Rick Sumner

Do you honestly think you can fairly compare Wells or Doherty to Drews? Have you actually bothered to read Drews? I'd suggest that Drews is pretty handily rebutted.

Which goes back to my point. Academics are answering the issues they are aware of. Unless you suggest there is a strong proponent of academia, particularly in relation to the historical Jesus, writing on this board. I haven't seen them, but who knows, they might be here under pseudonyms.

You can't fault them for not dealing with issues they aren't even aware exist.

This is where you're getting confused. They are up on their field. Should Doherty count? I'd give it to him that he probably should. But whether he should or not, the cold reality is that he doesn't.

The Jesus Myth theory is not part of their field at this juncture, just like the Farrer-Goulder-Goodacre hypothesis was not part of Kloppenborg's field at the time of his writing. The theory existed, it just didn't count, and he was under no obligation, nor did anyone have any right to expect him, to address theories that weren't getting any serious attention.

Doherty, like it or not, is a non-entity in their field. For better or for worse comparing Doherty to Crossan is akin to comparing King Kong to a spider monkey. You can't fault Crossan for not dealing with an issue that isn't even on his radar.

And that is your confusion, you think because the issue is obvious to you, it should be obvious to them. Reality check: This is a niche board that pays a great deal of attention to a fringe theory. It's easy to think it's obvious from here.

Once you leave here, and enter an academic world, it seems a lot less obvious. One does not walk out of an SBL conference, out of reading a major journal, out of reading any book published by any major peer-reviewed imprint with the impression that the Jesus Myth matters. Rightly or wrongly, it doesn't matter to academia.

You can't fault people for failing to argue a case that they have no reason to expect to be challenged on. Like, again, Kloppenborg and Q. If he wrote the book now, it would be a glaring omission. When he wrote it, not that long ago, it wasn't an omission at all.

I believe that you and I are discussing a specific case. A specific quote you made, and my specific charge that the bit I cited from you was no more or less accurate or justified than what he was saying.

If you'd like to get off the soapbox and stop waving the flag of "mythicists everywhere," at least for purposes of our discussion, you'll probably find the dots connect better.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

aa5874

You are not making sense. People who claim Jesus was only human simply cannot produce any evidence for their human only Jesus. These HJers have failed to address their own problem.

It is evident that the NT and Church writings propagate a mythical God/man, the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God who transfigured, resurrected and ascended through the clouds.

No HJer can use the NT and Church writings as a source for their human only Jesus.

External of the NT and Church writings, the word Jesus the Messiah is unknown. There is no record of a Messiah called Jesus during the reign of Tiberius.

The HJer has problems but can't address them.

Perhaps, they can say Jesus existed but all the information about the human only Jesus has been lost.

HJers have rejected the description of Jesus in the NT and Church writings and have just proceeded to fabricate from their imagination, a Jesus of their own design, believing without any evidence that their fabrication is true because their Jesus is plausible.

But, they are re-inventing the wheel. The HJers are repeating history.

The Jesus of the NT was just as plausible to people of antiquity as the human only Jesus that they have fabricated from nothing but plausibility.

It would appear that people tend to believe in Plausible Gods. When the Pagan Gods were no longer plausible they were rejected and the plausible God/man Jesus took their place.


I think Marcion was right, Jesus only appeared to be real, but he was not. And his father was not the God of the Jews, he had no father. Jesus was just an idea.

Toto

I'm not sure why you think I rest my case on Drews. RT France wrote specifically to rebut Wells. His effort was well written, well reasoned, and totally unpersuasive, since he had to assume that the gospels have a historical core. So the academy knows about the issue, and surely should know that the case for a historical Jesus does not have a solid foundation.

I think this is a cop out. The academy knows that the issue exists. But the issue makes most academics uncomfortable.

It apparently was on his radar, since he had something to say about it.

I know that it doesn't matter to academia. No one will get tenure for addressing the issue. But I think it is more a matter of sweeping the issue under the rug than actually having dealt with it.

Apparently you walked into the middle of a long conversation and thought you knew what was going on.

Then you decided that I had made some unwarranted assumptions and felt free to compare that to believing that 2+2=6.

That's okay. It would not, in fact, be a good use of your time to read everything that Chaucer has posted here.

Rick Sumner

You said the JM has been around for a century. Neither RT France nor Wells were around then. Drews was. Drews *was* fairly rebutted, so your charge that the JM hasn't been treated fairly ever is silly. Perhaps you're disappointed that nobody has addressed the JM as you now understand it. That doesn't mean that it has been ignored for a century.

