Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Toto · 05-17-2010, 11:22 AM

Searching for Jesus in the Gospels by Adam Gopnik.

Quote:

...

Ever since serious scholarly study of the Gospels began, in the nineteenth century, its moods have ranged from the frankly skeptical—including a “mythicist” position that the story is entirely made up—to the credulous, with some archeologists still holding that it is all pretty reliable, and tombs and traces can be found if you study the texts hard enough. The current scholarly tone is, judging from the new books, realist but pessimistic. While accepting a historical Jesus, the scholarship also tends to suggest that the search for him is a little like the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes: there were intellectual-minded detectives around, and Conan Doyle had one in mind in the eighteen-eighties, but the really interesting bits—Watson, Irene Adler, Moriarty, and the Reichenbach Falls—were, even if they all had remote real-life sources, shaped by the needs of storytelling, not by traces of truth. Holmes dies because heroes must, and returns from the dead, like Jesus, because the audience demanded it. (The view that the search for the historical Jesus is like the search for the historical Superman—that there’s nothing there but a hopeful story and a girlfriend with an alliterative name—has by now been marginalized from the seminaries to the Internet; the scholar Earl Doherty defends it on his Web site with grace and tenacity.)

...

Somehow comparing the search for the HJ to the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes is not mythicism, but the search for the historical Superman is?

But this is a fairly comprehensive, and sympathetic, review of the field.

aa5874 · 05-17-2010, 11:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Searching for Jesus in the Gospels by Adam Gopnik.

Quote:

...

Ever since serious scholarly study of the Gospels began, in the nineteenth century, its moods have ranged from the frankly skeptical—including a “mythicist” position that the story is entirely made up—to the credulous, with some archeologists still holding that it is all pretty reliable, and tombs and traces can be found if you study the texts hard enough. The current scholarly tone is, judging from the new books, realist but pessimistic. While accepting a historical Jesus, the scholarship also tends to suggest that the search for him is a little like the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes: there were intellectual-minded detectives around, and Conan Doyle had one in mind in the eighteen-eighties, but the really interesting bits—Watson, Irene Adler, Moriarty, and the Reichenbach Falls—were, even if they all had remote real-life sources, shaped by the needs of storytelling, not by traces of truth. Holmes dies because heroes must, and returns from the dead, like Jesus, because the audience demanded it. (The view that the search for the historical Jesus is like the search for the historical Superman—that there’s nothing there but a hopeful story and a girlfriend with an alliterative name—has by now been marginalized from the seminaries to the Internet; the scholar Earl Doherty defends it on his Web site with grace and tenacity.)

...

Somehow comparing the search for the HJ to the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes is not mythicism, but the search for the historical Superman is?

But this is a fairly comprehensive, and sympathetic, review of the field.

So, some scholars have accepted the historicity of Jesus before they could demonstrate or prove his history.

It would be EXPECTED that "scholarship" would have accepted the historicity of Jesus on EVIDENCE but SADLY they have NOTHING.

It is completely baffling that AFTER thousands of sources of antiquity has been EXAMINED for hundreds of years that scholarship are still searching for the historicity of a character they have accepted.

"Scholarship" is a big joke.

Quote:

....."While accepting a historical Jesus, the scholarship also tends to suggest that the search for him is a little like the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes.....

ApostateAbe · 05-17-2010, 01:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Searching for Jesus in the Gospels by Adam Gopnik.

Quote:

...

Ever since serious scholarly study of the Gospels began, in the nineteenth century, its moods have ranged from the frankly skeptical—including a “mythicist” position that the story is entirely made up—to the credulous, with some archeologists still holding that it is all pretty reliable, and tombs and traces can be found if you study the texts hard enough. The current scholarly tone is, judging from the new books, realist but pessimistic. While accepting a historical Jesus, the scholarship also tends to suggest that the search for him is a little like the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes: there were intellectual-minded detectives around, and Conan Doyle had one in mind in the eighteen-eighties, but the really interesting bits—Watson, Irene Adler, Moriarty, and the Reichenbach Falls—were, even if they all had remote real-life sources, shaped by the needs of storytelling, not by traces of truth. Holmes dies because heroes must, and returns from the dead, like Jesus, because the audience demanded it. (The view that the search for the historical Jesus is like the search for the historical Superman—that there’s nothing there but a hopeful story and a girlfriend with an alliterative name—has by now been marginalized from the seminaries to the Internet; the scholar Earl Doherty defends it on his Web site with grace and tenacity.)

