AndresDeLaHoz

Join the club.

Rational BAC

Amos does seem to represent himself as representing accepted Catholic theology.

Is this true?

Half my extended family are Catholic and I have never heard of half the stuff Amos talks about----at least in such an incoherant way.

AndresDeLaHoz

My whole country's catholic and I haven't heard half the stuff Amos talks about.

Amos

Yes, but laying floors is not exactly the same as "making things." To be a maker of things ousias are conceived and we need twelve of these to get a parousia.

These sins of Jesus' world were the sins of Joseph and those he carried to Calvary. These insights (or eidetic images) told Joseph that there was more to his world then what he first believed and his search for this unknown element is what prompted his journey to Bethlehem where parousia was found. After this he carried these same eidelon making qualities to Calvary because in his omniscience they had become redundant.

CX

I consulted one of our editors here and technically a word with an "aspirate 'H'" should be preceeded by "an".

Amos

The Church can be be all things to all people and if this is new to you maybe you have been discussing Catholicism with people who think like you do.

What I write is really written all over the Church but requires just a little different interpretation.

Tristan Scott

I voted yes, but I would say that the Jesus that existed was not the same as the Jesus depicted in the Gospels. The Jesus of the Gospels was a modification of the historical Jesus, modified to fit the perameters of the religion that Paul had invented, yet still be somewhat compatible with the Jesus that the people knew through oral tradition.

PopeInTheWoods

Well excuse me whilst I go throw an hissy fit.

PopeInTheWoods

By the way, I voted #5 with a strong leaning towards #4. I wonder how the situation would be different if HJ weren't presented as historical fact to the Western world for 1500+ years.

Andy

Clutch

Suppose there were four fellows hanging around ancient Athens once upon a time.

One was a stonemason, named Aristotle. He made a good living, and charitably donated money to found a school called the Lyceum.

One was a minor politician and friend of Plato's, named Iatrogenics. He fled Athens after some of Plato's enemies focussed on him, and went to live in Macedonia where he made a living tutoring for the royal family. The Macedonians mistakenly thought him the manager of Plato's Academy, and doubly confused the Academy with the Lyceum. As he left Athens, he flattered himself by comparison to Socrates, saying "I leave lest Athens sin against philosophy a second time."

Two were like-minded peripatetic lecturers, named Ouzo and Metaxa, who delivered lessons at the Lyceum. They began each lecture by thanking the founder of the institution, prefacing their lectures with, "Aristotle gives this lecture".

Now, over time a bunch of things got confused. Several times, before Iatrogenics fled, the four happened to be seen together; someone pointed at the group and said, "Now there's a real philosopher!" (meaning Metaxa), but giving some passers-by the impression that it was Iatrogenics, and others the impression that it was Aristotle.

And years later, when visitors from Macedonia later visited Athens, they said things like, "Did you know that our Alexander, Zeus rest his soul, was tutored by an Athenian? The fellow in charge of the Lyceum back then, I think".

And so forth. Make the story as complex a series of misunderstandings as you please; what matters for the sake of our thought experiment is the prospect that:

One person tutored Alexander and fled Athens with the famous quote.

One person founded the Lyceum and was called Aristotle.

Two people gave the lectures the class notes from which were saved and later attributed to Aristotle.

Now, however unlikely the scenario, the question is this: Were these facts to come to light, would we say that there was a historical Aristotle?

That is, would we say that Aristotle actually was not a philosopher, did not give any lectures, was not born in Stagira and never tutored Alexander? Or have these properties (or some weighted subset of them) become definitional of the name "Aristotle", so that we would say that the facts revealed that there was no Aristotle?

Notice the spurious weight carried by someone's bearing the name, in the story! My intuitions tell me to identify the stonemason as Aristotle because that's what he was called; probably we'd conclude that in this case Aristotle didn't do most of what we thought he'd done. But of course Aristotle was not strictly called "Aristotle", and the story could just as easily be told in a way having that name (and its Greek variants) part of a much later attachment to the confused history of the fictional individual to whom all of Aristotle's putative properties were attributed.

Imagine the stoneworker's name was Eugenia -- she was a rare female tradesperson in Athens! -- and "Aristotle" the name of the infant son of someone recounting the mistaken history decades later, but confused by his audience for the name of the person described. On this history, is it correct to say that there was a historical Aristotle? Does our name "Aristotle" really refer to the son of the much-later storyteller?

I contend that questions about historicity rest upon linguistic questions about the reference of names, which in the normal run of events (thankfully) never become relevant.

Now, the reason we'd have to tell such a weird story in the case of Aristotle in order to shake up our intuitions about historicity is because Aristotle was during his lifetime at the centre of hugely significant events politically, militarily and intellectually; Aristotle is "triangulated" by our knowledge of ancient treatments of these events. By contrast, the gap between the putative life of Jesus and the only depictions of him is large, the scope for misplaced attribution is considerable.

Suppose, for example, that there were two guys who crossed paths often, and who were at least on the same page vis a vis spiritual thought. One was John the Baptist, who spoke at length about various doctrines, some fairly original and some cribbed from Greek and oriental thought. Another was a guy named Jesus, who was intensely shy and led by example; he never lectured per se, but through his quiet and gentle example acquired a reputation as a holy man and a few followers, many of whom also revered John.

The absence of contemporary documentation, and the substantial passage of time, makes it eminently possible that something like this or fifty other scenarios explain the merging, decades later, of stories about various people's travels and miracles with other people's collected sayings, most of which had been added in the telling over the years, some of which trace back to various contemporaries, and none of which trace back to the guy named Jesus (Who, by the way, died of an aneurism when his follower Barabbas was stoned for practicing sleight-of-hand and being nicked as a sorcerous magician.) Given the complete opacity of the process whereby specific properties became predicated of some original putative referent of the name "Jesus", it is an open question whether our scepticism about a unique satisfier of those predicates amounts to a scepticism about the existence of a referent of the name.

Was there a historical Jesus? As a working hypothesis, I say Sure. But this is more a matter of convenience and convention than any evidence; the crucial thing is not to treat the convention as a warranted proposition that can be used to lever other claims in or out of acceptance.