mountainman

Dear Toto,

Point blank skepticism and suspicion are not only permitted, but are justified in all other contexts of profane ancient history: so what is so special about the case of "New Testament History" being dealt with by "New Testament Scholars"? Nothing that I can see - except perhaps the self-perception that they are dealing with hallowed, and not profane, ground.

Best wishes,


Pete

patcleaver

Your issue about the number of gods is just a red herring.

Please propose a reasonable estimate and then I will use that. Until you do, then I will continue using 10,000 because that is the best estimate that I have.

Jeffrey Gibson

And my "issue" is what exactly? That most of the sources you use are not only worthless but irrelevant to your claim that there are 10,000 gods being worshiped today in the same way that Christians/Jews/Muslims worship theirs since you "evidence" is about ancient practices and beliefs and you've equivocated when it comes to the issue of who and what is a "god"? How is that a red herring?

Please define what you consider to be "reasonable".


But where specifically do you "have" it from? What is your source for it? And is that source reliable?

Aren't you the one who reminded us that it is wrong to "respect" anyone's claim, let alone accept it as true, unless it stands, and can be shown to be, in "conformance with the facts"?

Jeffrey

Ben C Smith

Still no word from you about Apollonius.

Ben.

Jeffrey Gibson

Or whether his definition of "ordinary man" comports with that used by ancient writers.

I wonder whether Pat would consider Theagenes "ordinary". He left no teaching, was not known for his ethical example, had no disciples, and died an ordinary death.

And yet, as Pausanius tells us, after his pasing Theagenes was widely honoured as a god by both Greeks and "barbarians", with statues of him being set up in cult shrines dedicated to him where sacrifices to him were regularly offered, and was revered for his post mortem ability to cure diseases.

Nah, he will adjust his definition of "ordinary" so as to make it impossible for Theagenes to qualify.

Jeffrey

Ben C Smith

Right. The no-Olympian-boxer clause.

I am also wondering about Antinoüs. But maybe imperial pretty boy slaves are not ordinary, either.

Ben.

patcleaver

The incredibly silly claim of the HJ cult is that its more likely that Jesus was an ordinary man who was mythicized into a God then that Jesus was simply mythicized into a God.

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Theagenes

The story of Theagenes. Theagenes was a famous athlete of Thasos 480 BCE and after he died they erected a statue to him, but after the statue fell and killed somebody they cast it into the ocean. Years later the crops did not grow so the people of Thasos asked an oracle for assistance. The priestess replied that they had forgotten the great Theagenes. After some fishermen retrieved the statue of the athlete, the people of Thasos repositioned the statue in its original place, and they sacrificed to him as a healing god.

He was not mythicized into a God - he was simply declaired to be a God by the priestess. Everybody on Thasos knew that he was just an athlete who had died when they sacrificed to him as a God.

Were oracles allowed to just claim that any real or fictional person they wished to be a God had become a God and should be sacrificed to and worshiped? That is what the story claims.

Pausanias (160 CE) does not have any first hand knowlege of what happened in Thasos 640 years previous to his writing so this is not a primary source. He tells this tale amongst a series of other tall tails about ancient heroes who probably never existed. The best you can claim is that there is a story about someone who was ordinary and became a God see
http://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias6A.html
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancie...anias-bk1.html

Do you really think that this story shows that it is likely that an ordinary Jewish preacher in Judea became mythicized into a God?

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Antinoüs

Antinoüs was not mythicized into a God. Hadrian had him deified after he drowned because Hadrian was fond of him.

Do you really think that Antinous proves that its likely that an ordinary Jewish preacher in Judea would have been mythicized into a God?

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The probability that Jesus was an ordinary man who was mythicized into a God is very low because that is extremely rare. I still do not have any reasonable evidence that such a thing has ever happened.

The probability of a God being mythicized from nothing is very high. We have many thousands of cases where it seems that the God were simply invented.

Mythicizing a God from nothing is easy, the Hindus have mythicized 330 million Gods, and the Shinto's have mythicized 8 million. The Babylonians, Hittites, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans mythicized Gods by the hundreds or thousands. We know of thousands and thousands of tribal god, village gods and even family gods.

