchy and the concomitant consent to those values by the unempowered.

(The other major means of social control is through the police and the army.)

Hegemony fails when the consent is lost. Just think of the implosion of the eastern bloc. But I found an interesting news commentary on the new establishment of hegemony in Poland (here).

I haven't tried to defend the notion of hegemony to you. I have merely demonstrated a facet of it through you. Note the following:

Denial of its existence is part of its efficacy.

What claim was that?

The irony here is that the historical Jesus is certainly an unfalsifiable construct. There is no way to show that it is wrong (and of course no way to show it is right). It's an ontological commitment born amputated from any epistemology. But back to hegemony...

You seem to think that the notion of hegemony is not open to critique. All you need is a vantage point from which to do so.

Tell me about it.

Will Wiley

Ill be interested to check it out, though it seems to remind me of the Matrix, which might be why if I recall Marcuse was mentioned in the interesting documentary "return to source", though I may not remember this correctly.

I'll have to go over it when I have some more time, thanks.

As far as hegemony goes, and consent and new vantage points, it seems clear from my own experience that one can step outside religion, not consent to it's mental "prison house", yet still accept that the evidence is quite sufficient for a historical jesus, without being bothered or hampered by it.

Sheshbazzar

Excellent summation.
While most of the dialog here has been focused on the battles for ideas that go on between the intellectual movers and shakers of higher learning, the Profs and the 'experts', it is the little and 'uneducated' guys on the ground and out in the neighborhoods that when the hierarchy loses credibility and control, revolt and reject the premises of the old establishment.
That is what I was getting at with my little lowbrow, working-class, it happened in my own backyard tale.

It is often forgotten that it is the base that supports the Pyramid of a hierarchy and its hegemony.
And when the leaders at the top lose sight of that fact, and filled with themselves, begin to think that their opinions are what is supporting society, the downward pressure strains, cracks, and separates the blocks at the bottom, the blocks move (as I moved) and that pyramid begins to crumble.
And if the design was poorly engineered, the construction shoddy, and filled with rubble, it can literally implode.
What took centuries to build, and seems huge and eternal, can all come crashing down in a single day.

All of the 'specialists in any field which potentially relates to historical Jesus studies...' will come crashing down with it.




.

anethema

The "idea" of an hegemony(cultural or hierarchical) was quite important to Constantine. By the time of the battle of the Milvian bridge roman society was in tatters from 75 years of almost constant civil war. I dont think the HJ thing was all that important to him, maybe to his mother Helena. He needed a way to calm things down and keep people in line. Is this "idea" of hegemony important? Look back to the pyramids, free men not slaves(proven archeologically) built them believing their king was god. I would contend this couldnt be done without this absolute certainty on their part.

LegionOnomaMoi

I'm not talking about the mythicist argument or any argument about the historical Jesus at all. Merely your baseless claim (supported only by the claim itself) of this "hegemony" which (depite the wide variety of views, educational backgrounds, beliefs, etc., on the historical Jesus) is somehow the reason we find so few specialists who believe we lack sufficient evidence to say that Jesus existed. The same method is used to defend matriarchal prehistory, undermine the scientific method, and promote ideologies of all sorts when evidence is lacking: accuse the "hegemonic establishment" of maintaining their paradigm through groupthink. So what if (unlike actual examples of groupthink, hegemonic control, etc.) in this instance we're dealing with a time period of a couple centuries (which began by undermining the establishment) and such a diversity of expertise and opinion? You can continue to assert this "hegemony" exists with such vacuous statements as:
In other words, you can assert the reason for the ubiquity of experts who find our evidence for the historical existence of Jesus so convincing is "hegemony" simply because of this ubiquity, and defend your claim by appealing to it. The fact that this "hegemony" spans such a great period of time, distance, and such a diverse number of specialists is easily explained by an appeal to the dynamic nature of your construct.

