jjramsey

That looks less like an appeal to adverse consequences and more like a pointing out of a double standard on the part of (some?) mythicists.

GakuseiDon

The OP asked for a concise statement and said that they didn't want a debate. :huh: I think Grant's statement was reasonable, but as you say, it would need to be expanded on by Grant (who seems to have passed away recently) or another historian to see if Grant's view can be justified. Still, from the websites I've seen, he appears to have been a remarkably knowledgeable and respected scholar of history.

Good question! He seems to be called "atheist Michael Grant" on a number of websites, but no-one appears to quote Grant himself saying this. One reviewer of Grant's book says here:

Although Michael Grant seems to believe most of what the Roman chroniclers relate he believes almost nothing of what the Gospels relate about Jesus. Michael Grant's apparent atheism is in evidence in this ridiculous look at the life of Jesus.

Laura D.

Rlogan,

I thank you for the kind welcome. And I appreciate your comment. It illustrates that I lacked clarity in addressing my position. You conflate two separate issues of which I spoke earlier. Specifically,

You addressed my comment that “[h]istorians may refuse to dismiss an historical Jesus out of fear that they must then dismiss some pet figure from ancient history if they applied to it equivalent standards.”

And you argue that “peer review” for historical literature has nothing to do with these kinds of fears.

I agree completely. The fear of which I spoke (and I accept that you disagree with my position) relates to the bias that a workman has for the tools of his trade or in this case, the analytical process that workmen in his field have previously used to reach a decision.

Earl Doherty addresses this issue en passant when he says,

"Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Cyrus, King Arthur, and others have nearly suffered this fate. What keeps historians from dismissing them as mere myths, like Paul Bunyan, is that there is some residue. We know at least a bit of mundane information about them, perhaps quite a bit, that does not form part of any legend cycle."

We see ancient historians grappling with this same issue elsewhere when they write words to the effect, “If I apply this standard to "y", then we have to dismiss ‘x’.” We don’t necessarily suffer these fears. Let me give you an example,

Spin has said,

In support, he states,

Notice how we comfortably cite Arrian—a Greek historian living during the Roman period around 130 A.D., hundreds of years after Alexander—as source for the proposition that “Alexander did what he was described as doing.” This is actually in line with scholarly standards. The generally accepted primary sources for the proposition that "Alexander the Great was not only real, but that he did what he was described as doing" are (1) Arrian (circa 160 A.D.)’s Anabasis on Alexander; (2) Quintus Curtius (possibly 100 to 500 A.D.); (3) Plutarch, Life of Alexander, The Parallel Lives (circa 100 A.D.); (4) Justin (circa 200 A.D.); and (5) Diodorus (circa 100 A.D.).

My argument—not the peer review argument, the bias argument—is that historians want to keep the myth of Alexander’s meeting with Chandragupta alive. So they have an inherent bias toward allowing similar second-source material when they look at the historicity of Jesus. You can see this Hindu web site for an example of how some have applied the more critical analysis to Alexander (but you'll want to note the site's bias): http://www.hinduwebsite.com/history/...xandermyth.htm.

Now turning to your reference to my supposed conflation of peer review with the sort of bias I just discussed above. My preference for peer-review relates to my feeling that an author’s decision to subject his work and ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field is one indicator of potential reliability. Of course, and this may be why you conflate my subsequent peer review comment with my earlier bias comment, one point of peer review is that other experts are going to examine your work to ensure that it meets the standards of their field. In our case, we are arguing for the application of stricter standards than previously applied to historicity of the life of Jesus.

So to me the ideal—given that I don’t have the luxury of doing my own independent, original source research or the linguistic and historical background to do the analysis justice—is to find someone else who is qualified to do the work I lack the skill and/or time to do, has done the work, and then has published that work in a manner intended to let other qualified experts review it.

If you mean that historians by definition apply set standards consistently regardless of bias to their examination of supporting evidence, I agree (even if we are naïve to assume it the reality). I also accept that it is often true that “Christian Historians” have failed to meet that goal. But I reject any inference that a Christian cannot be an historian. Did the Christian historian John Crossan really win any points with other Christians for his conclusions on the historicity of Jesus?

Solo

The above strikes me as a thesis cross-dressing as inquiry. The writer claims as his purpose, "simply trying to understand". Several lines down, however, assessing Josephus he says the lines from Antiquities about Jesus, that it is not first hand knowledge, but "simply handed down record".In the concluding sentence, spamandham asks why historians "pander" to the idea of historicity, when the simpler explanation is that he is a myth.

This would be one example, where a writer's intent is given away by the cognitive patterns of his writing, in this case his forming structures around the adjective "simple" (or adverb "simply").

The NT cognitive structures certainly are not simple but can be read by people who are inclined to think of their authors as religious fanatics who are intellectually simpletons. Reading the texts simply, without historical, anthropological and psychological background they come to a simple conclusion that it is all bunch of garbage, myth and lies and propaganda, and people who can't see that are simply idiots or liars, or where the two combine, creatures called "Christian apologists". Were it that simple !

