jjramsey

Here is a fuller quote of Grant:

His point seems to be that contradiction and legendary material have been held against the Gospels far more than they have been against classical materials. To be fair, that is done, at least more blatantly, by the more "low-rent" mythicists.

GakuseiDon

You are correct, of course. Conversely, if he were a Christian it wouldn't affect the evidentiary value of his statement. But there appears to be a paranoid fringe to the Christ Myth camp who believe that scholars are ideologically driven to accept a historical Jesus. So stressing Grant's undoubted qualifications as a historian and (possibly erroneously) his atheism gives, in theory, greater credibility to his position. But I agree that in an ideal world it wouldn't be necessary. It should come down to the evidence.

Vorkosigan

Damn! Did I make a mistake? Are all those scholars in divinity schools, seminaries, New Testament Departments and the like atheists? Buddhists? Animists? Holy shit! I am so confused! And here I thought most of them were Christians with a priori commitments to the historical existence of Jesus! I must be paranoid and confused. Thanks for setting me straight, Don. I really appreciate how you've shown that the vast majority of scholars working on the historical Jesus question are not in fact Christians, and that the Society of Biblical Literature forum on the difficulties atheists face in the field that was hosted earlier this year was just a distorted figment of my overheated paranoid imagination.

Thanks! Now I can finally get off my Xanax! I'm freeeeeeeeeeeee!

Michael

Vorkosigan

The key lies in those last three words: demonstrating that the Gospels contain historical material about Jesus' life. Grant never bothers to do that; he merely assumes it, axiomatically.

Vorkosigan

GakuseiDon

Hi Vork. Thanks for proving my point. Unfortunately, this is why some are so eager to tag Grant as an atheist -- in an ideal world, it shouldn't matter.

I'd be interested in hearing more about what came out of that forum. Is there anything on-line?

Solo

Thanks Laura, it's always nice to be appreciated.

Jiri

No Robots

Here is the self-avowed atheist Biblical scholar William Arnal in his book, The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism, and the Construction of Contemporary Identity:

No one in mainstream New Testament scholarship denies that Jesus was a Jew. (p. 5)

And:

In the case of critical scholarship on the New Testament, earliest Christianity, and especially the historical Jesus, thing have been improving for the last thirty years or so. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present, numerous studies have appeared which not only acknowledge his identity as a Jew, but which emphasize it, and make it central to their reconstructions…. Thus is it a normal feature of the recent works emphasizing Jesus' Judaism that they tend to normalize him, make him an understandable and more ordinary figue among his contemporaries, comparable to other Jewish figures from the same time and place. (p. 15-16)

spin

What is your fixation with mythicists?

History involves not starting with mythical elements and discarding them. It starts with raw data regarding people and events, often in the form of literary works, and look to see how that data reflects any historical people and events. One attempts to stake a claim for the historical nature of the people and events; one does not start with assumption of historicity and discard what you have to. The latter has little to do with the methodology of history. One has no way of divining whether the people or events were in fact real or not. The distinction here is that history brings the people and events into the category of "real", though not being historical doesn't put the events and people in the category of "false". Only a subset of "not historical" is "false". All of those things we admit into the category of "historical" can be labelled "real" as in having existed or happened.

The mythicist attempts to move the figure of Jesus into the "false" sub-category of "not historical". The agnostic cannot do that.


spin

Vorkosigan

Of course it shouldn't matter. But in the real world, historical Jesus scholarship is dominated by Christians. As I've noted before, the closest you get to the ideal world is the atheists, they are all over the board on the historical existence of Jesus, because being an atheist entails no commitment to a particular Jesus. Being a Christian does. It's pure denial to maintain otherwise. It's completely unacceptable to refer to a "paranoid fringe" -- as if it is paranoid to notice that most HJ scholars are Christians.

Yes, just drop in at the SBL website. It was discussed here earlier this year, in fact.

Michael

countjulian

No one is free of their baises, that doesn't mean any theory that comes down the road should be excepted as just as valid as any other theory. For intstance, the mathemetician A.T. Fomenko maintains the theory that antiquity never happened and was just an invention of the Church (!). Classicists dedicated to their field are obviously not going to be very open to this idea. Yet they have rightly demolished it, and just because they have an interest in antiquity actually having happened doesn't mean Fomenko's crackpot theory is right.

Also, there are some very radical far-leftChristians who have come out against a historical Jesus, opting for a funky gnostic get-up.