Solo

What makes you think so ? Because the Soviets adopted the mythicist position with respect to Christ and followed Friedrich Engels' uncritical embrace of Bauer ? Not likely.

The first place to look would be Bauer: did he know about Josephus and Philo's mentions of Pilate ? 99.9% certain he did. I quickly looked up Schweitzer's Quest writeup on Bruno Bauer. He was fully conversant with both writers.

So the canard that Pilate was not historical, would not have originated with Bauer and Engels. We know that Kautsky - one of Engels'es brightest pupils -did not think that , quite the contrary he relied on Philo's version of Agrippa's letter to Caligula and the portrayal of the prefect as bloody-minded, to argue the Christian scribes were historically naive if they believed he would have been sympathetic to Jesus.

So, I feel pretty skeptical that you will find something in the Marxist primary classical sources that the Soviet encyclopedists would have been drawing on. Would they have shopped for wisdom with a proto-Nazi like Drews ? Hmmmm......I would be very surprised. The 'historical materialist' argument of Kautsky looks like standard fare to me.

But as Roger says, let's not prejudge the evidence. :huh:

Jiri

GakuseiDon

No, it was related to the second link I gave, where the author wrote:
As I said above: "It suggests that he had read some 19th C work published or used in Russia (since the Soviet Union didn't even exist 20 years before Drews) which alluded to the idea. But then again, maybe the author simply misunderstood what was being claimed. He seems to have misunderstood Drews' point."

The link is to an article in a series of articles that has "Translated from Russian by Tatiana Pavlova", and "Published with the kind permission of Bishop Alexander Mileant", who is a "Bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad".

GakuseiDon

I suggested it as a place to start, if the claims in the second link I gave had any validity. IF "maybe no Pontius Pilate" was part of some "official" position of the Soviets, then we might find a reference in pre-1961 editions of the Soviet Encylopedia, as the most convenient starting point. But we may well find that they didn't say anything along those lines, and any such comments have been taken out of context.

I have no idea why the idea is bizarre, to be honest. But I'm not necessarily saying that they were the source for the claim. I'll repeat what I wrote earlier: I think what happened was that someone took comments like Drews' regarding "pilatus", and this got mistakenly passed on as the claim that "there was no historical Pontius Pilate". That's probably the source of these claims. I'm suggesting that people on both sides of the argument may have done this, but I agree that there is no evidence that mythicists have made this actual claim, i.e. that there was no historical Pontius Pilate. Perhaps they used something like Drews' comment that "the Pilate of the Christian legend was not originally an historical person", and this was taken by apologists that they were suggesting that there was no historical Pilate. The quote I gave earlier -- that the theory [that there was no Jesus Christ, Apostles and Pontius Pilate] was "in the Soviet Union even 20 years before the works" of Drews -- is intriguing, but then again, perhaps the author misunderstood that as well.

I'M upset about it. No-one likes having their conclusions restated using hyperbole. Why do that at all, Toto? I've repeated many times that the evidence isn't there to prove that there was a historical Jesus.

That there is very little evidence for a historical Jesus. Questioning his historicity is, in my view, a valid line of enquiry. G.A. Wells and Earl Doherty have presented coherent cases that deserve to be investigated seriously, since they tend to deal with primary sources and accepted scholarship.

And that I also have no problems with people who are "historical Jesus-agnostic" if they believe that the evidence for historicism isn't strong enough to come down one way or the other.

Toto

If, if , if only. .

You second link is from a website with Eastern Orthodox ties. You rely on this paragraph which claims that the discovery of some archeological evidence for Pontius Pilate proves that Jesus Christ and the Apostles actually existed. This is such a non-sequitur it is hard to take anything here seriously.

Is this an official Soviet document? No. Does it appear to be a credible source for information on the Soviet position? I doubt it. It appears to belong among the apologetic statements made after 1961 that falsely claimed that skeptics had doubted the existence of a historical Pilate.

The author here has been translated by someone with inadequate English skills. Can you be sure if it refers to anything other than the idea that the gospels were mythical?

Is it too much to ask that you do some basic research before presenting an idea? You saw how quick Roger Pearse was to claim that this is the way it must have been, but there is not a shred of evidence.

Perhaps this is not part of your background. What have you read about Marxism? The treatment of religion in the Soviet Union? Soviet-American relations?

Drews is pretty clear that his claim is that the mythical Pilate of the legend was confounded with an actual historical Pilate. How stupid or inattentive would those Christian apologists have had to have been to get so confused? And were these Christian apologists reading Drews?

I mean, this is almost plausible in some parallel universe, except that there is not a scintilla of evidence for it and there is a massive amount of evidence against it.

Or, more likely, the translator did not give an adequate translation. It was mythicism in general that was in Russia 20 years before Drews, before there was a Soviet Union (Drews' Christ Myth was evidently published in translation in 1923 in Russia.)

