Freethought & Rationalism Archive

ph2ter · 04-08-2009, 01:29 AM

Quote:

4. Argue that pagan parallels to Jesus prove he did not exist. They don't. Certain themes in the lives of pagan gods may have been borrowed and pasted onto the Christian memory of Jesus, but this does not mean he didn't exist. A better argument would be that since Jesus has much in common with gods that other cults made up, it is simpler to suppose that there was no historical jesus (unless some historical evidence exists of him).

But why not argue that some events from Jesus life which historicists think were historical are actually borrowings from the other pagan cults and religions. The idea that Jesus is completely mythical need not always be emphasized. It is more easy to refute event by event than the whole story. Events then will fall one by one. On the end the whole story will collapse.

Quote:

5. Argue that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. The fact that no contemporary of Jesus wrote about him is not at all surprising. Prophets and messiahs were as common in Jesus' time as Starbucks are in our time. Jesus' ministry only lasted a few years, and he lived in Nazareth, a fairly small village. It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that Jesus existed but that not too many people cared about his message.

I think it is not very compelling argumentation. If nobody cared, how then his message was so powerful that pervaded the whole known world. Why was that message in the beginning so minuscule that almost nobody cared about.
Absense of evidence is exactly what one would expect if Jesus is unhistorical. This is most significant argument for mythicism. If evidence with the help of some miracle finally appears, then the mythicist case will immediately collapse.

Solo · 04-08-2009, 05:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aa5874

Quote:

Originally Posted by Solo

Originally Posted by Keith&Co.
It does seem to me that absence of evidence is, by definition, evidence of absence.

Yes, of course, if you are dyslexic...

Jiri

Only the dyslexic will argue that absence of evidence is evidence of existence.

Dyslexic ? You would not believe how many people for whom we have no evidence of using, or even understanding, the word witless, in fact are.

Jiri

fatpie42 · 04-08-2009, 06:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switch89

5. Argue that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. The fact that no contemporary of Jesus wrote about him is not at all surprising. Prophets and messiahs were as common in Jesus' time as Starbucks are in our time. Jesus' ministry only lasted a few years, and he lived in Nazareth, a fairly small village.

This seems to presume that accepting a historical Jesus ought to be our default position. Absence of evidence might not be evidence of absence, but absence of evidence still means that we are not justified in making positive claims to historicity.

Let's say that I want to say that Dionysus was a real person. Someone might say, but all we have are mythical tales. I might reply that those tales contain historical figures of the time such as kings who we know existed. The other person might reply, yes it's not uncommon for mythical stories to contain historical elements, but we don't actually have any evidence to suggest that Dionysus himself was a historical figure. Could I then say, "ah, but since absence of evidence is not evidence of absence we MUST accept the historicity of Dionysus"? No of course I couldn't. It wouldn't be a good argument at all. It's a similarly bad argument when you try to apply it to Jesus.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switch89

It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that Jesus existed but that not too many people cared about his message.

Except that we have evidence of a large movement of people who cared about that message an awful lot and their interest in that message led to it eventually becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire. If no one cared about the message it wouldn't have lasted for over three centuries in order to gain that status.

You might argue that none of that was until after Jesus' (supposedly historical) death, but if we want to consider the accounts of the gospels even remotely reliable how do we then account for claims that huge numbers of people welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem? If Jesus' did not have reputation which preceded him, this would suggest that the gospels are extremely unreliable in their portrayal of this figure. Far from helping us to establish that Jesus was a historical figure, it makes things especially awkward since any historical figure there might have been would seem to have very little resemblance to the figure described in the only available sources.

No Robots · 04-08-2009, 06:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by show_no_mercy

It doesn't matter if Jesus was Jewish or not. Christianity is not Jewish. No Robots seems unable to separate Jesus from Christianity, and seems unable to concede that there was no one uniform "Christianity" even in Paul's time.

Please indicate where I have done this, because my whole objective is to demonstrate the radical difference between Christ's prophetic Judaism and institutional Christian religion. As Constantin Brunner puts it:

Christ and the Christian religion! Did Christ really believe in the divine Trinity and imagine it as a triply braided pigtail? Did Christ really think of the Father in the terms of dogmatic speculation? Did he really think of the Father as the deus philosophorum of Tertullian or of Augustine’s Father as memoria, Son as intelligentia, Holy Spirit as voluntas – according to which he would then have had to consider himself as the intelligentia of the Trinity? By the Holy Spirit, did Christ really have the third person of the Godhead in mind, as in the twenty-first article of the Athanasian Creed – neither made, created, nor born of the Father and the Son, but emanating from them? Did Christ really think of the theory of original sin and of the cleansing of Mankind’s sins through his blood and of the cult of the Virgin Mary? (His thoughts about his mother were other than those of worship, and he considered his progeny-rich mother as little a virgin as she considered him God or memoria as his father – we shall yet see what this mother and this son thought about each other!) Did Christ really think of the symbolic books?! What need of many words, inasmuch as we know indeed that mystics are godless and that here we merely find it confirmed that the greatest of all the mystics, the most godless, virtually abolished God and religion and strikes the last blow against him.—Constantin Brunner / Our Christ, p. 215-6.

fatpie42 · 04-08-2009, 07:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switch89

Well of course the supernatural Jesus is a complete myth. But I think historians are more interested in asking whether the gospel stories were based on some guy named Jesus that was crucified.

