outhouse

fair enough

LegionOnomaMoi

You are missing the point (deliberately?) Here is a more than qualified historian, active in the field since he received his doctorate from Harvard in the 60s. Yet his book is riddled with problematic assumptions and conclusions. So why would he be more qualified than someone whose specialty is NT studies or something similar?


How can I be intellectually bankrupt when I'm asking a question: who do you consider qualified to talk about the question of Jesus' historicity and why?



I don't see them as maltreated. My undergraduate work was (well, for one major anyway) in classics. And I keep up with Greco-Roman history along with other areas of ancient history as a hobby, just as I do with christian history and Jesus studies. Whether it is in journals, monographs, edited series, or any other academic forum where historians of the ancient world publish/debate/discuss/etc., nobody else seems to think that "religious studies folk" are unqualified. They are cited frequently by people whose degrees include PhDs in ancient history or some other history degree (e.g., Ronald Hutton), asked to write papers for edited volumes (e.g., A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography) and their papers are accepted by journals outside of religious studies. And within those journals we also find classicists and historians dealing with the historical Jesus, e.g., John Thorly's "When was Jesus born?" in Greece & Rome or Paul L. Maier's "The Inscription of the Cross of Jesus of Nazareth". Everywhere I look in academic sources outside of religious studies which have to do with history around the time and place Jesus is said to have lived, I find historians citing "religious studies folk" and "religious studies folk" writing in non-religious studies journals/volumes.


According to whom? Those whose degrees are in ancient history, classics, or other fields seem to find them more than qualified. This isn't to say they always agree, but then "religious studies folk" disagree among one another as do specialists in every field of historical study. However, the relevant point is that if we look at academic sources in journals and other reviewed/edited sources dealing with ancient history (particularly Near Eastern or Greco-Roman) we find that "religious studies folk" are considered qualified by other specialists in various fields.


Which ones? The "religious studies folk", those in other fields who cite them and rely on their work, or those in other fields who also write about the historical Jesus?

That's true. And it's possible that everybody who thinks we have more than enough evidence to conclude that Jesus existed (whatever problems exist with criteria used to determine what within our sources is historical) are all wrong. But when I see classicists and other ancient historians treat historical figures in general, often enough it is with much less, not greater, historical skepticism. Apply the kind of arguments and logic used to say that Jesus never existed, and there isn't really anybody from ancient history you can't say the same for.

I don't think they have the money. Most of them publish technical works which the general public don't have easy access to. There's a lot more money in sensationalism.

tanya

Mark....

why? Hmmm. If we cannot trust Mark 1:1, then who can we trust?

Who should we consult to address the question of Odysseus' historicity? I vote for Homer.

Who should we consult to answer the question of the historicity of Lady Fujitsubo, stepmother, and lover, one thousand years ago, of Prince Hikaru Genji?
I vote for Murasaki Shikibu.

Does it matter, who has been selected as arbiter of these thorny questions?

None of these, Jesus, Odysseus, or Lady Fujitsubo, were genuine human folks. They were all fictional characters in literature.

LegionOnomaMoi

History is literature, particularly in the ancient world. The question becomes 1) do the numerous arguments over the past ~4 decades that the gospels belong to the genre of ancient biography hold weight 2) even if they do, is ancient biography so nebulous a category (and so related to "proto"-novels or similar genres) that a work can fall into this genre and still be fiction and 3) in either case, what are the implications? You bring up Homeric epics, which are clearly mythic to the point of being the mythic archetype. Time was, people assumed that no mythic tradition handed down for centuries could contain fact and that it was all myth.

This nicely demonstrates the point I tried to make at the end of my last post. The charge was that "religious studies folk" were unqualified and their work shows it. In 2002, Professor Trevor Bryce published a paper in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology entitled "The Trojan War: Is there truth behind the legend?" In it, he writes: "scholarly opinion is still much divided on the question of how much historical truth is embedded in Homeric tradition. On the one hand there are those who have a deep faith in the fundamental historical reliability of the tradition to the point where the Iliad is used almost like a history textbook or archaeological manual for reconstructing both the history of the period and the material setting in which the events narrated by Homer took place." p. 183.

He also reviews the evidence from our hittite texts, not just the identification of Wilusa with Ilium and Ahhiyawa/Ahhiya with Achaia (Greece), but even the possibility that the reference in "the so-called 'Indictment of Madduwatta'" to a certain "'man of Ahhiya' called Attarsiya" is to Atreus, the father of Agammemnon according to Greek myth.

