Chris Weimer

Paul himself disagrees with you. Paul says he received his knowledge of Jesus from God, not from man. That's why he lambasts the "pillars".

Gamera

One thing we do know about Paul, since he mentions it over and over, and since tradition confirms it without dispute -- he preached a gospel. That is, he preached a narrative about Jesus. He tells us what that narrative is in 1 Cor. 15. And it clearly refers to an historical personage in his mind. And clearly it is at least on its surface harmonious with Paul's other "doctrinal" writings.

If you doubt the attribution of this passage to Paul, then what narrative do you think he preached and on what basis do you think that?

GakuseiDon

No, I was referring to Paul's reference to "Zion" in Romans, not to the reference of "heavenly Jerusalem" in Hebrews. Sorry, I should have worded that better.

GakuseiDon

As I explained to SC Carlson, by "I think that Paul is referring to the earthly Jerusalem here" I meant in Romans. Hebrews specifically refers to the heavenly Jerusalem, so it is possible that Paul could have meant that (ETA in Romans!). But that means Jesus was crucified in the Heavenly City of God, which simply doesn't match the nature of the supra-lunar realm as it was known. I think we agreed that we shouldn't assume that Paul had a modern mindset, and that Paul was a product of his time. If so, it makes such an interpretation unlikely. So "Zion" (in Romans) meaning the heavenly Jerusalem is possible but unlikely.
Would you agree that this particular Zion in Rom 9 is referring to the earthly Jerusalem?

"The one who trusts in him will never be put to shame". Who is "he"? In the very next chapter, Paul writes:
4 For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes...
10 For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
11 For the Scripture says, "Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame"

The last seems to be a refer-back to the earlier passage. Who is "him" in both Rom 9:33 and Rom 10:11, if not Jesus?

A little later, in Rom 11:26, Paul writes:
Rom 11:26 And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: "The Deliverer will come out of Zion, And He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob"

"The Deliverer will come out of Zion" -- what is the most likely reading here, in your opinion? To me, it seems to be placing Jesus in Jerusalem.

This is where such rationalisations cut both ways. So IF a mystery religion had formed around a historical person, are you saying we shouldn't expect such details from his followers?

S.C.Carlson

OK, thanks for the clarification.

Vorkosigan

You know, Chris, you excoriated the mythicists here for not having a clue, and worse yet, for not even knowing that they don't have a clue -- irony so thick you can serve it up fried....

First things first: the things you refer to as evidence are not evidence. They are data. Let me repeat that: the Pauline epistles and the gospels in and out of the canon are not evidence -- they are data. This confusion of evidence and data is so fundamental to your thinking that I doubt you will be able to ever come to grips with how you have failed to understand the issues here -- that's why it was so ironic to read you endorsing the position that amateurs are clueless about how cluesless they are. Got that right, and you're a prime exhibit.

Let's start with a sketch of the The Problem: the clash between mythicists and historicists is not a clash over the evidence, it is a clash of interpretive frameworks used to examine data. The early Christian writings cannot be evidence until they have been analyzed with an interpretive framework. Hence, by calling the evidence you're implicitly assuming the existence of an interpretive framework and demanding that the reader submit to your interpretation. Your viewpoint does not separate data, analytical methodology, and evidence. To you, analysis is an I/O blackbox. Input Ebionite writings, output HJ. What mythicists want to do is peer inside that black box to see what's going on in there.

data -- in this case the early Christian writings -- are always constructions. That is to say, a piece of messy reality is extracted, polished, and prepared for analysis by an interpretive framework, be it canonical correlation analysis or Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique or globalization theory. In our case the data set is a construction -- the Greek text of the NT -- created by scholars based on a massive set of data from antiquity. The "originals" are then reconstructed using accepted techniques and by a group of scholars trained in the languages and the techniques. Such reconstructions of data are normal throughout the sciences and in principal there is nothing wrong with that.

In scholarly analysis, it is absolutely fundamental to keep one's interpretive framework and one's data set completely separate. The former cannot contaminate the latter; otherwise, it is useless, since the "data" will already contain one's conclusions.

So ask yourself first whether the reconstructed Greek text of the New Testament contains anything in it that reflects the interpretive frameworks of its constructors. I think we both know the answer to that question, but we'll skip that issue for the nonce.

The real issue for mythicists is the one that historicists hurriedly move on past: what population does the data belong to? In many kinds of scholarship, that issue does not arise, because the scholar has selected the population (all elementary school teachers in Arizona, all interracial married couples in their 40s in the US) before extracting the sample (random selection of 100 teachers from representative schools around Arizona, snowball sample of 15 couples interviewed until saturation point is reached). But in confronting the early Christian writings, the first decision the scholar has to make is what the population is. In the analysis of the texts of nascent Christianity, that means deciding: what is the genre of this document?

