GakuseiDon

I think you need to understand that there is some history between Godfrey and McGrath. Here are some comments made by Godfrey:

"lying", "childish snickerings", "personal vendetta with me [Godfrey] and Doherty", "repeated misreadings of words he disagrees with", "mischievous", "prepared to spread his misrepresentations".

And the above are just some of the things that he has written about ME.

I can show you a much longer list about what he thinks about McGrath and other scholars if you like (I am interested in these kinds of responses from Godfrey, Dave31, Toto, etc, so I tend to keep them). Not that I'm complaining; this is a debate that tends to bring out heated statements, and I'm no saint. But I'm not surprised that McGrath ignores Godfrey on specific points. Being accused of intellectual dishonesty for the umpteenth time is not a motivator for interacting with someone's points. You can fault McGrath for ignoring arguments I suppose, but ignoring arguments is not the same as building strawmen version of arguments.

I understand. Nor was I commenting on your open letter beyond the inferred (IMO) accusations of McGrath not presenting positive points relevant to Doherty's mythicist case, and McGrath responding to Neil Godfrey's argument by building a strawman argument of Godfrey's points. But I've made my points so I'll make this the last post on this matter.

I suspect your comment to McGrath that "not only do you unapologetically admit that you are less interested in a balanced portrayal of the work that you purport to “review,” but you insult your own readers by misrepresenting the very feedback you receive from your audience" will probably be remembered on some blogs longer than your essay about how to address a public audience about a contested issue, but that's the nature of this debate. Thanks for your time.

GakuseiDon

Thanks for that, Earl. I'll have a read through it. I doubt I'll respond, since I'm more interested in the side issues around beliefs and pseudo-science than in debating mythicism nowadays (though I'm happy to put my 2c in occasionally), but I'll update my website to point to your response.

Peter Kirby

You're right, actually. I will have separate occasion on my blog to treat the topic in itself. That of technical writing for the public, particularly on these contested issues, that is. It's an interesting issue that deserves its own airing.

This letter concerned the intersection of that topic and my dissatisfaction with the way the review series is being written. The quote-bite you suggest, Don, is really spot-on for why I am dissatisfied. It's no shame to me that some will take away just that.

Did you know that I find myself deleting abusive comments from my writing, sometimes? It's a bad habit, apparently one still with me even after refraining from writing in discussion boards for a long time. You can reread what you wrote, and you'll realize you don't actually believe all the adjectives and adverbs. They can just flow to your fingers if you have any ounce of outrage at the time.

Thanks for your time also.

Steven Carr

McGrath's comments indicate very clearly that he is proud of the statement that he will not ever call a mythicist play as 'in', regardless of what the facts of the case are.




But McGrath is open to new paradigms.

On his blog, he praises a new paradigm as 'promising'.

This new paradigm is one in which Historical Jesus scholars no longer even attempt to decide what is authentic and what is not.

‘Drawing on Theissen and Winter, Keith and Hurtado argue that historical study should explain not that some material is authentic while other is not, but how the impact of Jesus led to both kinds of material being present in the tradition…The contrast between an older method, creating piles of inauthentic and authentic material, and a newer one that seeks to explain the whole tradition, sounds promising, but has the potential to be overplayed’

Apparently, historical study is not to say which material is authentic and which is not…. It is more ‘promising’ to use methods which don’t try to decide what is authentic.

Yeh, I bet it is! It is pretty annoying, having to continually decide what is fact and what is fiction, before doing history.

McGrath has a new paradigm of using fabricated material. 'And even if a particular detail in the Gospels is a summary by the author rather than a saying of Jesus himself, it may give us an accurate impression. Even fabricated material may provide a true sense of the gist of what Jesus was about, however inauthentic it may be as far as the specific details are concerned.’

Who cares what Jesus said? If an author provides a (ahem) ‘summary’, that is enough for the precisely rigourous McGrath, who works with fabricated material, however inauthentic it may be.'

He also praises New Testament scholars for pioneering new paradigms of historical research, replacing the 'intuition' and 'instinct' that historians in other fields of history use.