I know what hegemony means. Which is why your claim that it applies here is so laughable. Social control? Of whom? And what culture? The "West" (i.e., the various countries where most, but not all, scholarship on the subject takes place)? Yes, the universities across Europe and America are (un?)consciously using their status to impose their conception of the historical Jesus...wait, sorry, there isn't any such conception...so we are left with merely one of their few points of agreement: that a historical Jesus exists. Jesus eaten by dogs? Unproblematic. The NT generally unreliable? No problem. Jesus was cynic philosopher, or an egalitaritan, or failed messianic leader, or a backwater nobody who we only know about because of Paul? All acceptable. But threaten the "hegemony" by declaring we don't have enough evidence he even exists? All of the sudden this vast hegemony which spans continents rises up to quash such revolutionary thinking and imposes their "cultural values."

I am thinking of actual hegemonic control throughout history, which is why your claim is so preposterous. You compare the control of paramilitary and military forces, totalitarian leadership, and (presumably) similar examples such as the suppression of minority rights to historical Jesus studies? It would be amusing if it didn't minimize and belittle of real examples of hegemony, when the elite did suppress, oppress, and/or enforce their values through various mechanisms of social control. Appealing to hegemony isn't just rhetoric, it makes a mockery of actual hegemony, stripping it of any value. If only you were alone in doing this.



No, just like the last time you brought it up, you continue to assert its existence. And when questioned, you appeal to its dynamic nature or (even better):

How convenient. Challenging the hegemony is further proof that it exists. A wonderful Catch-22.


That's not irony, nor is it (except in the strictest sense) true. I can not prove that Zeus or Herakles did not exist, but I can demonstrate that from a historical point of view they did not. I can also demonstrate we have no reliable evidence for Homer. The same could be done for Jesus, but despite arguments to that effect which have been proposed over the past 100+ years, only a tiny handful of specialists find such arguments convincing. This certainly doesn't make them right, but it isn't evidence for any "hegemony" either, and as you are asserting a social phenomena (the province of the social sciences) is at play now, it should be falsifiable. Fortunately for you, your construct enables you to interpret all evidence as supporting your theory.

spin

You were arguing the same argument the myther uses to say Jesus didn't exist. You will continue to play totally ignorant of hegemony. And I don't really care. You just want to waste your time arguing for the sake of arguing, which seems to be the only reason you come here.

You later claimed: "I know what hegemony means." You certainly don't act like you do.

If somehow a whole lotta people agree on an ontology that has no epistemology to it, you don't mind. That's normal to you. Who needs bars?

How fucking empty your rhetoric is. There is no point in trying to clarify something you refuse to deal with other than through the standard refusal to contemplate the issue. You can hack up things and repackage them, but in the end you are saying nothing meaningful, but that you can hack things up and repackage them. Bravo. I point to the fact that hegemony is not the monolithic singularity you are trying to beat your head against, so you drop your guts and get raucous. You claim to know what hegemony means. Given the stuff you keep saying, crap, you know what it means. You haven't bothered to get a grasp of the concept, so it's not strange that you whinge about the fact that hegemony is not fixed or singular. You can quote that as well to waste more of your time.

You can assert whatever you like about historical evidence of Jesus, you are merely kidding yourself. You can hang around and toady to all the amateur historians who have convinced themselves of their religious commitments or of the value of their religious training, but you do so empty-handed. You, like them, cannot turn traditions into history. You have no way to separate plausible ahistorical information in traditions from historical information.

The farce here is that you are calling it my construct, which reflects on your next statement....

Perhaps one meaning of the term, but what follows argues that you haven't grasped the topic here.

:horsecrap:

This is a sad reverie. If you know what hegemony means, you know that the only way to threaten hegemony is when enough people withdraw their consent.

Yes, I know that you haven't even taken the time to understand what you are trying to argue against. Plainly the subject is not about physical domination. Doh! Look back at the rough definition I supplied which is certainly not the militaristic-political hegemony you are trying to talk about. Go away and find out what you are supposed to be talking about.