The "mythicists", and here I mean not people, who hold that most that the gospels give us is myth, but those who think that that in itself is a sufficient proof that Jesus originated as a figment of imagination, given that there is not a reliable evidence of him from contemporary independent sources, are likely mistaken.

If we accept that Jesus of Nazareth, was built up by tradition that he did not intend to create, from a minor Jewish prophetic figure, to the most important man who ever lived, then obviously the later "importance" attributed to him, the huge crowds and attention he is said to have commanded, his mighty deeds and the measured dispensing of the tightly packed wisdom that filled his cranial cavity, is not the historical wanderer who received with the good news that he was Someone Special who can forgive sins also the bad news that the world is about to collapse. Ergo one cannot judge from the existence of people who wanted to believe in that Someone Special (who was alas executed as an evildoer) and who needed to believe that the world was going to pots, that they invented Jesus from scratch by fleshing him out of Paul's letters. The logical, measured, conclusion from the absence of external historical record of Jesus, is not that he did not exist, but that he was an historically unimportant blip on the historical radar.

(Want to test that ? In the last generation, two major world religions, Islam and Sikhism, suffered violent attack and forced occupation of their holiest shrines by fanatical reformers. What are their names ? Has anything been left of the reformers thirty and twenty years after their death ?)

Now, if the mythicists can show another example where a purely mythical figure descended to the Earth to be molested with impunity by earthlings, through mundane discharge of their office, where the supernatural was captured, tortured and killed by the merely natural, I will believe in their winged Wisdom descending into the sub-lunar sphere. In the absence of such inherently self-contradictory model of myth, I'll stick with HJ. On Joseph Campbell's and Friedrich Nietzsche's combined terms, Jesus' Fatal Flaw as Hero was in that he was All Too Human.

Jiri

Laura D.

Jiri,

I absolutely love watching you slice through others arguments like a hot knife through butter! In both the Muhammad thread and the Jesus thread, you are one of the posters whose analysis I thoroughly enjoy.

God bless,

Laura

andrewcriddle

Could you please give me a cite for Pagels claiming Paul was a full blown gnostic ?

I am aware that she has presented solid arguments that early 2nd century Gnostics found Paul more congenial than did early 2nd century orthodox but that is not quite the same thing.
If you define gnosis very broadly there are certainly pre-Christian examples but the spontaneous origin of Christianity therefrom is very problematic.

If you are talking about something like gnostic redeemer myths then the origin of Christianity therefrom would be at least somewhat more plausible, but we lack clear pre-Christian examples.

Andrew Criddle

Malachi151

The biggest reasons to reject a historical Jesus are these:

1) The entire life of Jesus can be reconstrucrted from Old Testament sources, inceed it is a fact that the entire life of Jesus was origionally constructed from Old Testament sources.

2) Some of the Old Testament basis for the life of Jesus clearly shows that that the authors fo the gospels used mistranslations in the Septugent for the basis of their story, which is quite funny.

3) The message of Xianity is a clear mix of Judaism and "paganism".

4) No one wrote about Jesus asside from Chirstians, or later people who based their comments clearly on what the Christians had told them.

5) The events taking place in Jewish society at the time create a clear expectation for such a myth to form.

andrewcriddle

Josephus does particularly use 'son of' when describing high priests and kings but his usage is wider than that

Eg in Jewish Wars Book 5 chapter 13 Simon's bodyguard/thug is introduced as Ananus the son of Bamadus.

Andrew Criddle

ynquirer

I haven’t tried to demonstrate anything in the special case of Egypt. Actually, I haven’t spoken of Egypt at all. It is you that have done so, for reasons I cannot yet understand.

Doesn’t it? What did it make anyone a procurator, if you are so kind as to educate me?

Philo calls Pilate epitropos, which means “administrator” or “governor-as-administrator” and in Roman contexts is usually rendered “procurator,” while the usual Greek word for “prefect” or “military governor” is eparchos. It seems that Philo was as mistaken as Annals 15:44 as regard exactly the same detail. Curious, isn’t it?

Because he was a contemporary of Pilate and an educated Jew that lived in a Roman province, who would be used to distinguish military from economic business likewise you and I can be?

If you say so. But let me state a brief remark before I quit. You said a few post above, and I hope you still stick to the opinion that Pilate was answerable to the Syrian legate; I agree that this is the very notion of subordination of the former to the latter. Yet what one finds in this text of Josephus is that Vitellius, then the Syrian legate, sent one Marcellus to order Pilate to surrender the government of Judea to him and go to Rome to answer before the emperor to the accusations of the Jews. Who was answerable to whom? Who issued the command for Pilate to go to Rome - Vitellius? It appears quite clear to me from this passage that both Vitellius and Marcelus were mere messengers that conveyed a command of the emperor to Pilate.

Toto

This question was raised before, and no one found any indication that Grant was an atheist. The only people who call Grant "atheist" are Christian apologists who either object to his rejection of the historical nature of the gospels, or use him as an example of an atheist historian who accepts the historical Jesus.

If the only evidence is that he believes "almost nothing of what the Gospels relate about Jesus" he might very well be Anglican.