stephan huller

The question has to be - what's wrong with the (apparent) modern understanding of krst being related to ks (= bone)? Sounds possible to me and I admit I know nothing about this subject. But the people that do today seem to think so. I know that this is what is reflect in the use of the term in the Coptic translation of the Acts of Judas the Twin.

Sheshbazzar

Usually I am impressed with your arguments and opinions. This time it seems to me you are willfully and rather needlessly arrogantly neglecting far too much.
Too bad, and really, a bit sad.

So it is. We differ. You feel a driving need to be insulting. I can live with it.

Robert Tulip

Consider also the famous 23rd Psalm
Anointing is all about death, as in the example of the woman with the alabaster jar in all the synoptics.

sotto voce

'Thou dost.'

"How, Galilean, you have conquered!"

spin

I should be content with this, but it sounds so dramatic that Champillion would be wrong. It is worth remembering though that he had no giants' shoulders to stand on.

It is worth noting that Sinaiticus doesn't/didn't have "saints" or, more correctly, "holy" (αγιων). It originally had "nations" (εθνων), but was corrected in the 7th c. to "ages" (αιωνων). This information is from Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. Your complaint is misplaced in Sinaiticus. In fact no early text had αγιων. It was the text that was available in Erasmus's time, which was the basis for the KJV. It is only the morons who can't face the KJV being wrong that stick to "saints" here. And as to what the original form of the verse was, it is hard to say whether it was αιωνων or εθνων, though Nestle-Aland, on the basis of the manuscript evidence, favour εθνων.

I'm a little non-plussed by this last sentence. You have made comments to suggest that you were ontologically driven, rather than epistemologically. I should be happily surprised.

Reading this in the context of Stephan's passing shot, it would sound here that I am being made out to be a historicist, which would not be correct. I tend to "club" historicists for making untenable claims about christian tradition literature and being naive about the tendentiousness of the scribes who maintained classical literature.

Here's the rub: you can't really trust anyone regarding theology, but you can about philological and archaeological evidence. I trust Finkelstein when he's writing about iron age settlements, but not when he writes popular books with journalists.

What are your criteria for making this last sort of assertion? I haven't read any claim of his that has any depth to it.

There is a loose movement in studies related to the period ostensibly covered by the Hebrew bible negatively termed "minimalism". Finkelstein is considered to have connections here. People like N.P. Lemche and T.L. Thompson both of Copenhagen, Philip Davies of Sheffield and various others, who have over the last few decades brought a measure of scholarship to biblical studies, people who have shown that tradition literature is eminently untrustworthy historically. Thompson of late has entered into new testament studies with a book called The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (2005) and has recently published a book with Tom Verenna. This seems to me to be the way forward, modern scholarship.

While you have no way of sustaining anything that Massey wrote in that late Victorian miasma of half-baked ideas that produced theosophy and Frazerian comparative (read "butterfly") mythology, what the minimalist "school" is doing involves working in the historical-cultural context to understand the tradition literature. The difference is amateurism and scholarship. You must know from the beginning that a pioneer such as Champillion had to make mistakes: there was no scholarly community to provide feedback that would reduce errors. This is the nature of pioneering work. Through scholarship the errors tend to be eliminated. Hence the recommendation to go with modern scholarship. Massey and Mead and Robertson didn't really know what they were doing, partly because they weren't scholars, but also partly because the so-called scholars of religious studies had abnegated their responsibilities due to prior commitments and provided no scholarly context.

You start with modern scholarship then become disaffected as you gain knowledge of the field and if that knowledge leads you away from the status quo. You don't start in Neverland and stay a lost boy, looking to Peter Pan.