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HJ is just another tail of Euhemerism. Euhermerism is the discredited belief that all Gods were ancient kings and heroes. Euhermerus invented the story that Zeus was an ancient king of Creat who overthrew his father Kronos to become king – it was just a tall tale that he just made up. Euhermerists made up just-so-tails about the origins of the Gods.

The story about the origins of the God Theagenes in Pausanius just seems to be Euhermerism, and should not be taken seriously, unless you have some other evidence that there really was a god named Theagenes, and there really was an athlete named Theagenes, and some reason to think that the athlete Theagenes was the origin of the God Theagenes, and not just someone named after the God (which was very common).

Your HJ tail about Jesus is just another unsupported tail of Euhermerism that needs to be thrown out. Ben, where is a primary source that says that Jesus was an ordinary man. How can you support this story if its not true.

Do you think that the ancient Egyptions believed, that Horus resurrected from the dead? Why not? - is it just because there is no primary source that confirms that they believed it?

Ben, I always thought that you were a reasonable person. Please explain why your position on HJ is not just double-standard hypocrisy?

Ben C Smith

I guess I do not know exactly what you mean by mythicized. I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that you meant that the person in question was deified. Perhaps you could clarify for me why you consider that, say, Augustus was mythicized as a god but not Apollonius.

I do not know how to answer this. I am not sure where you are seeing hypocrisy.

Furthermore, I let it pass the first time through, but I do not think you are very clear on my position on the HJ. Earlier on this thread, for example, you gave a long list of things apparently intended to reflect my position, but most of them did not.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Richard A Burridge, What Are The Gospels?, page 161:

However, in addition to his literary purpose, Plutarch has a moral problem: the principle of divine retribution dictates that bad men's lives and deaths show that crime does not pay and good men's the reverse. An ignominious death after Cato's apparent failure to stop the evil against which he fought all his life has to be balanced: 'His attempt to prove that the good are rewarded, by relating elaborate funerals for the unjustly afflicted, also seems contrived.'* So Cato is declared to be 'Saviour' (σωτηρα) by the immediate gathering at his door of 300 senators and the people of Utica (71.1). Great honours, decoration and a procession are given to the body, and it is buried near the sea 'where a statue now stands, sword in hand'—a romantic, yet victorious image (71.2). Even his enemy, Caesar, is brought on to speak well of him (72.2). All of this contrives to give a triumphant end to the βιος.

* F. E. Brenk, S.J., In Mist Apparelled, p[age] 270.

Later on that same page:

Geiger demonstrates the similar pattern in the deaths of Cato here and of Thrasea Paetus in Tacitus' Annals: both deaths are consciously modelled on the death of Socrates, as is shown by Cato's last reading of Socrates' final dialogue (Phaedo).*

* [Joseph] Geiger, 'Munatius Rufus', Athenaeum, 1979, p[ages] 61-5.

If Plutarch can write up the death of Cato in terms too fitting to be true, and if Plutarch and Tacitus can model the death of Cato or of Paetus after the death of Socrates, then is it possible (not necessarily probable, not necessarily certain) that the gospels have written up various events in the life of Jesus in the same way? Do those magnified or modelled events turn the gospels into works of fiction?

Ben.

patcleaver

"A number of letters supposedly by Apollonius are now thought to be forgeries"
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/...onius_of_Tyana

No they are not evidence that some people thought Apollonius was a God.

They are forgeries. All they prove is that: if some people believed that the letters were genuine, then they might believe that some people once worshiped Apollonius. They are not evidence that anyone ever actually worshiped Apollonius.

If I forged a letter from spin that claimed that some people worshiped spin as a God, then that would not be evidence that anybody actually worshiped spin. Even if someone thought the letter actually was from spin that would not prove anything. Even if somebody believed that the letter was reliable, thought that what it said was true, then it would not be evidence that spin was actually worshiped as a God.

You can not show that any ordinary men have been mythologized into Gods. Even if your could prove that there were a couple of nuts who worshiped spin, because they thought his posts were divine, that would not indicate that Jesus might have been an otherwise unknown Jewish preacher who was mythicized into a super God and only son of Yahweh the one and only Almighty Creator God of the Jews.

The scenario envisioned by the HJ's never seems to happen - its just bunk.