Not only do they know it exists, but it makes them uncomfortable too!

And they're the ones making assumptions?

Did he have anything to say about the Jesus Myth idea proposed by, for example, Earl Doherty? Anything that would distinguish Doherty from, say, Drews? Anything to show that he is aware that such a Jesus Myth theory exists?

Which is the universal response of the fringe theorist. In every discipline.

We can't just say that "The mainstream shuns him!" and call that good.

Arnel is all but a mythicist. Thompson. Mack. They got published.

Macdonald's theories are fringe. Goulder's were fringe. They got published. MacDonald's theories were, so far as I know, panned by reviewers in every discipline he touches. Yet they still got published. They still received peer-review. Negative peer-review, but peer-review nonetheless.

Allegro was fringe. Golb is fringe. Yet they got published.

Want to know something interesting about these scholars?

Many of them claim the same thing. A conspiracy of the majority. The tyranny of the mainstream. Christ, Golb says it every second page.

But even if they didn't convert the mainstream, they still got published. They still got their hearing.

Christ even Thiering managed to warrant critical review, and has published in peer-reviewed journals. And she's obviously a crackpot.

So saying that it's some great conspiracy of the mainstream, that is the copout. There is no conspiracy. There is a combination of a lack of effort and too many bad theories.

When was the last time Doherty so much as submitted a paper to a mainstream journal? Why don't you ask him.

You're getting confused again. You assume that because I am commenting in the middle of a long conversation, I must be commenting on the entirety of the conversation. It's the same bad reasoning you used with your century of Jesus-Mythicism.

I did read it. I don't really see a need to address it, since I don't have anything to add that hasn't already been said.

I did not, however, say anything to you about the broader context of your discussion.

aa5874

Where is the evidence for the mainstream theory that Jesus was only human? Why do you think Jesus was human by default?

If you claim JM theories are fringe and not good, then you must have strong and overwhelming evidence to show that the human only Jesus lived.

Everyone understands the mainstream theory, now it is time to put forward the mainstream evidence.

spin

Do me a favor, Rick: cite one major archaeologist in the field publishing on Qumran besides Jodi Magness, who doesn't have sympathy for some of the positions that Golb has espoused.

Oh, I guess you can call in Hanan Eshel the text scholar who poses as an archaeologist or his mate Magen Broshi. They work as a team inventing stupid ideas (such as the Essenes lived in the caves that have disappeared to account for the fact that there is no evidence on the ground for any Essenes) and such convenient idiocies to smooth over the "we've got nothing to show for 50 years of (apparently) unwarranted dominance".

Humbert, who published de Vaux's notes, disagrees with the archaeology only to pull a rabbit out of his hat to say that they Essene were there later. Hirchfeld obviously totally disagreed with all the previous archaeology. The Donceels, who were employed to analyse the full contents of de Vaux's materials, disagree. Magen and Peleg, who have been working at Qumran for the last 10 years, disagree.


spin

Rick Sumner

Somehow I knew this would get your dander up. I suppose I should probably point out that Golb's positions are not all archaeological in nature, and that his over-arching theory, while gaining support, is still a far cry from a majority position.

If it'll make you feel better, I'll say it "was" fringe, rather than "is" fringe.

I also didn't say Golb was wrong. Nor, for that matter, do I think he is. I'd endorse something of a variation of his theory. But that would be another topic for another thread.

Being a fringe theory doesn't make it a wrong theory. I listed Goulder in the list of fringe scholars too. I'm on record dozens of times stating that Goulder is fundamentally correct. I may not agree with his suggestion that Luke is to be read liturgically, I do agree that Luke used Matthew.

Don't worry spin, I'm not about to defend the Essene Hypothesis. Take a deep breath.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

spin

I'm not too interested in the man and his opinions, but the fact that those that he has embraced related to archaeology are certainly not what anyone but Jodi Magness would try to call fringe. Golb doesn't really do too much text crunching.

I'd call it sublimated.

And I didn't say you did.

(But then I think he hasn't got a leg to stand on.)

I'm not worried. I just don't allow such trivializing get gotten away with here. When one group has hegemony over the means of expression, as christianity has had, as conservatives have had in the scrolls field, the whole subject suffers. (To understand the issue, just look at the means of expression with regard to the Iraq war.) It's very easy to decimate any nascent contrary ideas when you have hegemony. Your trivialization of Drews reflects the trivialization of the time, but it doesn't really say much. Hegemony says that it is sufficient to denegrate the opposition (call them that happy little category "fringe" for example, or "anti-American"); you don't need to be able to respond sufficiently.


spin

Rick Sumner

There is no trivializing, particularly not of Golb. My very point is that simply pointing to the tyranny of the majority as a reason for people to be unfamiliar with a branch of study--particuarly for them to not have the depth of familiarity Toto implies, doesn't cut it.

