Diogenes the Cynic

I can read Greek. I don't need a translation.

aa5874

It is most remarkable that you have NO interest in establishing WHEN Paul wrote only WHAT Paul wrote.

If you want to do History you MUST establish WHEN, WHEN, WHEN Paul wrote.

The HJ argument is DOOMED and DONE.

You DARE NOT discuss the Evidence for WHEN Paul wrote.

spin

I didn't question that--a fast reaction quite often isn't an in depth one. You need to argue your case and not just assert it.

Solo

The problem here is that according to Mark, the eariest gospel, Cephas/Peter and the disciples did not see anything. The "news" of Jesus rising did not reach them (or their following) until they read in the gospel that the news did not reach them until they read in the gospel that the news did not reach them until they read in the gospel that the news did not reach them until they read in the gospel that the news did not reach them until they read in the gospel that the news did not reach......(to be continued). :huh:

So obviously, if you were Cephas/Peter's disciple at the time of Mark, the gospel had to be fixed: Attempt #1 (not so good) : write a passage into a Paul's letter to Corinthians in which he would contradict himself (1 Cr 3:10) and Mark (16:7-8) about being the first to preach the gospel of resurrected Christ (as against something like martyred Jesus who would intercede for the coming of Messiah in heaven but does not return himself, that was preached from Jerusalem). This would unmask Mark as a liar and impostor. Attempt #2 (excellent): Re-write the whole gospel of Mark, making Jesus' main disciples (the idiots in Mark) his true apostles giving testimony and make Jesus appear to them at Easter in recognition of their devotion (which Mark acknowledges but scoffs at as idolatry). Leave enough of the original gospel in the new one to convince the majority that Mark was just getting only part of the story and was not as reliable as his redactor Matthew.


The only vision of Cephas/Peter that makes any sense is the one on the roof of the house in Joppa (Acts 10:11-13). Chesterton said Jesus had chosen Peter as a leader because the church would be only as strong as its weakest link.

Best,
Jiri

spin

From this thread it seems that when a lot of people talk about the historical Jesus they merely mean the real Jesus. I envy these people being able to dodge through the lack of trustworthy sources that we have and find that despite all the obfuscation a real Jesus can be sighted. I am amazed at this. They can tread through the maze of tradition and end up extracting from amid the plausible stories a real figure.

I on the other hand think that the "historical Jesus" is the Jesus that can be shown to have some substantive historical evidence to support his reality and that there is no such substantive evidence. That means to me there is no historical Jesus. It is all deceptively wishful thinking of people brought up in a culture that portrayed with the certainty that Jesus was real. As I have said many times, the fact that I think the historical Jesus is a crock does not mean Jesus didn't exist. It means that we have no way of testing the claim. He may very well have existed, though all the discussions about probabilities are ludicrous. We cannot extract history from tradition sources. The best we can do is exclude material that is implausible, thus giving us plausible stories, nothing better nothing worse. Mythicism doesn't seem to offer any method for breaking this deadlock, but then neither does historicism¹. This lack of simple clarity is no problem from a rationalist point of view.

History is not some absolute record of everything that happened. There is no divine scribe taking note of everything. History is an act of reclamation. It is what real historians do. They try to reclaim traces of the past. They collect the best evidence available to tell what they think reflects the past. What they mostly do however is reflect themselves trying to reflect the past. An examination of histories written at different times about the same topic tends to tell us a lot more about the historians and their times than what they would ever realize, their predilections, trendy analytics, reflections of their own values and contexts. Yet they do wield evidence and they do provide some epistemological means to sustain their ontologies. What they know has a how to back it up. It is when they start telling stories uniting what they know that they become liable to telling new stories.

History has political significance. It can be seen to justify modern realities or need for political change or action. Population X held territory J before population Y invaded and stole it. Population P never used territory H but population Q made it a rich country. History is liable to political forces and is frequently debased through hegemony. (Every field of study is liable, though history has a special position.) Sexual politics reflected male hegemony--and frequently still does--when it used history to exclude women from the events of the past and sustain male dominance of positions in power hierarchies that promote acts of violence to exercise control and reinforce hegemony, both military and cultural. Pulling a nation together against a common foe presented through a docile news entertainment industry makes for an ignorant consenting public. History is often used to validate the hegemonic values of interest.

It is not strange therefore when we come to the amateur historians who are making efforts to understand biblical history that history somehow tends to reflect our cultures' status quo in the context of the religion. Jesus was real. We as rational skeptics need to withhold consent. We don't need to agree. The books have been fiddled. They have been in the hands of a religious hegemony for over 1500 years. This doesn't mean that the basic information is wrong, but that the information has been unintentionally obfuscated by the lack of objectivity in the maintenance of the materials and by the development of tendentious analyses that make the content of the words say what they are needed to say, whether they originally said them or not. Depending on those analyses and trusting the surviving form of those materials can only lead to the maintenance of the status quo. The Orwellian notion that who controls the present controls the past was a significant observation. In various ways christianity throughout history has controlled the present and therefore the previous past. We cannot trust the story that their histories tell. We cannot trust the retellings or the retellers. It has nothing necessarily to do with fraud or forgeries, though there have been such occurences. It is the nature of hegemony to reproduce itself. One needs to find a position from which to analyze what happens, rather than be carried along without hope of perspective.

