Freethought & Rationalism Archive

06-12-2006, 09:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by No Robots

Celsus did not ever say, however, that Christ himself was a myth.

Indeed.
Nor did I say he did.

Iasion

Sparrow · 06-13-2006, 04:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by No Robots

I just find it rather odd of you to make a contentious argument in a thread and then ask people who disagree to go start another thread.

Here is what you wrote:

Also from this site I see continued availability of of anti Christian documents throughout the first 4 centuries suggesting that the idea that no one disputed the historical nature of Jesus in antiquity to be false.

Were you to go back and calmly read what I originally wrote, you might find that I commented on what I saw as a novel presentation of the timeline and themes of early writings about Christ, both biblical and extrabiblical. On topic for this thread I think. I suggested that if there were some errors or debate about the content, that it should be taken to its own thread in order to not derail this one. Apparently I have failed in that latter regard.

I have not checked McDowell's new book to see if he makes the claim, which many of us have seen before, that no one from antiquity denied the historicity of Christ. Nor have I checked to see if somewhere in this thread it has actually been proffered. Nonetheless, it is frequently claimed by the sort of theists who think McDowell is a scholar.

Quote:

Originally Posted by No Robots

No one has ever denied that there were early disputes about "the historical nature of Jesus". However, his historicity itself was never part of these debates.

Quote:

Originally Posted by No Robots

Wrong. Arguments that Christ was a mere man were among the earliest of documented "heresies".

The view that there was no man but only a supernatural entity at the root of Christianity is indeed an ancient belief. My understanding is, however, that mythicists think it important to distinguish their position from that of the docetists in that mythicists uphold the notion that from the outset Christ was put forward knowingly as a fiction.

and from your earlier post:

Quote:

Originally Posted by No Robots

Please supply quotations from those texts from the first 4 centuries that deny Christ's historicity. You know what? You can't, because they don't exist. None of the early enemies of Christianity contested Christ's historicity.

Bolding above is mine. I can't quite figure out what your position is. To me the mythicist case is simply that there was no flesh and blood human at the root of the story. It does not claim that the story was an intentional fiction. I think Paul was sincere in his belief that he had seen a risen Christ. But clearly there was a wide variety of beliefs 1900 years ago.

The Celsus 'quote', which I've seen in other places, does appear to me to misrepresent the original text. However, Celsus is disputing the veracity of some aspects of the Christ story and certainly some of his arguments are lost, since all we have is what Origne quoted in his refutation. It seems to me that more research in this area is warranted. In general, I don't post quotes in which there are elipses unless I can verify for myself that the meaning is intact. I did not do that in this case since my only contention was that this site had listed some documents which No Robots insisted 'do not exist'.

Wads4 · 06-13-2006, 06:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ggazoo

Check out " The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict" written by Josh McDowell. This book is a quick way to counter those who argue that the bible and Christ have no historical support, and answers many criticisms.

The book covers historical evidence, fulfillment of prophecy, criticisms leveled against the authenticity of Christ and the bible and answers to those criticisms, sources and regions from which manuscripts have been recovered, and many references to search out specific area’s of interest.

It's filled with references of expert analysis of writings of antiquity, and even though there are no direct original transcripts of the bible, there are copies from within a generation, and writings from the disciples of the Apostles and the generations following shortly after, such as Polycarp (A.D 115), Justin Martyr A.D. 100-165), Ignatius (A.D 50-115), there are many other secular references also, such as a letter from Pliny to the Emperor (A.D. 112), Cornelius Tacitus (A.D. 55-120) was a recorder of history and is referred to as the greatest historian of ancient Rome, two of his most notable works are Annals and the Histories, the Annals cover the era from Augustus’s death in A.D. 14 to that of Nero in A.D. 68, while the Histories began after Nero’s death and continue Domitian’s death in A.D. 96, there are numerous references to Christ and his death along with references to Christians.

But we live in a time of denial: the Holocaust never happened, the lunar landings were faked, Islam is a religion of peace... people believe what they want in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Or you could check out its rebuttal by Jeffrey Jay Lowder, Evidence that demands a refund

Wads4 · 06-13-2006, 06:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by No Robots

This "quotation" from Celsus has been soundly debunked.

