krosero

In some of this it's unclear when "you" refers to me and when it refers generally to HJers, but I'll give this a shot.

It's true that the MJer approaches the same text before it is bowdlerized by HJ modeling; but an HJer approaches the same text before it is bowdlerized by MJ modeling. This hardly allows us to choose between the two. If, however, you're implying that the MJ'er approaches from a clean starting point without suppositions (and does not read problematic suppositions into the text), then we just have a simple difference of opinion, and quite an old one even if I'm not sure how exactly to name the schools of thought here.

I have hardly been doing history in this thread, because I did not want to start a thread for people to debate the details one more time; that's why the Nazareth question didn't hook me at all. Here I was just interested in the meta-issues, the philosophy of history, so to speak. But I'm actually deeply interested in the details of history. I agree with you that merely applying value judgments is no way to do history. Whether you agree with me or not, MJ's have values that they read into the texts (everyone, incidentally, must read into texts) -- not uniform values, but values nonetheless. It's a discussion of these that I'd like to have or to bring to the surface, before another discussion of historical details.

spin

The interesting thing is that the HJers quite easily find material to throw out as "mythical", for want of a better word at the moment. I can't find a single historical fact in the central theses of the literature to throw out.

I have never asked you to choose between the two. As a fence sitter, how could I?

I see a nice dialectic at the moment. The MJer has a lot of received biased that needs to be removed, as well as any "innate" bias of the MJer. The claims of historicity for the other side has been around for a very long time without ever attempting to do the hard work of pressing that historicity. I can see the two honing their positions in the years to come. I don't see that a synthesis will come out of it though.

HJism is a sloppy attempt to do history.

What people don't notice is the explanatory power of the Nazareth issue for understanding the development of the texts, which is the major issue for me.

Then I find it hard for you to apparently push in favour of HJism.

Have fun.


spin

freigeister

What mythicists do is throw out the central thesis of the literature (ie. the historicity of the man Christ) because it contains some mythical elements.

The central thesis of the literature in question is the historicity of the man Christ. To deny that the literature bears witness to this as an historical fact is like saying the Plato's works do not bear witness to the historicity of Socrates. The only question in both cases is whether they are true representations of the facts. To measure the truth of the facts as presented in the documents requires the application of critical methodology. No established critical methodology confirms the mythicist case, and mythicism has yet to articulate a coherent methodology of its own.

spin

How do you extract any history out of the texts? What are your historical methods for doing so with unprovenanced texts, whose authorship you don't know, when they were written you don't know, and whose contents yield no overt indication of historicity?

This doesn't make much sense. And I have little interest in the historicity of Socrates, which is a red herring here.

I'd would say the only question here is whether the information can be shown to have happened. I don't go for notions of "true", nor do I think that one can necessarily show that some specific event which happened actually happened. This is a crucial problem. We lose a lot of material for "historical reclamation" because we simply lack enough data. This means t hat there is often no way to separate things that happened from those that didn't.

Critical methodology? Do you mean historical methodology? If not, I don't think you are saying anything useful. If so, I'd like you to demonstrate your results.


spin

freigeister

As I have stated before, I hold to the principle of hermeneutic analysis established by Spinoza:


This is the heart of all valid textual analysis.

As Spinoza says, we can evaluate the text only according to itself. There is no other methodology. That is why mythicists cannot articulate one. What mythicists can do is formulate an hypothesis and then examine the documents to see how well the hypothesis is sustained. The question they wish to have answered is this: does the Bible support the hypothesis that Jesus never lived? The problem is that this hypothesis is not drawn from the text itself: the text nowhere claims that Jesus never lived. Spinoza, in contrast, examines the Bible from the perspective of its own avowed intention: to cultivate virtue.


As for results, I think the analyses offered by Spinoza and Brunner provide a perfect understanding of the Bible.

spin

You are not answering my question. And this information doesn't support your earlier claims. Please try again without the subterfuge.

Waffling is not at the heart of anything tangible.

Spinoza was a meddler in that waste of time known in inverted commas as "philosophy". Not that I'm against philosophical analyses, as I seem to have to make them. "Philosophy", however, that generic beast, is usually a set of assumptions on approaching the world that never can be validated objectively.

Virtue is irrelevant to what happened in the past. Please tie a rope around your leg and attach it to something big, until you come down. We are interested in the past: remember you were attempting to talk of the "historicity of the man Christ". You won't do so with Spinoza.

Avowed intentions are not necessarily either real intentions or pointers to the viable content of a text.

As I said: "I don't think you are saying anything useful."

You were making claims about history earlier. Your response here takes no step to give you any hope of making historical statements.

