spin

Orthodoxy is a political notion that creates heresy in order to exist.

sotto voce

For crooks, it has to be.

spin

Christianity has always maintained a notion of orthodoxy and in so doing also maintained heresy.

sotto voce

Every religion must. Including atheism, of course.

J-D

It appears that when you refer to general opinion among professional historians qualified in the area, you are in fact referring to the single opinion of just one historian. If Richard Carrier is the only person you recognise as a historian qualified to comment on the question, how hard have you looked for others?

spin

Only those, like christianity, that maintain an orthodoxy.

Ask an atheist. (And by definition atheism is not a religion, though try as you fallaciously might to recast it as such. This is just one of your usual deliberate misrepresentations, ie it's a troll.)

sotto voce

Which religion does not?

There is no necessity. An atheist's orthodoxy is that there is no deity.

If religion is defined as excluding atheism, of course it is. Nobody is trying to paint atheism or agnosticism as tame, pious little world views. There needs to be less sensitivity about this. Or perhaps, less pejorative rhetoric from atheists with use of the word 'religious'. The point here is that there is belief, or faith. Only when it can be proved, in the absolute sense, that there is no deity, or that agnosticism is a necessity, can it be said that atheists or agnostics do not have a belief and an orthodoxy.

But those who maintain that Christians have such a thing as apostolic succession have one very hard time convincing anyone that they are not reluctant theists. Because merely to claim apostolic succession is virtually a criminal act.

Toto

I have been searching for about the last ten years. Like Diogenes with his lamp looking for an honest man, I have been looking for an honest HJ scholar.

Some of them are honest enough to admit that the evidence for a historical Jesus is dodgy at best. Most of them don't want to think about the question. Some of them claim that the issue is not very interesting, and the problem was solved long ago, so long ago that they have forgotten the details, but it was convincing.

I challenged one professor of religious studies who used to post here, and he referred me to a book published almost a century ago by a liberal theologian (not a historian) which started with the premise that the gospels were evidence.

A few years ago, there was a "Jesus Project" - which admitted that the whole question of the historicity of Jesus needed to be addressed. Unfortunately, it was a victim of the recession and internal politics at the Center for Inquiry.

Now I have had to move on to other concerns (that damned recession) but I keep track of what's happening. There's no one I have seen except Carrier who is addressing the issue of the historicity of Jesus from the point of view of historical evidence.

For most of the rest of the historical Jesus guild, history is not the primary concern. Some are committed to Jesus as a non-violent community organizer, some as a personal savior. Which makes sense in a way - unless you really care about history.

J-D

Perhaps I did not make myself sufficiently clear.

I wasn't asking how hard you had looked for 'an honest HJ scholar', whatever that means (and frankly, I don't believe 'HJ scholar' would stand up to proper analysis as a meaningful description).

What I was asking was how hard you had looked for historians professionally qualified to comment on the subject of the historical origins of Christianity. I find it hard to believe there's only one historian in the world professionally interested in that subject, and I'd like to see some evidence before accepting that conclusion.

And I see now that in looking for that evidence I made a mistake by saying 'how hard have you looked?', because framing the question like that invites answers like 'very hard', 'really hard', 'really very hard', 'very very hard', 'extremely hard', and so on, when that isn't the kind of answer I'm really interested in.

What I should have asked, to better reflect my real intent, was 'how have you looked for historians professionally qualified to comment on the subject of the historical origins of Christianity?', or perhaps 'where have you looked for historians professionally qualified to comment on the subject of the historical origins of Christianity?'

Anyway, however you've looked and wherever you've looked (and however hard you've looked), if you've only found one so far, that doesn't provide an extensive base of evidence (of qualified historical opinion) to draw on.

mountainman

030-324 CE: Where is the archeological evidence for pre-Nicene christianity?