mountainman

But John does not expressly talk about any specific class of heresy. He simply talks about these "deceivers" who were characterised by their failure to confess that "Jesus" (i.e. the HJ) had "appeared in the flesh". He also calls them "antichrist". The purpose of "John" here, I think, is to discuss the biggest future heresy of them all. The controversy of the historical nature of Jesus, and whether in fact he "appeared in the flesh". Here is what "John" says:


The evidence does not support an EARLY mass conversion of the populace to John's religion, so we might be confident in assuming that when John said there were many such people in the world who did not believe that an historical jesus existed, he was right.

I don't feel competent to argue the point with historicists because of the vacuum of evidence. A perfect vacuum has been obtained in the first century in both political and church heresiological history, so I dont know what tools the historicists can use to try and separate, and classify and categorise these multitudes of John's "deceivers". Heresies appear abundantly - according to contemporary chronology - in the second century, including Gnostic docetic acts and gospels. But the first century stands a multitude of "John's deceivers". Seems simple enough.

Just as I consider the ahistoricists to be a subset of the mythicists, so do I consider the "docetists" (as they evolve from "Eusebius" to Nag Hammadi) also to be a subset of the mythicists. I think it is also within reason to explore the rough equation between the "mythicists" and John's "deceivers". And also that between these and the non christian Gnostics.

Thanks for your thoughts Doug.

I wonder whether historicists argue that these "deceivers" of John, were just "Heretical Christians" in disguise as "Orthodox HJ Christians"?

Best wishes,


Pete

Yellum Notnef

Perhaps Chaucer is embarrassed that many of his fellow HJ warriors DO believe in a magical Jesus?
IMO the magical Jesus believers should be the only ones to get so fired up over this. The rest of the people here who aren't dreaming of sky pie should forget this shit and get on with their lives.

I'll go one step further and say that an atheist forum shouldn't even waste time debating Christian nonsense. If we aren't believers then it's time to move on.

Toto

Hi Fenton: I see you can't keep your eyes off this forum.

Evangelical Christians who recruit unsuspecting students into cults such as Campus Crusade for Christ start off by saying that historians all agree that Jesus really existed, and then move on to "but what if it's true?" Are you going to cede all that ground to them?

Yellum Notnef

And how many times have we heard from Christians that because we talk about it so much it must mean we really deep down believe it?
You can't argue with crazy.

GakuseiDon

I am wary of the use of the words "proof" and "know" on this forum, since "can you prove it?" and "how do you know?" are usually followed by "But what about Ned Ludd? So you can't prove it, and you don't know." I'll demonstrate that shortly if I get a chance.

Sure, that would be a way. I thought you meant "Even though we have no evidence that anyone questioned the historicity of Jesus, how do we know that no-one did?" My response is we don't know; all we have is this piece of data. It doesn't prove anything in itself; however it needs to be taken into consideration when evaluation the case for the best explanation, a cumulative case.

A hypothesis is built on observations. An observation is not proof of anything other than being datum for the hypothesis. But this doesn't make the observation meaningless. To invalidate a hypothesis because each observation in itself doesn't prove the hypothesis (as one poster put it, a "chain of zeroes") is a ridiculous position to hold. I hope you don't hold to this.

Frank

Interesting comment. However, doesn't the vacuum of evidence apply even more profoundly to the first century as compared to the second? We have some manuscripts that reach back to the second century, but reaching back much further it becomes exceedingly attenuated and murky (at least that's my understanding). It becomes more like Irenaeus, quoting from Papius, tells us X, Y, and Z happened. X is sort of plausible (and aligns with other bits of information we have), but Y and Z are not (or even by Christian standards, they're considered mythic).

