LGM

Well said.

The other evidence we have is that there were a great many conflicting "christologies" in the first thru fourth centuries, a great many conflicting "gospels", and the primary christology that survives today, is the one "selected" by some 4th century committees, to consolidate the religion and serve the purposes of the Roman emperor.

And it was the Roman empire's patronage of that one particular brand of christology, that made one version "orthodox", and put the various other sects, and eventually all other pagan religions, out of business. And it was that version that was expanded, and copied and polished into the mind numbing collection of theological dogma that survives today.

Perhaps the next time a god-man comes to earth, he'll take the time to write his own biography, and tell us what he wants in his own words, instead of leaving that task to people who never met him.

Alas, I guess he was in quite a hurry to "fly" off to heaven.

Steve Weiss

Neither a Jesus nor a Nazareth existed 2000 years ago. That is a myth created centuries after the alleged fact. Additionally, what we all seem to accept as "historical" fact is full of exaggerations and inaccuracies, especially prior to the last 100 years or so. And that is a generous viewpoint. Did Oswald kill Kennedy, or Ray assassinate King? Did Washington never tell a lie? Did he chop down a cherry tree? Did Columbus discover America, or was it Lief Ericksen? Were the Wright brothers the first to fly an airplane? Did Marilyn Monroe commit suicide, or was she assisted in her early exit from the land of the living?

The bible is definitely not accurate history, and history itself is a very flawed factual standard. Most of what people believe to be true isn't so. The higher one's truth standard, the less there is of it around.

Gregg

I can understand why believers are so resistant to this whole thing, even though, technically, one does not have to cease being a believer if one accepts the mythicist argument. You can still believe in Paul's heavenly redeemer, although whether you also believe in multilayered heavens and demons infesting the lower atmosphere is another question.

What I don't get is the obstinate resistance I occasionally see from atheists and agnostics and non-Christians. Now, I can understand some inititial resistance ... I was very skeptical of Jesus-myth claims at first, and I still reject the "trash" versions which are basically just wild speculation. But Doherty's case is anything but ... it is systematically and seriously laid out and backed by strong, logical arguments and mountains of evidence. How anyone can look at it and not come away at least thinking, "Maybe Doherty is on to something here--his thesis at the very least deserves as much respect and consideration as any historicist argument," I don't know.

I wonder if Brooke ever checked out his site. Been a while since she's posted in this thread.

Gregg

Do you mean because Doherty's supporters haven't written reviews, that means they must not have looked into them with any depth? I don't follow. Is writing a review the only way to show you've looked into a theory in depth?

I admit I'm no scholar, not even a lay scholar, and I don't know Greek, so I have to take Doherty's word on some things. However, Doherty almost always provides references to support his translations. He backs up his arguments with as many pieces of evidence as he can find. I do consider myself pretty good at detecting b.s., and there's nothing in Doherty's arguments that set my b.s. detector off. I've disagreed with him on a couple of points he's made that are peripheral to his main arguments, although I can't remember the specifics now. What convinces me of his case is how well the various arguments mesh together to create a comprehensive, logical picture. Each part supports the other parts. The historicist case, on the other hand, seems to consist of a lot of ad hoc arguments that don't fit together and sometimes conflict. Such as "Paul never mentions any detail of Jesus' life, ministry, or crucifixion (except to refer to the cross) because he simply wasn't interested in the earthly Jesus." OK, so we grant that ... now, how do you explain why all the OTHER epistle writers had no interest in the earthly Jesus either? That's just one of the many things that always bothered me about the historicist case.I'd have to look through your criticisms of Doherty's case again to see if you've done this. I know I've seen it in other criticisms, though.Doherty said something like this on another thread. Whether he was referring to you specifically, I don't know for sure.Of course not. The more we can find out about what various groups and individuals believed about the supernatural world in the first century, the better. But there is always going to be a lot we can't know for certain, or know at all. Individuals like Paul were not necessarily always clear and consistent in their thinking about the supernatural world, and their beliefs may have changed over time. The same holds for the various Christian and pagan cults. I'm sure the philosophers weren't in agreement in all the details either. Given all the disagreement and lack of precision and shifting positions on every subject in the Christian church today, it's logical to assume that things were even more volatile and dynamic then, before the Roman church gained power and forced people to agree on things (and even then they had to have a series of councils to further clarify and codify beliefs).

Gregg

I can't seem to edit my previous message, but I wanted to add: But surely you don't think Doherty is simply making things up when he talks about people at that time having all sorts of beliefs, in dying/rising savior gods, in heavenly intermediaries between God and man, in multi-layered heavens, in things on Earth being imperfect copies of things in heaven, and so on. He provides plenty of documentation of this, and I think he pretty clearly demonstrates points in common between Paul's doctrine and terminology and that of the neo-Platonists. This coupled with the fact that Paul never refers to Jesus as a human being, never mentions Jesus' ministry or the place or circumstances of his crucifixion, in fact writes Jesus' earthly ministry right out of the equation (from scripture and personal revelation to Paul's ministry of preaching the good news, no mention of any Earthly events or of hearing of Jesus' ministry from witnesses to it), suggests pretty strongly that Paul believed some version of the multi-layered heaven, descending/ascending redeemer mythology.

LGM

This is another excellent point.

We don't know what very many people believed about the supernatural world in the first century. But it would be absurd to expect they thought in lockstep, or that religious thought wasn't constantly evolving, especially in a cultural crossroads like the near east.

We simply don't know. We don't really know who wrote Mark, and where, and what his agenda was, or his sources were or his intended audience was. But NT scholars don't get paid to say they don't know. So they take the thin documentation that survives from that time, and they speculate. And you end up with a historical Jesus cottage industry that is all over the map. From Doherty to Wright and everything in-between.