For historicists this decision is contained in their interpretive framework: the documents are in some sense historical -- the letters of Paul are copies of actual letters from an early Christian missionary. For mythicists one could take either position -- taking them as documents from the hand of Paul, as Earl Doherty does, or regarding them as epistolary fictions, as Hermann Detering does. But prior to any decision about whether the documents constitute evidence and what kind of evidence they constitute, one has to make a decision about what they are.

Now, it is important to note that the context of all the Paulines is the first and second century, an era that was the heyday of epistolary fictions deliberately written to look like real letters. Of course real letters were also written at that time. So let me ask you, Chris, what methodology have you used to establish that the Paulines are real letters? And if you recognize that Hebrews, the Deutero-Paulines, and the Pastorals, are all forgeries of one kind or another, explain the methodological/interpretive grounds for accepting the "authentic" Paulines as real letters from an actual missionary operating in the 40s and 50s of the first century.

Vorkosigan

spamandham

Something I've pondered, is that if these were actually letters to various people and churches, and Paul sent them, how were they collected back together again? This seems particularly odd when combined with Paul's own admission that his peers considered him nuts, and that he was the least among them.

Chris Weimer

"Evidence in its broadest sense, refers to anything that is used to determine or demonstrate the truth of an assertion."

The collection of data can be used as evidence for something. Not all data is evidence, some is. Whatever can be used to build up a case is evidence. Fingerprints on a gun is data, but when it is used in a murder trial, its evidence.

Michael, I understand that you've been living in Taiwan, but when you really can't even use English correctly, and then try to chastize me for it, you really only make yourself look foolish.

Vorkosigan

Yes, but we're not talking about evidence in its broadest sense, Chris. We're talking about evidence in a scholarly sense. As I noted earlier, you do not yet understand that you have a very serious problem. As you make clear below, you do not even grasp the difference between evidence assembled in pursuit of a conviction in court, and evidence assembled after analysis of data under the rubric of a scholarly model. In other words, you don't even know what it means to be a scholar.

No. Data is collected and then analyzed. It becomes evidence when, after analysis, it is assembled under some kind of model. Data can never be evidence without some kind of interpretive framework intervening. In your case you want us to accept your interpretive framework without any consideration of separately from the data it is working on, and insist we're fools for not accepting that framework. But of course, you are not really aware that you have accepted an interpretive framework....

No. Data is never evidence. Data is data. Always. The Greek text of the Paulines is simply ink on a page --data -- until you impose an interpretation on it. Then it becomes evidence. Kata sarka is two words in Greek until you interpret it in light of an interpretive framework that tells you what it might mean.

Courts and scholars use the term evidence in totally different ways. Here you are very badly confused. A fingerprint on a gun is not data but the outcome of an analysis of oils from human skin left on a gun. The methodology for collecting the print is an accepted one used in criminalistics; the fingerprint match is then made on a set of data points, either implicitly by a human eye mating a lifted print to one collected from a suspect, or by a machine that analyzes the data derived from a print and matches it according to threshold criteria selected by the programmer. In scholarly terms, a fingerprint is the outcome of an analytical process, and is evidence, not data (the data are the skin oils collected from the gun from which a fingerprint is constructed -- methodologies are well known and assumptions old hat, so nobody thinks much about how that evidence is constructed and the interpretive frameworks used to construct it -- except defense lawyers and criminalistics scholars.). It is evidence in legal terminology as well, but that use of evidence is different.

As I observed earlier, you do not even understand what you are talking about, and worse still, do not know that you do not understand.

But you are welcome to answer the question I posed and show me up for the fool I am:

So let me ask you, Chris, what methodology have you used to establish that the Paulines are real letters? And if you recognize that Hebrews, the Deutero-Paulines, and the Pastorals, are all forgeries of one kind or another, explain the methodological/interpretive grounds for accepting the "authentic" Paulines as real letters from an actual missionary operating in the 40s and 50s of the first century?

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

To take this another step forward, really, Chris, you're using the idea of evidence in a court case as the definition of evidence -- in that usage, the idea of court case functions as both an interpretive framework, and as a strategy to legitimate your rhetorical move. Actually, your idea of evidence is basically derived from folk psychology. You don't really get how evidence works in court.

I testified as an expert witness in a court case in LA in February, where I met Toto, among many other things. The plaintiff was attempting to show that the defendant was a poor driver, and wanted to use the fact that she failed the California drivers test three times as evidence of that. But the court threw out two of the failures, saying that they occurred after the accident that caused the case.

What constitutes evidence? In court, it is essentially Whatever The Judge Says. In the scholarly world, it is whatever is produced by methodologies working on the stuff of reality. In neither case is your idea of evidence supported, Chris.


Vorkosigan