Rick Sumner

While reviewing our previous discussion on 2Pet, I happened upon a fun little excercise that will pit two critics of my suggestions of the limits of subjectivity against each other, hopefully illustrating firstly that such limits are actual, and secondly that taking note of those limits is not a "meaningless" position:

Earl: Your AFS demands that 2Peter does not know the gospels. If he does, the whole house of cards begins to shake, because he meets all of your criteria. If he can meet them, but know a gospel Jesus, then so can Paul. If such a reading is accepted, your argument has led to a false positive, and there's no way to assure that it hasn't done so before. It could simply mean that your case requires tweaking to exclude 2Pet. But, if 2Pet knows the gospel, then your case as it is now does not stand.

Michael: You have argued at length that there is nothing pre-Markan in Mark. That all elements, including the transfiguration, are Markan creations. If Earl's right, and there's an independent tradition between Mark and 2Pet. then your case is wrong.

For what my two cents is worth, I've argued at length that Turton is right, and pointed to several indicators of Markan invention in the transfiguration.

So, gentlemen, whose case is more compelling?

Because of the subjective weight each of you attaches to your own arguments, as it stands right now, each of you will assess their own argument as the better, which illustrates quite nicely the limits of subjective assessments of evidence. People looking at the same evidence, arriving at different conclusions.

The analogy to how compelling Earl finds the AFS vs. how compelling I find the AFS should be obvious.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

gurugeorge

Sure, but there are even different kinds of "best", as you have just shown (e.g. socialism does have some virtues, and different polities are willing to make different trade-offs between various desiderata, of which economic efficiency is one important one - kind of foundational for everything - but not the only one people value).

However, the point is, if you take any given criterion (such as economic efficiency, which as I said was one of the main original selling points of a socialist form of economic organisation before it was actually tried), it can be decided objectively, and in the case of economic efficiency was decided objectively by the failure of socialist forms of organisation to be economically efficient. Not only that, but some economists predicted beforehand that socialism would fail and why it would fail, because it would be economically less efficient than capitalism for x, y reasons.

So the upshot is, economics is not a very good example of the kind of subjectivity you are talking about in these inquiries. It is in fact a pretty settled field - very, very few economists are socialists nowadays.

Loomis

Paul’s source is the Greek translations of the Hebrew scripture. He even says so.
Compare ...
The mystery is:

What is the exact name that we should call?

What is the name of the Lord?

How can we call on the name of the Lord if we don’t know what it is?
It is the discovery that the name that should be called on is “Jesus”.

If we agree that the name Jesus is tightly coupled to the name Yahweh then maybe what happened is this:

Loomis’ hypothetical reconstruction of how Jesus was born

Paul and other Greeks didn’t know who the Lord was in the Hebrew scriptures. That’s because Yahweh’s name was replaced with the title Lord.

It was a big fucking mystery (BFM).

Then one day they figured it out.

Think about it.

The trouble was that by the time they (re)discovered that the Lord was named Yahweh they had already invented stories surrounding that character - and so they couldn’t mentally backtrack.

Even though they discovered that the lord was named Yahweh they still didn’t realize that Yahweh was "God."

krosero

I can hardly believe this, Earl. I did not know how you would respond, but I was 100% certain that you would.

And your reasons for not responding make no sense. Barely one-fifth of my post concerns the apologists. The rest was about the argument from silence, including a response to what you said about Titus.

And I did not bring in the apologists; you did.

You made an unsupported statement about there being no evidence that the apologists had an HJ faith. As with all unsupported statements, yours could be made casually and briefly. The only way to challenge such claims is in detail, which I did (though hardly at length). But at that point you plead weariness? Now you’re telling me that you can make a controversial statement but that you have no obligation to respond when it is challenged?

There are very few things, Earl, that you have done which have actually risked my respect for you (a respect I have tried to cultivate against my own tendencies toward rancor when I’m in a dispute with anyone). But this is one of them.

You have told everyone again and again that your argument from silence cannot be met with hand-waving; you told Rick that it is illegitimate to say that your silences have already received responses. Yet when I try to use an argument from silence – the very kind of argument that you, of all people, should be expected to appreciate – you say that it has already been answered many times. You waive your hand. You don’t even bother to give a link or reference.

It is not true that you have addressed this silence so comprehensively as to have earned a right to waive your hand. Do you have anything as comprehensive as J.P. Holding’s replies to your list of silences? I tried my best, when writing my essay, to find your statements on this matter; and I was forthright in my essay about why I found your statements few and possibly self-contradictory. You addressed the issue at the end of your formal debate with Don, but you barely got into it then; you seemed not really to grasp the argument.

In an ongoing thread I even cautioned one of your critics against mischaracterizing your position on this issue, because I honestly don’t think you’ve written enough about it to be really sure.