Doherty makes a good case, but you can poke holes in it, just like any other case, because the information is so incomplete, and what does exist is subject to anonymous redaction, interpolation and outright forgery.

Gregg

Well, you may be able to poke holes in Doherty's case, but they would be very small holes. It is a powerful circumstantial case. Each piece supports and strengthens every other piece, and taken as a whole it explains the available evidence beautifully and points compellingly to, really, only one possible conclusion. This is much different than the historicist case, which is fragmented and relies on rather unconvincing ad hoc arguments, as in my example above. "Why doesn't Paul ever speak of Jesus as a human being?" "Well, because he just wasn't interested in the human Jesus." "So why don't ANY of the epistle writers speak of Jesus as a human being?" "Well, everybody already knew all that stuff and there was no reason to repeat it." And so on.

Gamera

You've slipped on the same evidentiary banana peel as spin does. The mss that constitute the Christian Scriptures are in fact very close in time to Jesus's purported existence. Much closer in time than the mss that attest to Augustus or Socrates are to these historical figures.

You have simply ignored that. Having a mss that is 100 to 200 years within the purported existence of personage during the classic period, along with evidence that those mss were probably copies of much earlier mss, is remarkable evidence for that time.

Like I say, I'm happy to abandon the historicy of Jesus, if using the same standard you abandon the historicity of virtually every historical figure up until the year 1000. Because the ms evidence for Jesus is simply on par with or superior to than the mss evidence for Pericles or a dozen other famous historical characters.

Deal or no deal?

Gamera

You tell me. You're the one using them as evidence for the historicity of the figures on them. Off the top of my head I would think the coins were used for currency, not for recording history. But if you have evidence to the contrary, let us know.

So Uncle Sam is an historical figure now?

GakuseiDon

You are right, of course, and it was a silly thing for me to claim. Mind you, from discussions that I have had with Doherty supporters I suspect that I may not be far from the mark. Like those who believe the claims made about the "pagan copycat" theory, many people read Doherty and accept his claims without looking further into it.

Reread his arguments about why he believes that pagans thought that the stories of their gods were set in another dimension, for example, and you will see few references. He is long on speculation and short on evidence. In some cases, that's fine, simply because there is little evidence in the first place. In other cases, it is NOT fine, because there is evidence against him and he just leaves it out. For example, I can give six examples where "born of a woman" is used to clearly indicate a normal human being. Doherty doesn't give any for the reverse. I can give quite a few references that show that pagans thought that stories of their gods set on earth were performed on earth -- how many references provided by Doherty show stories set up earth were thought by pagans to have occured in another dimension? How many can you remember offhand? My guess would be: zero. And for good reason.

Yes, a lot of people read Doherty on this and find that the picture that he builds up on early Christianity is agreeable. But as I've continually pointed out, this is because Doherty is appealing to modern concepts like "stories set on earth but occuring in another dimension" that simply didn't exist in Paul's day. People who have grown up watching the Twilight Zone understand Doherty very well. I suspect that this is the reason why this particular version of the Christ Myth didn't occur in the 19th C, where most of the others did.

The reason that I picked up on this was because I debated Doherty on Second Century apologists. I had a pretty good idea of how the early Christians decided to attack the pagan gods. There was simply nothing there that was anything like what Doherty was claiming. It seemed an odd omission for Christians trained in Greek philosophy to make. The more I looked at pagan writings themselves, the more it became clear that Doherty was retrojecting modern ideas into early Christian and pagan beliefs.

IYO, why don't any of the early epistle writers write anything about the appearances of Jesus after resurrection? What did Jesus look like? Where did he appear? When did he appear?

Why does the apparent lack of interest in the details about Jesus's life exist in letters going into the Third Century, long after the Gospel accounts were known? Why is it so hard to find historical details about anyone in those letters?

Why do reviewers conclude that Plutarch wrote his book "Parallel Lives" so that "the text might have a timeless rather than a contemporary feel" and that it "strategically aims for an immemorial rather than a time-specific feel"?

These are all important questions, but the first one that should be asked is, does Paul talk about an earthly Jesus? Given the markers that we do have -- "born of woman", "in the flesh", "seed of David", etc -- it can only be on earth. Note that even Doherty now gives some credence to the suggestion that "born of woman" was interpolated to combat Marcionism. But what does that then do to everything that he argued previously???

When I first started debating Doherty, I had a lot of respect for him. I don't have as much now. IMHO Doherty makes these types of strawmen claims far too often. Requests for evidence get turned back as a "failure of imagination" or "you are demanding exacting precision". It's one reason why I decided that there isn't much point debating Doherty anymore.

Try this out for yourself. Find some point where the evidence for him appears weak, or there is evidence against his position, and ask him about it. See if you are happy if the answer is "failure of imagination".

Sure, I agree with you completely. But doesn't that mean we should be even more careful when examining claims about what people in that time believed? As I've repeated, if Doherty wants to claim that Paul had his own unique ideas about Christ, then there is nothing I can do to disprove that. I can pull out a number of examples where "born of woman" indicates humanity, but it still doesn't mean that Paul thought that way. But then going on the evidence at hand we would have to conclude that the evidence sides with historicity. (Of course, in a cumulative case, other evidence may overwhelm such a conclusion).

No, a lot of what he writes is correct.

Here is a challenge, then. Look through Doherty's book for evidence of other descending/ascending redeemer mythology. By evidence, I mean primary or secondary sources, not Doherty's opinions. (If you've followed any of the debates on this board, you've probably seen that one of the criticisms of Doherty is that he misuses secondary sources). Then we can investigate them to see what support there is for Doherty's thesis. Who knows? Maybe I'll convince you or you'll convince me. But let's start looking at the evidence.