Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Diogenes the Cynic · 04-09-2012, 10:51 AM

What Mark thought is irrelevant. Mark was making stuff up about a person he knew virtually nothing about. The Jesus of the Gospels is not the Jesus that was crucified. The Gospels are trying to interpret and explain a historical event that the authors had heard about only remotely and without detail. They had a blank paper outline of Jesus, and they colored it in as best they could. They got a lot of stuff wrong because they were dealing with a culture, a religion and a language that they didn't know anything about.

Imagine trying to write a biography of Gandhi if the entirety of your knowledge about him is having heard somebody else describe the movie to you once. You might remember a few quotes and a few key incidents ("he gets shot at the end"), but you can't really make a story out of it. So you look at the Mahabharata (because you are a person with a faith belief that information about him can be found there), and you concoct a few narratives from passages you believe you have been told through inspiration are about Gandhi.

You also remember being told about a couple of scenes of masses of people using non-violent resistance, but you can't remember the details, so you make them up, maybe even using some details from other movies you've seen. It doesn't matter if it's journalistically accurate because it's still the same general idea, and you're making a religious point anyway, not reporting for the New York Times.

So then you end up with a book of completely made up horsehit about a guy who really lived and had some vague resemblance to some of the things in your book (kinda/sorta the teachings, maybe a quote or two and you remembered to have him get shot at the end), but you've transformed him into something completely different (I forgot to mention, you gave him superpowers too).

This is what I think happened with Jesus - a hagiographical corpus was composed by people who had nothing to research but primitive doctrinal formulas and possibly a sayings tradition. The rest was filled in with the LXX, imagination (which they probably thought was inspiration) and allusions or borrowings from the myths they already knew (other movies that had seen).

seeker · 04-09-2012, 11:00 AM

Isn't the question of Jesus' historicity sort of a red herring?

The fact is that pretty much any scholar who studies that era would have to agree that there were a lot of guys named Jesus walking around in Palestine, claiming to be the Messiah. The greatest likelihood is that the biblical Jesus is an amalgamation of various historical figures. We are, after all, talking about an era in which the common wisdom of several religions was that a Messiah was due.

Unless you accept the Bible literally, the Jesus described therein could not have existed. Strip away all the supernatural BS and there is nothing remarkable about Jesus. The whole question of historicity really masks a far more important question IMO; Does it really even matter whether he existed or not?

maryhelena · 04-09-2012, 11:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

What Mark thought is irrelevant. Mark was making stuff up about a person he knew virtually nothing about. The Jesus of the Gospels is not the Jesus that was crucified. The Gospels are trying to interpret and explain a historical event that the authors had heard about only remotely and without detail. They had a blank paper outline of Jesus, and they colored it in as best they could. They got a lot of stuff wrong because they were dealing with a culture, a religion and a language that they didn't know anything about.

Imagine trying to write a biography of Gandhi if the entirety of your knowledge about him is having heard somebody else describe the movie to you once. You might remember a few quotes and a few key incidents ("he gets shot at the end"), but you can't really make a story out of it. So you look at the Mahabharata (because you are a person with a faith belief that information about him can be found there), and you concoct a few narratives from passages you believe you have been told through inspiration are about Gandhi.

You also remember being told about a couple of scenes of masses of people using non-violent resistance, but you can't remember the details, so you make them up, maybe even using some details from other movies you've seen. It doesn't matter if it's journalistically accurate because it's still the same general idea, and you're making a religious point anyway, not reporting for the New York Times.

So then you end up with a book of completely made up horsehit about a guy who really lived and had some vague resemblance to some of the things in your book (kinda/sorta the teachings, maybe a quote or two and you remembered to have him get shot at the end), but you've transformed him into something completely different (I forgot to mention, you gave him superpowers too).

This is what I think happened with Jesus - a hagiographical corpus was composed by people who had nothing to research but primitive doctrinal formulas and possibly a sayings tradition. The rest was filled in with the LXX, imagination (which they probably thought was inspiration) and allusions or borrowings from the myths they already knew (other movies that had seen).