There are two points of interest here. The first is that the Iliad, a mythic story passed down through oral tradition over centuries, nonetheless has historical elements, from places long forgotten except in myth to perhaps even a memory of an actual conflict (and, according to some scholars, much more). The second is the scholars using the Iliad (to quote Bryce) "almost like a history textbook". And these are not the "religious studies folk" (i.e., NT, early christian, and biblical specialists). I think Bryce creates an impression that there are two equally represented extremes, one group thinking it's mainly reliable and another completely myth", when in reality there do not appear to be many specialists who possess the kind of "faith" Bryce refers to. However, there are some, and the fact remains that even Homer is, apparently, used by historians, and some scholars will take something as small as two similar sounding words (one in Hittite, and the other in Greek) and run wild applying them to unearth history from Homeric myth.

spin

You really are slow on the uptake, LegionOnomaMoi. It's never been about who says it--except for the seat polishers. It is always the evidence.

Unless questions are naive or gormless they are always laden. But you've cut a bit of the drama queen and re-asked the same naive question:

It's never been about who says it.


Precisely. It was irony regarding your unnecessary rump-covering job.

Now, did that feel good or did that feel good?! Defending the faith is so liberating.

Fuck, you keep coming back with the same lame lack of understanding. Look back over all those historical Jesus rags and tell me how many of them were written by historians and how many of them assume their conclusions and how many of them are prepared to play the credentialism game when pushed to it? Have you read that old goat Casey's last pathetic insult to scholarship (see the Hoffmann thread)?

You wanna tout their credentials and they wanna tout their credentials, but where is the history in these historical Jesus books? Who actually coughs up the significant evidence to put Jesus in the historical camp?? History is not about asserting an ontology, nor is it about belittling some other ontology. However, it is about attempting to establish what can be known about the past by mustering the critically evaluated evidence. History requires methodologies that overcome the hegemonic dictates of the current cultural status quo (of whatever era the history is attempted in). The epistemology needs to be transparent and work towards an understanding of the barriers of our own narratives to overcome them and get closer to what happened in the past.

I answer this below, starting with "Academia is happy...."

You should have left it there.

Flogging numbers isn't meaningful in history. Appealing to numbers won't change what did or didn't happen. A century ago few scholars challenged the historicity of most of the Hebrew bible. The notion that there was no conquest would have been laughed out of the room. Now we are down to defending David and looking for ways to keep the Judean kingdom alive prior to Hezekiah's father in order to give some respectability to the unified kingdom story. Appeal to the evidence not the folly of numbers.

Academia is happy with its separate competences. You can do whatever you like in your field as long as the field hasn't been turfed out of the club--think phrenology or paranormal studies.

And it's not these guys who are being considered. In the field of text scholarship, how can one fault the work of Bruce Metzger? If Ehrman had kept to text criticism and not flirted with history where he clearly doesn't belong, he could have built on his own meritorious work such as the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. (It was the smell of success that brought about the more popular of his efforts and the main chance that put Ehrman behind a historical Jesus book.)

I will happily read the technical works if I have reason to.

That's what I call hysterical jesusism. (Hysterical in both senses, of them and to me.)

spin

Bryce's question is significant. "Is there truth behind the legend?" Working purely from the legend and the sources that maintain it there may be no way to answer the question. What Bryce does is bring new evidence to the equation, the Bogazkoy libraries, building on the groundbreaking work of Gueterbock and Goetze, who helped contextualize the texts.

Legends in themselves cannot reveal any historicity behind them. They contain material that plainly isn't historical and other material that may not cause complaint so cannot necessarily be discarded but whose veracity cannot be ascertained. There may or may not be "truth" as Bryce intimates in them, thus showing the epistemological quandary: how do you distinguish any "truth" solely from within the tradition? It has to be placed into a wider cultural net. There need to be external insights into the foundations of the legend. Otherwise there are no criteria with which to deal with Bryce's question.

LegionOnomaMoi

Again, yes. But evidence is nothing without interpretation. I can look at a statue of zeus and declare it evidence of historicity, but the fact that the evidence is there doesn't make my interpretation any less wrong. We have a good deal of data when it comes to Jesus and early christianity compared to many periods/figures/etc. from ancient history. The question isn't just the evidence, but what it means and what the best explanation of it is.


I wouldn't know.

Again with this "historian" bit. If you look at my last post, you'll see a discussion of how non-"religious studies folk" can still butcher history, despite degrees which happen to include the word "history" (much like Akenson). I've seen this time and time again. For the most part, ancient historians tend to be less skeptical and more willingly to leap to implausible conclusions than within historical Jesus studies (mainly because no person has been subject to greater scrutiny, not because such historians are inept).


