maryhelena

OK - my thanks for proofreading...

All a mythicist position rules out is the assumption that Jesus is historical.
:wave:

GakuseiDon

I've been musing on this, and how this will affect my review. In my "Sublunar" part of the review, I plan to do this:

1. Set up the cosmology of people back then, i.e. a kind of Metaphysics 101
2. Examine Paul in light of that
3. Go through each reference of Doherty's in the sections addressing the above, showing if it is consistent or not.

But how do a cover the objections of someone who thinks "people thought a lot of weird things back then, so anything goes"? If I said "One suggested reading is that some people back then put the Underworld -- the place into which Semele descended and where Dionysus came down into to rescue her -- in the stars", I'll sound like a damn idiot.

And yet, it is always possible that there is some other reading. And given the nature of indirect evidence, an argument can always be spun to support it, even in the presence of direct evidence to the contrary.

So how do I counter the notion of "anything goes"?

ApostateAbe

I think you should place emphasis on the principle that the person who presents a hypothesis has the burden of demonstrating its greater relative probability, and it is trivial to demonstrate the possibility of anything in these matters. You can even make it the general theme of your review, as it is important for the reader to understand and agree with the fundamental philosophy of your criticisms. An example of such thing, like you have drawn, proves the argument to good effect. You are unlikely to convince people who are all but incapable of critical thinking, but maybe you should leave such people out of your target audience.

gurugeorge

Looking into it with the link you thoughtfully provided, I don't think it is. This is the passage that involves the stars:

Pretty much your standard "astral vision". You can get this sort of thing either through lucid dreaming or, the other way round, throught training in what occultists call "astral travel" while awake.

The vision goes on:-

He finds himself in a realm of stars - the souls waft FROM BELOW. Are they the real stars as he would see them with his physical eyes? Maybe, maybe not - the whole thing is an astral vision, so he might have CONNECTED the stars he saw with the stars you see in the night sky - or he might not have. It's all a bit ambiguous, but that's just the way it is with these things.

And so on and so forth - the kinsman explains all sorts of stuff about how life after death works. It is of capital importance (for my broader thesis, re. Jesus giving Paul his gospel) to understand that this is just the sort of thing that happens: entities talk to you and tell you stuff. It all seems very real, but we moderns understand it's just a capacity of the brain to produce this kind of seeming-alternate-reality (just as it's a capacity of the brain to produce incredibly intricate geometrical patterns under the influence of LSD - i.e. the brain has the capacity to generate seeming-reality and what seems like third-party dialogue off its own bat).

Only then, after an in-depth explanation of how justice is meted out in the afterwold, we come to the passage you quoted:

There is no indication so far as I can see that there has been any descent after the initial opening of the vision in the realm of stars (or vast star like things). The movement is still in the same "place" as the vast realm of stars, up to which the souls were wafting. The "cavern" is in the same place.

What "place" is that? To call it "on the earth" is as futile as calling it "in the sky". It's precisely a "Buffy-like realm" (as you once amusingly put it) that partly intersects with our world, partly influences it, partly has a similar up-down directionality to our world, but isn't completely congruent with it. A "Dreamtime".

I think your problem is that you are keen to put everything these ancients are saying into a neat physicalist pot. But you simply can't do that. As demonstrated here, a fair amount of what the ancients were talking about were taken from visionary experience. Visionary experience was more common, perhaps because more accepted in those days, and the dividing line between waking reality and the things seen in visions was rather blurred; as was the dividing line between thoughts you got out of your own head (philosophical thoughts, cosmological thoughts) and thoughts you seemed to get from entities in visions.

Of course we can't expect our modern, staid academics to take the necessary time out from their daily labours to get into lucid dreaming or astral travel, but to really understand the ancients, you have to at least put a placeholder there for these kinds of experiences, you have to understand that they can be very real-seeming to those that have them, they are not just made up, and they are not like vague daydreams, they have specific content that doesn't seem (to the visionary) to be generated by the visionary's own mind (although of course we nowadays understand that it was). And you have to accept and understand that they are a SOURCE for a lot of the stuff ancients babbled on about.

All the stuff through all religions about "gods", "spirits", "demons", the whole mythological menagerie, through "trolls", "pixies", "pisacha", etc., etc., etc., it's all the same stuff. And you simply don't understand the first thing about ancient religion and philosophy until you get this very, very basic point straight. People didn't just have vague philosophical ideas and clothe them in imagined imagery. They sometimes did that, but sometimes they also had visions, got their philosophical and religious ideas from them, which they then may have further elaborated in their minds in the ordinary state of consciousness.

