spin

I have challenged everyone on this forum to cough up the goods on a historical Jesus. Everyone. Yet in the end every one of those professors of historicity have gone into the eveningtide with neither anything to show for their professing nor the honesty to admit that they are full of it. Why should Jesus Mythicism be any different? The professors of that belief have a good model to follow.

Like what? The assumption that story means history? Hey, we've got a book! What else? Zip.

So where's all this historical evidence that needs to be explained away? In your wishful thinking, right? Or perhaps you have some non-historical evidence that should be considered?

Historical Jesusism is just the latest attempt of otherwise rational beings to justify their personal foibles.

Reactions against Jesus Mythicism are eminently entertaining. Numerous religious people seem to find the notion so repulsive that they must take the obligatory swing at it. But it's really a young idea. It hasn't got the benefit of the millenia of subterfusion that deflect believers from seeing their chosen (or inherited) beliefs for the vacuousness they are. Give Jesus Mythicism a bit of time and reserve your swing, so that either they come up with something more substantial or have developed a more substantial propaganda machine to start to rival the prevalent religion, then your swing will give you more pleasure.

Remember, you read about it here and not many other places, because of a cultural notion described by Gramsci as hegemony. Society's individuals have been so mentally colonized that they scorn things that don't fit their limiting constructs of the received world model. With respect to religious analyses such as Jesus Mythicism members of this forum don't bear the burden of hegemony. That allows it to flourish here, for what that's worth.

As you may know I don't accept any of the positions on the subject of the existence of Jesus, as I don't think there's enough evidence to decide, but to me your shot at Jesus Mythicism seems merely like throwing stones in a mirror. Evidence has never been one of your strong points, preferring
untrained religiously motivated language commentators to scholars in the field in your own personal folly, so you should appreciate the irony of you talking about anyone else explaining away evidence. Not knowing anything about language aren't you just as fundamentalist as anyone you want to deflect the label onto? It's not the evidence that matters, but what those who you believe tell you.


spin

Chaucer

For one thing, Antiq. 20 is not part of any developing tradition. It is a secular unsympathetic chronicle of historic happenings on the ground.

I was responding to Toto's mischaracterization (since refined) of the strictly human Jesus model as coming only from theologians, when it simply doesn't.

When the social consequences get dire enough for enough people, no matter how far down on the totem pole, anarchy follows sooner or later. We're only at the start of this meltdown now. And it is, after all, a global meltdown. We have yet to play this whole thing out. The jury's still out on doctrinaire capitalism. It could still go the way of doctrinaire socialism in the 1980s. Watch this story............

Chaucer

Clivedurdle

I thought I was making an off topic comment by responding to this, but maybe I am not.

Humanity is actually incredibly co-operative - body language, reading others' emotions, talking with each other, rearing children, teaching, building families, communities and societies.

For various reasons, the existence of war and strife and "evil" we have assumed - with religious underpinnings - that we are sinful and not able to love each other.

But this is false. Heroes like Jesus may in fact be stories we tell to spread co-operative ways.

May I introduce hear a word wordy showed me.

http://www.eupraxophy.org/

spin

I gather this is a veiled reference to the James passage which in turn is apparently based on a misunderstanding of a number of comments by Origen and scribal intervention has created a reference to Jesus where none was in the original text. Origen merely tells us that Josephus didn't believe in Jesus, not that he mentioned him. Josephus does mention a James though, who Origen had equated with a brother of Jesus. Hence the innocent interpolation.

I have also pointed out in the past here that the contorted description of James as "the brother of Jesus called messiah, James by name" is so unlike anything written by Josephus in that though Jesus is placed before the subject of the comment, he hadn't been mentioned before, a construction Josephus doesn't do, especially when a brotherly connection is relatively rare, for Jewish tradition was to supply the father.

So people like the Jesus Seminar were not trying to palm off a strictly human model of Jesus?

Unfortunately, riots and aggression and other signs of a meltdown have already failed in America. Heard of the Wobblies? Capitalism is so ingrained that you could hire unemployed people to act as thugs against "anti-capitalist" action trying to protect people's rights.

I note that you have stopped the stuff about today's consensus coming from a "an extremely secular academic discipline". Besides a cover-boy like Ehrman (who went through the seminary anyway), there is nothing secular about those who voice the position; they are mainly and merely religionists who are less traditional. Of course if you only listen to conservatives you might get that opinion.


spin

judge

When you mark your own exam papers naturally you get straight A's.

Another uncredentialled anonymous internet poster imagines that he is "winning" and those who dont agree are dishonest.
What can one say to that? If the problem is that those who disagree with you are not being honest...

That is an answer for anything............. I guess.

bacht

So what do you suggest judge, should we all follow a "middle way" between fundamentalists and mythicists? And if you're up to it maybe you could explain just what evidence the Jesus Mythers are desperately explaining away.

judge

My considered suggestion is that we should stop asking others what we should do and make up our own minds.

Chaucer

LOL! I addressed exactly that in the OP:

"a frequent reason given by mythicists why we should look askance at this reference is the odd word order. But the word order in "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ [tou legomenou Christou], whose name was James" is characteristic of Josephus:


"Wars 2.21.1
a man of Gischala, the son of Levi, whose name was Johnâ;

"Ant. 5.8.1
but he had also one that was spurious, by his concubine Drumah, whose
name was Abimelech;

"Ant. 11.5.1
Now about this time a son of Jeshua, whose name was Joacim, was the
high priest.

"This is a good example of why one should be steeped in the writing style before plunging in with both feet. "

What do you think this means?

"I was responding to Toto's mischaracterization (since refined) of the strictly human Jesus model as coming only from theologians, when it simply doesn't."

And it was extremely secular at one time. Some moderate theologians merely hitched a ride later on. There was a time when ecclesiastical authorities would have had your guts for garters had you moved one step in the direction of the kind of study many in the Jesus Seminar today take for granted.

Chaucer

Toto

The Jesus Seminar folks are all products of seminaries or a special field called "New Testament Studies." They are not professional historians, and their methods do not pass muster with any secular evidence-based discipline. The Historical Jesus is the product of religious analysis and popular culture, not historical investigation.

Chaucer

Assuming that's the case for the sake of argument, let's put the Seminar to one side and pose this question in addition: Can one still maintain that there is not an overwhelming academic consensus of an entirely secular kind that posits no virgin birth or resurrection and takes Jesus of Nazareth to have been an historical human being who was entirely human and executed by the Romans under Tiberius?

Chaucer