I don't know. Most aren't a part of the web 2.0 historical Jesus quest that I know of, and the only books I read which would get into this are the most popular of the sensationalist stuff. There was a time (particularly after Strauss) when academics did debate more about whether Jesus ever existed. This is less true today, but I read (for example) Dunn's response to Wells and Wells subsequent response (and his change of position). Neither involved a "credentialism game".


Yes, while going through current threads.

First, a lot of it isn't in books at all, but papers. Second, a great deal depends on an approach to history (not just things like "criterion of embarrassment" but far more fundamental). Third, if you go back to what you initially responded to, what I said (and I later explicitly clarified meant) concerned whether or not specialists within any field are necessarily responsible for taking seriously views which virtually no specialist holds.

By "history" here do you mean historiography or are you making a statement concerning the philosophy of history?


Mustering and finding the best interpretation, yes. But "critically evaluated" is quite unclear. There were and continue to be those who have adopted theories from the desconstructionalists, the particularly skeptical post-postivisits (Feyerabend, Quine, etc.), marxian, radical feminist, etc. theories of history and concluded that for the most part it is all fiction. Carrier's Proving History would be considered a joke and his application of Bayes' theorem laughable. I side more with Windschuttle, Tucker, Appleby Hunt & Jacob, and those like them in that we can "know" (with reasonable certainty) many things about history, including ancient history.

Amusing. Which "status quo"? Both within and outside of historical Jesus studies, radically different interpretations of history, historiography, and the philosophy of both are employed. So where's the hegemony?


Quite true. I don't see how it's relevant (yes, there are those who seek to impose the present on the past, again both within and outside of historical Jesus studies, but it is hardly universal), but it's certainly true.



You missed the point. It wasn't about how many scholars believe anything, but your dismissal of "religious studies folk" as qualified compared to (apparently) the "real" historians. The problem is this demarcation is yours, and seems to be ignored by the very people you appear to claim are qualified.

And in which field did such challenges and application of critical methods begin within academia?



It really isn't. First, any demarcation is bound to be fuzzy. An expert in classics may be highly qualified to talk about various aspects of the Roman empire, but quite unqualified when it comes to linguistic research on classical languages. Second, the boundaries between "competences" are crossed all the time.

I would, if phrenology hadn't been "turfed out of the club" long ago and paranormal "studies" considered unscientific by virtually everyone but those involved. Your comparisons apply far more aptly to mythicists than those who have engaged in historical Jesus studies.

He did. His Studies in the textual criticism of the New Testament contains several papers/lectures which date after the book you reference. He has also continued to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Compare, for instance, his discussion of the "secret gospel of mark" in his Lost Christianities with the paper he wrote in response to Hendrick and Stroumsa in the Journal of Early Christian Studies.
Interesting.

mountainman

Where is a statue to Jesus?


Bullshit. This is a deluded statement. We have next to no evidence that is not textual. The absence of monumental evidence is monumental.

There are serious problems we all have to face because of the current devaluation of the notion of evidence and of the corresponding overappreciation of rhetoric and idealogy as instruments for the analysis of the literary sources. There are no archaeological sources that stand up to critical scrutiny.

LegionOnomaMoi

So, because we have artistic representations like statues of Greco-roman deities, but not of Jesus, we should ask "where are these" because...?

And your basis for comparison?


Indeed.

None at all? Or just with respect to christianity? And what archaeological sources do stand up to what scrutiny?

aa5874

Your claim is most blatant and erroneous. We have ZERO dated DATA from the 1st century about Jesus.

And here again, you do the Bait and Switch. Supposed historians like Ehrman claim Jesus was Scarcely known but all of a sudden you proclaim we have a good deal of data about Jesus.

The "Scarcely known" Jesus has MORE DATA than Tiberius the Emperor of Rome, Pilate the Governor and Caiaphas the High Priest if the Pauline letters and the Jesus stories were written in the 1st century.

It is so very easy to understand the NT Canon when it states Pilate was a Governor, Tiberius was Caesar, Caiaphas was High Priest, Herod was King and Gabriel was an Angel.

Well, it is even easier to understand that Jesus was claimed to be the Son of a Holy Ghost in the same books.

Surely you could not be putting forward the absurd notion that ORDINARY people cannot understand written statements in the NT.

If the Jesus story was written in the 2nd century then it was written for Ordinary People.