Toto

I assume you are asking why Paul would not be regarded as a founder. There is a common idea that Paul was the real creator of Christianity, just because we have no other record of a Christian who appears to be so early.

But from Paul's letters, it appears that he joined an existing movement of some sort. He traveled or wrote to existing churches, and disputed other preachers in the same movement. Someone came before him - or the early Christian movement evolved out of Judaism.

mountainman

Thanks for all the thoughtful responses. I have attempted to
collate them, without individual attribution in the following
series of lists. Some of the information provided related not
to MJ theories, but HJ theories, and some of the information
related to general considerations in the analyses of both types
of theories. Consequently I have made three separate lists,
adding in to the list of HJ postulates the former list, and
renumbering the sequence:

While I was compiling this I took the liberty to add one myself (#7).
Please feel free to add, or subtract (by simplification) to any list.
I'd like to think about these results for a while before taking the next
step of the analysis (perhaps simplification) of the results.


List of possible postulates for MJ Theories

(nb: "stories" refers to "Gospel Stories")

1) the Jesus stories are mythology, itself a "transformed earlier myth"
2) Story characters are arbitrarility ficitious or historical
3) christianity grew organically without founder, later invented a story
4) stories are based on Hebrew scriptures (not an HJ)
5) Paul and his letters are "historical" (eg: Doherty's MJ)
6) stories are "mythical" created by an historically unknowable "storyteller(s)".
7) stories are "mythical" created by an historically knowable "storyteller(s)".


Other relevant (analytical) considerations:

1) MJ theories may not necessarily share common postulates
2) HJ theories may not necessarily share common postulates.
3) MJ and HJ theories may share a common set of postulates.
3) MJ and HJ theories may share common postulates.
4) HJ may be an unnecessary postulate (Occam's Razor) for MJ


List of postulates for HJ Theories

1) Sufficient historicity - the actual history of the time can be recovered in sufficient detail to have some assurance that one obscure person existed.
2) HJ Core (assumed as an unexamined postulate).
3) Evidentiary - because "of the fact" that christianity exists, it may be concluded that some HJ, or charismatic founder, or "NRM personality" started it.
4) Textual core written records are historical evidence of an HJ.

5) Source Language: the New Testament was written in Greek
6) Transmission: the critical Westcott-Hort transmission is correct
7) History: the christian historiology written c.314 is true and correct
8) Apostlic lineage: the apostle Paul wrote something preserved to us
9) Paul and his letters are "historical"

Gamera

Isn't the most problematic postulate of all forms of the MJ that narratives with similar structures are related. Seems to me the basic methodology of the MJ theorist is to find older myths with similar narratives and other structural patterns and conclude that the Jesus narrative therefore derived from those myths, and therefore must be a myth

The problem with this is pattern recognition. I can indisputably show structural similarities between the Jesus narrative and an Ikea catalog or a Pinter play, if called upon to do so. It's an inherent ability of human cognition.

Therefore, I find all forms of the MJ invalid. There simply is no myth one cannot claim that the Jesus narrative reflects, so the theory is worthless.

gstafleu

(I've flipped the order of paragraphs)
Sure, ugly ducklings galore. If we take that as our sole point of departure we couldn't distinguish a daisy from a rose, or from a cow for that matter. The solution is always to use relevant criteria for similarity. And indeed, "relevant" can be quit subjective.

So:
The thing to do is to find relevant similarities. For example, if it could be shown that in a lot of mythologies gods occur who sacrifice themselves and are them resurrected for the good of humanity, we would have some justification in saying that we find a theme in Christianity that it shares with these other mythologies. And since the dying and resurrecting is an important, relevant part of the mythologies in question, the similarity is relevant. Contrast this e.g. with finding acronyms at variable distances in the scriptures.

Hence if someone comes up with a similarity between two mythologies, the first critical issue is showing that the similar elements are important in both mythologies. If we for example see that that other mythologies share the splitting of an androgynous proto-human into man and woman, as in Genesis 2 (see this thread, especially the last post (#4051098)), that is a relevant similarity as this splitting is important to the creation stories. Something that may not be important is the number of rivers (four for example) that surrounds an initial paradise.

There is something else that I think is sometimes misunderstood: similarity is not identity, and if a mythology A has elements that we see in another mythology B, that does not make A "just another version" of B. It just means there is a connection between A and B. But usually A has added things to the shared theme that makes it sufficiently different from B so that they are no longer the same mythologies. Just mythologies with shared elements.

