show_no_mercy

I have to add to Chaucer's apparent hasty generalization logical fallacy that not every skeptic that posts in BC&H has been posting in the two months that Chaucer has been a member here. Chaucer is also dealing with a piss poor sample size in regards to the history of posters on the board.

Sea

Representing the 'legendary embellishment, not myth' faction here. I think Jesus was a real person who believed he was preparing the Jews for an apocalypse in his lifetime. He was so charismatic that not even his death stopped his movement entirely. Instead, some of his followers came up with another explanation which turned his public failure into a spiritual success.

It is true that the only first century information we have about Jesus comes through the Church itself, but the failures of the crucifixion and the apocalyptic statements are likely to be historical facts that had to be worked around. Same with Jesus being from Nazareth even though many thought the Messiah was supposed to be from Bethlehem. Matthew and Luke appear to have made up contradicting birth stories to resolve that problem.

Michael Grant's Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels and Bart Ehrman's Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium both advocate the view I just outlined.

Not trying to start a big argument in this thread; I just wanted to show that I have thought about the evidence and still consider Jesus historical.

I'm new to this forum, so I'm surprised to hear the mythicist position is the majority. On TheologyWeb -- where I've been a skeptical regular since late 2003 -- we have a few mythicists but most of us believe the Gospels are legendary embellishments. Interested in hearing more about why the situation may be reversed on this forum.

show_no_mercy

It's not. Maybe if you asked the question in the Lounge how many people think Jesus was a myth you'd get a better sample, not the 15 or so regulars who've posted in the past 2 months in this very specific subforum of FRDB.

No Robots

Hi Chaucer:

If we are interested in culture and its development, then we certainly have to account for the impact of Christ. There is nothing wrong with questioning origins, but causes can only really be fully understood by their effects. The cause of the Christian phenomenon must be equivalent to its effect. There must be at the source of Christianity a singularly powerful phenomenon. In the absence of any other possibility, most people conclude that this phenomenon must be a remarkable individual. When we then look at the texts, we see that they consistently attest to just the kind of remarkable individual that we would expect from our causal analysis. By ignoring the question of cultural effects, mythologism frees itself to posit any kind of origin.

The real problem is that our approach to cultural studies is evolutionist, where effects are assumed to be greater than their causes. We think that our culture of today is immeasurably greater than anything ever said or done by anyone as obscure and antiquated as Christ. Progessivism/evolutionism ultimately argues that the fundamental cause of Christianity is some kind of evolutionary mechanism. It is impossible from this position to see Christ as anything other than a negligible blip in the course of history, an accident around which evolutionary forces happen to have crystallized. Only by rejecting this evolutionist/progressivist perspective can we see that our culture is wholly a reflection of Christ and the handful of other geniuses who have, in effect, made us.

dog-on

Of course, the Holy Roman Empire should not be considered as the "singularly powerful phenomenon" at the source, now should it...

show_no_mercy

Yes. Romulus and Remus must have been historical, and the offspring of the god Mars and the virgin Silvia.

semiopen

I'm neutral. Is there a tangible difference in something if Jesus existed or not?

Chaucer

Most of my father's colleagues are/were complete atheists. I consider myself (depending on my mood:-) either a non-denominational theist or a skeptic. By theist in my sense, I mean something considerably less than someone-like-Jefferson's Deism. He and others like him believed that there was some being who gave the cosmos a bit of a push and then sat back and watched. I don't even believe that.

I believe that, as Hawking and others researching particle physics have also observed, there are many more dimensions to this cosmos than just our familiar three plus time. (Some recent physicists posit eleven.) It is possible therefore -- although not certain -- that a multi-dimensional being -- or two or three -- may exist in these extra dimensions, and it may be some vague awareness of such beings that has influenced especially socially enlightened figures like Bahaullah and so on. We don't really know.

I do not credit any of the religions on this planet as reflecting anything to do with physical reality in our familiar three dimensions plus time at all. All those religions are pure flights of fancy. Furthermore, if the more far-fetched declarations of the Bahaullahs and the Buddhas and the Spinozas et al reflect anything real at all, they may reflect the presence of multi-dimensional beings who have existed extra-dimensionally only from the start of the cosmos or well post-Big-Bang, not prior to the cosmos at all. I do not believe that anything of any kind existed before the Big Bang. The Big Bang is the sole start of everything that is, everything that lives and everything that thinks.

Perhaps some may just term me an agnostic, others a theist (even though I don't view any possible multi-dimensional beings as being at all supernatural since they'd still be part of the cosmos after all and bound by its laws), others a skeptic. This does distinguish me from most of the atheists I know, those atheists I've known thanks to having grown up in my father's circle. But it still distinguishes me from most agnostics as well, since agnostics aren't sure if something supernatural exists or doesn't, whereas I'm quite sure nothing supernatural exists, and if any beings exist in the newly discovered dimensions of particle physics at all, they sure aren't supernatural. They're still a natural part of this cosmos.

Sincerely,

Chaucer

PS: [added later] Perhaps, I'm an anti-supernatural theist;-)

No Robots

As usual, I am at a bit of a loss as to what you are getting at. But the fact is that the most interesting dimension of history is how the Christian spirit permeated the Roman Empire and its successors. Of course, this process is fraught with disasters, misunderstandings and out-and-out betrayal. The old joke is that the Holy Roman Empire should actually be called the Nominally Christian German Confederacy!

Chaucer

A declaration like that simply shows your own ignorance of the way the most up-to-date historians practice history today. Historical data emphatically includes textual data, which is SIFTED. Unless you wish to burn down every library in the world (something which I would not put past many a mythicist I've encountered on line), that data will still be around after you and I are six feet under.

Chaucer