I quote McGrath '‘New Testament scholars have sometimes been pioneers. The attempt to define criteria of authenticity was in fact an attempt to articulate more precisely and rigorously things that in most other areas of history were determined in much the same way, but with a far greater degree of intuition and instinct’'

It is surprising that historical Jesus scholars are doing no more than what historians in other fields of study do, when they are also pioneering new criteria of authenticity.

I guess pioneers trod well-known ground in the Matrix....

jgoodguy

I propose that all the HJers have the problem of discarding the paradigm of a Historical Jesus. A 2000 year old tradition is hard to ignore. The lack of any primary historical evidence is frustrating and the lack of credible secondary evidence creates a challenge. The result is either a minimal HJ(He existed but is not relevant to the 2000 year old tradition) or a host of possible Historical Jesus.

The challenge for the MJers is to sift through the same uncredible evidence and do better. Will they attempt to get beyond a minimalist view that orthodox Christianity was a mythology and create a host of possible Jesus Myths in their own matrix?

spin

What you miss out on here is the fact that the fence is quite wide, providing room to sit on it without any difficulty. You don't need to be in either camp, as both camps lack the wherewithal to justify their position. One group has the unenviable task of trying to get history out of tradition, while the other has the apparently impossible task of showing that there is no real world underpinning to the tradition. That provides for a wide fence. There is no need to decide. It's only important for christians and presumably those here interested in this subject aren't christians.

jgoodguy

Good points. I'd say that there are advocates other than Christians for the various positions and the lack of evidence leads to the substitution of rhetorical lingo for evidence.

aa5874

The MJ theory has NO such impossible task. No other myth character, even when described as completely human, was subjected to your impossible task.

Jesus Christ of the NT is NOT the only entity to have been theorised to be MYTH and there was NO obligation or mandate to show that there is no real world underpinning other myth characters.

Romulus and Remus are considered MYTHS WITHOUT any impossible task.

We have the MYTH description of Jesus in FOUR Versions and we have NO credible historical evidence from antiquity for Jesus and this is precisely COMPATIBLE with other characters that are considered MYTHS.

And further, because the Pauline writers made Jesus Christ such an EXTREMELY SIGNIFICANT character supposedly BEFORE the Fall of the Temple and claimed to have PREACHED ALL OVER the Roman Empire then it would be expected that Jesus Christ would have the "talk of the town" but NOT a word was heard of Jesus.

The theory that Jesus was MYTH is extremely good and the data for myth Jesus is compatible and even surpasses other MYTHS.

There is also one more point that is critical. It was sometime in the middle of 2nd century that we get NOISE about Christians and Jesus by a Greek writer called Lucian in "The Death of Peregine" and Celsus a Roman writer in "True Discourse".

The abundance of evidence from antiquity do suggest that the Jesus story was started sometime in the 2nd century since that is when we get EXTERNAL NOISE about Jesus and Christians.

aa5874

Mythology does NOT require credibility. Myths are essentially INCREDIBLE entities and their history is fiction.

Romulus and Remus although described COMPLETELY as humans and BORN of the SAME woman are considered MYTHS because of ONE critical factor---there is NO credible historical source of antiquity for the myths Romulus and Remus

Jesus of the NT SATISFIES the criteria for mythology and SURPASSES the myths Romulus and Remus. Jesus was described as the CHILD of a Ghost where as Romulus and Remus were described as human.

The MYTH Jesus theory is SECURE and WELL SUPPORTED by the abundance of evidence from antiquity.

mountainman

The fence is 300 years wide. The tradition was first widely published not 2000 years ago, but in fact about 1686 years ago (using Nicaea). The evidence tendered and discuss is exceedingly problematic and has been called a vacuum by the archaeologists.

In regard to this above observation about the rhetoric, it follows the same assessment as the ancient historian Momigliano:

This includes all of "Christian idealised history" in the absence of evidence. The blogs of McGrath are a typical example of the excessive overappreciation of rhetoric and idealogy as instruments for the analysis of the literary sources.