Gerard Stafleu

Toto

Gamera - if everything is just narrative and text, how could you possibly tell the difference between MJ and HJ? I think all of your historic evidence has been deconstructed.

Malachi151

In correct. I agree that this is what some people have done, but there is much ore to MJ than just that, for example Early Doherty's work.

My article on MJ is almost finished now, and I don't rely on what you said at all, in fact I go out of my way at avoid that issue:

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...th_history.htm

Gamera

[QUOTE=gstafleu;4056706](I've flipped the order of paragraphs)

.

The difference is roses are things; narratives are texts, and have structures that must be discerned. I don't need to use pattern recognition to determine that a rose is red and a daisy is white and yellow. I do have to use pattern recognition to discern structure in a narrative, which is what the MJ people do.

I guess my criticism is that this is exactly what the MJ people don't do. They find patterns and assume etiology, and in so doing cover over the uniqueness of the narratives they compare. Thus resurrection has a particular meaning and usage in the Jesus narrative which is utterly and completely different than it is in the Osirus myth. But the proponents of JM simply ignore the details and difference, choosing what fits in order to make a preordained conclusion: that the two stories are related. Like I say, using that methodology, I could show that Jesus was generated by a Pinter play.

Gamera

Everything isn't just a narrative and text, Toto: But texts and narrative are. And that's what constitutes history.

The issue is how we interpret those texts. Some we interpret to mean "history." And some we interpret to mean "myth." But in each case all we are confronted with are texts, not events. So a form of privileging is going on in our interpretation of texts. Nothing wrong with that, as long we are aware of it. What I find naive is the acceptance of "historical" texts as history as a means of claiming that the Christian scriptures aren't historical. It's tautological. Worse, there really is no difference between privileging the Christian scriptures as historical (something skeptics criticize Christian for), vs privileging Tacitus as historical in a way Luke, say, isn't. Both are a form of textual privileging, and the skeptics don't have the "high ground," just a different ground.

As to historical evidence of Jesus being deconstructed -- you've made my point, the same is true of all historical texts, not just the Christian scriptures. There never is any there there once you deconstruct the texts. They're texts, not events. Socrates has been deconstructed. As has Pericles. As has Nero. All we got are agendas about these guys in the form of texts.

Gamera

A very interesting article, Malachi, but I don't know if it even qualifies as part of the JM argument. You're not arguing that Jesus organically derived from prior mythic narratives, the way say, the Myth Of Balder may have taken on Christian tropes in late Norse culture. Seems to me, you're arguing that Jesus is a literary construct, derived from a series of prior texts, consciously (not organically) written into existence. A literary figure, in other words, that made the leap into historical presence. Seems to me you're using "myth" in the sense of a fake, not in the religious/cultural sense.

I don't know if this saves you from the pattern recognition problem. You've simply replaced prior myths with prior texts (which by the way is not different from the problem for the JM proponents because we only have the myths because of text -- the prior myths are merely texts about the myths, which may or may not have accurately preserved them).

By the way, speaking of which, how do you know the priority of the Hebrew scriptural narratives since many if not most of the earliest mss we have for the OT are younger than the mss we have for the NT. One could make the contrarian argument that the narratives of the OT were derived from the NT, based solely on ms age.

mountainman

Hi Gamera,

In this thread I am trying to abstract attention towards what
in mathematics and geometry are termed "axioms", and in physics
and the sciences are termed "postulates" or "hypotheses".

I can understand that your position is more towards the HJ
mode of thinking. Here are the postulates which may be observed
at the basis, and foundation, of theories (of history and/or
historiography), related to an historical Jesus.

You may not like the MJ hypotheses, but that is not the purpose
of this thread. Please, if you are compelled to support an HJ
position, at least select one (or more) of the following basic
HJ postulates, so that your opinion is clarified. Thanks.

List of postulates for HJ Theories

1) Sufficient historicity - the actual history of the time can be recovered in sufficient detail to have some assurance that one obscure person existed.
2) HJ Core (assumed as an unexamined postulate).
3) Evidentiary - because "of the fact" that christianity exists, it may be concluded that some HJ, or charismatic founder, or "NRM personality" started it.
4) Textual core written records are historical evidence of an HJ.

5) Source Language: the New Testament was written in Greek
6) Transmission: the critical Westcott-Hort transmission is correct
7) History: the christian historiology written c.314 is true and correct
8) Apostlic lineage: the apostle Paul wrote something preserved to us
9) Paul and his letters are "historical"