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Old 01-15-2007, 10:36 AM   #1
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Default Take your shot: Guignebert's refutation of the mythicist case

Hi,

In a previous post, I was wondering why Earl Doherty, in his Responses to Critiques of the Mythicist Case, didn’t address the critique made by Charles Guignebert in his book Jesus, published in 1933 (first French edition). Perhaps he deemed those 6 pages or so were not worth mentioning, or that he had already addressed the main points through his other critiques, or whatever. In France anyway, the mythicist debate is considered “case closed” by scholars since Guignebert’s works. That’s why I thought it would be useful, for informative reason at least, to post his main arguments on this board. I know Guignebert’s Jesus was translated into English, but it doesn’t seem that easy to get a hold on.

NB: Sorry for the grammatical mistakes in the translations of the excerpts...

Guignebert starts his first chapter “the historical existence of Jesus” by a summary of the mythicist case since Dupuis and Volney, mentionning Bruno Bauer and his followers, Jensen, Kalthoff, Robertson, Smith and Drews. He then proceeds to criticize their specific theses. The main problem, he says, is that they surmise a lot without any substantial elements to back up their hypotheses. Couchoud, for example,

Quote:
simply replaces the Jesus enigma by the Cephas enigma. If we don’t know a lot about the carpenter, we precisely know nothing about the fisherman before the synoptic tradition introduces him in the story.
Then comes his overview of the mythicist position:

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When one takes a broad look at the different mythical theses, many questions immediately come to mind: why don’t Christians and Paul himself regard Jesus as a god, if he is one, and what does this fake humanity included in their myth mean? If we suppose that the Jerusalem people invented the humanity of the Lord so as to gain advantage over Paul, why would the latter produce an analogous speech to theirs? There is more ; evangelical christianity is not a specific religion: the god it worships is Israel’s ; why would it have made this divinity for its own use, while concealing it at the same time? If this god Jesus is an aspect of Jehovah, why doesn’t a single word point in this direction? Are we in the middle of a Mystery where secrecy rules? So be it. But then, why does the christian Mystery god die in broad daylight, after a public trial, from the Roman hands? Is there any other Mystery cult similar to this? Why leave so many inconsistencies and gaps in the legend of the god, since it was built outside reality? Why describe him with useless, even outrageous human features? Why the effort of talking about the siblings of the god, and even giving them names (Mc., 6, 3)? Why does his family believe he is mad (Mc., 3, 21)? Why does he get angry? Why does he weep? Why doesn’t he accept to be called “good” (Mc., 10, 18) and says that only God is good? Why does he say that he doesn’t know when the Day will come (Mc., 13, 32) – his Day, if we take the Pauline perspective -, he who came to announce Salvation? Why are his last words (Mc. 15, 34) words of despair (My God, why have you forsaken me?), at the very moment he has consumed the Cross great mystery? Why? For the sake of plausibility? This is acknowledging a lot of methodical and logical thinking to people who generally lack it. Why so many uncertainties in a teaching which is still difficult to understand even today? Above all, why did those who elaborated the legend put their hero during their time, contrary to what was done by all other religions, so as to benefit from an ancient tradition effect? – To all these questions, and many others, the mythicists offer no satisfying answer.
Brief personal comment : even if some of these questions may appear outdated, I think it could be a good exercise for any myther to answer this flow of interrogation marks.

Guignebert goes on:

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It only requires to read the Gospels to see that if the writers had invented this man, they would have paid much more attention than they do to him. And this is why the pseudo-biography they give us of him is so deficient. Actually, this man, this Jesus, is already the Christ for them: they endure his humanity ; their story is made of legendary variations based upon a reality which bothers them and without which they probably would have preferred to write.
Then comes a refutation that Earl Doherty already addressed for sure in his Response to Goguel:

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Furthermore, why didn’t the Jews, probably well informed and who so fiercely got involved in controversy with the Christians, have the idea to stop any discussion by proclaiming: he didn’t exist? The Talmud tried to degrade him, not to negate him.
We then move to Paul:

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The best witness of the historicity of Jesus is actually Paul, purportedly the main support of the mythicist case. His Christ is obviously a divine being ; he is a god, but a god who once was a man, otherwise is Paulinism nonsensical. If the great Mystery of the Apostle is to be fulfilled, the Lord has to have been a true human being. The mythical crucifixion of a god, the illusory death of a non-existent being is entirely alien to the Pauline realism.
This sounds very clear cut, maybe too much.

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Paul asserts that, according to the flesh, - and Paul knew he could have met him in the flesh, - the Lord was born of David’s stock, born of a woman, under the Law, that he wanted to manifest himself in human form and endure a crual human fate ending on the cross, to obey God. What we are dealing with here is truly a man who can suffer and die because otherwise he couldn’t make the sacrifice necessary to the salvation of the world.
Well, already debated ad nauseam by Earl Doherty I guess.

