GakuseiDon

Yes, it comes across that way, which is unfair. I apologise to mythicists and retract that remark.

Ferryman to the Dead

I am a Mythicists and no apology necessary here. Its cool. I have heard worse.

aa5874

But, don't you even realize that your "saying" includes you.

You don't think Jesus of the NT was a mere man.

Perhaps you were NOT thinking and simply believed anything.

Once you believe Jesus was supernatural and resurrected then you support a MYTHOLOGICAL Jesus.

Chili

. . . and he was and told us to do the same thing.

gurugeorge

But you've been here long enough to know that there's not much here.

OTOH, she's not all bad. It's always worth having people like her around (and people here like mountainman and aa5874) because it's generally good to have extreme positions staked out and defended so that we have a clear view of the total field of possibility. Also, Price says she's cleaned up her academic act somewhat - and that's a good enough recommendation for me not to reject her totally (I may get round to reading her latest books at some time).

And you never know where the truth will come from - as a Popperian I'm firmly convinced that there's no guaranteed "source of truth" - that neither the senses, nor reason, nor academic qualifications, guarantee the truth of one's propositions - and that we approach the truth by proposing bold theories and testing them to destruction.

One mustn't mistake rules invented to make life easier, for actual means to approach truth. There's a certain manner and "house style" in the academy that you learn when you study there, but it's nothing more than that - a convenience, a habit and mannerism of going about things that partly defines a community and keeps it distinct from "outsiders", forming a slight barrier to idiotry in a time-pressured world.

And furthermore, while I'm at it, academic subject distinctions are arbitrary conveniences stemming originally from the mediaeval (feudal) origins of universities; knowledge is knowledge is knowledge, there is no such subject as "physics" that's hermetically distinct from "biology" or "history".

*climbs off soapbox*

Doug Shaver

I don't think I can add much to what was posted while I was away from the board. Your quotations do not even begin to show any mythicist making an actual claim that any "gospel details of Jesus' life actually do match messianic prophecies in the OT."

The gospel authors clearly believed there was such a match. Liberal historicists say they were mistaken; mythicists say they were mistaken; almost everybody except inerrantists says they were mistaken. It is simply incoherent of you to argue that mythicists are claiming there actually was a match.

GakuseiDon

Fair enough, though I was referring to "Old Testament's so-called 'prophecies' about Jesus" which I wrote and you responded to back on page 4.

Well then, as per the OP: where do you think the 'Nazareth' came from in the 'Jesus of Nazareth' in the Gospels? Or references connecting Jesus to Capernaum or Galilee?

GakuseiDon

Yes, Price's reviews and comments on Acharya's more recent work has done that. I even saw Carrier commenting how he had heard that her latest book was apparently more scholarly a little while back.

I don't disagree with anything you said from your soapbox, gurugeorge. I also appreciate the opportunity of reading through new viewpoints espoused by Acharya S, Doherty, mountainman, etc. Having read them, I certainly think that they are wrong; but I can't say I have wasted my time looking over them, and not every point can be rejected out of hand.

As you wrote, you never know where the truth will come from. Isn't mountainman in fact more right than wrong about how flimsy the dating of early Christian materials? And I think Doherty's focus on how earliest Christians thought of Jesus as divine is interesting. Even Acharya S shows us how 19th C Christianity tried to explain other religions by 'finding' similarities between Jesus and the other leading figures of other religions, much as Justin Martyr 'found' similarities between Jesus and the Greek gods. All very interesting to me.

But, as you also noted, bold theories need to be tested to destruction. Has this happened? Have the theories of Doherty, Acharya S, mountainman been tested to destruction? Have those who think that they have something to offer done this? Should they do this?

Chili

Nazareth is the little 'city of God' inside the mind of a Jew out of which the inner child is to be born. In the Gospels this Jew was Joseph and the woman was called Mary who was from this 'big little city' of God.

Capernaum was the comfort zone of the ego identity unto which this child was born that so created the conflict in the mind Joseph [here], now in Galilee as the place where this liberation movement takes place and is thus what the Gospels are all about. It so is where religion is purported to find its own end in our journey to Jerusalem-on-high in Israel, which for Catholics is Rome in the Church Triumphant.

Sheshbazzar

See how simple and logical all of it is when explained.