And the evidence for that would be...?

The gospel Jesus is distinctly mythical. Paul's epistles also depict Jesus as distinctly mythical. There are no reliable extra-Biblical accounts. Where exactly is a historian going to come up with evidence for a non-mythical guy named Jesus who was crucified which has any relevance to the Christian myth?

If you look in the Talmud then yes, you can find people called Yeshua who were executed. However, that isn't evidence for a historical Jesus. A historical Jesus theory doesn't simply aim to show that there was at least one person called Jesus who died by crucifixion. They want to show that such a person acted as the originator of the later Christian stories and there is simply no good evidence to back up such a strong assertion.

dog-on · 04-08-2009, 07:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by No Robots

Quote:

Originally Posted by show_no_mercy

It doesn't matter if Jesus was Jewish or not. Christianity is not Jewish. No Robots seems unable to separate Jesus from Christianity, and seems unable to concede that there was no one uniform "Christianity" even in Paul's time.

Please indicate where I have done this, because my whole objective is to demonstrate the radical difference between Christ's prophetic Judaism and institutional Christian religion. As Constantin Brunner puts it:

Christ and the Christian religion! Did Christ really believe in the divine Trinity and imagine it as a triply braided pigtail? Did Christ really think of the Father in the terms of dogmatic speculation? Did he really think of the Father as the deus philosophorum of Tertullian or of Augustine’s Father as memoria, Son as intelligentia, Holy Spirit as voluntas – according to which he would then have had to consider himself as the intelligentia of the Trinity? By the Holy Spirit, did Christ really have the third person of the Godhead in mind, as in the twenty-first article of the Athanasian Creed – neither made, created, nor born of the Father and the Son, but emanating from them? Did Christ really think of the theory of original sin and of the cleansing of Mankind’s sins through his blood and of the cult of the Virgin Mary? (His thoughts about his mother were other than those of worship, and he considered his progeny-rich mother as little a virgin as she considered him God or memoria as his father – we shall yet see what this mother and this son thought about each other!) Did Christ really think of the symbolic books?! What need of many words, inasmuch as we know indeed that mystics are godless and that here we merely find it confirmed that the greatest of all the mystics, the most godless, virtually abolished God and religion and strikes the last blow against him.—Constantin Brunner / Our Christ, p. 215-6.

Mythical beings do not actually think at all...

fatpie42 · 04-08-2009, 07:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by No Robots

Quote:

Originally Posted by show_no_mercy

It doesn't matter if Jesus was Jewish or not. Christianity is not Jewish. No Robots seems unable to separate Jesus from Christianity, and seems unable to concede that there was no one uniform "Christianity" even in Paul's time.

Please indicate where I have done this, because my whole objective is to demonstrate the radical difference between Christ's prophetic Judaism and institutional Christian religion. As Constantin Brunner puts it:

Christ and the Christian religion! Did Christ really believe in the divine Trinity and imagine it as a triply braided pigtail? Did Christ really think of the Father in the terms of dogmatic speculation? Did he really think of the Father as the deus philosophorum of Tertullian or of Augustine’s Father as memoria, Son as intelligentia, Holy Spirit as voluntas – according to which he would then have had to consider himself as the intelligentia of the Trinity? By the Holy Spirit, did Christ really have the third person of the Godhead in mind, as in the twenty-first article of the Athanasian Creed – neither made, created, nor born of the Father and the Son, but emanating from them? Did Christ really think of the theory of original sin and of the cleansing of Mankind’s sins through his blood and of the cult of the Virgin Mary? (His thoughts about his mother were other than those of worship, and he considered his progeny-rich mother as little a virgin as she considered him God or memoria as his father – we shall yet see what this mother and this son thought about each other!) Did Christ really think of the symbolic books?! What need of many words, inasmuch as we know indeed that mystics are godless and that here we merely find it confirmed that the greatest of all the mystics, the most godless, virtually abolished God and religion and strikes the last blow against him.—Constantin Brunner / Our Christ, p. 215-6.

That is a really awesome quote.

fatpie42 · 04-08-2009, 07:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dog-on

Mythical beings do not actually think at all...

That doesn't mean you cannot write true or false statements about them.