Quote:
Paul asserting that the Lord was “a man in the flesh born of a woman” could be deemed probative enough, but taking a close look at two Epistle passages seems even more convincing to me. In the first one (2 Cor., 5, 16), the Apostle stresses the need to live in Christ resurrected, and he says that he only wants to know this one even if he had known the Christ in the flesh before, i.e. Jesus during his lifetime. Indeed, it is only the Lord glorified which matters to the pauline Mystery. But there are men who draw authority from the fact that they have known Jesus in the flesh, showing to Paul what advantage this represents for them.
This is why he says (1 Cor., 9, 1) that he also saw the Lord, not in the flesh as the Jerusalem people but in the spirit thanks to his humility (1 Cor., 15, 8). The concern of re-establishing the dignity of his mission through this glorious compensation in front of the Twelve proves to me that Paul held for certain that Jesus had lived.
I particularly enjoy this one because, if I remember well, ED used the same passages to argue the exact opposite in his Argument from silence article!

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You won’t get rid of this difficulty by saying that it was just an ideal humanity serving a soteriological construction, because an interpretative hypothesis, even audaciously asserted, is no match to a precise and perfectly clear text, let alone to a bundle of texts. Besides, what could have led people constantly living in a state of confusion between myth and reality to make a man out of a god? To make a myth sound plausible? This could make sense for a mythomaniac today, not for a mystic or a myst from the first century. To the contrary, turning a man into a god was common in ancient religions.
Another sociological consideration which maybe would require to be closely examined (if not already done).

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We are told (Couchoud) : such a thing could not have occured among the Jews. This is perhaps not entirely true since Simon the Samaritan was gathering devotees at the time. But this is not on Jewish ground that the Pauline transposition occurred and that the Christ Jesus became the Lord before whom all the creation bows (Phil., 2, 10): it is in Hellenistic territory, in a world of Mysteries of salvation and syncretism, that this great mythisation of Jesus and the Gospel took place. In the Palestinian world, in the middle of Jewish orthodoxy, only a fool could have imagined that the spirit of god had turned into a man, and nobody would have listen to such assertion without indignation.
I guess this is not disputed by mythicists today.

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The machination of the early tradition was inevitable, and it happened in multiple steps: first, it exploited the Messiah idea on the Jewish ground by using all the messianic texts ; afterward, it exploited the Sôter concept on Hellenistic ground, which was imposed on Jesus-Christ. Our synoptic Gospels only belong to the first step. Paul belongs to the second; John and the author of the Epistle of the Hebrews are in the same vein. The transformation of Jesus into Sôter is no more exclusive to his human existence than his transformation into Messiah. I would even say that neither of them could be historically conceived if Jesus had not really lived.
And the conclusion:

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The Christian propaganda exploited, elaborated and built a Christ myth to the benefit of Jesus, it didn’t invent Jesus himself, and it is Jesus who, one way or another, initiated the faith it put in him. Perhaps it is not the way one sees things when one indulges oneself in the ecstasy of building hypotheses and reasonings ; but I assure that it is thus that one sees them when one humbly studies the texts, in the historical frame that the facts indicate, without trying to extort from the texts what one wishes to find in them.
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Old 01-15-2007, 12:32 PM   #2
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From the introductory paragraphs of Guignebert's Jesus that I could read for free from questia, I gather that Guignebert starts off with the assumption that someone was the inspiration for Christianity, and that it was a person named Jesus, and any mythicist argument has to provide a better explanation. I see no reason to assume this, or to assume that arguing against the various mythicist theories prevalent in 1933 is a positive argument for a historical Jesus.

For example:
Quote:
[Couchoud] simply replaces the Jesus enigma by the Cephas enigma. If we don’t know a lot about the carpenter, we precisely know nothing about the fisherman before the synoptic tradition introduces him in the story.
Jesus-mythicists are often also Peter-mythicists. I don't see how this supports a historical Jesus, unless you are trying to explain Christianity by a historical Peter.

Then we have:

Quote:
When one takes a broad look at the different mythical theses, many questions immediately come to mind: why don’t Christians and Paul himself regard Jesus as a god, if he is one, and what does this fake humanity included in their myth mean? If we suppose that the Jerusalem people invented the humanity of the Lord so as to gain advantage over Paul, why would the latter produce an analogous speech to theirs?
I don't understand this at all. Paul did regard Jesus as a god, or at least as a divine mediator between god and man. The "fake humanity" is part of the mythmaking. Some mythicists assume that the orthodox church invented a historical Jesus to bolster their authority through the apostolic succession, but where does Paul produce an analogous speech? Paul does not quote Jesus, and in any case the later gospel writers appear to have placed a lot of commonplaces into Jesus' mouth, some of which might also be found in Paul's letters.

Quote:
There is more; evangelical christianity is not a specific religion: the god it worships is Israel’s; why would it have made this divinity for its own use, while concealing it at the same time?
Early Christianity appears to have associated itself with Judaism because of its status as an ancient, legal religion in the Roman empire.

Quote:
If this god Jesus is an aspect of Jehovah, why doesn’t a single word point in this direction? Are we in the middle of a Mystery where secrecy rules? So be it. But then, why does the christian Mystery god die in broad daylight, after a public trial, from the Roman hands? Is there any other Mystery cult similar to this?
We don't know a lot about the mystery religions, so there might have been.

