GakuseiDon

Correct. Can you answer the question, please?

Well, just tell me that there is no difference between a claim about what happened 50 years ago and a claim about what happened 500 years ago.

[Then tell me how you know that Jesus Christ falls into the category of urban legend. It's that simple.

Then just tell me how you know that those stories fall into the category of chinese whispers. It's that simple.

Then just show me how it is confused transmission, wishful thinking, faulty memory, lies, delusions. It's that simple.

Nope. What do you think? Was Paul lying?

Then, are you saying we can know nothing from ancient literature? If we can, how can we know?

Nope.

If it works for you, then good for you.

Great. So what is your opinion of Paul's letters and the Gospels? Nothing in there worth using?

You are obviously a pure spirit and a rational man. Good for you!

spin

I already have. There functionally is no "ancient sense" of the notion you use. It's like you trying to talk meaningfully about ancient semiology.

Why do you insist on asking questions that you cannot show to be relevant to the conversation? What has 500 years got to do with anything here?

Can you tell the difference between an oral tradition that is 500 years old and one that is 50 years old (to use your figures)?

Gosh, you're having difficulty seeing that your generalities are a bit too general. Your "just that simple" is to me just that simplistic. I did not say that Jesus falls into the category of urban legend. I gave you the chance to see that you were not saying anything meaningful, because you had no tools to delineate with.

With the image of chinese whispers to help show the transmission problem I've tried to use crayons for you, Gak. You will believe what you will believe.

Can you show me that it was not? We both know you can't.

Nope what, exactly?

I don't know. You are the one with the overburdening need to have answers. That's why I asked you to comment.

You see I can live with not knowing thinks. It's better not to know than to believe what you don't know.

I don't think you've been reading this forum very closely over the years. I have frequently talked about the use of ancient literary sources. Why didn't you speak up then for clarity?

You can get information from ancient sources but it takes more of an effort than simply reading what the source says.

Yet you make claims for historicity. Why?

The need for evidence doesn't work for you?

Paul self-admittedly is no help to us. He never met Jesus and he didn't get his gospel information from men.

The gospels are undated, unprovenanced, anonymous works. I don't really know how to place the information contained in them in a historical manner.

This doesn't detract from there being a lot of information in the literature. The problem is knowing how to use it. It's that simple.



I was hoping for more insight into your modus operandi. Vain, you say.


spin

Solo

It is most likely (99% +) an articulation describing of a state of high nervous excitement and clouding of consciousness. The medical circumstances to such experience are many but they seem to originate in partial complex seizures of the temporal lobe. Paul, who had no inkling of the physiological origin of his mystical states, believed that the periods of beatific, electro-convulsive bliss - and their accompanying phenomena were post-mortem communication by an entity which he associated with the Nazarene Yeshu.
The reality of Paul's experiences was confirmed by other sufferers who came to accept Paul's narrative for it; the reality of Yeshu's existence was established by the missions from Jerusalem.

Jiri

Ferryman to the Dead

Problem is they were not contemporaries of Jesus. Most written some 70 to 150 years after the fact.

http://www.infidels.org/library/hist...ally_live.html

http://www.usbible.com/Paul/pauls_confessions.htm

© 2009 www.StellarHousePublishing.com 4
As Rev. Dr. Robert Taylor says, "And from the apostolic age downwards, in a never interrupted succession, but never so strongly and emphatically as in the most primitive times, was the existence of Christ as a man most strenuously denied."1 According to these learned dissenters, the New Testament could rightly be called, "Gospel Fictions."2

Doug Shaver

We don't have his word for that. We have Eusebius's word for it.

Doug Shaver

That's one difference I keep seeing between historicists and at least some of us ahistoricists. We will concede that reasonable people may disagree with us. You, apparently, will not return that favor.

gurugeorge

No Robots, with respect, I think you're so overly enamoured of Hegelianism that you are forcing some sort of dialectical polarity where none really exists. Mythicism isn't really in some sort of pugnacious "opposite" of historicism (except in the sense that sometimes tempers get heated and it looks like a pillow fight, or handbags at thirty paces ). Mythicism isn't a programme of action, it's one (class of) possible explanation for the existence of the ancient Christian literary remains, and the Christian religion.