Come back when you know the topic.

Uh-huh.

In your spare time when you're not going off the handle about something, google "cultural hegemony" or consult a book. Try "Gramsci". Or ask someone in culture studies about it. This is not a novel idea in scholarship.

Here's a google scholar search, if you can bother clicking.

So, it's true that it is unfalsifiable, but you want to minimize the fact. I can understand that. You are committed to the belief.

History has never been democratic.

Now, unless you want to spend a little time catching up on the notion of hegemony, I don't think you will be able to warrant another response.

Anyone interested in hegemony may like to read this accessible but long blog entry on the Tea Party which deals with the notion (if pressed for time start about 2/3 of the way through--you'll see the heading).

EarlDoherty

I’m going to horn in on this back-and-forth debate which is going nowhere, that I can see (though I side with spin). As I see it, yes, historical Jesus studies since Reimarus have been steadily dismantling the old hegemony, the one still in evidence in evangelical circles. But that does not mean that they have not been busy building their own new hegemony. You scoff that such a view is simply a mythicist tactic to make the concept “unfalsifiable”: as long as we can put some kind of hegemony in view, we can explain why the members of it don’t agree with us.

You know what your problem is? You’re not on the front lines. You’re not on the receiving end of, let alone grappling with, the hostility, the vitriol, the vacuous and fallacious counters, the rabid ad hominems, the foaming-at-the-mouth responses of supposedly professional and qualified scholars in their antagonism toward mythicism. That right there is a dead giveaway. This is not a scholarly debate that’s going on, whether it involves “specialists” or not. It is a desperate defence of the new, reduced hegemony which the historical Jesus scholarly community has adopted, standing at the line it has drawn in the sand.

The very fact that such ‘specialist’ academia has withdrawn all the way to the point where it is willing to postulate an HJ who was a virtual non-entity, who didn’t say or do almost anything of what the Gospels tell of him, who garnered virtually no notice outside his personal circle—to postulate that, rather than give the idea that no such figure ever existed any consideration, any time of day, and to attack such theories and those who hold them in the most disgracefully unprofessional manner…well, that tells you something. It certainly tells me something.

This goes far beyond wanting to defend its own evidence (which it rarely even attempts to provide) or to calmly and effectively dispute and disprove the opposite evidence (which it almost never seems to undertake or manage to do but only declares has been done), it goes much deeper than that. Call it personal investment, call it fear of retaliation, losing face, call it aversion to radical new paradigms (history is certainly full of that). Or call it a new hegemony.

After all, despite all those conflicting and perpetually unresolved quests for the real Jesus, at least we got one thing right! He existed! Maybe even one of our interpretations is correct, we just don't know which one. But that he never existed at all? Who would want to think that we'd all been 'had' to that extent and for so long? No way! (Oh, the shame! The embarrassment! The waste of an entire career! The lost book deals, the A&E Specials!) No, no! This is where we make our stand!

Have you read Bart Ehrman’s new book, the long-awaited defense of historicism, finally supplying the proof that mythicism hasn’t got a wooden leg to stand on? Do you think he’s accomplished that? He’s been inundated by a flood of negative reactions, including from some historicists, who think--and have demonstrated--that his ‘case’ is a joke, a piece of blatant incompetence, not even addressed to a scholarly audience. Have you read my ongoing detailed response to the book on the Vridar blog? (If you haven’t, you shouldn’t be given the time of day in a discussion like this on a forum like this.)

This (and let’s throw in that clown McGrath, or the Triage Trio of Hoffmann, Casey and Fisher who are desperately trying to keep historicism on life support on their Jesus Processed blog while slaying the mythicist monster) represents your “ubiquity of experts who find our evidence for the historical existence of Jesus so convincing”? Ehrman is at least even-tempered, even when casting ad hominems about agenda-driven mythicists, but Hoffmann & Co. would choke on the vomit they spew at mythicism and mythicists, accompanied by very little in the way of rebuttal to our arguments. This is professional, unbiased scholarly conduct by open-minded academics who have abandoned all semblance of hegemony? Their behavior speaks for itself.