Robert Tulip

(maybe Champollion rode pillion for Hermes? ) I just find the karast story to be an interesting illustration of how a false meme can arise. The drama here is that this karast = anoint idea suggests, if true, that the term Christ has Egyptian origins. If false, it suggests the search for Egyptian origins is to some extent building castles in the air. I was certainly disappointed as it is a beautiful story if like me you admire Giordano Bruno's efforts to turn religion upside down by emphasising Egyptian heritage.Thanks for this further sourcing. I discussed this topic here with a screenshot of the CS αιωνων which I understood was the original, but in the parallel translation alongside is rendered as if it were αγιων. I thought this was the 350AD version, but now you say it was 'corrected' several centuries later.
Well perhaps if evidence shall be king then logic shall be queen. Yes I am 'ontologically driven' by the idea that the universe understood by science is the only reality. So I accept science on faith, as a moral certainty, as against the more epistemic attitude of mere confidence. I view evidence and logic as new gods who are in process of subordinating the old myths within a modern pantheon. So any real majesty for Christ has to derive from evidence and logic.Well no, that was not my implication, more that the "pros" in theology have to sell their souls to historicism for career advancement, a la Ehrman. This is all interdiscipinary material, and it is hard to see who are the relevant scholars since the Christ Myth Theory is excluded from polite society. I agree. Theology derives from subjective values whereas philology derives from objective facts. Values are intrinsically metaphysical. But we do need values, especially if we want to discuss a slippery vexed idea like majesty. Again the Humpty Dumpty principle explained by Lewis Carroll is central to understanding theology: 'glory means what ever I want it to mean'.Let me take that one on notice.This is all very good, but it raises again the point you have made about whether scholarship should be driven by ontology or epistemology. The minimalist school is inherently epistemological, using the scientific criterion of confidence as the basis for assessing claims and rejecting any claims of ontological certainty as religiously driven. I think that is fine as far as academic research is concerned, but while the scholars stick to facts and refuse to make value judgments (except of the sort that evidence is king) they cut themselves off from popular culture where the demand is primarily for values, expressed in myths as the stories that give meaning to life. Myths have to be distilled so they can be preached. Far better to have myths that are compatible with evidence and logic than those which are not.You are right in implying a wistful bitterness in JM Barrie. But I don't agree that your Manichaean 'amateur v scholar' ontology is reliable. Scholars are too cautious, and while amateurs make mistakes, they also have the freedom to be pioneers. What looks to the cautious to be a miasmatic malarial marsh may in fact be a path of genuine insight. What you call "prior commitments" is a form of prostitution of the mind, and it seems to me very unclear how much such Faustian bargains continue to infect scholarship. Suggesting Massey had swamp fever is almost like drawing a map and including a note 'there be dragons'.

I agree with Earl Doherty's recent comment in response to Robert Price that the old History of Religions school of the 19th century is something we've largely lost sight of since mainstream academia circled its wagons in the early 20th century and drove them into eclipse.

spin

I would have gone with a comment about small mushrooms and complain about a speech impediment or something. "Champillion? Sorry, I had a cold. You know, the mushrooms."

Nestle-Aland supplies three separate correctors of Sinaiticus, marked as א¹ (4th-6th c.), א² (7th c.), and א^c (12c.). The photos from the Sinaiticus site don't give obvious signs of these corrections. Under αιωνων all I could see were traces of the letters on the other side of the paper. (For what it is worth, there is an epsilon above the alpha.)

My problem is always where an ontology comes from. Everyone has ontologies and they are seemingly functional inside the individual head, but what relevance do they have outside those heads? How would relevance be demonstrated? You have developed your own personal ontology, but how does it relate to what is outside your head? And how would you know? And how did it get there? These questions ask you to attempt to find ways to communicate your answers to someone who does not share your ontology and to do so meaningfully for that person.

One might pervert e.e. cummings and define a religious academic as "an arse upon/ which everyone has sat except" a scholar.

I must admit I've never been interested in this majesty discourse. I don't see that it is a tree that flowers.

However in passing, whatever I want a word to mean doesn't augur well for communication of ideas. The more one has to struggle with communication the less that is communicated. We normally work on approximate agreement regarding our words. Even if you are upfront in defining a term used differently from the communally agreed usage, you hinder communication.

Communal agreement of language is community defining. Religions create community through language and scholars create community through language. Whatever I want a word to mean is self-alienation. A religious community can alienate itself from the rest of society through language, as transparently seen in the case of scientology. But then other religions do the same thing in varying degrees. Think of grace and sin for example, relatively meaningless terms to me.

So much for in passing....

