Amaleq13

Iasion,

Sorry for the confusion. I thought you were talking about a different passage from the one quoted because I didn't see anything that seemed to suggest this gospel was new.

"This is taught in the gospel, as it is called, which a short time was preached among them;"

This seems to me to describe a brief ministry rather than a recent gospel. I would think otherwise if "ago" followed "short time".

Am I missing something here?

Amaleq13

Iasion,

Sorry for the confusion. I thought you were talking about a different passage from the one quoted because I didn't see anything that seemed to suggest this gospel was new.

"This is taught in the gospel, as it is called, which a short time was preached among them;"

This seems to me to describe a brief ministry rather than a recent gospel. I would think otherwise if "ago" followed "short time".

Am I missing something here?

Julian

Yes, I also noticed the strange wording in this section. Is it for a short or maybe a short time ago...? I am not sure what it means exactly.

Do we have the underlying Greek handy for this section?

Julian

Emp-JohnIV

Is it just me or does it seem that RPG is not even talking about the Jesus Myth idea, only saying that it would be stupid to talk about it because of some form of argument form athuraty that has yet to be shown?

Toto

You slipped this in. There is a lot of evidence that the Jesus-myth theory was rejected, but I have seen no reference to academic literature refuting the theory. The "refutations" that you have referenced involved early scholars who either assumed that the gospels must contain some core of history (a proposition that no one can defend by today's standards of history) or that Josephus must have made some reference to Jesus (a very slim reed, even if it can be defended.) I would not count these as refutations.

I think that Richard Carrier's review of Doherty's work has to count for "peer review."

That is what I would have thought, but for orthodox Christians, challenging the existence of Jesus seems to be very different from merely denying his divinity. I think that Christians have gotten used to the secular society doubting the divinity of Jesus, but as long as they can claim he existed in some form that even remotely resembles the gospels, they have a start on trying to convince others that he was actually divine. If he didn't exist, their entire world view is exposed as based on a fiction.

When Campus Crusade for Christ does its recruitment, they start by saying that all historians agree that Jesus existed, and go on from there. If they can't say that, how will they get more members?

Ahab

I don't really understand why Doherty's thesis should be that upsetting to Christians. Even if the historical Jesus is considered a myth, didn't Paul really believe that Jesus had been sacrifiiced to atone for mankind? He just believed this sacrifice happened in what we would today consider to be some spiritual realm - it didn't actually happen on earth.
Most Christians don't seem too troubled by the idea that Jesus/God presently dwells today in a spiritual/mythical realm. I don't quite get why they couldn't still adhere to their faith and still accept Doherty's thesis? Or is Doherty saying that Paul knew that Jesus never existed here on earth or some sub-lunar/spiritual realm?

RPS

It isn't a disinterested source, but a listing of such references is here.

It's off-track, but remember that according to Fredriksen (who is not a Christian), the majority of scholars accept the TF as essentially authentic, though interpolated.

Sorry, it doesn't. When Demski writes an amazon.com review praising Wells' book, that isn't peer review.

If you think so, you must not spend much time in Evangelical circles. Try mentioning the Jesus Seminar in that context sometime and watch the sparks fly.

I think anti-Christian folks can latch onto the Jesus-myth idea to provide a short-cut way to attack the Christian worldview. From the perspective of effectiveness, I think Jesus-myth advocacy hurts the anti-Christian movement a lot by making it easier to paint them as a fringe group rather than people with a powerful challenge to Christianity.

Toto

Well, now we get down to the real issue. Most Christians today have little in common with earlier Christians. They are, in fact, modern products of the Enlightenment and believe strongly in a rational world with hardly any supernatural elements to it. (Just one real miracle in history when God decided to violate His Laws of Physics - the resurrection. Anything more would be uncouth and put them in the same class as the voodoo priests.)

If Jesus were purely a spiritual entity, they might just lose their faith, because they don't really believe in all that spiritual stuff any more than they believe in Santa Claus, and they certainly wouldn't be able to convince anyone else to follow it - after all, Buddhists might have a much better track record on morality and worldly success. But as long as there is a historical anchor to their "faith" they feel comfortable "believing." Without that anchor, they lose that comfort factor

IMHO

Toto

Bede and Layman (Chris Price) spent a lot of time here and didn't convince me.

Sure they do. It's the easy way out. But once you admit that the TF has been tampered with, you have no real way of knowing what the original text said. And once you say this to someone supporting the interpolation theory, they have to change the subject to Antiquities.

You miss the critical distinction. Richard Carrier did not start out as a mythicist. He is a professional historian (working on his PhD thesis) and reviewed Doherty as a historian. He has no financial or ideological ties to Doherty. Demski and Wells are both financially supported by the Discovery Center and started off as opponents of evolution.

I have said this before. The Jesus-myth theory is not a good political move. There must be some other motive for studying it.

freigeister

For me, mythicism is upsetting because I see Christ as providing the foundation for the human sciences. Denying his historicity is, for me, equivalent to trying to erase atomic theory from human memory.