Jeffrey Gibson

Hardly NT is it?

I didn't know Matthew -- even, despite the grammar of what is translated here not ruling out human agency in producing Mary's child -- is the whole of the NT.

You'll have to prove that Matthew says she brought forth a child without human agency on the basis of the Greek if your assertion is to be regarded as true. Besides that, just as in Tacitus Annals 18, there's no reference to a Jesus here.

What Mantra is that? And please show me where in Mark or John or Acts or Romans or 1-2 Corinthians or Galatians and Ephesians, where in Hebrews, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Peter, 1 & 2 Timothy, where in Titus, Philemon, 1 2 & 3 John we find Jesus being proclaimed as the off spring of a Ghost of any kind. Your claim ,repeated ad nauseaum, that the whole of the NT declares Jesus to be such a person depends on this being done in these writings. But it isn't there in any of them, is it.

<edited>

Jeffrey

Steven Carr

So slaughtered by explicit statements by Christians about the location of Christ, historicists resort to saying nothing.

gurugeorge

Sorry to toss your viewpoint off the cuff there. But your point above could actually be said to go counter to the bipolar argument (i.e. the ups and downs thing might have a different explanation).

What I'm against is the offhand imputations of Pauline craziness that you sometimes see coming from the rationalist camp. Craziness is not necessary to explain visions, and it's a poor mockery target for rationalists to pick. But I take your point about there possibly being other reasons to go the crazy route, with the visions as a byproduct.

Hehe, I was wondering whether someone would take me to task about that after I fired it off - I meant in the context of that discussion, a real hallucination as opposed to a real person (or a real case of literary farce, or a real case of con-artistry, for that matter). Just making that general philosophical point, is all.

Well, isn't this the argument later too, in another form? Say, you have the Christ vision telling Paul "I was on earth, and was crucified, in the flesh" - after some time, people are unsure whether this meant "actually embodied in flesh and blood" or "only appearaing to be actually embodied in flesh and blood". The argument with the Jerusalem people doesn't seem to be about whether or not Christ was crucified (and we have Hebrews, which seems to be more from the Jerusalem line, which stresses that he was crucified in the flesh too) - insofar as he seems to explicitly mention the Jerusalem people, it's more to do with the scope of the mission.

Also, are we absolutely certain that the Paul's rivals are always the Jerusalem people? "Another Messiah" just means another Messiah, not necessarily "another (version of the story of) Jesus the Messiah".

spin

That didn't make sense to me in the context.


spin

spin

Yes, "as historical investigators", but you are not acting as a historical investigator at all. The supernature, miracle, and the like are not areas that history deals with. What you're doing doesn't seem to me to be history.

See above.



The material you are dealing with doesn't allow you to do so. It requires you to deal with the aspects that you want to treat in your biased manner.

History has to be grounded in what it can talk about. The material being analysed asks you to take its supernature as acceptible.

See above.

Yes, "as historical investigators", but you are not acting like a historical investigator at all. Supernature, miracle, and the like are not areas that history deals with. What you're doing doesn't seem to me to be history.

See above.

(Umm, tautology??)

The material you are dealing with doesn't allow you to do so. It requires you to deal with the aspects that you want to treat in your biased manner.

(History has to be grounded in what it can talk about, which is evidence from the past.)

(Not a misunderstanding, but an erroneous assumption, analogous, as I believe, with the generation of Nazara from nazarhnos.)

You've wasted your time laboring over Ebion. Here's what i said, that you for some reason took umbrage to:

If Paul is simply mistaken in his belief that Jesus was real, how is that any different from the case of Ebion?

Nothing you've said seems to deal with this simple rhetorical question. The implication of the second part is that writers about Ebion mistakenly believed that Ebion was real. Paul may have been just as mistaken in his belief. You'e been going around in circles for some reason on this issue.

(You lose me with this "I would say... philosophically speaking ... strictly speaking...")

That's the possibility I have long argued, yes.

(I couldn't make sense of this side comment.)

That is correct.

I don't know how you get the first part, but the second is okay. Then comes the rabbit:
The result you have is that Paul has had some experience not derived from a real Jesus. That's a reflection on Paul's experience, not on the reality of this Jesus. You've somehow jumped a track.


spin

Solo

What I was saying is that the visions/revelations do not necessarily come only from the up-and-down thing.

The up-and-down thing is however a very strong religious motivator. From the purview of psychology, religious beliefs function as psychic compensations, which of course favours it among people who are down and out, depressed. I hated it as a kid when I saw the thick black book on my mom's night table (and so did my dad, btw). It was a sure indicator she would be miserable.


I think people have a problem understanding any kind of mental challenge or immediately assume that if the shrinks should have a legitimate interest in you, you are a
dead to rights.

