gurugeorge

Btw, forgot to add to my last response that Richard Carrier does a statistical probability breakdown that might be the kind of thing you are asking for here, in the post here on IIDB (or it might have been somewhere else, sorry I'm so wooly on this, but it does exist I assure you! ) where he outlines how he came to the position that mythicism as more likely than historicism.

Can't remember where that post is, but IIRC Amaleq13 referenced it a while ago.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Gamera,

I agree with your interpretation that "Onoma" has more the sense of "authority" here than simply the sense of "name" This seems reasonable. We should remember that the name "Jesus Christ" or perhaps the backward pronounciation of the name as Christ Jesus was used as a magical spell to cure all illnesses by Christian healers. The name had authority for these people.

I do not think we have to imagine that the writer needed to have a specific historical figure in mind to state this. He simply had to believe that at some point in time a god because a man and was sacrificed and ascended back to heaven as could be derived from the suffering servant tale in the Jewish Old Testament and a dying/rising god cult.

I do not think this passage is a smoking gun. The case for the mythical (or "literary" as I prefer) Jesus relies on a host of strong evidences: the silence of Pauline writings about an historical Jesus, the multiplicity of contradictorary Jesus characters found in and among the gospels, the multiplicity of gnostic Jesus writings and characters, the derivation of many gospel stories out of Old Testament stories, the environment of dying/rising god tales and mystery religions, the forgeries of Eusebius and the silences of independent Jewish and Roman sources.

Each of these smoking guns can individually be covered over or kicked under the table. It is only when we look at the whole picture that we see a virtual battlefield filled with many weapons, bullets and clouds of smoke.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Ted Hoffman

Mack writes regarding that Philippians passage: “according to the Christ myth, Jesus became the Christ by virtue of his obedience unto death. Here in the Christ hymn, Jesus is the incarnation of a divine figure who possessed “equality with God” already at the very beginning of the drama and had every opportunity to be lord simply by “taking” possession of his Kingdom. His glory however, is that he did not “grasp” that opportunity...but took the form of a slave. Because of this, God exalted him to an even higher lordship.” Burton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth (or via: amazon.co.uk)(1995), p.92

Three points:
1. Historical people are not pre-existent (i.e. existing before they appear, "incarnate" or "descend" to a sublunar/supralunar realm/earth.)

2. If Paul believed that Jesus was a god who incarnated, and the hymn indicates that he does, then Paul believed not in a historical Jesus, but a mythical one - that is, at the very least a demigod.

3. Historical people are not capable or "taking forms." The idea of "taking form" leans toward Docetism because it separates the essence of the being (a god) from his form (a slave). As such, this story (the ascent and descent) takes place in a mythical realm. This is very much like the story of Zeus, who took the form of a duck and impregnated Leda to bring forth Helen and Polydeuces.

IMO, this hymn is a smoking gun that Jesus was a myth.

Amaleq13

Here 'tis:

Carrier Converts to Mythicist Position

andrewcriddle

In Apostolic History and the Gospel edited by Gasque and Martin, CFD Moule has an article pps 262-276 on this passage.

He suggests that the name above every name is the name Jesus, and that it has become the name above every name to which divine worship should be given, due to the exaltation of Christ to whom God had given this name (Jesus) at his birth.

Andrew Criddle

Toto

C. F. D. Moule, “Further Reflections on Philippians 2:5-1 (pdf)

Rick Sumner

I've read it. I actually responded in the thread (I was the one that pointed out that Carrier had confused Julius Caesar with Caesar Augustus). That doesn't help me at all (and neither does your last response). I'm not interested in whether or not mythicism is more probable (though I wasn't persuaded by Carrier at any rate. Appeals to "Quest of the Hero" never impressed me much. Whether Jesus is historical or not, the story's been etched in figures from the OT. Since those "heroes" are part of what was used to make the scale, saying Jesus scores highly is a tautology). I'm looking for a specific scale--a way to objectively determine whether or not it is "unlikely" for a silence to occur in the Pauline epistles.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Loomis

Behold!
Is an allusion to …
Also…
Is an allusion to …
There are better examples of this at Romans 10:9-13 and Romans 14:8-11.

The important thing to understand is that 'Paul' was citing the Greek/LXX translations of the OT which read 'lord' (kurios) instead of 'Yahweh'. Paul seems to be completely unaware of the God (Yahweh) behind the title (Lord), and instead decides to invent his Jesus story around an unknown mysterious ‘Lord’ character.