Take for example:
"Harry Potter is a Muslim"
"Arthur Dent does not believe in aliens"
"Bilbo Baggins is a Hobbit"

The point of the quotation is that the figure of Jesus in the Bible does not believe in the doctrine of the trinity, nor does he consider his mother to be divine. Whether Jesus is an historical figure is an entirely different debate.

show_no_mercy · 04-08-2009, 07:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by No Robots

Quote:

Originally Posted by show_no_mercy

It doesn't matter if Jesus was Jewish or not. Christianity is not Jewish. No Robots seems unable to separate Jesus from Christianity, and seems unable to concede that there was no one uniform "Christianity" even in Paul's time.

Please indicate where I have done this, because my whole objective is to demonstrate the radical difference between Christ's prophetic Judaism and institutional Christian religion. As Constantin Brunner puts it:

Christ and the Christian religion! Did Christ really believe in the divine Trinity and imagine it as a triply braided pigtail? Did Christ really think of the Father in the terms of dogmatic speculation? Did he really think of the Father as the deus philosophorum of Tertullian or of Augustine’s Father as memoria, Son as intelligentia, Holy Spirit as voluntas – according to which he would then have had to consider himself as the intelligentia of the Trinity? By the Holy Spirit, did Christ really have the third person of the Godhead in mind, as in the twenty-first article of the Athanasian Creed – neither made, created, nor born of the Father and the Son, but emanating from them? Did Christ really think of the theory of original sin and of the cleansing of Mankind’s sins through his blood and of the cult of the Virgin Mary? (His thoughts about his mother were other than those of worship, and he considered his progeny-rich mother as little a virgin as she considered him God or memoria as his father – we shall yet see what this mother and this son thought about each other!) Did Christ really think of the symbolic books?! What need of many words, inasmuch as we know indeed that mystics are godless and that here we merely find it confirmed that the greatest of all the mystics, the most godless, virtually abolished God and religion and strikes the last blow against him.—Constantin Brunner / Our Christ, p. 215-6.

This is all fine and dandy, but we don't know what "Christ" thought at all. We only know what the gospel writers put in this person's mouth.

aa5874 · 04-08-2009, 08:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fatpie42

Quote:

Originally Posted by No Robots

Please indicate where I have done this, because my whole objective is to demonstrate the radical difference between Christ's prophetic Judaism and institutional Christian religion. As Constantin Brunner puts it:

Christ and the Christian religion! Did Christ really believe in the divine Trinity and imagine it as a triply braided pigtail? Did Christ really think of the Father in the terms of dogmatic speculation? Did he really think of the Father as the deus philosophorum of Tertullian or of Augustine’s Father as memoria, Son as intelligentia, Holy Spirit as voluntas – according to which he would then have had to consider himself as the intelligentia of the Trinity? By the Holy Spirit, did Christ really have the third person of the Godhead in mind, as in the twenty-first article of the Athanasian Creed – neither made, created, nor born of the Father and the Son, but emanating from them? Did Christ really think of the theory of original sin and of the cleansing of Mankind’s sins through his blood and of the cult of the Virgin Mary? (His thoughts about his mother were other than those of worship, and he considered his progeny-rich mother as little a virgin as she considered him God or memoria as his father – we shall yet see what this mother and this son thought about each other!) Did Christ really think of the symbolic books?! What need of many words, inasmuch as we know indeed that mystics are godless and that here we merely find it confirmed that the greatest of all the mystics, the most godless, virtually abolished God and religion and strikes the last blow against him.—Constantin Brunner / Our Christ, p. 215-6.

That is a really awesome quote.

What is awesome about asking questions and never providing answers.

The quote is essentially composed of six unanswered questions and questionable assertions.

Quote:

(Question 1)
Christ and the Christian religion! Did Christ really believe in the divine Trinity and imagine it as a triply braided pigtail?

(Question 2)
Did Christ really think of the Father in the terms of dogmatic speculation?

(Question 3)
Did he really think of the Father as the deus philosophorum of Tertullian or of Augustine’s Father as memoria, Son as intelligentia, Holy Spirit as voluntas – according to which he would then have had to consider himself as the intelligentia of the Trinity?

(Question 4)
By the Holy Spirit, did Christ really have the third person of the Godhead in mind, as in the twenty-first article of the Athanasian Creed – neither made, created, nor born of the Father and the Son, but emanating from them?

(Question 5)
Did Christ really think of the theory of original sin and of the cleansing of Mankind’s sins through his blood and of the cult of the Virgin Mary?

(Questionable Assertion)
(His thoughts about his mother were other than those of worship, and he considered his progeny-rich mother as little a virgin as she considered him God or memoria as his father – we shall yet see what this mother and this son thought about each other!)

(Question 6)
Did Christ really think of the symbolic books?!

(Questionable Assertion)
What need of many words, inasmuch as we know indeed that mystics are godless and that here we merely find it confirmed that the greatest of all the mystics, the most godless, virtually abolished God and religion and strikes the last blow against him.—Constantin Brunner / Our Christ, p. 215-6.

Thread Tools	Search this Thread
Show Printable Version	Search this Thread: Advanced Search

Freethought & Rationalism Archive

The archives are read only.