But the visions come first; more so for ordinary folks, but even sometimes for rational people and philosophers. And in terms of that kind of thing, it's going to require going through ancient philosophy with a fine-tooth comb from this point of view, more of a brain-science-based understanding, to really try and understand what things like "Middle Platonism" was about.

Another classic example - the beginning of Parmenides' famous poem. For generations, commentators have bypassed this as a "merely poetic" introduction to the "meat" of Parmenides' philosophy. It is not: it is in fact a description of the very vision in which Parmenides got his philosophy from Persephone, and themes introduced in it are integral to the meaning of his philosophy. Parmenides wasn't like Bertrand Russell in a chiton, he was more like a priest-cum-healer.

The ancients were weirder and more alien to us than we think - even the rational ones.

But another thing that's of interest to me about this, now, having gone through it, is that it makes me mistrust your critiques of Doherty even more. Clearly, what happened is that Doherty read the whole passage, absorbed it, tried to get into its spirit and meaning, and summarised it, actually pretty accurately. You on the other hand cherry-picked it, apparently without really making even the slightest attempt to actually understand the passage in its entirety- without any apparent interest in actually advancing knowledge - merely in order to bang on your hobby-horse and make Doherty look like a fool.

Not good GD, not good, I actually did have more respect for you before this.

GakuseiDon

Yes, though I think it is Plutarch describing a made-up vision to make his point about justice in the after-life.

Either way: I agree he is in the stars. (I don't know why anyone thinks that this part is in question).

Agreed. They are still in the stars when they come to the chasm.

No, it isn't. Read my post where I lay out the analysis. "Clustering together like birds, they flew round the chasm in a circle, but did not dare to cross it" and "odors wafting up". Wherever they are, they are ABOVE the chasm, looking down.

It is NAMED in the text: Lethe, the Place of Oblivion. Lethe is located in the Underworld:

The spirit said that by this opening Dionysus went up to the gods, and afterward led Semele up by the same way, and that the place is called Lethe.

Where do you place the opening into the Underworld?

Not my first dance, gurugeorge, not my first dance. I'm sure things will get remembered the way you described it, though.

aa5874

But, that is what is very confusing. Historicists discredit the gospel story line and then turn around, as if suffering from amnesia, and use it for historical purposes when defending their HJ.

Once Historicists have deemed the gospel story line non-historical then their HJ cannot be accounted for in history except by their imagination which has no historical value.

Perhaps historicists are just agnostics posing as historicist since they really know nothing now and have not known of the true history of Jesus in the past.

GakuseiDon

Here is the Wiki article for Lethe, for those interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethe

Toto

You would have to explain why you reject a reading that places this entire scenario in an alternate universe, or why you think this is subject to rational analysis in the first place.

Why don't you start by not mischaracterizing the argument as "anything goes?"

It is very hard to construct a convincing argument against a position unless you understand it from the inside.

mountainman

Many tenured HJ'ers get accredited for citing earlier tenured HJ'ers who have not yet been retrospectively cited as so suffering. It may not be legally possible to claim that HJ'ers writing in the 20th and 19th centuries and earlier were "suffering from amnesia". It's a sort of a loophole. Do we have many tenured MJ'ers?

Dont forget this practice of citing the citations of the citations of the citations etc is standard academic practice. At the begiing of this imposing (and largely tenured) academic movement the very first tenured HJ'er was our man Eusebius, who was a very accredited fellow himself and editor of the earliest New Testament editions, which failed the Nicaean canonisation process.


The true history of Jesus was not really and truly officially canonised until after Julian's death. Between the failure to canonise at Nicaea and the ultimate canonisation as reported via Anathasius c.360's (or later) perhaps the true history of Jesus was thrashed out in the imperial scriptoria between these dates in the 4th century? Something was not quite right with the 1st Constantine editions, or so I have heard, so a process of closure on the NT canon ensued.

Do we really know the true history of the period 325 to 365 CE?
What does Ammianus tell us?

"The highways were covered with galloping bishops"

What can these galloping bishops tells us about the true history of Jesus?
What did they tell us about the HJ?
And for sake of the Historical Jesus Himself, dont mention Arius of Alexandria

GakuseiDon

That cuts every which way, Toto.

And that's it! I'm out of here for a while. Thanks everyone.