Anthony Storr wrote a brilliant monograph on Churchill's 'black dog' and his manic defense against it (in Kleinian terms) as absolutely the right thing that Britain needed to fight Hitler. In that, his thinking was exactly as the ancients' who at times thought madness was also a source of good things (see Plato's Phaedrus). A normal, rational man, would have sued for peace with Hitler after Dunkirk. But a guy who was frightened to death of sleeping near balconies (for fear he would not be able to fight off the urge to jump at night !!!), and who was passing around crazy ditties as the verses of Pushkin, it was not an option.

Christ was not telling Paul things of that sort. Paul was interpreting his highs and his thoughts that came to him in the exalted states he attributed to the Lord.
The Lord would not have been passing information, as e.g. the naive interpolator of 1 Cr 11:23-25 sough to affect.


The Jerusalem missions, I would say 'yes', they were Paul's main rivals. As best as I can read it, he vied with them for access to James the Just, apparently unsuccesfully.

Jiri

gurugeorge

The supernatural per se, the supernatural that people who believe in the supernatural believe in, isn't, but reports of the supernatural are. We are under no obligation to believe the import of peoples' supernatural claims, but we can take them at their word that IT SEEMED TO THEM that they had such-and-such an experience, which we can happily categorise as "... of a supernatural being".

Why? Because we (as scientically-informed moderns) know that subjective experiences of the supernatural (i.e. of angels, spirits, demons, gods, etc.) that seem very real to the reporters can come about from hallucinatory visions caused by any number of things, including madness, breathing exercises, chanting, concentration (including prayer), drugs, etc. These types of experiences are possible, they were more common then than now (because a bit more socially sanctioned), and have traceable causes in the way the brain works. They are overwhelmingly the most likely explanation for all supernatural stuff that isn't con-artistry or sheer error (e.g. conceptual or perceptual error).

(I'd go so far as to say they are the origin of all religion: in a trope, if human beings didn't have these kinds of experiences, there wouldn't have been any religion at all, only philosophy in the ancient sense, like Stoicism or Daoism. It's the primary candidate for convincing experiences of supernatural occurrences and the seeming-experience of supernatural entities, and consequently the belief that events in the world are run by such entities, rather than proceed by natural causes, as per common sense and philosophies. Of course these beliefs can spread to people who haven't had the requisite visionary experience, in various ways, but that all comes later.)

We can comfortably take it that, as a result of any of these causes, people can have experiences of things that seem to them to be supernatural - or rather, seem to them to be real, but as having the qualities we call "supernatural" that we cannot scientifically allow exist.

So where's the problem? Paul, in his own words, had just such an experience. That's sufficient reason for HIM to believe the Jesus HE was talking about was real.

So that's at least one hugely important early Christian for whom it was (as we can see, in our scientific hindsight) all vision, and for whom the belief in the reality of the story came from vision.

Do we have any reason to believe it was any different for the Jerusalem Christians before Paul? That, I'm willing to admit is more tricky. If 1Corinthians 15 is genuine, then very much NO; but even if it isn't genuine, we at least have this solid report from an important early Christian. We don't have any reports from the other few hundred Christians from around his time, so since he is the one we have evidence for, and he was the one who was spreading the word, and his churches likely had the same characteristics, then it's reasonable to take his case as typical for the very earliest bunch. And this is made more much more likely by the picture he paints of daily life in his churches (prophecy, tongues, etc. - much like a gathering of occultists or spiritualists, or a spiritualist church today).

Of course later it changes, but that's the picture that seems to emerge in the very earliest days, based on Paul as Paul, speaking for himself, and bracketing the later stuff.

And we can comfortably deny that acceptibility, while at the same time holding that there's a perfectly straighforward way in which it can seem, to the people who make supernatural claims, that the purportedly supernatural event they experienced was real.

In what sense? I am dealing with the report of a human being's experience by that person, and interpreting it in the only reasonable way that it can be interpreted in a scientific worldview - as a brain phenomenon giving rise to real-seeming experiences of an entity talking to him and giving him his biography, and a message to take home.

Granted that he had a visionary, as we would say hallucinatory, experience of Jesus talking to him, he cannot have been mistaken about his belief that he met and spoke to Jesus, and that the Jesus he met and spoke to was real, because he actually experienced meeting and speaking to Jesus. That's what a visionary experience is: the convincing appearance of something as real that's not real.