...

Somehow comparing the search for the HJ to the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes is not mythicism, but the search for the historical Superman is?

But this is a fairly comprehensive, and sympathetic, review of the field.

Yeah, that bit about Sherlock Holmes and Superman does strike me as nonsense. I suspect that the Sherlock Holmes analogy belongs to an argument entirely different from the Superman analogy, but the two analogies were placed misleadingly adjacent.

It is an interesting read, a survey of the expanse of secular scholarship. Toward the end, he throws in a paragraph appealing to my own model.

Quote:

One thing, at least, the cry assures: the Jesus faith begins with a failure of faith. His father let him down, and the promise wasn’t kept. “Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God,” Jesus announced; but none of them did. Jesus, and Paul following him, says unambiguously that whatever is coming is coming soon—that the end is very, very near. It wasn’t, and the whole of what follows is built on an apology for what went wrong. The seemingly modern waiver, “Well, I know he said that, but he didn’t really mean it quite the way it sounded,” is built right into the foundation of the cult. The sublime symbolic turn—or the retreat to metaphor, if you prefer—begins with the first words of the faith. If the Kingdom of God proved elusive, he must have meant that the Kingdom of God was inside, or outside, or above, or yet to come, anything other than what the words seem so plainly to have meant.

That is the primary vantage from which I interpret the beginnings of Christianity and its development in the first and second centuries.

mountainman · 05-17-2010, 07:33 PM

The New Yorker article ends with a mass of questions the final one being ....

Quote:

Did the rise of Christendom take place because historical plates were moving, with a poor martyred prophet caught between, or did one small pebble of parable and preaching start the avalanche that ended the antique world?

What about the impact of the Constantine Codex (and its Eusebian "packaging") on the Greek civilisation as a whole?
This impact can hardly to be described as "one small pebble of parable and preaching"
and cannot be confused with the impact of the Constantine meteor.

Space impact 'saved Christianity'

By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor

Quote:

Did a meteor over central Italy in AD 312 change the course of Roman and Christian history?

A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock's impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity.

Reminiscent of the stories of the Kents out cruising in their automobile?
Good Superman material.
Did Constantine send his "agents" to investigate the impact site?
Did they find a UFO?
Did they find the new testament?

spamandham · 05-17-2010, 09:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Somehow comparing the search for the HJ to the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes is not mythicism, but the search for the historical Superman is?

In my mind, there is no historical Sherlock Holmes either. The character may be somewhat inspired by one or more historical people, but you could never discern even the smallest significant detail about any of those historical people from Sherlock's character.

The same is true for Jesus, IMHO. To the degree the character may be inspired by one or more real humans of history, they are not found in the texts we have. Whether Jesus is a myth in the Superman sense or in the Holmes sense, seems to me to be picking nits.

mountainman · 05-18-2010, 11:02 AM

All indications point to the assessment that we are dealing with a purely literary figure. Sooner or later people will realise the next step is to investigate the 4th century publisher of the "Story". Who profited from the publication of the "Jesus Story"? How much gold was the publication worth? Who lost as a result of the publication of the "Jesus Story"?

Quote:

Originally Posted by spamandham

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Somehow comparing the search for the HJ to the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes is not mythicism, but the search for the historical Superman is?

In my mind, there is no historical Sherlock Holmes either. The character may be somewhat inspired by one or more historical people, but you could never discern even the smallest significant detail about any of those historical people from Sherlock's character.

The same is true for Jesus, IMHO. To the degree the character may be inspired by one or more real humans of history, they are not found in the texts we have. Whether Jesus is a myth in the Superman sense or in the Holmes sense, seems to me to be picking nits.

Toto · 05-31-2010, 01:48 PM

Choose your own Jesus

Quote:

In the event, the synoptic gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles do make absolutely extraordinary claims, and so modern scholars have every right to read them with a skeptical eye, and question their factual reliability. But if you downgrade the earliest Christian documents or try to bracket them entirely, the documentary evidence that’s left is so intensely unreliable (dated, fragmentary, obviously mythological, etc.) that scholars can scavenge through it to build whatever Jesus they prefer — and then say, with Gopnik, that their interpretation of the life of Christ is “as well attested” as any other. Was Jesus a wandering sage? Maybe so. A failed revolutionary? Sure, why not. A lunatic who fancied himself divine? Perhaps. An apocalyptic prophet? There’s an app for that …

But this isn’t history: It’s “choose your own Jesus,” and it’s become an enormous waste of time. ...

