spin

You seem to have totally forgotten the context in which you made your first faux pas.

The "religious specialists folk" development is a nice small example of how traditions stray from reality.

Many rs folk from Ehrman to Casey, authors of the popular works of the historical Jesus, re bloggers.

[Attempted bait and switch on credentialism omitted]

(Does the revelation not help you to understand the writer behind the works? And hopefully those two monographs don't include his "Jesus of Nazareth", but two of his Aramaic gospel analyses.)

What I get out of this is that you'd like to think that historicist shit doesn't smell like mythicist shit. Understandable given your tendency, but I think you're wrong.

How do people working within the permitted activities of a hegemony relate to an understanding, or a sidestepping, of that hegemony?

Rubbish. History is relatively simple to comprehend. It's the attempt to reconstruct the past. The evidence may be extremely diverse, but history is not in itself hybrid at all.

Toto

An Anglican theologian who talks in creative post-modern odes about spirit and pneumatology. No quite my idea of scholarship, but to each his or her own.

Sorry for not being clear - the editors of the book, and the authors of the chapter in question, are evangelicals.

And dismissed. But at least not ignored, as he usually is.

It is your limited experience with the debate.

Wells in particular has been criticized for having a PhD in the wrong field.

LegionOnomaMoi

I posted it right below what you quoted above.



What?

I was referring to Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel and Aramaic approach to Q, but I probably should have included vol. 343 of the Library of New Testament Studies his The Solution of the 'Son of Man' Problem. Those are the only three books/monographs that I've read by him, although I may have read an article or two as well. And I've always considered Aramaic approaches to Greek texts fraught with complications that Casey treats all too lightly.



Clearly there are differences, even if the methods employed by historicists are all crap. If you can point out an academic work (and I don't mean something simply written by an academic) which is riddled with factual errors rather than problematic methods, assumptions, and conclusions by all means do so.

A larger issue, however, is to lump the enormous amount of diverse scholarship behind historical Jesus studies together in the way one can with the better mythicists. There are a handful of authors like Price who, while in the extreme minority, are nonetheless of a qualititatively different sort than Freke and Gandy. I find their methods to be quite flawed, but whereas (for example) The Jesus Mysteries simply compares Christ to Mithras without alerting the reader that the mystery cult version likely dates after the gospels, Doherty does say "Although Mmithras was an ancient Persion god, the form his cult took in Hellenistic times is a Greek version. Some scholars locate its inception in Asia Minor about 100 BCE, others as late as the latter first century CE." (p. 116).

However, the historicists are far, far more diverse as far as their historical approaches and skill are concerned. More importantly, even if any attempt at reconstructing the historical Jesus is doomed to fail, it is quite a different thing to say he never existed. The former can be a statement about the problems with determining what is historical in our sources (or is a statement that no such elements exist). The latter requires an alternate explanation for the origins of christianity which do not result from a historical person who became shrouded in myth and legend by the time anything substantial was written about him. It is here that even those most skeptical and critical of the whole quest for the historical Jesus break from the mythicists. They regard the quest as futile because no methods are capable of seperating fact from fiction in the gospels, and thus we are left with the bare skeleton of some guy Jesus who inspired a following and was executed, and whatever else might be accurate in what we have too inexorably tied into the myth to be recovered.

What hegemony? What we have are people trained in different field, in different places, interacting with one another on a diverse range of topics in numerous different arenas, and as a result a wide divergence in opinions, approaches, methods, etc.


1) Anything is relatively simply to understand when you vastly over-simplify it. I can just as easily (and erroneously) say "Linguistics is a relatively simple thing to understand. It's an attempt to understand language."

2) According to many, history is as much a novel construction as it is a re-construction.

Neither is classics if I define it so simplistically: "It's easy to understand: it's the study of Greece and Rome".

LegionOnomaMoi

I don't tend to read theology either (which is what the paper is about), but that really doesn't matter here. This is a formal academic piece in an academic journal.



Ah. My mistake. Thanks.





I wasn't referring to Wells, however (whose PhD isn't in ancient history or related to it, yet he has not been ignored and in the books/papers I've read his credentials aren't part of the critique; in fact, he changed his view in response to Dunn's 1985 critique of his work). I was referring to Doherty. You stated that Doherty was just applying to Grant what had been said about him (Doherty). Am I wrong in thinking that critics of Doherty on the web have simply said Doherty didn't have any expertise at all (or something similar)? Or do many actually say his expertise lies elsewhere or isn't in NT studies.

spin

None of any meaningful significance to me.

Good answer.

It's just a rehearsal of your previous position. Your "[w]hat hegemony?" speaks more eloquently.

The Einsteinian notion of "make it as simple as possible, but no simpler" jumps to mind. I reduced history--I think reasonably--to one act, no matter in which context it is done. The process might be misguided or hindered by all kinds of hurdles, but it still aims to clarify details of the past. Your oversimplification of "classics" hides the fact that it involves history, literature, Greek and Latin philology, anthropology and other pursuits all for themselves limited only to the theme of Roman and Greek studies. I think you are just being perverse. (And I'm making no criticism of classics.)

aa5874

Again, you present a BAIT and Switch argument by completely and conveniently forgetting that HJers claim Paul is an EARLY witness to an historical Jesus.

Why do you constantly Bait and Switch???

An early Paul destroys ALL CLAIMS that Jesus was mythologised LONG after he was dead.

Paul supposedly preached Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, in the likeness of God, was LORD, and was RAISED from the dead for over 17 years.

An EARLY Paul suggests that Jesus was MYTH from the very start.

If Paul was early then he claimed his Jesus was NOT human since 37-41 CE.

If Paul was early then he claimed Jesus was RESURRECTED since 37-41 CE.

If Paul was early then he claimed the resurrected Jesus VISITED him since 37-41 CE.

Please, no more Bait and Switch.

Jesus was MYTH and falsely shrouded in history.

Early Paul claimed Jesus was God's own Son. See Galatians 4.4

Toto

Is it?

Anglican Theological Review" is a quarterly journal of theological reflection. In the spirit of sound learning that has been the hallmark of Anglican divinity, our aim is to foster scholarly excellence and thoughtful conversation in and for the church."


They have specifically said that he doesn't have the right degree.

LegionOnomaMoi

Clearly.




This is the same Einstein who found the nonlocality of quantum theory and the incongruity between quantum mechanics and GTR so displeasing that he not only came up with the "cosmological constant" (his biggest mistake, according to him) and devoted years trying to refute instantaneous correlation at a distance because the simple answer (nonlocality) was too simplistic an explanation?


And your description of history "hides" far more. If I say "study of Greece and Rome" this includes the literature of Greece and Roman, their languages, etc. Just like your definition "reconstruct the past" is accurate, but it "hides" the fact that it involves (among many other things) literature, anthropology, etc. But as all of these are used to "reconstruct the past" you can vastly over-simplify it like this. Likewise, "studying greece and rome" can involve "literature, Greek and Latin philology, anthropology and other pursuits", but as it is still about Greece and Rome, I can simplify.

mountainman

The usual. i.e is there a secure and unambiguous christian archaeological relic dated before the 4th century?

LegionOnomaMoi

How is that "the usual"?