The famous teacher of thinking Edward De Bono introduced a new word for his students when it came to making yes/no decisions. The word was "po". Instead of answering "yes" or "no" and overeasily making shallow decisions based on our thinking ruts, we needed to say "po": "hold your horses, let's do this right, or as right as we can." Wrong decisions are frequently made through inadequate information. You don't have to be a mythicist. You don't have to be a historicist. You just have to say, "po."

We can be stuck with "po" when dealing with the past. We may simply lack sufficient evidence to say "yes" or "no". But it doesn't matter. You're not selling a book trying to make money one way or the other. You aren't a bunny forced to believe. You don't have any investment riding on it. You can say "po". It's not important to decide. It really isn't.

All the hocus pocus about best explanations based on no evidence means nothing. Embarrassing criteria. It's all just echoes of hegemony. All this crap about myths is just limiting reactions to hegemony. It's not important. You don't need it. You don't have to play. Just say, "po."

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^1. I think we can agree that unlike "historical", "historicist" and "historicism" are fairly simple terms for us to negotiate: they deal with the positive belief that Jesus was a real person in time.

Grog

First, I retract my earlier opposition to your agnostic position. I think you are correct, at least as things stand. I certainly do not have a method for breaking the deadlock, true.

However, what would it take for mythicism to produce a valid method? Around when I first came on this board, I brought up the example of William Tell. Historians have mostly concluded that William Tell did not exist, based on the lack of evidence. Early histories were based on popular tales, documents had been tampered. Can we conclude absolutely that Tell did not exist? No, we can't. While a negative can be demonstrated to be true, it is extremely difficult to do so. There are still attempts to link Tell with historical figures and I think those attempts are mostly based on the usefulness of the Tell meme to politicians. You raised the examples of King Arthur, Robin Hood, and St Nick. Ok, I get that point.

But setting aside "mythicism" and the various propositions for HOW the Jesus-belief came into being, it seems to me that we can see the elements of the Jesus story itself all emerging from non-Jesus beliefs. We can see various teaching by and about Jesus as emerging from the Church. There is little (anything?) that requires a person "Jesus" to have been the inspiration for the Jesus story. Based on these observations and the lack of any early attestation to a person Jesus, are we not warranted to conclude that Jesus probably did not exist?

IF we make that conclusion, then that frees us to test the theory that Christianity emerged in some other fashion, not from the inspiration of a single teacher. If our interest is in the origins of Christianity, how we approach all the material seems to hinge on whether we first make an assumption that Jesus did or did not exist. Or we say he was irrelevant, which to me isn't much different than not existing. I don't care if an irrelevant Jesus actually existed.

The assumption (Jesus did not exist or was irrelevant) might be wrong, but I think it can yield testable hypotheses. I do not think the historicist Jesus can yields anything testable because entailed in the proposition is the event horizon beyond which we cannot see: the obfuscation of tampered evidence, the oral history with its untraceable path back to origins, the illiterate peasants who could not write down the teachings of Jesus, the very obscurity of Jesus going unnoticed by contemporary writers, etc. What aa refers to as the BLACK HOLE is all very convenient to the historicist case.

But we do have documents from this time period.It is only a black hole insofaras we want to relate documents to a historical Jesus. We have contemporary Jewish sources from 100 BCE through 100 CE. If we are interested in the origins of Christianity and we only look for documents that mention "Jesus" then maybe we aren't looking in the right places. If we similarly looked for the origins of mankind, and only considered big brains, then we would be similarly disappointed (Leakey did think he would find Early Man out there with the australopithicine remains).

Po is fine. Do we stop there? Or do we still try to get beyond po? To me, the topic is too interesting to just say 'po.' I want to keep digging.

aa5874

Please, please, please!!!! Once HJers have NO evidence for their argument then there is NO deadlock.

It is the complete opposite---the HJ argument is DEAD--LOCKED DEAD.

Only the MJ argument can be maintained.

Evidence for an HJ instantly KILLS MJ.

But, HJ is DEAD--LOCKED DEAD--MJ will NEVER die.

Pilate will ALWAYS be known as Governor of Judea.

Caiaphas will ALWAYS be remembered as High Priest.

Tiberius will ALWAYS be ackowledged as Caesar.

Jesus WILL ALWAYS be MYTHOLOGY just like ZEUS, Romulus and Remus.

"Long live" Myth Jesus!!!

Myth Jesus has been Exonerated

Diogenes the Cynic

The Gospel of Mark has no relevance to Paul, nor does it really contradict Paul. It just literalizes what Paul was already saying about Jesus ascending to Heaven from the Grave.

Mark was no associate of Peter's, by the way, that's ridiculous.


Well, I ignore Acts as historically worthless, and that scene from Acts is not Christophanic anyway. We simply do not have any information about what the original claim or claims were. I like Price's suggestion that the original Christophany was the transfiguration. The hypothesis is that because this would only signify that Jesus was an exalted prophet, not the Davidic Messiah, the story was bumped back into Jesus' life to make room for a better story.

spin

Grog, thanks for pushing the ideas about. By saying "po" instead of "yes" or "no", we can be more (shudder) creative with our approach to the available data. If we don't have to decide, we can see more options and perhaps get better results. Po is a provocation to try alternatives, though we are not force to take any if none of them yield improved results.

stephan huller

Another difficulty is that the fact that fathers from justin to clement thought he was a god isnt an argument really against him being human. The classic pagan example was zalmoxis