Chris Weimer

Haha, great quote. :rolling:

No Robots

Spinoza, in refusing an academic appointment, wrote:

But since it has never been my wish to teach in public, I have been unable to induce myself to accept this splendid opportunity, though I have long deliberated about it. I think, in the first place, that I should abandon philosophical research if I consented to find time for teaching young students. I think, in the second place, that I do not know the limits, within which the freedom of my philosophical teaching would be confined, if I am to avoid all appearance of disturbing the publicly established religion. Religious quarrels do not arise so much from ardent zeal for religion, as from men's various dispositions and love of contradiction, which causes them to habitually distort and condemn everything, however rightly it may have been said. I have experienced these results in my private and secluded station, how much more should I have to fear them after my elevation to this post of honour.

He also wrote:

I have honestly endeavored not to laugh at the actions of men, nor to bemoan them, nor to abhor them, but to understand them.

Malachi151

"Indoctrination" is impossible to avoid. Any theology eduction is going to contain certain assumptions, such as "Jesus is and was real", which will necessarily precondition one's views of the material. Likewise, most people who go into the field in the first place already have certain assumptions and beliefs which are favorable to the traditional Christian understanding of the texts.

While I have never attended a theology school, I'd wager a bet that if I spoke out in class and offered interpretations of the texts that favored a mythical Jesus, or argued with my professors that Jesus never existed, I wouldn't have an easy time, and may indeed be expelled from some schools.

Could I graduate from a theological seminary school with a thesis arguing that Jesus never existed and that there is no God and that Christianity is a sham that contributed to the decline of Western Civilization?

I doubt it.

Well, this should be no surprise, since anything that is substantially challenging to Christianity is often rejected even by non-Christian scholars out of hand.

Apologetics for Christianity is still huge in the West, especially America, even among non-Christians. Look at Closing of the Western Mind, that book got hammered, and even though I don't think its that good a book either, it got hammered for the wrong reasons.

He seems to take a very historical view of the scriptures. His work on a lot of things is good, I agree with that. He contributes a lot of useful material, but I think that he dismisses mythicism out of hand and he argues about things as if he knows certain facts about the life of Jesus which it is indeed impossible to know, as many people do.

People infer things from the Gospels, based on certain assumptions about them being generally true, though that assumption is never backed up, and if that assumption is challenged, then most of these types, though I haven't seen a case of Ehrman taking this this head on, will eventuality just say, "No, it can't be".

I haven't seen his specific position on mythicism, but when I hear him talk about Jesus its sometimes very similar to Tabor. "Jesus was a threat to the social order, and he was doing this and doing that, etc., etc.," as if anyone actually has any evidence of any of this.

ERRRR RED FLAG ALERT, RED FLAG ALERT!

LOL, I thought you just said that "indoctrination" does not occur in theology eduction. What is an "anachronistic reading"? That's the problem here.

There is a finite amount. It may be large, but it's finite.

This is where there are major differences between the natural sciences and Biblical studies.

All that Biblical studies entails is the study of human artifacts. Any field that studies human artifacts is greatly reduced in scope as compared to any field that studies nature itself.

It doesn't matter if it's the Bible or Minoan civilization, there are only so many artifacts to study, and for the most part, everyone in these fields as looked at all the same stuff.

Yes I agree with you, but again this just a matter of familiarity with material. This is one of the reasons that I started an atheist led Bible study, so that atheists could get familiar with the material, since most are not. That doesn't even begin got scratch the surface, but its a start for most people.

I agree that these types of errors occur due to lack of familiarity, and I know that I have made many such errors myself many times, which is why I come here and discus things because its a quick way to see if something is just obviously wrong, but there are many errors made on the other side of the coin for basically the same reasons as well, taking the conventional wisdom uncritically.

No, but someone can read the core primary source materials in a matter of months and be able to come to some of their own conclusions about them that would have a lot of validity. Those then need to be checked against the other volume of material, etc., but let's face it, you have the Bible itself, then some relevant apocrypha, the major 2nd - 4th century writings by apologists and a few heretical scraps, and with that you have a pretty solid foundation.

Sure there is more, but you can read all that in a few months time to a year's time.

Well, it depends. Traditional Christianity contains within it many false assumptions. Being taught those false assumptions and accepting them as true indeed puts you in a worse position than no education on the matter at all.

Oh hey look, that's how Christians and theologists deal with anything that they disagree with, hence my point is proven.

Chris Weimer

Where did he write about not getting an education, though?

Chris Weimer

Speaking out in any class or arguing with professors over anything will likely to cause you trouble.

No, but you could a secular institute for a masters in biblical studies.

Gee, really?

Anachronistic reading - it happens in every field. Attributing modern thoughts that wouldn't have occured to the ancients.

gnosis92

I was going to say,
I think that Doherty might be credible (I don't read Greek, and reading Ehrman, Pagels, Funk, Crossan, Mack and of course, wikipedia is about as far as my NT education goes -- not including people like Josh McDowell and Ravi Zacharias) but I see no reason why Doherty doesn't publish in scholarly peer-reviewed journals.

I did post a thread months ago "why don't MJ'ers publish in peer-reviewed journals"? with little response.