If you are upset with me, I am upset with you, GDon: you have thrown out an idea that has instantly converted Roger Pearse and impressed Ben. So I can't ignore it, and I have spent a lot of time looking into it, only to discover that it has been a massive waste of my time. There is nothing behind your speculation. What was your point here?

GakuseiDon

Believe it or not, I was trying to be helpful. Based on the second link I gave, I still suspect that we might find something from the late 19th C which could shed light on where the idea comes from. But I think people misunderstanding Drews' comments that "the Pilate of the Christian legend was not originally an historical person" as "Pilate represents the constellation of Orion", or even someone doing a partial translation of the equivalent phrases from Niemojewski without the surrounding context, as likely suspects, though I understand that you disagree.

Ben C Smith

Have you read any egregious examples of quote-mining recently?

Read the text again and tell me with a straight face that some Christian apologist could not misunderstand it as an actual claim that the historical Pilate did not exist:

According to this, the Pilate of the Christian legend was not originally an historical person ; the whole story of Christ is to be taken in an astral sense, and Pilate represents the constellation of Orion, the javelin-man (pilatus, in Latin), with the arrow or lance-constellation (Sagitta), which is supposed to be very long in the Greek myth, and appears in the Christian legend under the name of Longinus, and is in the Gospel of John the soldier who pierces the side of Jesus with a spear (longche, in Greek).

On this very thread we have the following from Steven Carr:

Is Steven saying that only one nutcase (as opposed to none) did not believe that Pilate existed? If so, then Steven read that paragraph and thought the fellow Drews was summarizing did not believe that Pilate existed. If not, then Steven was not being very clear. Release the hounds, Toto!

Heck, I had to reread the paragraph to make sure I was understanding it. At first glance, it does indeed look like somebody is denying the very existence of Pilate. And do not tell me that no apologists would be content to pass on this information based on the first glance. We all know better than that.

A recap of this sordid episode in the annals of historical criticism.... First you thought that GDon was trying to get apologists off the hook by finding an errant mythicist, and you castigated him for that, as well as for having the temerity to ask whether an old book or two happened to be available online. Then, when you realized that he was not actually looking for an errant mythicist, well, it was his fault anyway for not being clearer. Now you criticize his hypothesis (actually that of Andrew Criddle) for requiring the apologists to be too stupid or inattentive, and for wasting your time. Doubtless you think his breath stinks, too, and are only barely holding back insults about his mother. (Hyperbole alert.)

Come on. Call the crusaders back home. Give it a rest.

Ben.

Amaleq13

What I see is you and other mythicism opponents blowing one obscure scholar's thesis into a "whole Pilate/spear-chucker mythos" with no justification.

What I see is you and other mythicism opponents wasting time belaboring a dead horse nobody of any note apparently actually ever rode just as creationists belabor a hoax that was exposed by the very scientific methods they deny.

It is a tremendous waste of time that serves no useful purpose.

Roger Pearse

Either is possible. But Drews comments are enough to explain the origin of such a myth. There are quite a lot of careless readers out there.

Don has done us a great service, by localising an origin for this stuff. I suspect he is right, and this IS the origin. But what we need to see now is the next step down the chain.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Toto

See below.

Please try to construct an actual trajectory for this 19th century idea to lie low and suddenly pop up in 1961. I can't.

You have a list of the Christian apologist sites that claimed that Pilate was thought to be non-historical. Can you show that any of them read Polish or Russian, or read Drews in translation, or that there is any likelihood that they were referring to obscure 19th century writers?

Let's be clear about what is going on here. Several people have caught Christian apologists in what appears to be outright fabrication. The origin seems clear - they have constructed a narrative that goes "skeptics refused to believe that X personage in the Bible was historical until Y was found." This sort of wishful thinking is the most likely suspect for this particular error. It is understandable - not admirable, but at least understandable. We have all seen people in the midst of political debates think of facts that might be true, and then convince themselves that they are true. Or person A speculates that something might be true, and person B decides that it is true. This is how rumor mills and echo chambers word. The only remedy for this is fact checking and revision.

This theory - the Christian wishful thinking theory - posits that the idea that Pilate was not historical originated in 1961, with Christian apologists. It fits the data.

But you have come up with an alternative theory, that the non-historical Pilate can be traced to the 19th century. (And I'm still not clear on who you think made the original mistake of interpretation, or when, or if you have worked this out.) This theory has no evidence for it, merely speculation. Why do you think this is helpful? What explanatory value does it have?

No Robots

But we must not hastily conclude from this that Doctor Drews disbelieves in the existence of the historic Pilate. He thinks, with Niemojewski, that the Christian populace told the legend of a javelin-man, a certain Pilatus, who was supposed (sic) to have been responsible for the death of the Saviour. “This,” he recklessly adds, “wholly sufficed for Tacitus to recognise in him the procurator in the reign of Tiberius, who must have been known to the Roman historian from the books of Josephus on the Jewish War which were destined for the imperial house.”--The mythical interpretation of the Gospels: critical studies in the historic narratives / Thomas James Thorburn, p. 241.