I've noted your tendency to use "meaning" differently depending on the circumstances. As I understand the term it necessarily involves the explication of symbols. You use the word this way at times, but here you talk about giving "meaning to life", ie not regarding a symbol. You are using "meaning" in some very different way. I think it may be to impute value, in this case to life, that abstract quality that we normally use to define what we have in common with snakes and bacteria, but not with stones or water. If this is correct, it might be clearer if you used "value" rather than "meaning". But then, how do you give value to an abstract idea?

You take my comments out of context. I was specifically dealing with how someone who has little knowledge in a subject must start their investigations, as in your case in the area of diachronic linguistics. You start with the best explanations available of the status quo. You don't start with the amateur. How do you know that the amateur is not a bullshit artist? Well, you even know if the scholar is not a bullshit artist, but you work from the notion that the scholar has recognized qualifications in the subject (as Ehrman doesn't in history, so why people pay attention to his amateur excursions into history is because they don't understand the notion I'm explaining here, that it is not enough that a person is a scholar, but that they are a scholar in the necessary field).

And a conspiracy theory may be true. However, you cut your losses when you don't know by punting on the status quo.

I think this analogy misses the mark. prostitution ostensibly involves a willing party: "you give me money and I'll...." What I called "prior commitments" might better be called "hobbled" or "blinkered". The individual is restricted by circumstance. (Everyone ultimately is by nature, but some more than others and religionists are in the more category.)

I'll just leave you to bridle the dragon.

Isn't this mutual masturbation, ie Doherty blows you, so you blow him and so on?

The field of religious studies, ie (Judeo-)Christian studies, is somewhat different from the studies of those amateur syncretizers you want to support. It has a very long tradition, which allowed some developments starting with the enlightenment that were novel and daring. It was a time when an old hegemony had begun to decay and a new one had not yet risen to replace it. (I'm sure the minimalists look back to those who broke the mould during this era.) Mythicism in christianity goes back to David Strauss.

All very interesting of course, but I believe a community of non-devotional analysts, not committed to any position as to the nature of the traditions of christianity, though with the requisite skill sets of history, historiography and philology would today be in the best position to evaluate the prevalent religion. Without those skill sets they would not be prepared for the task. The ability to shed ontological commitments is a prerequisite as is the ability to search out such commitments that lack an epistemological foundation. The process would be a re-construction of religious studies with the aim of avoiding the hobbles in the process.

stephan huller

My difficulty again (and I have tried to avoid 'attacking' Doherty) is that you have native Greek speakers who happen to be reading this material who come to very different conclusions about what the text(s) say than Doherty. The usual paradigm in antiquity is that our texts say Jesus was a God born from a woman who appeared at a certain time in history on this earth and those who disagreed with this premise had a very different set of scriptures. I see these two pieces of evidence (1. that our texts were read by native Greek speakers both heretics and orthodox as saying one thing and 2. the existence of another collection of writings which were 'heretical' and generally supported a different understanding of Jesus - one which is closer to but not exactly what Doherty is espousing) as basically confirming that our collection of writings are 'historicist.'

There is of course one additional piece of evidence - the fact that the earliest Patristic polemics try and disprove the 'heretics' (= Marcionites) by means of a more or less commonly held canon save for specific Marcionite 'alterations.' This isn't exactly the same as 1 and 2 (for reasons I don't need to get into) but underscore the idea that there was a common ancestor text related to the proto-orthodox and the Marcionites which NEEDED to be altered in order to support either the 'heretical' and 'orthodox' positions (depending on how you want to look at it).

Either way I don't see any debate regarding whether the story Jesus happened in real historical time on this earth.

mountainman

The fact remains that history seems to indicate that the majesty of the Emperor Constantine was physically shoved behind the figure of Jesus in the 4th century and has remained powerful ever since. This majesty was crucially defined by the existence of a specific crime, called laesa maiestas, literally "Violated Majesty". This has spawned inquisitions by Christians, commencing by Constantine's actions following the Council of Antioch where he issued rescripts to have magistrates and philosophers of Antioch tortured.

Chili

So now you are saying that that rulers like magistrates and philosophers were the majestic to be executed. That would make sense and the right thing to do from their perspective.