And it is simply offensive for you to add that I raised nothing new. I try as much as possible not to go over old ground. I included my questions about the references to “the apostle” in the writings of the apologists as a direct response to what you claimed here; months ago I looked for anything you might have said on that point, in your writings online and offline, and could find nothing. Instead I found you telling Don in your debate with him, concerning the apologists: “It’s not just Paul and his type of faith they show no knowledge of”; and similar statements throughout your work. I bothered about this specific point in my essay precisely because I checked to see if it was old ground, already addressed, and found that it was not.

The least you could do is give us a link or reference to where it has been addressed (or a quote of what you’ve written). It would not constitute a response to my post, but at least it would be more than hand-waiving.

I don’t understand this at all. You’ve been very eager to talk about Pauline silence; and in this thread you had already started engaging arguments comparing your silence with the one in the proto-orthodox, Jews, and pagans. You’ve argued your silence with zeal, but when Rick points out that your argument from silence begins to break down when we reach the apologists, you suddenly declare the apologists to be off-topic, or too big a topic.

And I deserve a simple reply to my simple informational question about whether you’ve read my essay (which covers in-depth the topics we’re discussing here). You have pressed me very hard in the past, publicly, not just to acknowledge your essays but to give full refutations of them; but you have yet to acknowledge that my essay even exists, much less to tell me if you have read it.

The work I did is, most emphatically, not old ground. No one that I know of has attempted to apply an argument from silence to your theory of Christian evolution from the beginning in Paul all the way to the end of the apologists.

I am honesty flabbergasted at your refusal to give even superficial answers. PM me if you have to, but what is really going on? Your given reasons are, frankly, offensive and unbelievable.

Kevin Rosero

gstafleu

And then you say re my Jesus ben Ananias idea:
The reason I'm combining these two ideas is that they have something in common: without evidence they don't amount to much. The question for the minimal crucified HJ (minXHJ) is thus: if there is no candidate available, to what extent is it reasonable to hold open the possibility, other than as the most unlikely of Hail-Mary passes? For example, I reckon myself in the MJ camp, but I do hold open, as a matter of methodology, the possibility that there was an HJ to whom all the myth got attached. The matter of methodology being that in science we always talk about the most likely explanation, rarely if ever about a 100% certain slam-dunk.

Add to this that not only do we have no candidate, we have arguments to the contrary. In that case, can one hold on to the possibility that we perhaps one day may find a candidate while, at the same time, claiming that the arguments to the contrary don't matter because one occupies a different conceptual universe? Again, I suspect methodological problems here. When one reckons oneself in the HJ camp, I would assume that means one takes the HJ hypothesis as the most likely one. I just don't see how one can validly do that without any candidates plus evidence, given the availabilty of arguments to the contrary. At the very least one would have to address these arguments, surely?

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

Just as a blind shot, could it be because the idea that Jesus never existed was inconceivable to them, and hence they could not frame arguments based on that idea? When true believers find fault in the ideas of others, don't they often "rewrite" these other ideas in their own terminology, after which they burn the thus constructed straw person?

Gerard Stafleu

Ben C Smith

No candidate? For a minimalist such as Diogenes the candidate is the man written of by Paul and later elaborated by the evangelists.

Ben.

gurugeorge

But there's the nub - where's the evidence that he wrote of a man? He wrote of a superhuman entity, for sure; and he wrote of him using some apparently historical references, for sure. But many myths have historical and geographical references.

What's really needed is to find some evidence that would satisfy the modern mind that the entity was a human being mythologised, rather than a mere myth. And that's precisely what you don't have in the early stuff. It all looks like myth - IOW there's nothing, not one jot or tittle, in Paul, to suggest that the entity he is talking about was an entity known of as a human being, to any of the other human beings that he talks about (e.g. Cephas, etc.). Nor is there any such witness of a real human being in the Gospels, they are all anonymous accounts of an apparently mythical entity by nobody knows who.

Ben C Smith

Unless your entire point depends on that last statement (known as a human to Cephas or others), in which case your point is incapable of demonstrating whether Jesus was a human to Paul (which is the real issue to my mind), the only way you can make this statement is if you have already dismissed, for whatever reason, the several Pauline references that appear indeed to refer to a human being.

Ben.

gurugeorge

What? The several references that refer to a mythical entity (i.e. a miraculous, god-like being) that happen to have "historical" referents that might just as easily be references to Scripture, and are no more necessarily historical than references to Hercules' birthplace, family and deeds - those references, you mean?

As to your other point, what rationalists with a rational view of history want (i.e. a view of history in which mythical entities don't actually exist, but real human beings do), is something to show that what we are dealing with is a human being mythologised. The only way to show that is to show that Paul believed that his mythic entity had recently existed and had been known (on his human "side", one might say) by Cephas, etc. That cannot be shown - there is nothing to tie down the mythic entity to a human being through human beings Paul knew. That crucial piece of evidence is what is missing. And it's the only thing that would work to tie the myth to a man.

And that connection is precisely the proto-orthodox error (or fabrication, I'm not sure which), that gave them their idea of "apostolic succession" - that's the tail that wags the dog of the historical (as opposed to merely "historical" - i.e. mythical) Jesus.