Of course there’s a conception. The conception that such a figure existed, even if he has been reduced (by necessity) to a bare-bones figure, about whom nothing can be known. If this character cannot be defined in any consensus manner, all options open, with nothing in the Gospels representing what he actually was or did, where is the evidence for his existence—or to put it a more pertinent way, what constitutes the evidence that his existence, his bare existence, is so irrefutable, so sure, so sensible, that a theory within scholarship interpreting the evidence differently for two centuries is nothing but a sham and the refuge of incompetents and charlatans?

Since Ehrman has clearly disappointed, since McGrath is a joke, since Hoffmann & Co. spend 90% of their time insulting and shitting on mythicists, we still need someone to put forward that overwhelming and problem-free evidence for the existence of Jesus, and to rebut with solid substance once and for all the arguments put forward by mythicists.

How about you, Legion? Are you up to it? Or have you too put your blind trust in professionals who have all the right credentials and would never be guilty of bias, fear or vested interest? Why not start with my response series to Ehrman on Vridar? Right there, you can see both sides of the story. You can start a new thread here on FRDB, detailing the wonder and wisdom of Ehrman’s case and the faults and fallacies of mythicism. Don’t let us down, now.

Earl Doherty

anethema

I would contend that the institutionalization began with Constantine, of course this is hardly contraversial. The "academy" is a direct descendant of Eusebius, a self proclaimed liar in defense of his world view. IMO thewhole house of cards can be found in Julian the apostate. Again, to me the HJ is irrelevent to the history of christian origens. It happened get over it. The absolute fact is claiming anything from ancient documents is tantamount to claiming that Sumerian documents verify Noah's flood. I think this is Hoffmans argument, I could be wrong he's quite obtuse about what he actually thinks. Real history, to me, deserves better than this shitstorm. I dont care whether Socrates actually lived, I care that his method was preserved.(Hitchens)

LegionOnomaMoi

I didn't say this was a mythicist tactic. I've heard similar claims (all historical Jesus scholars are christians and were trained in seminaries, none of them are historians, etc.), but hegemony is a qualitatively different claim.

Which gives me perspective. I've seen now the difference between how mythicist arguments are treated in academic publications compared to online and similar forums. I've taken the time not just to read and keep up with modern scholarship on early christianity, the hellenistic world, Jesus studies, etc., but also the history of modern historiography, biblical studies, Jesus studies, etc. I've even taken the time to read garbage like Freke and Gandy's books and similar works, not to mention the sophisticated critiques from Strauss to Wells to you and Price. And recently (within the last year) I've started reading the back-and-forth which takes place on web 2.0

When I was just starting to research early christian origins over 6 years ago, I wrote to Bart Ehrman asking about the question of Jesus' historicity. He was kind enough to respond with some sources and a brief outline of the history of the issue, and so I started my research with Frazer, Drews, and Wells, along with rebuttals to these. The more I branched out, both forward and backward in time (and, with after learning german and french, increasing the number of works I could access), the more the disparity between the erudition of your average specialist writing about some aspect of the historical Jesus, and that of the average mythicist. Online paper after online paper, post after post, and on and on, filled with blatant factual errors, mistranslations, poor surveys of scholarship (not just christian or jesus scholarship, but greco-roman and jewish as well), and so forth. And at that time there was little response from scholars who in general stick to academic arenas (journals, monographs, conferences, etc.) rather than popular books or the web. Apparently, that changed rather dramatically, as I've seen some of the hostility and back-and-forth which now takes place on blogs, forums, etc.