Where did gnostics come from? Did they just pop up in the second century out of nowhere, or is there some history we're simply not aware of? It's clear that some of their doctrines were based in the second century (and were derived from a blending with Greek and other myths), but we have some scattered information about early Jewish Christians that give us a very mixed (and ambiguous) message regarding what they believed (and there's hints that they may have held some gnostic like beliefs). There was some tension between Paul and Jewish Christians (which is even presented to some degree in the New Testament, notwithstanding it seems pretty white-washed). There was obviously a strong counter-Christian movement among Jews (which seemed to gain more and more steam as more Jews were pushed out of Palestine, but we also learn something about this tension in the New Testament).

We go from a bare bones gospel of Mark (our early manuscripts even lack a resurrection story, much less details like Roman guards at the tomb, a conspiracy among Jewish leaders to suppress the resurrection story, mass resurrections, and so on). The epistles of Peter are generally believed to be pseudepigraphs. If Mark was a companion of Peter, then it seems pretty hard to believe that he would omit such important facts (while in other instances including pretty mundane stuff)? Matthew was most likely not a document translated from a native Jewish language into Greek (as was once believed), and it seems pretty unlikely that its author was a native of Palestine (much less an original apostle).

When you put this all together, it seems clear that what we have from the first century, is not very much. It was once believed that Peter wrote the epistles attributed to him, it was once believed that Matthew was an apostle (and his gospel translated from a Hebrew original), the idea that these documents were altered was never seriously investigated (after they were canonized). Today these presuppositions have yielded to modern methods of textual criticism (and they've become largely implausible).

The aforementioned formed a substantial part of the basis upon which authenticity of these documents was premised on. At this point historians have sort of withdrawn themselves from the game (and the scholarship is almost exclusively generated by experts in biblical history, and associated disciplines). Bart Ehrman is somewhat unique, because he offers a wealth of knowledge about this subject (the type of academic background almost exclusively held by people who are theologically commited to Christianity, and whose only scholarly goal is to defend the authenticity of these documents, not to conduct an unbiased investigation that simply follows the evidence wherever it may lead). Right off the bat we can say that Ehrmans' original motivation for gaining this expertise was in conflict with what he discovered (which makes his work immensely more credible compared to others in his field).

Chaucer

To paraphrase your own terminology, that's bullshit. Look, in my country, it just so happens that half the educational textbooks for kids happen to be produced in Texas. Texas is the most culturally backward place in the U.S., maybe in all of North and South America. The result is that textbooks are being generated that give appallingly ignorant woo about science as well as some other academic disciplines that are judged fit only for sissies in this cowboy culture, but that are actually essential to pulling this country's children out of a cesspool of know-nothing nonsense that becomes a virtual fetish in our pop culture.

No wonder creationism has grown such legs here, when the know-nothings are in charge of circulating the "truth" to the next generation. Any phony bullshit on any serious academic discipline, be it on science or history or paleography or whatever, is every rationalist's concern, because it robs from the hope that our next generation will have a clearer perspective on all modern research than the current bamboozled one does. Mytherism is phony history for many reasons, one important reason among many being that it deals in dogmatic certainties, a la fundies, rather than a balance of likelihoods, which is how professional peer-reviewed academic historical research is properly done.

Because a rationalist's proper concern is the woo that is being purveyed our grandchildren on all fronts, it is essential that this new generation not have its brains filled by nonsense that thoroughly falsifies the way all modern research in all modern academic disciplines is done.

Chaucer

Toto

But if that piece of data is not evidence for your hypothesis, it does not add to your cumulative case. In another thread on this forum, PhilosopherJay has opined that fictional characters are commonly assumed to be historic after a generation. I don't know what this is based on, and I don't know what you basis you have for using the fact that no one we know about treated Jesus as a fictional character as evidence for historicity.

What is so ridiculous as accumulating "evidence" that is irrelevant to the issue and then claiming that there is a cumulative case in favor of your hypothesis?

Yellum Notnef

Where do you imagine I'm from?

Chaucer

I can't imagine. But I can imagine that your education in the various ways that serious professional historians research history was anywhere from appalling to nonexistent.

Chaucer