ApostateAbe

It explains everything! In fact, it can explain any conceivable textual evidence you can possibly imagine. I think this may be why I tend to put so much focus on explanatory power in my argumentation. Without explanatory power, then it really does not help so much to "explain everything." If you need an example of where "explaining everything" can go wrong because of the lack of explanatory power, then, uh, I can PM you.

Toto

Imagination is always a possible explanation of texts, in the sense that the texts alone are never proof of actual events. I'm sure it is the best explanation of texts such as the Infancy Gospels that show Jesus as a child striking his playmates dead and bringing them back to life.

But that is different from explaining the origins of Christianity.

ApostateAbe

Gotcha.

Juststeve

To proceed as Abe suggests I think we begin with the Gospels, not as evidence of what really occurred but as evidence of what the early Christian community thought occurred at the time the Gospels were written. On the basis of a broad consensus of scholars that would mean what Christians believed about Jesus withing 40 to 70 years of his supposed death.

We then need to test various theories against each other for how Christians came to believe what they did. We might for example ask how did Christians come to believe that Jesus had been baptized by John. One competing explanation is that Christians believed that Jesus was baptized by john because he really was. Another, suggested by Doug is that someone just made up the baptism by John out of their imagination. Both are possible but I do not regard both as equally likely, for much the same reasons Abe has suggested.

We could apply the same reasoning to the supposed fact that Jesus walked on the water. Christians might have come to believe that because Jesus actually walked on the water, which I would reject based on the laws of physics, or it might be an instance of Doug's imagination. In this case I take Doug's suggestion as being more likely.

In both cases we are looking for how Christians came to believe what they appeared to believe at the time the Gospels were written. In some instances the best explanation can be Christians believed it because it's true, in other instances we must look for more probable explanations.

Steve

dog-on

Steve, the most likely reason for the Baptism scene is because Mark created it when he wrote his gospel. The scene was derived from the OT books of Malachi and others.

I suppose that you need to deal with this fact first, before trying to find the real Peter Parker...

ApostateAbe

OK, your hypothesis has at least some detail (connection to previous myth), which is an advantage over giving no detail at all. With no detail at all, you would have no explanatory power. So, great. It is the kind of thing we need.

dog-on

Explanatory power, in this context, is only relevant if there is actual evidence to explain. The problem in NT studies is that there really is no evidence apart from the texts themselves. So, any explanation becomes, inevitably, circular.

What is actually in evidence is that we are dealing with derived stories. That's about it, as far as I can see.

ApostateAbe

Anyone who explains the text has "evidence." The text count as evidence for whatever explanation you may have--be it an explanation that involves history, myth, or whatever else. Just because an explanation has evidence does not mean that the explanation is correct or even probable. We have a misleading tendency in our language, in my opinion, to speak about the quality of the evidence when we really mean the quality of the explanations. Explanatory power, therefore always has applicability in this subject, because the evidence is always there, though one explanation--maybe a mythicist explanation--may be better than other explanations for that same evidence.

You say that any such explanation becomes circular... I think you may have need to clarify that. I do hear a lot of talk about concluding my assumptions or about circularity, and I think such talk follows from the customary target of debate--Biblicist Christians. They may say something along the lines of, "The Bible is the Word of God because here is a passage that says so." My arguments are different. My arguments would tend to be more like the following:

1) The canonical Christian texts reflect the earliest Christian beliefs.
2) These beliefs are best explained as originating from historical events followed by mythical evolution.
3) Therefore, we conclude that there were certain historical events.

You may disagree with such an argument. Maybe you disagree with the first premise. Maybe you disagree with the reasoning wound up in the second premise. Maybe you think that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. There may be a bunch of things wrong with it, but it is not necessarily circular.

Juststeve

There is evidence of what people were saying about Jesus when the Gospels were written. What p3eople were saying may or may not be true, but either way the Gospels are evidence of what people were saying about Jesus at the time. The question is why were they saying that.

Consider a contemporary example. Look in the paper and you will see people say various things about President Obama, that he was President of the Harvard Law Review, that he was born in Kenya. It is worth trying to understand why people are saying those things, whether they are true or not. Similarly it is worth trying to understand why people said what they said about Jesus whether we think it true or not.

The explanation, Mark just made up the baptism based on a prior legend is a possible explanation, but one rendered less plausible by the factors Abe hs pointed out, at least in my mind.

Steve

dog-on

I would say that point 1 needs to be evidenced. In fact, it seems that there was quite a bit of in-fighting regarding "Christian beliefs" right through to Eusebius. So, I would view item 1 as questionable.

As I pointed out with the baptism scene, a much better explanation is derivation, as we actually have evidence showing this to be the case. There is no evidence to support the claim that "these beliefs are best explained as originating from historical events followed by mythical evolution", whereas there is plentiful evidence to show that the stories were derived from pre-existing literature.

Your argument is circular because texts cannot be the supporting evidence for the content of the texts and there is, in fact, no evidence external to the texts to support the content. That's why.