Clivedurdle · 05-31-2010, 02:34 PM

What precisely is the problem with a literary Jesus?

And these strange distinctions between Holmes and Superman. They are both characters in stories - I thought there were historical precedents to Superman as well.

And why is a character with historical antecedents historical? Is there a boiling point or metamorphosis point somewhere?

Macbeth? Hamlet?

Just reading a Lindsay Davis Falco story in which she jokes how Homer stole all the best characters!

mountainman · 05-31-2010, 07:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

Just reading a Lindsay Davis Falco story in which she jokes how Homer stole all the best characters!

She obviously did not connect with the reception that the "Jesus Jokes" in the "Gnostic Acts and Gospels" were received by the orthodox christian Photius. Photius reports that the Gnostic author depicts Jesus in "an extremely docetic fashion".

He asserts that He never was really made man,
but only in appearance; that He appeared at different times in different form
to His disciples, now as a young, now as an old man, and then again as a boy,
now taller, now shorter, now very tall, so that His head reached nearly to heaven

We are obviously not dealing with a Gnostic author who thought that Jesus was an historical figure. It is patently obvious that, when one experiments in removing the "Christian Glasses" one perceives that Jesus has been "Homerized" by the Gnostics, and elsewhere Paul has been "Aesoped". I cannot explain this other than to suggest that the Gnostics cannot have conceived that this Jesus (and/or Paul) character was an historical figure.

Jesus is cast as a figure in a genre of extremely distinctive literary fiction that the orthodox christians found extremely offensive. In fact, it adequately explains the "Gnostic heresy". The Gnostic heresy was to read the "Gnostic Books".

Quote:

Photius' BIBLIOTHECA OR MYRIOBIBLON

114. [Lucius Charinus, Circuits of the Apostles: Acts of Peter,
Acts of John, Acts of Andrew, Acts of Thomas, Acts of Paul]

Read a book entitled Circuits [1] of the Apostles, comprising the Acts of Peter,
John, Andrew, Thomas, and Paul, the author being one Lucius Charinus, [2] as
the work itself shows. The style is altogether uneven and strange; the words
and constructions, if sometimes free from carelessness, are for the most part
common and hackneyed; there is no trace of the smooth and spontaneous expression,
which is the essential characteristic of the language of the Gospels and Apostles,
or of the consequent natural grace.

The contents also is very silly and self-contradictory. The author asserts that
the God of the Jews, whom he calls evil, whose servant Simon Magus was, is one God,
and Christ, whom he calls good, another. Mingling and confounding all together,
he calls the same both Father and Son. He asserts that He never was really made man,
but only in appearance; that He appeared at different times in different form
to His disciples, now as a young, now as an old man, and then again as a boy,
now taller, now shorter, now very tall, so that His head reached nearly to heaven.

He also invents much idle and absurd nonsense about the Cross, saying that Christ
was not crucified, but some one in His stead, and that therefore He could laugh
at those who imagined they had crucified Him. He declares lawful marriages to be
illegal and that all procreation of children is evil and the work of the evil one.

He talks foolishly about the creator of demons. He tells monstrous tales of silly
and childish resurrections of dead men and oxen and cattle. In the Acts of St. John
he seems to support the opponents of images in attacking their use.

In a word, the book contains a vast amount of

childish,
incredible,
ill-devised,
lying,
silly,
self-contradictory,
impious, and
ungodly statements,

so that one would not be far wrong in calling
it the source and mother of all heresy.

[1] Or "Travels."
[2] Also Leucius, or Leontius. His date is uncertain,

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Choose your own Jesus

"Not the beginning of a fruitful quest for the Jesus of history, but the end of it."

I suggest that if we were to choose the historical Jesus from the ground of ancient history then he appears to have been introduced as a meteoric superstar in the fourth century with a great production manager and publisher. The codex was 4th century "High Profile Technology", quite comparable to "Hollywood" today in its effects. The rise of the impressive basilicas cannot be overlooked.

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05-31-2010, 02:34 PM	#8
Clivedurdle Contributor Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: London UK Posts: 16,024	What precisely is the problem with a literary Jesus? And these strange distinctions between Holmes and Superman. They are both characters in stories - I thought there were historical precedents to Superman as well. And why is a character with historical antecedents historical? Is there a boiling point or metamorphosis point somewhere? Macbeth? Hamlet? Just reading a Lindsay Davis Falco story in which she jokes how Homer stole all the best characters!

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