You can preach to yourself and be happy, but when you attempt to communicate you have to use a language that others must accept. Evidence is by its nature an ostensibly objective means of communicating your position in such a way as to show that you have some reasoning for it.


spin

freigeister

While you are vociferous in your attack on the methodology I have put forward, you are coy about discussing what you would put in its place. You do say:

From this, I would guess that you hold to the "hermeneutics of suspicion":

In his work, Freud and Philosophy, Ricoeur states that, "three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud."

This paper summarizes the outlook on religion of each of these three masters of suspicion.

This paper (payment required) deconstructs each of the three to show the inconsistencies of their own hermeneutic. (David Stewart, "The Hermeneutics of Suspicion," Journal of Literature and Theology 3 (1989): 296-307.)

spin

Oh christ, Ricoeur. We're off the beam into religious wonderland.

We are supposed to be dealing with historical evidence. It is not a matter of "suspicion". One justifies each step one asserts based on historical evidence. This yields a relatively simple legal-scholarly approach to the matters to be dealt with. Suspicion is just your muddying of the waters. If you want to believe what you believe without the necessity of historical evidence, then fine, but this leads to your epistemology being questioned if you want to communicate with other people. Responding by plummeting into the obscurities of (religiously b[i]ased) hermeneutics, will not change your epistemological responsibilities when dealing with others.

Your response above imputes that you are not interested in communicating in a manner which is as objective as possible. You have put no methodology forward. You have merely cited others' presumed methodologies, which is not communicative. You have avoided actually demonstrating or defending your position.

In dealing with texts from the period we are ostensibly looking at, one cannot indulge in assuming one knows what type of text we are confronted with. Such facetious terms as Ricoeur's "hermeneutics of suspicion" show no consciousness the task facing us, as does your summing up earlier of a citation of Spinoza as "This is the heart of all valid textual analysis", especially when the citation refers solely to "Scripture", a tacit admission of abandoning one's objectivity. I don't really wish to attack Spinoza generally despite a few earlier comments of mine, but textual analysis has developed enormously since Spinoza's day and you should probably get an update in the various fields including linguistics and philology.

Please, freigeister, if you want to indulge in history (as you seem to want to do with such phrases as "the historicity of the man Christ"), use safe historical methods based on evidence in a manner that attempts to be objective.

And to help me understand your position, when you are confronted with a text such as the epic of Gilgamesh (or Le Morte d'Arthur), would you wish to talk of the "the historicity of the man X" (where X might be Humbaba or Lancelot or the like)?

If you still care to give a coherent analysis underlying your use of the notion "the historicity of the man Christ", please feel free to do so, remembering your audience and its need for a semblance of objectivity, for without that attempt at objectivity, you can share nothing that has much opportunity to communicate.


spin

freigeister

Hey, you're the one who called them "tradition literature". Again I ask, according to what methodology do you so classify them?

Please provide examples that specifically illustrate how Spinoza's hermeneutical method has been superceded.

Another recent discussion on this board discusses historical methodology, and cites a Wikipedia article. All the methodologies mentioned here are derived directly from Spinoza's work, and indeed the Wikipedia article on Spinoza specifically states that, "[h]e is considered the founder of modern Biblical criticism". For a guy who insists on his devotion to history, you sure seem dismissive of the history of historical inquiry.

How odd that you would bring this up after having churlishly dismissed my comparison of Christ to Socrates. Nevertheless, the answer is the same: we must apply everything we know of the documents. I am not sufficiently well informed about the two works you have mentioned to assess the historicity of the personages in question. I can say unequivocably that, based on what I know of the Bible, Christ indeed lived.

Let me be clear. There is no way for me to prove Christ's historicity to you. The reason is that the proof can only come from an accurate reading of the documents; and I cannot, in the end, force you to read the documents accurately.

freigeister

You make a mistake in your review of Allen. Eliot [1819-1880] never translated Bultmann (1884-1976). Eliot translated Strauss, Feuerbach, and Spinoza.

And as for Charlotte Allen, she engages in the Conservative strategy of attributing the search for the "human Jesus" to those wacky radicals of the Enlightenment. Nevermind that most "Enlightenment" figures were very anxious to preserve Christ's divinity. I suggest you read Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment. Israel makes it very clear that it was Spinoza that introduced the notion of the human Jesus to Western civilization, and that this has been resisted by almost everyone. Allen simply doesn't have the chops to accurately assess the situation. Even Israel stops short of Kant, the real architect of the resistance to Spinoza. I heartily recommend Constantin Brunner's Spinoza gegen Kant (translated into French as Spinoza contra Kant, and I have in my possession an unpublished English translation).