But you find that evidence of some hegemony? Compare it with, for example, climate studies. Here's a multi-disciplinary study of one of the most complex systems known to humans, and there have been and continue to be studies published in reputable journals which challenge the academic consensus. Some of the lead climatologists in the world are so-called "deniers". So far, the models discussed or created by the IPCC, CRU, NASA, etc. have all been wrong. Yet there we find an enormity of papers, press-releases, official statements, etc., all to the effect that the science is settled. And if you find the attacks from scholars on mythicists hostile, you should spend some time reading the attacks on scientists who don't agree with IPCC models.

A similar "battle" took place during the so-called "linguistic wars" between the diverging generativists as well as the generative approach vs. others. Now there's embodied cognition and the battle over that.

Within Jesus studies, hostile attacks and ad hominem are present quite apart from the question of his historicity. Funk's clever PR moves prompted a number of vitriolic responses from the conservative christian scholars. Crossan found himself more or less ambushed after a request for a debate with W. L. Craig at a conservative seminary with a "moderator" who was not only biased, but basically joined Craig against Crossan.

All of the above examples concern (for the most part) hostility between/amongst specialists. When it comes to mythicism, the vast majority of mythicists I've encountered
1) Haven't read much if any actual academic works
2) Can't read Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or Aramaic
3) Get most of their information from (apparently) searching the web to support a position they wanted to find in the first place.

As a result, the web is filled with bizzare and ridiculous mythicist "arguments". Unfortunately, for the most part it seems as if historical Jesus researchers believe the question was adequately answered by the responses to the arguments proposed over the past 100+ years that Jesus never existed, and looking at the bulk of what constitutes the mythicist position (if they look at all) dismiss it as sensationalist bunk with the reliability of your average conspiracy theory. And the exceptions to this rule unfortunately seem to consist mainly of those scholars who have blogs and instead of engaging those arguments made by educated, intelligent, and informed individuals, they are almost entirely responses of the type you describe. A small minority of scholars have continued to address, in papers or books intended to at least be used by specialists (if not solely by specialists) arguments such as those of Price.

However, the hostility of the debate on the web is hardly an indication of some hegemony. There are a handful of scholars engaged in the online debate compared to the thousands who publish papers, monographs, books, articles, and so forth every year. Within the Journal for the study of the historical Jesus alone several recent articles have criticized the whole endeavor to date as mostly fruitless. The diversity of arguments about the NT, Jesus, and early christianity expressed in academic sources over the last century or even the last two decades is enormous. That's not a hegemony. To call it one is either to seriously misunderstand what the word means, to mischaracterize the state of research, or to reveal a lack of familiarity with academic publications apart from the most accessible ones.

To use Kuhn's argument to explain why so few even take seriously any mythicist arguments, let alone agree with them, would be at least defensible. Claiming the cause is some academic hegemony is just sad.

It tells me that I misjudged the extent to which you have followed the debate since the 19th century. Line in the sand? That line you refer to was drawn 150 years ago, and several times since. For the first half of the 20th century, Dibelius & Bultmann and their followers (applying German folklore conceptions of orality) argued that the "historical Jesus" was almost completely obscured by the mythic Christ we find in all of our sources. When Gerhardsson first proposed his alternate model of first century Christian orality, which posited a much greater degree of reliability, the response was scathing reviews and dismissal. The same is true of gospel genre and comparisons between these and ancient lives. Your description of the "hegemony" portrays a much more unified and steadily retreating group of scholars then exists. There are far more, not fewer, arguments arguing a certain historical reliablity (compared to earlier approaches such as Formgeschichte) of the gospels. The spectrum of views, from "we can't even say with any certainty Jesus existed" to "the gospels are based on eyewitness testimony", has increased since the first half of the 20th century. Whatever "line" in the sand you refer to, it isn't reflected in academic forums.