How boring.....a nobody doing nothing worth remembering....

Diogenes the Cynic · 04-09-2012, 11:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by seeker

Unless you accept the Bible literally, the Jesus described therein could not have existed.

Can the Jesus described by Tacitus have existed literally?

Diogenes the Cynic · 04-09-2012, 11:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by maryhelena

How boring.....a nobody doing nothing worth remembering....

It isn't boring to me, and being a somebody is not a criterion for historicity. I am a nobody and yet, I exist, and I exist historically.

seeker · 04-09-2012, 11:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Quote:

Originally Posted by seeker

Unless you accept the Bible literally, the Jesus described therein could not have existed.

Can the Jesus described by Tacitus have existed literally?

Tacitus mentions Christ only as the supposed founder of Christianity. In fact his reference really is more to the lore about the beginnings of what he considers a 'hateful religion'.

The point though is that unless you loosen the notion of an HJ to someone who sort of resembles the BJ (biblical Jesus, blowjobs are not capitalized except at the beginnings of sentences) then I would suggest that the Christ described by Tacitus is completely irrelevant. When you consider Tacitus depiction of Christianity as 'hatred of mankind' I'm not sure Christians would agree that Tacitus was talking about the biblical Christ.

tanya · 04-09-2012, 02:35 PM

I have no silver stakes, so I must rely on eating lots of garlic....

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Mark's intent is irrelevant. Mark is not a witness to anything and doesn't understand that phrase. He could well have misunderstood the "son of man" sayings (wherever they came from) as having a titular significance when they did not.

If you said "bar'nash" to the average person in 1st Century Jerusalem, though, they would have just heard it as "human being."

What Mark thought is irrelevant. Mark was making stuff up about a person he knew virtually nothing about.
...
Can the Jesus described by Tacitus have existed literally?

a.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Mark is not a witness to anything and doesn't understand that phrase.

maybe I don't need garlic, I just need to repeat Dio's sentence here, about 100 times....

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

He could well have misunderstood the "son of man" sayings (wherever they came from) as having a titular significance when they did not.

But, Dio, friend, you are completely off topic. No one is writing about "son of man". I am writing about "son of God". Son of man is not supernatural. Son of man doesn't repudiate historical anything.

I am writing here, in this thread about Mark 1:1, which states, in black and white: "son of GOD", with none of this "kurios" palaver, this is the real McCoy, Diogenes, theos i.e. YHWH.

So, why are you confounding this sentence in Mark 1:1 with "son of man", which does not appear in Mark 1:1?

You inquired, may I remind you, What would refute Mythicism? I replied that Mark 1:1 supports Mythicism, contrary to your claim that Mark's gospel is one of the many sources that can be offered as refuting the concept of Jesus of Capernaum as Myth.

b.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

If you said "bar'nash" to the average person in 1st Century Jerusalem, though, they would have just heard it as "human being."

What can I write here, Diogenes? First, this is utterly irrelevant. Second, I have no idea what "an average person" living in 1st century Jerusalem would have thought, on hearing "bar'nash". Third, you err, sir, in writing that those folks would have "heard" "human being". No Sir, they would have heard, "bar'nash", and would have INTERPRETED that collection of phonemes as meaning "human being", one supposes, I don't really know what kind of people, other than Roman soldiers, occupied Jerusalem during the Roman-Jewish wars....
Fourth, and finally, Jerusalem was not the locus of the creation or spread of Christianity. Surely you understand that....Mark is a Greek text, intended for literate, native GREEK speakers. It is not a Hebrew text, or a Syriac text (I don't know whether bar'nash is Hebrew, or Syriac).
But, what has this obscure phrase bar'nash got to do with Mark 1:1? Mark is a GREEK text, not some kind of semitic language text. You, Diogenes, yourself, pointed out that Mark had no idea about Hebrew traditions. Why do you interject a Hebrew/Syriac phrase into a discussion about the meaning of Mark 1:1?

c.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

What Mark thought is irrelevant. Mark was making stuff up about a person he knew virtually nothing about.