Remember that early Israelites worshipped El and Yahweh as two discreet gods, and in Deuteronomy 32:8-9 Yahweh is even portrayed as one of El’s sons. Over time these two gods were combined in to one big “God.” When this happened it left holes in the older stories (holes for new characters to creep in).

My summary:

1. Paul never heard of Yahweh.
   
2. Paul’s bible read ‘the Lord’ and Paul didn’t know what that meant.
   
3. Paul invented Jesus to bring meaning to ‘the Lord’.

EarlDoherty

I thoroughly disagree. First of all, we all I’m sure admit that the so-called “argument from silence” is not mathematical, not a laboratory exercise. It involves acknowledged subjectivity. But that does not mean it cannot be measured and evaluated. It does not mean a stalemate, that just because someone says “Yes, he did,” and someone else says “No, he didn’t” that these are necessarily two claims on an equal footing. The evidence and argument behind each one of those has to be looked at and compared and a choice made, even if it can’t be 100% definitive. The ‘definition’ of the argument from silence is essentially: When we have good reason to expect the mention of some subject in a given context, and we don’t get that mention, it is legitimate to deduce from this the possibility that the subject does not exist, or is not known to the writer. The crux of the matter resides in evaluating the “good reason” and the spectrum of “possibility-probability”.

In my own (and others’ that I’ve seen) evaluation of the silence in someone like Paul, I have stressed the “good reasons” why we should expect some clear mention of an historical Jesus and his features/experiences/teachings, etc. I and others regard these as very “good reasons”. On the other side, the reasons or explanations for why Paul and all the rest of the early writers are so silent, are not good reasons: they create as many problems and further questions as they purportedly answer, they have largely been discredited by counter-argument as being infeasible and against common sense. For example, the old timeworn saw that “Paul had no interest in the historical Jesus” is thoroughly neutered by, among other things, the sensible observation that Paul could hardly have conducted a missionary movement preaching Jesus as the Son of God if he never, or was unable to because he had dismissed all knowledge of the man as unimportant, actually presented the historical figure, or wasn’t in a position, or chose not, to demonstrate in the first place why his listeners should believe that this HJ was the Son of God. I hardly need some kind of technical ‘methodology’ to point out the infeasibility and lack of common sense of such an explanation.

On the other side, what is offered to suggest, let alone discredit, the “good reasons” behind the mythicist’s application of the argument from silence? Usually, all it is is “Well, I don’t think so. Stalemate.” “I don’t think so” is not a refutation of those “good reasons.” Just as Ben (sorry, Ben) saying “you live in a different conceptual universe, and it doesn’t matter to me how many of these things you come up with, it won’t change my mind” is not in itself a counter to those “good reasons”. You also say,

I have consistently backed that “unlikely-ness” up with good reasons, which are logically argued, such as the example I gave above about Paul’s preaching. Your “he actually knows if it’s unlikely or not” is a fallacy, because it is requiring something from me and the argument from silence which doesn’t belong to it: namely foolproof demonstration. The argument from silence is essentially an inductive exercise. [Induction: “Any form of reasoning in which the conclusion, though supported by the premises, does not follow from them necessarily.”] But that “necessarily” can lie anywhere along a spectrum of probability, depending on the force of “the premises”. If you want to reduce its probability, or maintain that we have a “stalemate” you must demonstrate that the force of your premises are equal to the force of mine. That neither you nor anyone else has done, that I can see.

Let me rework an analogy I provided in The Jesus Puzzle. Let’s say we have a man who is honest and devoted to his family. After his death, an acquaintance tells his widow that the man had once won a million dollar lottery. The widow refuses to believe this because she was unaware of such a thing, and everyone knows that he was always anxious to provide for his family, and on his deathbed he had apologized to her for not having done a better job at that, and his bankbooks showed no entry for such a winning, and so on. Through inductive reasoning, we use the argument from silence to conclude that the acquaintance lied or was mistaken, because the ‘evidence’ and premises on the other side are so compelling. There is, of course, a chance that it was all a deception on the deceased’s part, but is that a “stalemate”? If you, perhaps as an acquaintance of the acquaintance, come along and declare that you don’t subscribe to the widow’s view (maybe because of your business connections to the acquaintance), and moreover don’t address the reasons the widow has given, let alone discredit them, how can you think that your position has the same force as the opposing one?

Your succeeding remark, “Without tangible measures, "likelihood" ultimately comes down to "touch blue, make it true.’” is simply you ‘defining’ the situation, not only invalidly, but in a manner which serves your purposes. The “tangible measures” are contained in the premises, the features laid out in the context, such as in my analogy above. Jehanne’s analogy about O.J. does exactly that as well.