Only...that happened. For Jesus, not so much (only a few have ever suggested we can't know if he existed or anything about him). But the "quest for the historical Socrates" (more often, the "socratic problem") dates back even further than the historical Jesus quest. And at the beginning of the 20th century, after 200+ years of arguments that Plato had it right and Xenophon wrong, or both had it wrong and Aristotle was right, or even that Aristophanes was the most reliable source, so many critiques of every source existed that scholars who had spent years on the question (e.g., Gigon or Joël), and others threw up their hands in despair declaring that we can't know anything about Socrates at all. As recently as 2009, Dorion's paper on Socrates is remarkably similar to some essays by Price: the problem of the historical Socrates is not just unsolvable, it's a "pseudo-problem" because all the works we have on Socrates are "works of fictions."

The situation has happened in the reverse too, with the Iliad. Classicists and historians used to regard it as entirely mythical, and now there are a fair number who argue that even some of the mythic heroes were historical, not just the battle itself.



1) Many careers are built upon hacking away at the arguments of others
2) The vast majority of scholars don't even try to publish popular works or engage in other P.R. stunts.
3) As you yourself have demonstrated, a much better way to become popular and well-known is to offer radical hypothesis that challenge the consensus. The sensationalist crap that Ehrman writes for the public demonstrates how much easier it is to make a career out of such works.
4) It's a lot easier to say "we can't know" and to attack those who try to reconstruct the past than to do so yourself ("you" here being the general "you", not you specifically).
5) New careers are starting all the time. Thanks to the mixture of methods from anthropology, sociology, literary theory, etc., there are ever more ways in which one can apply fresh techniques to historical questions. Carrier has built much of his on this issue.


I've read three of Ehrman's popular books: his bad rehash of Schweitzer, his embarrassing version of his much more erudite works on textual criticism, and his latest piece. I have trouble understanding why he bothered with this one. It lacks the necessary depth, critical analysis, and nuance required to actually address mythicist arguments worth addressing, and thus won't convince anybody who was a mythicist to begin with, and offers nothing for those who weren't. I was even more disappointed with his book than I was with Carrier's, and I expected to Ehrman's to be bad (and expected more of Carrier).

I followed the back and forth between Carrier and Ehrman, and a few other responses. But for the most part, I don't care. There was nothing in his book I didn't know already. I work at a university, which means not only do I have easy access to an enormous library, I have immediate access to an enormous number of electronic versions of journals, monographs, etc. For the subjects I'm interested in, that's what I use to understand them. And if I'm going to buy a book, with few exceptions I'll only find it on amazon or from the publisher because it won't be available in bookstores. The only reason I bothered to buy Ehrman's book at all was for the same reason I bought Freke and Gandy's books: to know what other people were reading.

What "desperation"? If there is any desperation (as opposed to infuriation), its because while in the typical academic media the mythicist case is seen as untenable, the public sees little of this (what they can access with at least relative ease is often too technical) and thus scholars like Hoffman or Casey are 1) late to the game and already behind in the numbers when it comes to the web and 2) facing the vastness of an opposition (largely uniformed) all too ready to accept any counter to any point they make. And so they and their supporters resort to ad hominem attacks, poorly constructed arguments, etc. But you can find the same thing when it comes to evolution, climate change, intelligent design, and more. The fact that a number of biologists are blatantly hostile, insulting, demeaning, dismissive, and so forth when addressing those who question evolution or promote ID doesn't make these biologists any less right, and whatever desperation they have is the result of frustration with what they see as the stupidity of the uniformed.


There is no logical soundess to such an argument. Trivially, there are options which can't be considered by any sane person attempting a historical reconstruction. More importantly, it's one thing to say "we can't determine what is fact or fiction about this character" and quite another to say "he didn't exist." Your statement conflates the two. In order for the latter to be true, then something else must have provided the catalyst for Christianity. The reason so few within academia accept the mythicist position is because they don't find any explanation other than a historical Jesus as a catalyst to be plausible, or at the very least that the historical Jesus as the point of origin is a much more likely source for Christian origins than any other hypothesis.