I heard that the only basis of Origen's contra Celsum was that as there were lots of Christians in existence in his day, then Christianity must be true. If that is so then it is the fallacious argumentum ad numeram.
His writings might have been forgotten had it not been for Origen shooting himself in the foot by preserving Celsus by criticising him. Celsus made the very necessary appeal to Christians not to be aloof and other-wordly, and anti-social, but to muck in with the needs of the Empire. He also poured scorn on the superstitious idea of the resurrection, as do many of us,-and in that respect at least, he has not been debunked, but rather, supported.

No Robots · 06-13-2006, 08:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sparrow

To me the mythicist case is simply that there was no flesh and blood human at the root of the story. It does not claim that the story was an intentional fiction. I think Paul was sincere in his belief that he had seen a risen Christ. But clearly there was a wide variety of beliefs 1900 years ago.

Fine. But many mythicists do maintain the "deliberate fiction" position. It is ancient evidence for this that I deny.

Quote:

The Celsus 'quote', which I've seen in other places, does appear to me to misrepresent the original text. However, Celsus is disputing the veracity of some aspects of the Christ story and certainly some of his arguments are lost, since all we have is what Origne quoted in his refutation. It seems to me that more research in this area is warranted. In general, I don't post quotes in which there are elipses unless I can verify for myself that the meaning is intact. I did not do that in this case since my only contention was that this site had listed some documents which No Robots insisted 'do not exist'.

I insist that no documents from the 4th century or earlier provide evidence that Christ is a deliberate fiction.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wads4

I heard that the only basis of Origen's contra Celsum was that as there were lots of Christians in existence in his day, then Christianity must be true. If that is so then it is the fallacious argumentum ad numeram.

I provided a link to Origen's work. You should make use of it.

Quote:

His writings might have been forgotten had it not been for Origen shooting himself in the foot by preserving Celsus by criticising him. Celsus made the very necessary appeal to Christians not to be aloof and other-wordly, and anti-social, but to muck in with the needs of the Empire. He also poured scorn on the superstitious idea of the resurrection, as do many of us,-and in that respect at least, he has not been debunked, but rather, supported.

Celsus is great. His critique of Christianity is excellent. I'm just saying that he never denied Christ's historicity.

Wads4 · 06-13-2006, 08:57 AM

"I provided a link to Origen's work. You should make use of it."

Yes I will when I get the time. Glad you approve of Celsus.

Gamera · 06-14-2006, 05:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

Plato and Xenophon both say there was a trial. Both were in the right place at the right time to know for a fact whether the trial actually occurred, even if neither was physically present during the proceedings. In the absence of any contradictory evidence, we might as well take their word for it that it did. That doesn't mean we have to accept their accounts of what Socrates said at the trial. They are almost certainly not Socrates' actual words. Maybe they contain the gist of his defense, and maybe they don't. I have no particular opinion on that issue. All I feel comfortable believing is that there was a trial, that it was politically motivated, and that the outcome was Socrates' execution. Further details are not known, and I don't think they're even guessable.

By comparison, the gospel authors are not even known. That alone undermines any presumption that we should just take their word for anything. On top of that, there is no good reason to think that any of them ever set foot in Jerusalem, and it is unlikely that any of them was even alive during Jesus' purported lifetime. It is possible that the authors were close enough in time and place to have talked with people who were in Jerusalem when the trial occurred, but possibilities are not evidence. There is just no prima facie case for presuming a historical background to the story of Jesus' trial, or at least not as good a case as there is for Socrates' trial when you compare what we know about the gospel authors with what we know about Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes.

The problem with this, Doug, is that our knowledge of Plato and Xenophone is just as shakey as our knowledge of John and Matthew. We only know about them based on later texts. We have no reason to believe that anybody would make up a false Plato, but epistomologically, I don't think Plato and Xenophone's existence as contemporaries of the putative Socrates is any more certain than that of the gospel writers. You've simply assumed that Plato and Xenophon are who the texts say they were. But if you distrust the texts that attribute the gospel authorship to Luke, etc. you must have the same approach to the texts that establish Plato and Xenophon's authorship and existence. I don't think you'll find one is more certain than the other.