(And you know this how?) yes, of course he was making stuff up. Mark is fiction. That's what one does, as an author of a novel. One makes stuff up.

d. tacitus:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Can the Jesus described by Tacitus have existed literally?

Dio, I am worried about you. Are you in good health? Your sentence is very peculiar. Tacitus never mentions Jesus. What are you reading at night before going to bed? Surely you must know about Tacitus' writings?

problems with citing Tacitus as a source of historical information about Jesus of Capernaum:

1. earliest (and only) extant manuscript of Tacitus' Annals (Latin) dates from 11th century. Tacitus himself wrote the Annals in 115CE.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Tacitus is not a witness to anything and doesn't understand that phrase.

Tacitus was not a witness.

2. source material? What documents did he consult?

3. language? Greek? Latin?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ancient history

Tacitus is the only writer who says he wrote his own life. Athenaeus mentions that he wrote a history of the affairs of Rome in the Greek language.

GREEK, Diogenes, not Latin. Just like his friend, and correspondent, Pliny the younger: They wrote in Greek. Do we possess a Greek version of his Annals? NO.

4. What did Tacitus write about Hercules?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

Tacitus records a special affinity of the Germanic peoples for Hercules. In chapter 3 of his Germania, Tacitus states:
... they say that Hercules, too, once visited them; and when going into battle, they sang of him first of all heroes. They have also those songs of theirs, by the recital of this barditus as they call it, they rouse their courage, while from the note they augur the result of the approaching conflict. For, as their line shouts, they inspire or feel alarm.

5. errors: motivation? interpolation? Pilate as "procurator", when he was actually a "Prefect".

6. does not write Jesus, but rather, Chrestus. Diogenes: Does Χρηστος have a specific meaning in Greek? In the second century, when Tacitus, living in "Asia" as senior most member of the Roman government, wrote his Annals, do you suppose he may have been just a tiny bit influenced by the preceding and ongoing WAR with the Jews? Do you suppose AT THAT TIME, there may have been some crucifixions of trouble makers, by the Roman Army, in Jerusalem?

7. lack of specificity "great multitude of Christians in Rome"...how many? does this smell like garlic? To me it smells more like INTERPOLATION.

8. missing important volumes of Annals: 7-10, parts of 5,6,11,and 16.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roger Pearse

All of the late Italian manuscripts - some 31 at the last count - are copies of a single mediaeval manuscript, also in the Laurentian library, where it is number 68.2. It is referred to as M. II or 'second Medicean', to distinguish it from the unique codex of Annals 1-6.
...
This MS is written in the difficult Beneventan hand. It was written at Monte Cassino, perhaps during the abbacy of Richer (1038-55AD). It derives from an ancestor written in Rustic Capitals, as it contains errors of transcription natural to that bookhand. There is some evidence that it was copied only once in about ten centuries, and that this copy was made from an original in rustic capitals of the 5th century or earlier, but other scholars believe that it was copied via at least one intermediate copy written in a minuscule hand.

9. definite evidence of interpolation, not just some kind of theoretical claim:

Quote:

