Jeffrey Gibson

But don't you have a responsibility to find out if your observations are correct -- especially if you intend to continue in your claim that yours is the best explanation for her doing what you observe her doing? Otherwise, aren't you just besmirching her character and her scholarly integrity?

Boy do you have some uninformed ideas about these matters!

So much for your saying that you have no idea what motivates scholars while advancing one that besmirches their integrity.

In any case, I note that you've now shifted the grounds for your not telling April what you've claimed she needs to hear -- from saying that she wouldn'tbe interested in hearing from you to saying that she'd probably expect you to have read the books she's read to saying now that you don't have the time to write to her. What's to be made of this?

Leaving aside the fact that it probably wouldn't take much time to say to her what you have to say and that you are probably using up more time in explaining why you won't write to her and why you think she writes what she writes than it would probably take to get a message off to her, are we really to think, especially after seeing you offer one excuse after another for not sending her your sound criticism of her views -- I think it's this: (1) that you won't ever be writing to her even should you find the time to do so, and (2) that my explanation for why you won't write to her is correct.

Jeffrey

Toto

Is there something wrong with wanting to keep options open? I don't think so. Why are you trying to escalate a casual observation into a major ideological confrontation?

That your imagination knows no bounds? That I'm thinking as I type and haven't solidified my ideas yet? Jeez.



Why are you so obsessed with me?

In any case, my playground monitoring duties here on this board seem to be eating up all of my free time.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to get back to work.

Jeffrey Gibson

No, even assuming that that's the issue I under discussion and that you haven't equivocated (just as you did in asking me previously about what I wanted for the JP) when you've now made it so.

But there is something wrong with saying, as you did, that her doing so, if indeed that's what's she's been doing, is a "desparate gasp for historicism", a "clinging to a straw that there might be a historical Jesus in spite of the lack of evidence", and is being done for the sake of " those who want to continue to believe" in an HJ.

So now it's a casual observation. Didn't you call upon her (or someole like her) "to write write a paper explaining exactly how [her] "highly suggestive" idea can be fleshed out to some sort of probability that there was a Jesus behind the myth" and to show that she is not mooting the idea solely to give those who wish to believe in an HJ something to cling to?

So you will be writing to her? We can count on that?

Jeffrey

Toto

You called upon me to write a paper refuting her. I said that first someone needed to write a paper laying out the positive case for Social Memory being evidence for Jesus. Then I rethought the matter and decided she might not even be making the arugment that Social Memory was evidence for Jesus, only that Social Memory left the possibility of Jesus an open question, which is the only logical conclusion that I can draw from a brief reading of the blog.

So if anyone thinks that there is a positive case to be made for finding evidence of Jesus in Social Memory, I think that there will be a number of people who will refute it, with glee, quoting spin on flyspecks or other gross items.

If the idea of Social Memory is just that an absense of real evidence for Jesus is not evidence for his absense, I have no problem with that statement.

I spent enough time chasing this issue with Solitary Man, tracking down his references, which never supported his claims. Real people can be mythologized, but the process cannot be run in reverse - given the mythology, you can't run the movie in reverse to recover the real person, or even know that there was a real person.

The Jesus Project, from what I can see, may be working on issues that can actually add something to the discussion, as opposed to wandering down that blind alley yet again.

Jeffrey Gibson

To be precise, what I did was to ask whether or not you would submit a paper to the JP showing the JP that "The claim that, since some myths are based on real historical persons, you can take any particular myth and work back to a historical person" was " in the end" pushing on a string". See here.

Actually what you said first was

And this was in response to Andrew Criddle's note that:

It was only after this that I said:

See here:

Which, by the way is also a question, or at most a suggestion, not a call, let alone a call to refute her.


Thank you for ignoring my main point, for remembering only part of the conclusion your drew about her appeal to social memory as a methodology that members of the JP should employ, and for once again attributing to me things I did not do in order to score some points against me.

Jeffrey

Toto

Jeffrey - I know that you seem to write in English, but how did you confuse

"I said that first someone needed to write a paper .. "

with "First, I said . . . " - which would be the only meaning that would make sense of your reply.

?????

Jeffrey Gibson

How did you confuse my asking whether or not you would be willing to propose a paper to the JP the intent of which was to the JP why "The claim that, since some myths are based on real historical persons, you can take any particular myth and work back to a historical person, sounds [to you] like pushing on a string" with a call to you to write a paper refuting what April wrote?

And your first was in reference to what you thought should happen before you might take up my suggestion and was being used as the first in a now growing string of excuses for your not putting your money where your mouth is when you have a chance -- and on several venues where those whom you say need to be made aware of your criticisms actually reside -- to do so.

Jeffrey

Toto

Have a nice day with your imagination, Jeffrey.

mountainman

Dear Jeffrey,

You seem to entertain a very limited black and white set of options on the classification of others' opinions and positions. Is it a fact that Archarya's position (or anyone else's for that matter) is "either right or wrong"? This is simply another assertion from an assumed authority, and indicative of a massive attitude problem. It appears as authority-driven.

Which authority will you appeal to to support your contention that any given opinion must be either a right opinion or a wrong opinion? That, by implication, an opinion cannot be partially right, or partially wrong. I have absolutely no idea how you arrive at conceptions of this nature, unless it is by conditioned behaviour which has not yet been self-examined. Do you have a citation to back up your assertion, that, after all, any position must be either the right position or the wrong position? And from which field is this citation sourced? Christian Theology?.



Best wishes,


Pete

Jeffrey Gibson

If we ever needed more proof that Pete is incapable of reading correctly what he reads, here it is.

Pete, where ever did you get the notion that Toto and I are speaking about A's position? And by the way, the name is spelled Acharya S not Archarya.

As to whether something can be somewhat right and somewhat wrong: is that what you think of your hobby horse?

Jeffrey