Whether you call it sublimated or fringe, the fact remains that Golb did get published. Even Thiering has managed that. Doherty hasn't tried particularly hard to do so, by his own admission.

Which goes back to my original point with Toto, you can't make assumptions about what knowledge or level inquiry a scholar has preformed without having reasonable grounds to expect them to share it.

It's not, for example, Crossan's fault that he hasn't heard of Doherty. He's simply not going to show up in any bibliography Crossan is likely to be looking at, and consequently we can't draw any conclusions from Crossan's failure to address Doherty.

I agree. That does nothing to help Toto's charge, which is that the academy knows of Jesus Myth theories that they fail to address. Even that we should expect to find a case laid out by every academic who publishes on the historical Jesus. And that, consequently, anyone who fails to do so has simply assumed it.

I'm afraid I find that line of reasoning to be silly.

If you think Drews was trivialized in his time one must wonder how familiar you are with the actual events. Drews was involved in a great many public debates, warranted great and hearty response from the academy.

The revision of Schweitzer's Quest I mention above that deals with the Christ Myth does so exclusively by addressing Drews. The man earned a whole chapter. The same treatment, for example, that Schweitzer accords Strauss.

The seriousness Schweitzer accorded Drews is representative of what most of his contemporaries afforded him.

The charge that the Jesus Myth has always been ignored is simply false. Drews was quite certainly not ignored.

I say Drews was handled because he was. That's the simple reality of it. His case hinges too heavily on Frazer's "dying and rising" god category, which simply didn't exist in the sense that Frazer, and later Drews, thought it did.

Have you, like Toto, perhaps not bothered to actually read Drews?

Call the category whatever you want, it doesn't matter, and I don't mean "fringe" derisively. We can give it any name your little heart desires. The fact remains that, contra Toto, we cannot make conclusions based on an author's failure to address a subject when that author cannot reasonably expect his audience or his peers to challenge him on the conclusion.

It is, for example, the reason the International Q project doesn't build an argument for Q. It's assumed that the target audience and the participants all accept that Q exists.

So it is here. Crossan (to keep with the same example) has probably never read Doherty's book, and has no reason to believe that many of his target audience have ever heard of Earl Doherty. Consequently, it would be more bizarre for Crossan to respond to the argument than it would be for him not to.

Trog

I didn't find the part in this thread where it was set forth what, exactly, a Jesus Mythicist is (though I'll admit, I did have problems with my eyes glassing over for some stretches). Was there some agreement on this term reached prior to this thread? I'm new here, so I'm not familiar with all the established terms of art.

I thought I was a Jesus Mythicist, because to me the stories of BibleJesus (fish-multiplying, beverage-converting, fig-wilting, death-curing, water-walking, self-resurrecting, semi-god) sound qualitatively just like the tall tales of Achilles, Merlin, Paul Bunyan, and assorted other super-guys I consider mythical. Isn't that the essence of mythicism? (I mean, aside from apparently being a degenerate menace to science, civilization and all.)

Do I believe Josephus refers to a person who went by the name of Jesus? My understanding is that he refers to several. But even if all questions of authenticity are set aside, my next question would be where his information came from. And even if that question is set aside, I see he has a Jesus, brother of a James, a Jesus who led an uprising, and a Jesus who was scourged and brought before Pilate, all of which arguably have some ordinary bits in common with BibleJesus. I've also heard there are extra-Biblical references to a magician Jesus (or Yeshua) who traveled about with disciples. My conclusion? I would say the preponderance of evidence is that there were probably a fair number of people in that place and time named Jesus, Joses, Joseph, Jesuph, Yeshua, Joshua, Jehoshua, and all the other local variations on "Joe". And some of them could easily have had ordinary attributes in common with BibleJesus. I'll even grant that various mundane particulars of some of these Joes could have been absorbed into an amalgamated BibleJesus legend along with a heaping helping of miracles, magic, and supernaturalism (parts of which may have been borrowed from other myths). So does that mean I'm not a Jesus Mythicist after all? Is my willingness to grant there was almost certainly at least one person named Jesus, or equivalent, back then all that is needed to put me in the "historical" Jesus camp?

By the same token, if I accept that there was an actual Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, would that put me in the "historical" Santa Claus camp?