Originally Posted by rationalwiki

The surviving copies of Tacitus' works derive from two principal manuscripts, known as the Medicean manuscripts, which are held in the Laurentian Library in Florence, Italy, and written in Latin. The second Medicean manuscript is the oldest surviving copy of the passage describing "Christians." In this manuscript, the first 'i' of the Christianos is quite distinct in appearance from the second, looking somewhat smudged, and lacking the long tail of the second 'i'; additionally, there is a large gap between the first 'i' and the subsequent 'long s'. Latin scholar Georg Andresen was one of the first to comment on the appearance of the first 'i' and subsequent gap, suggesting in 1902 that the text had been altered, and an 'e' had originally been in the text, rather than this 'i'.
In 1950, at historian Harald Fuchs' request, Dr. Teresa Lodi, the director of the Laurentian Library, examined the features of this item of the manuscript; she concluded that there are still signs of an 'e' being erased, by removal of the upper and lower horizontal portions, and distortion of the remainder into an 'i'. In 2008, Dr. Ida Giovanna Rao, the new head of the Laurentian Library's manuscript office, repeated Lodi's study, and concluded that it is likely that the 'i' is a correction of some earlier character (like an e), the change being made an extremely subtle one. Later the same year, it was discovered that under ultraviolet light, an 'e' is clearly visible in the space, meaning that the passage must originally have referred to chrestianos, a Latinized Greek word which could be interpreted as the good, after the Greek word Χρηστος (chrestos), meaning "good, useful", rather than strictly a follower of "Christ".

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Tacitus is not a witness to anything and doesn't understand that phrase.

Tacitus was not a witness.

Donnmathan · 04-09-2012, 03:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve Weiss

Quote:

Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

Hi smeat75,

Historians often change their opinion about what is historical and what is not.

For example, a man named William Herndon spent 25 years gathering material about Abraham Lincoln after he died. For more than a century the best Lincoln historians dismissed all of Herndon's work as false inventions and fabrications. For almost a century almost no major biographer of Lincoln used Herndon's material for fear of being laughed at by his colleagues.

In the last 20 years, there has been a considerable reevaluation of Herndon's work with many Lincoln historians now seeing Herndon's work as generally reliable and giving us important insights into the life of Lincoln before he became president.

If all historians in a field could be wrong about material relating to a modern figure like Lincoln, is it not quite conceivable that all or most historians could be wrong about material relating to an ancient figure?

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Raskin is correct about the tenuousness of the historical record, and one does not have to go back to Lincoln for examples of revisionism and inaccuracy as orthodoxy. Who killed JFK? Did FDR know about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance? And countless others.

The further one goes back into time the less validity there is likely to be in history since evidence is often fragmentary and is frequently lost. I lost my university ring before I even graduated, so though I once possessed it, it is a lost artefact from only a few decades earlier. Strange as it may seem, some artefacts are even forgeries or are made out of whole cloth, so there may be an intention to rewrite history according to a predetermined agenda. See Orwell's 1984.

Glad someone mentioned that (1984). I have several books on ancient history that date to pre-1970 (or so), and all treat biblical events as proven history; one even bends over backwards trying to shoe-horn the Flood in around the time of Sargon I. It seems to me that the trend has been the reexamination of ancient history to see if those biblical events were real, and then weeding most of them out. Therefore, one must tread carefully in giving credibility to sources from the long period where Christianity dominated the field of history.

Now, if I could get something clarified: am I understanding that the HJ crowd is pigeonholing Jesus in with Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Arthur, in that they are heavy layers of mythology piled atop probably historical but utterly mundane individuals (or composites thereof)? Does the HJ position strip all supernatural aspects of the stories away, or is it a catch-all that includes both the literal-interpretationist Christians as well as historians who just don't buy that the whole Christian movement started on a myth? As an admittedly amateur student of history, I find that position interesting, and the rancor that seems to exist on both sides baffling.

Toto · 04-09-2012, 06:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Donnmathan

..

Now, if I could get something clarified: am I understanding that the HJ crowd is pigeonholing Jesus in with Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Arthur, in that they are heavy layers of mythology piled atop probably historical but utterly mundane individuals (or composites thereof)? Does the HJ position strip all supernatural aspects of the stories away, or is it a catch-all that includes both the literal-interpretationist Christians as well as historians who just don't buy that the whole Christian movement started on a myth? As an admittedly amateur student of history, I find that position interesting, and the rancor that seems to exist on both sides baffling.

The HJ crowd is not unified.

