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Don't expect Chaucer to. For some reason he has difficulty accepting that possibility and even indirectly accused me of lying about it. I had expressed my agnostic position on the matter after he had shown an inability to allow for the distinction, only to find him insist that I was a mythicist. That's basically when I put him on ignore.


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Tom Sawyer

Ya, how many more times do you want me to say that? Should I make a video of a puppet show of me explaining it or something?

Paul isn't the only source of the Jesus story and the guy is clearly a scammer who exploited the tale for political purposes and did so quite successfully. When I was talking about people doing that, I was pretty much referring to him specifically.

There are two possible explanations of the Jesus story. The first is that it's entirely fictional and the second is that it's loosely based on the life of someone with a lot of mystical elaborations and outright thefts from other mythologies added in. Neither position is based on evidence and can only be taken as a result of rationalizations there is no hope of verifying. I find the notion that it's based on something to be the more logical choice between them, so I go with that.

I also think that Hercules, Jason and Achilles were based on real people. That doesn't mean that I think anyone went around wrestling three-headed dogs in the underworld, though.

GakuseiDon

That isn't the case. There have been quite a few non-theist Jesus historicists posting on this board. Earl Doherty noted this -- pointing out two in particular -- on his website a few years back:
http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/Weimer-Gibson.htm

"Those who have followed this site and my work over the years, including my involvement on various Internet Discussion Boards such as the Internet Infidels, will know that I have encountered considerable opposition from dissenters to my theories on Jesus Mythicism. At times, that opposition has been loud and antagonistic, even rabid. This has included not simply those with confessional interests on the question of Jesus' existence, but others who identify themselves as religiously neutral, even atheistic. Paradoxically, I have found that those who declare themselves in the latter category tend to be among those who react against myself and mythicism with the greatest amount of vitriol and animosity. Why this is so is not clear to me."

I think you may not notice them so much, Chaucer, since there are generally more Jesus mythicists posting regularly on this board.

Also, I think many mythicists are focused on apologists and apologetics (I see so many arguments starting with "Apologists say..." or "Christians say" on this topic, but really WHO CARES), so there are fewer topics for non-theist Jesus historicists to debate on than you might imagine.

GenesisNemesis

I'm a semi-historicist. I think all the supernatural stuff in the Bible probably isn't true. "Probably" is being generous.

Ktotwf

What I find weird about the Historical Jesus/Mythicist Jesus argument is that, for some reason, it is taken as the default neutral stance that a man, Jesus, existed whose life is only testified to in the religious writings of a group specifically promoting his worship (all of which can be easily analyzed as literary works, all of which are contradictory with each other, and all of which promote a separate agenda, and all of which seem to be derived from OT precedent) and who was said to have done dozens of miraculous things.

It strikes me that for ANY poorly attested to "historical" figure who is claimed to have done impossible things, we should be cautious and assume as a starting point that they DID NOT exist. The burden of proof should be on the HJers, not the MJers. Apparently, however, because society has accepted the HJ hypothesis on faith for 2000 years, the burden of proof shifted in most people's minds, which is absurd.

I recently asked the Professor of my Buddhism class what historical evidence there is about the Buddha's ACTUAL life. He said, "Not very much." I said, "Well then, is there skepticism as to his historicity?" He replied, "I haven't seen any. I guess you can be skeptical about anything though." What?!! That strikes me as the sort of level of "skeptical" thinking that is applied to nearly ANY religious figure.

I'd like to see a real effort to find out who the historical Xenu is. I don't believe in the whole transporting billions of aliens to earth and blowing them up in Volcanoes bit, but it seems obvious to me that there has to be SOME kind of figure named Xenu to serve as the powerful origin of the myth, or else why would Tom Cruise continue to believe?

aa5874

Once you admit you have no evidence then there are many many possibilities, not just two.

But, there is information that clearly shows that the Church writers and the authors of the NT presented Jesus as a God or the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God who created the world, was transfigured, resurrected and ascended to heaven.

There can be NO physical evidence of non-existence only a description that matches mythology. And Jesus of the NT is a perfect match. A myth like Zeus and Apollo.