Now on to Ben, who does the same thing, too.

Who or what is a “Jesus minimalist”? While I don’t know the full definition of this term, it is apparently a circular tautology. A Jesus minimalist is one who is unperturbed by the lack of any reference to an HJ in the epistolary record. Thus, such a creature “has no trouble with the Christ hymns.” The pre-defined Jesus minimalist naturally sees the argument from silence as “bankrupt”.

Not that I’m aware of and I’ve been through pretty well everything of the very little that is available. But I’ve never had my hands on a Greek text of the Orphic Hymns, or of the Hymn to Demeter, although the English opening of the latter would seemingly not allow it.

I’m glad you brought that up. It’s a good example of my ‘relative force’ argument. Yes, there are requirements on the mythicist side as well. But are they as difficult and infeasible as those on the other side? To claim that nowhere and by no one is there any mythical idea in the ancient world of a god “dying” anywhere else but on earth in history is more than a bit extreme. And the very consistency of the phraseology throughout various early documents, that Christ “took on the form/likeness/similarity” of a human, rather than say he was actually a man and walked the earth, and in the complete absence of any reference to clearly earthly activities and experiences, has to point to something. The mythicist explanation is a feasible one, when the total picture of the thinking of the times is taken into account. And no, it is not docetism, for the hymns are too early for that kind of docetism. (I might add that since this is not docetic language, the same language in later documents, such as the Ascension or 1 John 4, and certain elements in Ignatius, cannot automatically be claimed as docetic, or anti-docetic.)

Back to Rick:

All of this assumes that we cannot arrive at any conclusions about what another human being is likely to do or have done. Society would be in chaos if that were true. Yes, it is a case of “If I/we were James, in the assumed context (of an HJ), what would I/we have done? What should we expect?” While, again, not mathematical, there is nothing wrong with such reasoning, even if we can’t arrive at 100% certainty. It’s hardly decided by a “whim” but by our total knowledge of human tendencies of behavior, particularly in cases (and I’ve outlined many dozens) where it would be to the advantage of the writer to appeal to such expectations. If these are “preconceptions” then so be it, but they are “preconceptions” based on what we can reasonably expect, not on some kind of arbitrary desire, with no firm basis. It is only by denying those obvious tendencies and reasonable expectations that the HJ-ers can defend the silence in the epistles.

Strictly speaking, at least as you’re presenting it, there isn’t one. Your demand isn’t reasonable, let alone for a theoretical scale which will let one arrive at a specific figure, Carrier notwithstanding. But this doesn’t mean you can dismiss the whole thing, let alone that the mythicist position in regard to the argument from silence isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. We are capable of exercising judgment, and arriving at relative probabilities, even without such ‘scientific methodologies’. We do it in every aspect of our lives, and we constantly make decisions and choose avenues of action and belief based upon such judgments.

The major exception seems to be in the area of religion.

Earl Doherty

Ben C Smith

Sorry, I have seen that term used before, but it probably does not have a set definition. I should have defined my terms.

A Jesus minimalist, in my terms, is someone who holds that there was an historical Jesus, but that this historical figure did only one, or very few, of the things usually ascribed to him; often (but not always) that one thing would be the crucifixion.

On this board, Diogenes the Cynic, I believe, would be a Jesus minimalist. On his view there was a Jesus who was crucified in Jerusalem, but that is about all we can know of him. The rest (the miracles, the sayings, the birth narratives, the controversies) have been tagged on.

Amaleq13 is probably another Jesus minimalist. In fact, I am tempted in that direction myself, though I still have a broad assortment of issues to decide first.

When Price talks about the heirs of Jesus, he strikes me as a Jesus minimalist. Of course, he can also turn the other way and say that maybe not even that much of a Jesus was historical, which is why I would prefer to call him an agnostic on the issue.

At any rate, such a person almost completely fails to feel any force at all from the epistolary argument from silence.

I cannot exactly blame you for making this kind of mistake when you did not understand what I meant, but no, there is no circularity and no tautology. Someone who holds that all we can know about the historical Jesus is that he was crucified (and believed to be resurrected) finds all kinds of support from the epistles. Plenty about the crucifixion, or at least about the death, but little or nothing about the teachings, the miracles, the controversies, and so forth.

No trouble with the silence of those hymns concerning an earthly career. But an argument such as that from Couchoud would affect even a minimalist. (However, his argument is decidedly not an argument from silence.)

Ben.