Toto

How does adding one questionable method to another achieve consensus?

Wikipedia is not a consensus: it is a political process in which a well organized faction can get its way. I notice that one of the footnotes for the contention that critical scholarship rejects Jesus mythicism is a book that is being panned on another thread here as vapid an intellectually lacking.

Littlejohn

The gospels are propaganda and support for the new Catholic doctrine, created around 140. However, together with elements of propaganda (of nature obviously false) there are also elements of historical truth, however, often reported as incorrect and sometimes largely distorted.

At the researcher and scholar, then, one requires a strong effort of intuition, supported by a patient and long research work to determine what's true in the Gospels (*). It's obvious that we need to establish it to report all other data from different sources. Do you think this is casual that the Catholic apologists seek in every way to dismiss reliability and credibility of all sources not-Catholic? ... They know very well that these sources, properly interpreted, can lead us to discover that truth kept hidden for almost 20 centuries !

All best

_____________

Note:

(*) - As an example, we can take the episode of the Jesus' resurrection announcement done by the Magdalene to the rest of the disciples. This episode can be described as true or false, depending on how you look at the real events that characterized the life of Jesus of Nazareth. To determine this is therefore necessary to strive to understand what could be the alternative interpretation about that Catholic clergy continues to "propose" to his people. Incidentally, this alternative explanation you need search it in the gnostic "milieu".


Littlejohn
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skunker

okay, I'll defer to the 'scholars' in this thread for the consensus. Caio!

thedistillers

But, this does not tell why the criterion is valid.

Wikipedia says:

The crucifixion is another example of an event that meets the criterion of embarrassment. This method of execution was considered the most shameful and degrading in the Roman world, and therefore it is the least likely to have been invented by the followers of Jesus. Therefore, the criterion of embarrassment can help scholars conclude that the crucifixion is historically probable.

This reasoning does not make any sense to me. Christians think Christ dying in a shameful and degrading way was to take the punishment for our sins. :huh: I was under the impression it is a good thing, not an embarrassment.

If I tell a story about a friend who's running to the hospital in a pajama because his son has been hospitalized, it is probable the story is true, because it is embarrassing to run on a street wearing a pajama? Surely if I was a friend of that person, I would NEVER invent such an embarrassing story, it MUST be true.

Steven Carr

Josephus was very , very embarrassed about any Jew who had been crucified by the Romans.

He writes that every single one shamed the Jewish nation.

In fact, not a single crucified person has ever been regarded as anything other than shamed and degraded.

Even Jesus himself thought the 2 thieves on the cross were both shamed and degraded, and he was embarrassed at the thought that people who had been crucified could go to Paradise.

People like Paul were incredibly reluctant to speak of any crucifixion. He was just way too embarrassed.

Sarcasm off.

I think if somebody says something is embarrassing, the least they can do is produce embarrassed people....

Mind you, Christians were probably so embarrassed that Jesus was killed by Peter after Peter found him in bed with Peter's son that they decided to say he was an innocent victim of crucifixion instead.

Much less embarrassing.

gstafleu

As I've pointed out before, in Christian mythology Jesus was crucified by the "bad guys" (whoever they may be). What better way to show how bad these bad guys were--and hence how noble Jesus, their victim--than by using the hated occupiers of Israel (the Romans)' favorite method of execution against the hero?

Gerard Stafleu

No Robots

It is Paul who coins the phrase "the scandal of the cross," so the crucifixion was clearly a sore point from the get-go. Paul certainly had no interest in demonizing the Romans, so the crucifixion does not serve any desired theme of antagonism. And it is Paul who theologizes the crucifixion as an act of redemption, attempting to turn a negative into a positive. The Gospels try to correlate the crucifixion to scripture, but do so in a very unconvincing way. All this points to the fact that the crucifixion was indeed a very deep source of embarrassment for the early Christians, sort of like gay Republicans are for their party. There are plenty of other examples of Christ's words and deeds that are faithfully recorded out of love for him, but all the same troubled his devotees. Certainly the tensions we see here are a literary wonder without parallel. All that points to is the genius who lies at the core, namely, Christ himself.

Littlejohn

There is only a small, tiny detail to bear in mind:


JESUS NEVER WAS CRUCIFIED!!...


Perhaps this also explains why Paul (anyone who has been in reality) does not speak hardly ever of the crucifixion of Jesus ... In the "pauline epistles" (Galati, if not mistaken) is found only a brief reference to the fact that Jesus was "hung to wood", which does not necessarily mean that he had been crucified, since at the "wood" (that of a branch of a tree or that of a pole protruding) were hung, according to Jewish tradition, even the corpses of individuals STONEDS! (hit by stones)


My best


Littlejohn

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patcleaver

The climax of the Christian story is his triumphant over his horrible shameful defeat and torture. The greater his triumph - the better the story. The more horrible and shameful his defeat - the better the story.

The greatest triumph they could imagine is physical resurrection and eternal life and bodily ascension into heaven and sitting at the right hand of Yahweh and being the god of the cosmos and judging the people who defeated him.

The most shameful defeat they could imagine at the time was betrayal by his friends, scourging and crucifixion.

It is common for Christian apologists to add additional horrors to his disgrace such as claiming that they pulled hair out of his face and head during his torture. The nuns in Catholic grade school used to tell us all these extra spicy details that Catholic apologists made up, such as, how the cat of 9 tail they whipped him with had knots or metal tips to pierce his flesh. Every lent we used to have to go through an exercise called the 14 stations of the cross where we meditated on his shame and tortures.

You can tell how deeply embarrassing it is by how Christians love to endlessly brag about the tortures inflicted on Jesus. That is what the movie "Passion of Christ" was all about – the thrill of seeing the empty tomb, that symbolized his triumph, after watching his practically endless degrading humiliation and torture.

A disgraceful degradation followed by a great triumph is not an embarrassment but a source of pride. There is nothing embarrassing about it at all. Its probably the most appealing part of the Jesus myth.

I have never heard of anyone rejecting Christianity because of the horrors of Jesus defeat. In fact, Christian apologists regularly glorify is the horrors faced by Jesus. The only complaint about Jesus death that I ever hear from skeptics is that it is common for people to die much more horribly than Jesus did.

Some people are buried alive in natural disasters, or slowly cooked to death in fires, or wither away for years in horrible pain with cancer and other diseases, and 10,000 children a year slowly starve to death. Lots of people face much more horrible deaths than a scourging and a few hours hung on a tree. Why should we feel particularly sorry for the fictional Jesus character, as he laughs while tossing unbaptized infants alive into the eternal fires of hell - just consider what Darkman endured.

patcleaver

See what I said above regarding Christian pride and bragging about the horrible degradation and torture of Jesus.

Paul never said that Romans crucified Christ. Paul said that the Archontes (who were demons) were responsible for his death on a pole or tree.

Nowhere in the entire new testament does it specifically say that Jesus was killed on a cross. The whole cross thing is a very late additional detail to his death. The Greek NT says he was killed on a pole or tree.

Yes, most of the Jesus story in the gospels obviously correlate with earlier Jewish scripture, but that makes sense, because most of the Jesus sayings obviously correlate with sayings of previous Jewish sages and Greek philosophers. If your looking for originality, then you should look elsewhere than the gospels.

I never understood why Christian apologists go on and on emphasizing the horrible degradation, humiliation and death of Jesus. I thought it was just homoerotic sadomasochistic right wing perversion. Now I realize that it also makes the triumph of Jesus' resurrection more spectacular; and they can use the criteria of embarrassment to try to trick the gullible into believing that their propaganda is historical.