Minimalist

I'm curious...do you also think that Zeus, Odin, Osiris, Baal, etc., are also based on real people?

Xtians usually resort to special pleading on that score.

spin

Going from what he wrote -- he is after all our primary source for the beginning of christianity -- there is no reason to believe that he was simply "exploiting the tale". It could easily be that he was the initiator of the messiah-already-come trope, the savior in Jewish garb.

And why must you assume that he was a scammer? Is that the only possibility you can conceive of for someone touting a religion? Are the nutjobs who come knocking at your door to bring you Jesus scammers?

If you reduce motivations in such a trivial way, will you give yourself an opportunity of understanding what you are trying to talk about or is it not your intent to understand it?

Will people ever stop being sloppy with their language??

In the context of traditions such as the religious tradition we are dealing with it is usually inappropriate to use "fictional". By using terminology in an over-generalized way you reduce the analytical possibilities so as to be oblivious of much of the necessary discussion in the field.

To call something fictional in the context of religious tradition is quite different from calling it mythological. Fiction deals with literary invention, which is usually inappropriate for traditions. Myth deals with religious explanation. To work with the banal notion of someone making something up just shows a lack of seriousness regarding the subject.

There are people who flog the notion that the Romans made up christianity, one writer imagines that it was Josephus and the Flavian dynasty who invented the religion. There are others who think the central salvific act of christianity to have been perceived as operating on a celestial plane and not in this world. The first is fictional; the second is mythic.

Neither of these two are convincing to me. I have proposed as another approach the possibility that Paul, working in the context of both mystery religions (Mithra was very popular in Anatolia) and Jewish messianism, had a vision in which he saw the salvific act of Jesus (like that of other mystery religions). That vision was probably not of divine inspiration, but perhaps either a psychotic break or a dream that left him in a state of confusion.

Paul has almost no Jesus story for you to build your real guy behind the crap approach. He just has to accept inherited notions of his messiah being of the seed of David and born (like all saviors) in order to perform his tasks. Beyond that Paul is no help for you to hang a real guy on. You have to give primacy to the gospels, yet they were written long after Paul, perhaps long enough for more traditions to be accreted, ie all that stuff you want to rationalize as a good chance of being real, but about which you are fundamentally clueless.

Once you have a figure in an active tradition, you are likely to find more accretions over time. Some time before Tertullian was writing, someone made the wrong assumption that the Ebionite movement was founded by someone called Ebion, so Tertullian argues against the fictitious Ebion and, by the time Epiphanius was writing, Ebion had a home town and disciple traditions. You would come along and accept that Ebion probably had a real core. And be wrong.

The proposal that Paul was the initiator of christianity based on his experience of a revelation is neither fictional nor mythical, so neither term in any strict sense is appropriate. I don't believe that this is how christianity started. I don't know. But it seems more reasonable to me than either fiction or myth. I think Paul thought Jesus was real. That disqualifies both terms.

The use of "fictional" as a catch-all for non-historical analyses doesn't give you a chance to see the range available. Others use "mythological" as you use "fictional" and the range of analysis is missed. Chaucer here lumps everything into two camps, historical and fictional, so that all other choices are denied.

One doesn't need to decide and by not deciding you are more open to better data. People tend to channel their thinking once they have decided and they maintain positions long after they are untenable.

But such thought is of no explanatory power whatsoever... at least in the context of christianity.


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DrZoidberg

There's a whole academic field (mythology) that study origins of myths. Even though it's impossible to say for sure, there's probably a real person (or archetype of a group of real people) at the core of every mythic human-like entity. But this person is obviously so far removed from, let's say Poseidon, that any knowledge of the real person will tell us next to nothing about the god modelled on them.

Hindu gods reincarnations are all placed in history, since they have all been born into this world by human parents, and most often led remarkable lives.

spin

What happens when mythological narratives are based on astronomical events, say the apparent death of the son, or agricultural phenomena, such as the withering of crops in the late autumn? Is there a real person behind the Persephone story?? Is there real people behind the battle between Marduk and Tiamat?




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