HE thought it was real. WE know it's not real, and that he was mistaken. WE categorise the entity he seemed (to himself) to experience as not real, as a brain fart. But HE thought that entity was real - and he can be forgiven for doing so, because, after all, he spoke to the bloody thing and it spoke back to him! (And we can roughly understand why he had such a real-seeming experience that wasn't actually real: the mechanisms are being investigated as we speak, but they probably have to do with the mechanisms underlying sleep paralysis and dreams, combined with the mechanisms involved in proprioception and world-modelling, including modelling of the other as "real".)

The object of our investigation is NOT the reality or mythicality of Jesus. The object of our investigation is a religion and its texts, and we are trying to explain how the religion came to be. AS PART OF THAT INVESTIGATION, one option is that Jesus was real (i.e. a human being), but we've already been through that and tentatively eliminated that option - in Paul, as he speaks for himself, not contaminating our reading with preconceptions brought in from later writings, there is nothing to show that the Jesus he believed in was a human being who actually lived.

That's precisely why we are looking for alternatives.

Now, there may be numerous potential alternatives, but we have one bit of information that stands out above all others, the only bit of positive information we have as to the status of this Jesus entity in those earliest times - that Paul saw his Jesus in some kind of visionary experience, and got his gospel from that Jesus. (And as I say, same goes for the Jerusalem people if 1Corinthians 15 is at least partly authentic.) Now, that Jesus was real to him (and he presumably believed that he had a human aspect at the time he'd been on Earth). But that Jesus wasn't real: he was, as we would say, mythical. Of course he is mistaken, but we don't need to look for any other reasons why he was mistaken than this: he was mistaken because entities perceived in visionary experience aren't real.

avi

The OP asks for evidence that Jesus was mythical. spin has provided this "scale", for us to employ in assessing the evidence:

Class:....... Real/Imaginary..Historical/not.... Mythical/not
1.............. real.................. historical........... not mythical
2.............. real.................. ahistorical......... not mythical
3.............. imaginary......... ahistorical......... not mythical
4.............. imaginary......... ahistorical......... mythical

I find it difficult to employ spin's "scale".

Was Paul Bunyan real or imaginary? Whole cities have his statue....
Was Paul Bunyan historical or ahistorical? Newspaper articles of his accomplishments are not rare.
Paul Bunyan is fictitious, but quite possibly based upon a real live human possessing a more conventional physical stature.

In other words, I think that spin's "scale" leads us away from the OP. The only evidence we need to procure, in my opinion, to demonstrate the mythical character of Jesus, is that which asserts that Jesus' behaviour comprised actions lying beyond the limits of human capability.

LaoZi may or may not have been "real", but he certainly was "historical", in the sense that we possess 2000+ years of written documents, stones, ivory, and leather parchment representing DaoDeJing, his most famous contribution. His life was credible, human like, absent any notion of supernatural capability, hence, "not mythical", but he may have been fictitious, hence, "not real". Notice that spin's "scale" does not embrace such a circumstance: i.e. "not real", "historical", "not mythical".

The OP asked for evidence of the mythical nature of Jesus of Nazareth. Then, I suggest we need to first agree on what one means by "mythical". I find spin's "scale" unsatisfactory in attempting to differentiate "mythical" from historical. To me, a mythical creature is simply one possessing a demonstrated ability to perform actions which lie outside the range of human capabilities. spin's parameters "real" and historical, simply muddy the waters...

Achilles and Paul Bunyan, to my way of thinking, both acknowledge my simple minded definition of a mythical being--one capable of performing deeds which no mortal can accomplish.

What about evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was mythical? Like the former two, it is claimed that Jesus performed actions (raising the dead, walking on water) which ordinary mortals cannot achieve. Proof that Jesus was fictitious, i.e. imaginary, is not readily found, just as with Paul Bunyan--> One finds on the contrary, plenty of evidence that Bunyan was a genuine lumberjack....Several cities in North America have statues commemorating Paul's accomplishments...

Writing from an archaeological perspective, two thousand years from now, when excavating Klamath, California, or, Bangor, Maine or Bemidji, Minnesota , one will surely debate whether or not Paul was historical or real, etc.... One thing is for sure: the excavators will find lots of concrete with Paul's image expressed upon it....

In my opinion, we require neither "historical", nor "ahistorical" evidence to declare a creature mythical. Its mythical stature is defined simply by its supposed, fantastic accomplishments, lying well beyond the human landscape.

gurugeorge

Why isn't the interpolator (and I agree it looks fishy) merely copying Paul's manner of speaking in Galatians 1:12? That, it seems to me, is the clearest evidence we have of visionary experience. He can't have received it from a human being, because Jesus is no longer on earth at that time (on any reading). The only live option (apart from lying, of course! ) is visionary experience.

joedad

That’s always been part of my methodology. We don’t have a Jesus that is separate from the mythical one that flies away up into the sky like superman.

Paul Bunyan

Pretty damn interesting.