Sheshbazzar

To prevent misunderstandings regarding Mr Schulz's own position viz religion, it must be noted that in the linked article, it is;
That is the Rev Short's personal philosophising, and not at all necessarily reflective of Charles Schulz's own views or motives in introducing the Great Pumpkin.
Indeed, the same article goes on to inform us that Mr Schulz....
which would hardly indicate Mr Schulz himself personally believed, or ever intended to suggest through the medium of his comic strip that worshipping a deity was or is hazardous.



This sentence however is spot on, and is worthy of memorialising.

mountainman

Also worthy of memorialising is the fact that we can locate, with great precision to the year 324/325 CE, the historical process of the Pumpkinification of Jesus.

gurugeorge

You said "all the evidence for the HJ is in the Christian Canon".

Well, sure - but in exactly the same sense, "all the evidence for the MJ (or any number of other a-historicist positions) is in the Christian Canon".

IOW, yes, it's true that "all the evidence we have for whatever our position may be - and whatever the truth turns out to be - is in the Christian Canon".

But you didn't mean it that way, did you?

Therefore, you were begging the question. The Christian Canon is evidence of something, sure, but whether it's evidence for a historical human being is what has to be established - it can't be taken for granted, as you just did.

mountainman

Actually gurugeorge, with respect to evidence from the manuscript and textual traditions, this cannot be correct. In our possession as "evidence" are well over 100 books of the non canonical "Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc". These books also paint a picture of the figure of Jesus but certainly not in any historical sense. These books are well and truly agreed to be some kind of popular Hellenistic romance/fiction, in which any possible historical references are overshadowed by impossibly miraculous events. According to the historian Robert M. Grant, the evidence available in these books, which have slowly been unearthed over the last few centuries, represent "severely conditoned responses to Jesus ... usually these authors deny his humanity".

Only when the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc" are EXCLUDED, then can people arrive at pronouncements such as "all the evidence for the HJ is in the Christian Canon". Of course, it is natural to exclude these books, because we have been told authoritatively to do so, following the heresiologists of the orthodox canon-following church, from the very beginning of the story of Christian Origins. The (perhaps unconscious) exclusion of this evidence is preventing us from seeing the bigger picture, and is an entirely unnatural method of conducting an objective investigation.

Moreover, outside of the manuscript tradition evidence there exists a huge mass of evidence in various fields associated with ancient history, such as archaeology, C14 radio-carbon dating, architecture, etc, etc, etc. In developing any narrative for either an HJ or an MJ or an FJ we are still bound to address this non literary evidence, or its [GREAT and SILENT] absence, during the epoch, say 000-312 CE.

DCHindley

I always felt he was a new order Mennonite. Lucy & Linus' last name, Van Pelt, is common among Mennonites here in Ohio. POW!

DCH

spamandham

There are noncanonical early sources that are also evidence for MJ. The noncanonical sources reveal a tremendous variety of early Christian thinking, as well as revealing that much of what we attribute to Jesus had been established much earlier. This is to be expected if there was no 1st century historical Jesus, but requires quite a bit of baseless speculation to explain from an HJ perspective.

Any of this sound familiar?


* Love the Lord through all your life, and one another with a true heart
* Love yea one another from the heart; and if a man sin against thee, speak peacefully to him, and in thy soul hold not guile; and if he repent and confess, forgive him. But if he deny it, do not get into a passion with him, lest catching the poison from thee he take to swearing, and so then sin doubly …
* Love the Lord and your neighbor.
* Anger is blindness, and does not suffer to see any man with truth
* Hatred, therefore is evil; etc.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_of_Naphtali

Gee, might the 12 patrriarchs be the 12 disciples? Nahh. It must just be coincidence because the idea that a writer would base a work on something that he is familiar with is simply absurd.

mountainman

I would like to point out that we (ie: everyone I know of at least) are all assuming that the non canonical sources are demonstrative of "early Christian thinking" but that this assumption is far from being established as an historical fact, especially in view of the contents of some of the Nag Hammadi codices. Particularly the books with the more expensive high quality bindings, and specifically Codices 6, 9 and 10. Heavily Hermes speaks to Asclepius in these works. Plato's republic is also preserved, as is the three part fabrication from "Eugnostos the Blessed" to the christianization result of "The Sophia of Jesus Christ". You may see this as a trivial nit-picking comment, but I see it as central question in the future understanding of the integrated picture of what may be recovered as the history of Christian othodoxy and Gnostic hereticism.

What these "Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc", reveal IMO more clearly than "Christian thinking", is "antiChristian thinking".

And the fact remains that these texts according to our best guestimates, were authored more or less continuously from the 2nd through to the 4th centuries CE. Before and after Nicaea - but do we see a change in them to indicate Nicaea had happened? Not that I can see. Who wrote them and why? At the moment, to risk understating the obvious, we dont have a proverbial clue. Therefore I think it is entirely appropriate to question whether these "antiChristian" books were authored by "orthodox Christians".

spamandham

What about the dead sea scrolls? Although they are not Christian, we can nonetheless see Christan ideas developing within them. These *have* been carbon dated, and the dates are quite early. Nonetheless, we see "Jesus'" words within them, as well as so many others ideas we attribute to Christianity.

Steve Weiss

Correct!

Steve Weiss

If there were no historical Jesus, how could there be Jesus's words? A folk hero with the assigned name of Jesus may have said similar things, or may not. There simply is no record to verify anything.