Gamera · 06-14-2006, 05:54 PM

[QUOTE=Doug Shaver]

Quote:

Are the authors irrelevant? How do the texts come into existence?

Generally we don't know and so we invent an author as a place holder for the origin of the text, which is the only thing we usually have. See Foucault's "What is an Author?"

http://foucault.info/documents/fouca...nction.en.html

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The issue is what the people who wrote the texts were thinking and why they were thinking it. A text is a record of some person's thinking. That is all it is. That is all it can be. People make history. Texts do not make history. They may record history, or they may record something else, but they do not make history. People, when they make history, might be responding to what other people wrote in some texts, but the texts themselves are not doing anything.

No, the issue is what does the text mean to us. We can never know what some long dead person thought. It's hard to know what you thought yesterday. All we have is texts, not people's minds.

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The texts are necessary. That does not make them sufficient.

Texts plus readers equal meaning. Authors aren't in the equation.

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It is vacuous to refer to a document's purpose without reference to its author's intentions in producing the document. If we have no way to know, or intelligently speculate about, the author's intentions, then we have no way of knowing what was the document's purpose. Authorial intent and documentary purpose are inseparable.

On the contrary it is naive to pretend we can know what an author thought. All we have is texts and we have to decide what they mean to us. Even the search for the author's intent is simply an exercise with a text and us, as readers. The author is always absent and cannot arbitrate our conclusions.

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You would respond, I suppose, that the document is our sole source of information about the author's intentions, that we are clueless about the author's thinking except for what we can infer by reading what he wrote. Very well, but that does not excuse to pretense that it is anything other than people that we are talking about.

It's not a pretense. Meaning happens when readers read texts, not when long dead authors channel their intents to them. All we have is texts.

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We're looking at a document. Why does it even exist? It exits because some human being produced it. Why? Writing was very hard work in the old days, and it was also very expensive. Why did people do it? People had to go to a lot of bother and spend a lot of money to produce documents. Why did people do that?

Yep, you've just invented an author to make the text meaningful. That's Foucault's point. We constantly invent the author by means of the text. Trust me, the guy who wrote the Gospel of Luke, is long dead. We can't ask him a thing. All we can do is read the text and decide what it means for us, even if that means producing an author we attribute intents to. All of that is our doing and has nothing to do with the long dead Luke.

Gamera · 06-14-2006, 05:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomboyMom

Sigh. No, only Christianity has the unique history of Christianity. The point, however, is that fictional writings can fool people, as in the case of Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard, unless you believe that these writings are true?

Well it can fool people, but not for 2000 years. I doubt anybody will know who Hubbard is in 2000 years, and besides, Hubbard isn't writing a hoax, he's writing very strange cosmology.

With Smith, I grant you, it has all the earmarks of a hoax. But it's only been 150 years.

Gamera · 06-14-2006, 06:02 PM

[QUOTE=RGD]

Quote:

This is, of course, is fundamentally wrong. The essential sciences and important architectural, historical, etc. works were NOT preserved by Christian monks - they were preserved and fundamentally amplified by the Muslims. The important renaissance in Western culture occured when these works were re-introduced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Once again - false. See above.

You need to tell that to an Anglo-Saxonist (like myself), who knows about the 12th century renaissance (apparently you do not) and the preservation of literary and philosophical works by clerics in England and Ireland starting from the 5th century -- with no real contacts with Islam, I assure you.

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LOL. Have you read Beowulf? Have you noted the Christian elements? What survived survived purely by chance - the most pagan poetry survived only in Iceland, which adopted Christianity so late that a culture of historical interest preserved some of them.

Read it in Old English and wrote my dissertation on it. You're making my point: the Christian author of the poem reveled in his pagan ancestry, as was generally the case in AS England. There was none of the putative contempt for a pagan past that you claim.

The theory that Iceland was pure pagan is naive and thoroughly debunked by people (like me) who know the field. I studied in Iceland by the way, and read Old Norse.

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And your knowledge of the history of this period is woefully incomplete and distorted.

I guess I was able to trick my dissertation committee then.

06-13-2006, 08:57 AM	#476
Wads4 Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Jersey, U.K. Posts: 2,864	No Robots "I provided a link to Origen's work. You should make use of it." Yes I will when I get the time. Glad you approve of Celsus.

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