I should venture to say that's all this is about for most of the "a-historicists" here (that's the broader umbrella category - for of course it's still possible the whole thing might have been a literary farce that got out of hand, a forgery with political intent, or any number of other options that are not strictly mythicist).

It's true that some people who are mythicists also have an agenda for action, perhaps a spiritual agenda (e.g. Freke & Gandy) or a sociopolitical agenda (e.g. Acharya S), or something of that sort, but the having of an agenda isn't what defines mythicism on this board (I don't think) - it's purely an investigation into what actually happened in those times. (i.e. person A called "X" walked from here to there, scribbled such and such, said these words to entity B called "Y", who then went to such-and-such a city, did such-and-such things, etc., etc.) that resulted in us having the texts and extant religion that we have, called "Christian". (Yes, I'll grant that there's a tiny bleed through of socially determined categories back into the facts - even "person" is such! - but it's pretty minimal, because we're trying to make it pretty minimal, that's the whole point of this thing we call "objectivity".)

Ferryman to the Dead

Agreed! Eusebius was the great forger of the time! His interpolations are famous!


Why would a mythicists have a spiritual agenda? Thats horse malarkey. Acharya S having a sociopolitical agenda! More hogwash.



myth-i-cist [mith-uh-sist]

–noun

a person who views various figures of antiquity, including both pagan gods and major biblical characters, as mythical.


The Evemerist Position

http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/mythicist.html

http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/mythicist.html

Doug Shaver

Yes, he does.

Maybe, maybe not. We don't have Polycarp's own word for that -- at least, not in any of his extant writings.

Nor does Irenaeus or anyone else claim to have seen any document from Polycarp's hand attesting to any such conversations.

My opinion is that if Polycarp had actually known any man who had known Jesus personally, he would have mentioned it at least once in something he wrote, and that that document either would have been preserved or would have been unambiguously referenced in some other document that was preserved.

gurugeorge

No, the evidence suggests that people thought that a divine god-man called "Jesus" actually existed and did and said some stuff (i.e. that he was historical - and this is regardless of questions of "what he was made of", regardless of the question of "Buffy-like realms"). We already know that, it doesn't require much in the way of investigation to discover that bland fact!

What the evidence doesn't suggest is either:-

a) that there actually WAS a divine god-man called "Jesus" (Hume's principle - the purported "evidence" is simply not good enough to overturn our common-sense understanding of the world, such that we could allow that this specific god-man existed, and that therefore, by extension, our natural categories are wrong); or

b) that there was a human being who might have served as the basis of the god-man story (in this case of course the evidence principle is looser than it would be to prove that a god-man existed, we just need something like contemporary external evidence of an ordinary human being with the right name or some internal giveaway in the NT canon itself).

These latter two are the interesting historical questions - not historical facts about what people believed (we know those historical facts already - they believed in the historical existence of a god-man, albeit with all sorts of variations in regard to "what he was made of"), but historical facts about what actually was the case (whether there was either a divine god-man or a man).

Two people can believe in the historical existence of a mythical entity, but one believe he was wholly a spiritual being, the other believe he was wholly a fleshly being. It's rather like an ice-powered superhero having a "vapour form", or the Human Torch turning into living fire. It's just whacky shit that people believe (and people believed in all sorts of whacky shit in those days - despite your best efforts to turn them all into nice, well-behaved proto-rationalists ).

Again, taking "Paul" - suppose he had an astral vision, a certain kind of structured hallucination (like a lucid dream, but awake) of an entity called "Jesus", who spoke to him, and told him "Know ye that I lived in Palestine yea years ago and did this and this - and if you look closely in Scripture, you will find this was reported". What would be the status of the "Jesus" entity for him? Of course TO HIM this entity would be historical.