Malachi151

Yes quite, but who says what is the anachronism? The Christians?

The whole Jesus Myth issue is basically about showing that the traditional view IS the anachronism.

It is the Christians who are interjecting later beliefs onto earlier people and cultures.

The whole New Testament is setup is indeed FOSTER anachronistic reading!

jgibson000

Excuse me, but who??

But the problem is that as far as his reconstruction of 1st century Judaism and the HJ goes, he is a crank.

Ah yes, Rathenau, Miskotte, and Menuhin, those established experts on 1st century Judaism and the Historical Jesus. I see their HJ work -- along with that of CB -- referred to and praised all the time in current and classical historical Jesus studies!

Do you know whether or not the admiration these men (but curiously not Einstein or Schweitzer) had for CB was for his writings on the HJ?

Wow. I didn't know a remark I posted here had reached the masses, let alone was as powerful as you make it out to be, or that the confidence of the "common people" (!!) in the scholarly community was so weak that one remark from me sets it crumbling.

Do the poor benighted "common people" even know (or care) who Brunner is?

In any case, if anything is destroyed, it's your credibility when you assert as you do that Brunner is the authority on anything, let on matters HJ or that he came anywhere near doing history in his reconstruction of Jesus' life, teaching, and significance.

JG

Gregg

I don't understand your point here, I'm afraid. Doherty may be largely self-educated, but he is not "totally untrained."I've considered the possibility that I'm assuming a double standard before, and I don't think this judgment applies. Here's why:

People who study evolution are studying organisms, the fossil record, DNA, etc. These things are what they are. They don't change (except over time). They're predictable. There's not as much subjectivity involved in interpreting the evidence, and the peer review process winnows out bias and subjectivity eventually.

On the other hand, Bible scholars are studying material written by other human beings, stuff that has been copied and edited and re-copied and re-edited over decades or centuries. A lot of material has been lost, often through deliberate neglect or destruction. They are dealing with words, words that often have different meanings or shades of meaning. They are trying to figure out what somebody with a very different worldview, dealing with issues we often don't fully know about or fully understand, meant by something he wrote.

And on top of all this, large numbers of these scholars have confessional interests or work for theological institutes, denominational backed colleges, and universities that have a powerful interest in keeping the alumni happy. Am I saying I don't trust Bible scholars as a group to be as objective as scientists? You're damn right I am. We are not just talking about words in some musty old book here, we're talking about beliefs that millions of people, including a large number of Bible scholars, cherish and hold sacred. I don't think there's any widespread, conscious, deliberate conspiracy to reject mythicist claims, but I also don't think Bible scholars have neglected the mythicist angle because the evidence for historicity and/or against mythicism is overwhelming.

So the fact that the majority of Bible scholars reject mythicism means a great deal less to me than the fact that the majority of biologists reject ID.

Bullshit. What is "crazy" about what Doherty proposes? Once again:

We KNOW there were people in the ancient world who believed in dying/rising savior gods.

We KNOW there were people in the ancient world who believed in descending/ascending divine beings, intermediaries between God and man.

We KNOW there were people in the ancient world who believed gods, angels, and demons could do quite human things, bleed, die, fight, fornicate, etc.

We KNOW there were people who believed in levels of heaven which became increasingly more Earthlike the closer you came to the surface of the Earth.

We KNOW there were people who believed that things on Earth had heavenly counterparts, and vice versa.

We KNOW that Christianity emerged in the midst of a vast empire, one that was incredibly diverse and relatively tolerant of different sects and beliefs, one where there many people probably had a general feeling of anxiety and rootlessness leading them to seek meaning in many places, one where ideas and beliefs and philosophies flowed and mixed freely, one where many people were fascinated by Judaism and the Jewish scriptures and where Jewish apocalypticism was at a fever pitch.

It would be hard to imagine a better environment for a new religion to emerge in, one that drew from various religious and philosophical currents of the day, put them together and interpreted them in new ways.

Please explain to me why it's "crazy" to think that in such an environment, with beliefs and philosophies such as those I listed floating about, people might have linked two or more of these beliefs and philosophies and added their own ideas and interpretations? Or that other people might have taken the resulting belief system and combined it with other beliefs and added their own ideas and interpretations? I mean, this stuff happens. We KNOW this. Any objective survey of religious history will tell you this.

There is nothing "crazy" about saying that Paul believed in a Christ in the likeness of flesh who was crucified by the demon spirits of the firmament. This is well within the scope of the religious beliefs of the day. If one can find reasonable (not exact, but reasonable) parallels to Christian beliefs in prior and contemporary belief systems and philosophies, than what is "crazy" about saying Christianity might have evolved from those beliefs? You might say, "Nothing, but there had to be an actual, specific crucified man as the catalyst." But why? You already had descending/ascending divine beings, dying/rising savior gods, personified Wisdom, the Logos, the Son of Man. What is "crazy" about suggesting that Jesus Christ was an amalgamation of these concepts? I don't get it. I mean, OK, if you don't think the evidence supports it, fine. But what's "crazy" about it?

Gregg

Doherty was published in the Journal of Higher Criticism (Fall 1997).

I think we will start seeing more papers published on the MJ thesis. My money's on Richard Carrier to really break the logjam.