There are secular HJ'ers who strip out all of the supernatural elements and look for a mundane Palestinian at the core of the legends.

And there are liberal Christians like Crossan who seem to want Jesus to have existed in order to demonstrate that social or personal transformation through unconditional selfless love and radical pacifism is possible

But there are also Christians who need Jesus to have existed in order to leave open the possibility that he was more than human.

aa5874 · 04-09-2012, 06:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

What Mark thought is irrelevant. Mark was making stuff up about a person he knew virtually nothing about. The Jesus of the Gospels is not the Jesus that was crucified. The Gospels are trying to interpret and explain a historical event that the authors had heard about only remotely and without detail. They had a blank paper outline of Jesus, and they colored it in as best they could. They got a lot of stuff wrong because they were dealing with a culture, a religion and a language that they didn't know anything about....

You have EXPOSED your underlying problem. You have Presumed your OWN history and is dictating what you Imagined as actual events that did occur.

Please, get back to reality. No sources of antiquity show what you have imagined.

In the ALL the Gospels the same character was crucified.

It is YOU who have a BLANK piece of paper and is trying to re-construct your Jesus without a shred of corroboration.

History can ONLY be re-constructed from SOURCES from the past not from imagination.

You DISCREDIT gMark and the other Gospels and then make stuff up.

I don't want to hear your INVENTIONS--I already have the Gospels and they don't have anything at all like what you just said.

Mythicism cannot be falsfied.

The Jesus stories were Myth Fables like those of the Greek and Romans.

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04-09-2012, 10:51 AM	#171
Diogenes the Cynic Moderator - Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Twin Cities, Minnesota Posts: 4,639	What Mark thought is irrelevant. Mark was making stuff up about a person he knew virtually nothing about. The Jesus of the Gospels is not the Jesus that was crucified. The Gospels are trying to interpret and explain a historical event that the authors had heard about only remotely and without detail. They had a blank paper outline of Jesus, and they colored it in as best they could. They got a lot of stuff wrong because they were dealing with a culture, a religion and a language that they didn't know anything about. Imagine trying to write a biography of Gandhi if the entirety of your knowledge about him is having heard somebody else describe the movie to you once. You might remember a few quotes and a few key incidents ("he gets shot at the end"), but you can't really make a story out of it. So you look at the Mahabharata (because you are a person with a faith belief that information about him can be found there), and you concoct a few narratives from passages you believe you have been told through inspiration are about Gandhi. You also remember being told about a couple of scenes of masses of people using non-violent resistance, but you can't remember the details, so you make them up, maybe even using some details from other movies you've seen. It doesn't matter if it's journalistically accurate because it's still the same general idea, and you're making a religious point anyway, not reporting for the New York Times. So then you end up with a book of completely made up horsehit about a guy who really lived and had some vague resemblance to some of the things in your book (kinda/sorta the teachings, maybe a quote or two and you remembered to have him get shot at the end), but you've transformed him into something completely different (I forgot to mention, you gave him superpowers too). This is what I think happened with Jesus - a hagiographical corpus was composed by people who had nothing to research but primitive doctrinal formulas and possibly a sayings tradition. The rest was filled in with the LXX, imagination (which they probably thought was inspiration) and allusions or borrowings from the myths they already knew (other movies that had seen).

04-09-2012, 11:00 AM	#172
seeker Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: US Posts: 748	Isn't the question of Jesus' historicity sort of a red herring? The fact is that pretty much any scholar who studies that era would have to agree that there were a lot of guys named Jesus walking around in Palestine, claiming to be the Messiah. The greatest likelihood is that the biblical Jesus is an amalgamation of various historical figures. We are, after all, talking about an era in which the common wisdom of several religions was that a Messiah was due. Unless you accept the Bible literally, the Jesus described therein could not have existed. Strip away all the supernatural BS and there is nothing remarkable about Jesus. The whole question of historicity really masks a far more important question IMO; Does it really even matter whether he existed or not?

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