lee_merrill

I agree, my contention is that you are doing an argument from silence, for if we had a record of this other census, we would certainly believe there was a census. Without a record, we shouldn't say no census happened in that time. Thus you are presenting an argument from silence, just as one skeptic wrote a book saying there was no real city of Nazareth, because we had no record of it. At that time...

Ah. You can't hear some official saying, "and it's just time for a census, how convenient"?

GakuseiDon

Easily, if we assume that their writings were inspired by the same person. I think that arguably Paul was writing about a historical person.

I'm no sure what you are getting at here, I'm afraid.

How about a formal debate: "Resolved: From those letters generally attributed to Paul, the evidence suggests that Paul believed that Jesus Christ: (1) lived on earth, (2) died in the near past, (3) was crucified in Jerusalem"? Limited to 5 rounds. I'll be away for about 6 weeks from mid-June, but we could have one or two rounds beforehand, and conclude later on.

GakuseiDon

Yeah, I don't know why they think they are scoring points by raising the apologist card so often when arguing about a historical Jesus. It makes it appear that they are more against Christianity than a HJ.

dog-on

How do you go from Paul's full blown deity to what we find in Mark, especially if they were inspired by the same historical person?

Regarding the Ebionites, if you reject the epistles and have some form of the passion story, minus the birth narrative (Mark?), then it's fairly easy to come up with a non-divine Jesus. So, is there a version of Matthew floating around that leaves out the nativity and deity aspects? That would be an interesting find...

Re: Your debate invite. There are people on this board who would argue those specifics much better than I and besides, how much of a debate would it be with the following likely sequence:

You: born of a woman
Me : Interpolation

or

Me: Marcion's version was likely the original
You: Fie on Marcion's sponge, etc, etc, etc....

Chris Weimer

I wonder how they know Marcion exists...

Chris Weimer

Yes, I figured out a long time ago there's no point in arguing with fundamentalists. I put you on the same ignore list I put praxeus, mountain man, lee merrill, and other people who live in their own fantasy land.

Drat, and I really wanted to ask you how you know that Marcion existed...

dog-on

I don't "know" that Marcion existed. I only know that there are negative references regarding his "activities" in the writings of other people who may or may not have existed themselves. Hell, Mountainman could be right after all...or Atwood's whole Flavian conspiracy...as far as actual evidence is concerned.

I actually look at this whole topic from a political perspective. At that time, as in ours (hopefully to a lesser degree) religion had significant power. The people in the hierarchy of such a system would (not unlike leaders of our own day) probably not be hesitant in doing whatever it took to help the flock keep the faith...

Amaleq13

Refusing to accept a claim because it lacks any credible supporting evidence is not an argument from silence but, even if your misuse of the term is accepted, it is clearly not an example of fallacious reasoning.

Don't you refuse to accept claims that lack credible supporting evidence all the time? I don't how you could afford a computer otherwise.

The claim "Jesus supported homosexuality because the Gospels never depict him preaching against it." is a legitimate example of the flawed logic known as an argument from silence.

On the other hand, refusing to accept the claim "Jesus supported homosexuality" is entirely logical if there is no credible evidence to support it.

I think the ultimate source of your confusion may be a failure to differentiate between refusal to accept a proffered claim because it lacks credible support and asserting the opposite of a proffered claim.

One can reject a claim without asserting the opposite of it.

gurugeorge

[QUOTE=dog-on;4517470]I agree, and I think the key issue is the Apostolic Succession. I think the whole rigmarole was built around that, probably by the bishops of Rome and Alexandria. The historicisation of what was initially a "cool", somewhat anti-establishment, Hellenized Jewish version of the Mysteries was undertaken in order to create the rationale for tight political control over the flock, by intimidating them into believing their bishops had a hotline to the Deity through historical lineage to the Man Himself. That's the tail that wags the dog, the Wizard behind the curtain.

This is where I think there's a sort of a grain of truth in Mountainman's ideas - probably Eusebius either belonged to a version of this religion that already had a fairly historicised view that had gradually coalesced a la Doherty (maybe driven initially by people like Clement of A), and propagated that view, with its fabrication of Acts, etc., or they just created the historicisation out of whole cloth, a la Mountainman, at the behest of Constantine (although contra Mountainman, I think a vibrant thing called Christianity did exist before that). It was a shrewd move because this "cool" Hellenized Jewish religion was a growing thing, in its various forms (mostly Gnostic, and mostly started by proto-Gnostics like "Simon Magus" - i.e. "Paul"), and Constantine thought he could see a way of co-opting and unifying the movement to his advantage, as a sort of potential religious/social "glue" for an Empire that was starting to fall apart (partly as a result of Christianity itself, its individualistic, anti-authoritarian attitude, etc., but partly because of military, political and economic mismanagement and the sheer unwieldy size of the thing).

To do this it was necessary to give bishops a more centralised, "higher" kind of authority than they had - hence the creation of the idea of Apostolic Succession, hence the historicisation.

Now this is of course a conspiracy theory of sorts, and in a way I agree with Chris that it's partly based on "feel", but that "feel" is based on a triangulation of what I understand of both historicist and mythicist arguments, plus my understanding of mysticism and other religions. I'm not best placed, nor have I the time to marshal the evidence to support it, but FWIW I think that's the general outline of a way of looking at the evidence we have that makes sense of it, and I think it has falsifiable elements. (Freke and Gandy's outline is fairly similar, I'd just tweak it a bit.)

I also think it does justice to the depth and beauty of Christianity - there's something profound about Christianity, only a fool would deny it; and that something is, as Freke and Gandy outline, that it was a sort of esotericisation of what was previously a rather more recondite form of Western non-dualism, originated by early Greek philosophers like "Orpheus", Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, passed on as a rather "secret" thing through the Mysteries, and later esotericised in early Christianity. (Parallel to this, a separate stream of this Western non-dual gnosis was kept alive in neo-Pythagoreanism, neo-Platonism and Hermeticism, and passed on to Sufism.)

The horror of it is, that as a result of these machinations, for nearly 2,000 years the West has had no religion, really. It has had an okay system of moral guidance and psychology, but nothing really deeply spiritual to compare with the other great religions (apart from a few mystics here and there, all viewed askance by the authorities). The "magical" elements (i.e. the practices, comparable to meditation and that kind of thing in the East) went "underground", eventually scattered and all that was left of that stuff was the hotch-potch of Western "occultism" - garbled fragments toyed with by thrill seekers.

Hence Art - Art has been the blind striving of the Western psyche for the true religion that it has been missing, an instinctive attempt by genuinely religious types to fill the yawning void in the heart of culture. And the bitterest irony is that "literalist Christianity" was probably, initially, just an innocent mistake, or an attempt to tighten up the organisation, but grew into a kind of politico-religious monster with almost no actual religion to it at all.

post tenebras lux

IMHO, there are some people who can't see the phrase "pious fraud" (or the implication of it) without - seemingly automatically - jumping to the assumption that they have a conspiracy-theorist on their hands.

Likewise - IMHO - whilst they accept that we've lost many ancient documents because the (usually) pious scribes didn't copy them, they have a hard time accepting that maybe these scribes had a (pious) bias when they were deciding which documents were worth copying for posterity and which weren't.