Quote:
Why leave so many inconsistencies and gaps in the legend of the god, since it was built outside reality? Why describe him with useless, even outrageous human features? Why the effort of talking about the siblings of the god, and even giving them names (Mc., 6, 3)? Why does his family believe he is mad (Mc., 3, 21)? Why does he get angry? Why does he weep? Why doesn’t he accept to be called “good” (Mc., 10, 18) and says that only God is good? Why does he say that he doesn’t know when the Day will come (Mc., 13, 32) – his Day, if we take the Pauline perspective -, he who came to announce Salvation? Why are his last words (Mc. 15, 34) words of despair (My God, why have you forsaken me?), at the very moment he has consumed the Cross great mystery? Why? For the sake of plausibility? This is acknowledging a lot of methodical and logical thinking to people who generally lack it.
This sounds like the thoroughly discredited argument from embarrassment, plus the equally discredited idea that those ancients were too simple to invent a religion. I won't go over all of that here.

Quote:
Why so many uncertainties in a teaching which is still difficult to understand even today? Above all, why did those who elaborated the legend put their hero during their time, contrary to what was done by all other religions, so as to benefit from an ancient tradition effect? – To all these questions, and many others, the mythicists offer no satisfying answer.
We don't know that those who elaborated the legend put their hero during their own time. Paul does not place Jesus at any identifiable time in history. The later gospels were written much later - after the destruction of the Temple - and placed Jesus at an earlier time, during the governorship of Pilate. This is one of Doherty's main points, and the historicists have no satisfying answer to the question of why there are no contemporary records of Jesus.

Quote:
It only requires to read the Gospels to see that if the writers had invented this man, they would have paid much more attention than they do to him. And this is why the pseudo-biography they give us of him is so deficient. Actually, this man, this Jesus, is already the Christ for them: they endure his humanity; their story is made of legendary variations based upon a reality which bothers them and without which they probably would have preferred to write.
More arguments from embarrassment.

I don't see anything new in the rest of the argument.
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Old 01-15-2007, 12:41 PM   #3
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Originally Posted by Toto
the historicists have no satisfying answer to the question of why there are no contemporary records of Jesus.
Why would there be any contemporary records of Jesus? He was certainly notable to some people, but given the complete dearth of records from that period and the relative obscurity of Christianity during the time of the Apostles, it seems extremely unlikely that any records would be around.
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Old 01-15-2007, 12:45 PM   #4
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Originally Posted by Ideologist View Post
Why would there be any contemporary records of Jesus? He was certainly notable to some people, but given the complete dearth of records from that period and the relative obscurity of Christianity during the time of the Apostles, it seems extremely unlikely that any records would be around.
There isn't a complete dearth of records, and Christians were likely to preserve or copy or at least mention any records that existed. But 4th century Christians were reduced to manufacturing relics and forging documents about him.
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Old 01-15-2007, 12:47 PM   #5
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Originally Posted by Toto View Post
From the introductory paragraphs of Guignebert's Jesus that I could read for free from questia, I gather that Guignebert starts off with the assumption that someone was the inspiration for Christianity, and that it was a person named Jesus, and any mythicist argument has to provide a better explanation.
Yes, that's it in a nutshell. Except that Guignebert acknowledges that the name itself is not so sure. He keeps using "Jesus" for convenience.

Thanks for your comments.

Jeff.
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Old 01-15-2007, 01:40 PM   #6
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Originally Posted by Toto View Post
There isn't a complete dearth of records,
I forgot the "almost;" there are a handful.

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and Christians were likely to preserve or copy or at least mention any records that existed. But 4th century Christians were reduced to manufacturing relics and forging documents about him.
Certainly, it would have been nice had they done so. But we must remember; the Church at the height of its power and ability to preserve manuscripts still regularly lost works from neglect. Is it any wonder that in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and even 4th centuries, when the Church was persecuted and out of power, it would be unable to regularly preserve obscure Roman documents of questionable worth over the still fragmentarily preserved works of the Church Fathers?
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Old 01-15-2007, 02:20 PM   #7
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Originally Posted by Toto View Post
There isn't a complete dearth of records, and Christians were likely to preserve or copy or at least mention any records that existed.
In whose contemporary writings that have been preserved would you expect a mention of Jesus? Philo?

Ben.
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Old 01-15-2007, 02:29 PM   #8
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In France anyway, the mythicist debate is considered “case closed” by scholars since Guignebert’s works.
Completely stupid statement, ignoring the works of several French writers of the 20th century. Go, do your homework instead of misrepresenting the French authors.
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Old 01-15-2007, 02:35 PM   #9
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In whose contemporary writings that have been preserved would you expect a mention of Jesus? Philo?

Ben.
Possibly Philo. I would expect a mention of Christianity or early Christians in Josephus that was not so clearly forged.

And if Jesus had existed in the time frame described by the gospels, I would expect at least one follower or observer to have written something that later Christians would have treasured and preserved, with some sort of personal information.
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Old 01-15-2007, 02:37 PM   #10
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., ignoring the works of several French writers of the 20th century. ...
Please name some?
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