Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Doctor X · 03-17-2004, 11:57 PM

. . . and there was St. Bastard. . . .

--J.D.

Llyricist · 03-18-2004, 12:16 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Vinnie
The crucifixion of Jesus in an "inheritided tradition". Embarrassment and multiple attestation.

Vinnie

Embarrassment? This keeps getting trotted out as if it actually had any value in determining anything. When in fact it is wholly irrelevant, especially in the case of the crucifixion.

If Doherty is right, then the central point of the Jesus Myth (as related by Paul) WAS the crucifixion, so the gospel writers were stuck with it. No embarrassment there.

If the Flavian Hypothesis is right, then the only embarrassment there is falls squarely on whoever falls for it.

Are there ANY JM Hypotheses, that aren't made of straw, that are in any way undermined by this "embarrassment criterea"?

I don't know of any.

judge · 03-18-2004, 12:20 AM

"With reference to....the originality of the Peshitta text, as the Patriarch and Head of the Holy Apostolic and Catholic Church of the East, we wish to state, that the Church of the East received the scriptures from the hands of the blessed Apostles themselves in the Aramaic original, the language spoken by our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and that the Peshitta is the text of the Church of the East which has come down from the Biblical times without any change or revision."

Mar Eshai Shimun

by Grace, Catholicos Patriarch of the East

The Peshitta is all but ignored by western scholars, however there is much evidence that it is the original from which our greek mss were translated.

Signs of the Cross written by Andrew Gabriel Roth outlines much evidence in this regard.
You may find some here who disagree but you will not find actual refutations.

Vinnie · 03-18-2004, 12:39 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Weltall
Actually the only sources we have for this event are the gospels and they contradict themselves on this rather important event.

If you have an extrabiblical attestation for the crucifixion I'd love to see it.

Every source dealing with crucifixion. They contradict one another? So what. They should. The cross was initially embarrassing and Christians made stuff up to alleviate this. Errors are expected.

Vork:

Paul and Mark for starters (contra B. Mack).

""""Please explain how you know the Crucifixion was embarrassing to early adherents.::::::::::

We've been down this road before. I can't believe you want to even object to this!

The "skandalon" of a crucified Jesus is history remembered. "Skandalon", as you should know, is from the Pauline corpus.

Why don't you guys just go to X-Talk?

They have been discussing this very issue: the historical fact of the crucifixion the last few days.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/15242

Follow all the "facts of a historical Jesus" threads in the last few days starting with that one.

Here, I'll reprint all the pro-crucifixion statements by various scholars:

Patrick Narkinsky

Quote:

Stipulating (but not necessarily conceding) that the gospels are not basically historical, the crucifixion is unlikely to be fabricated. The problem is this - Jesus is described as Christ from the beginning of the Christian movement. The Christ - or Messiah - was in Jewish expectation the king of Judah who would finally overcome foreign overlordship and restore the people of YHWH to their rightful place of glory.

Crucifixion at the hands of the Romans would present a prima facie case that Jesus was *not* the Messiah. It seems grossly improbable to suppose that any Christian would have made it up.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/15248

Ted Weeden:

Quote:

Richard, when I say that as a historian I am convinced that the crucifixion of Jesus is a historical fact, I am making a judgment based upon the best available evidence, weighing that evidence against various probabilities, and then deciding which of the various probabilities is most cogent and persuasive. In the case of the crucifixion it is, as has been pointed out by others on this list, multiply attested by both Christian sources (Paul, the Gospels) and non-Christian sources (the Jewish historian Josephus [unless Josephus' reference to Jesus' crucifixion is a total Christian corruption of the Josephus text] and the Roman historian Tacitus) of the first century. There is no evidence that any source of the first century states or infers that Jesus died a natural death or by some other tragedy, or that Jesus was mythologically viewed as having been apotheosized or translated to heaven, as some traditions hold to be the case for Elijah,
Moses, etc. Using the criterion of embarrassment, employed by some Jesus scholars, such as Meyer, would suggest that Jesus' death by crucifixion could only have been an embarrassing, even scandalous, fact about him (see Paul) in the view of non-Jewish or Gentile persons, since his crucifixion would have been recognized as a clear indication that Jesus was guilty of some capital crime against the Roman Empire. If Jesus did not die from
crucifixion, it is difficult to explain why Christians, interested in
winning converts among Gentiles of the time, would have nvented such a tradition, since such a tradition would in effect serve to undermine their evangelistic cause rather than support it.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/15249

Joe Weaks

Quote:

The logic here is not quite right. Sociologically speaking, a
martyr-like death does indeed elevate the memory of the individual to hyberbolic heights. So, you would be correct to say, "Were not Jesus crucified, he would never have been considered a martyr much less God's self-sacrificing love incarnate." But, communities don't invent stories of martyrdom to lift up a diving man persona. They invent stories of stupendous deaths, mostly "being taken up." See for example, Lucian's
Demonax, or Jewish traditions of Moses or Elijah.

It seems extremely unlikely to posit why the early community would make up the fact that Jesus was crucified along with other criminals. What seems much more PLAUSIBLE is that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, and then the early community would have reason to reinterpret said crucifixion with tales of martyrdom, compassion to criminals on the cross, a centurion seeing Christ for who he was at point of death, the curtain in the temple tearing and then adding on resurrection stories to overshadow the humiliation of death.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/15262

Jeffrey Gibson

Quote:

Funny how Suetonius and Celsus and Porphyry and Lucian and Minucius Felix and Fronto, among others, who were targets -- or at least aware --of this alleged marketing plan, didn't pick up on that, but instead see Jesus' crucifixion as a sign that Jesus was a failure and Christianity superstitious and pernicious nonsense.

Funny how apologists like Justin Martyr and Origen and Octavius found themselves having to devote more attention to defending the claim that Jesus' crucifixion did not prove Jesus a charlatan and Christianity utter foolishness than with anything else they had to struggle with in their defense of Christianity.

In any case, you have a hidden supposition here that what the cross and Jesus' crucifixion has **come** to symbolize is what it **would** have symbolized to those who were the first recipients of the message of "Christ crucified".

In the light what of what Jews had been schooled by Deut. 21:22-23 to believe regarding those hung on a tree, let alone what Circero and Plautus and Varo and other Greco-Roman authors say regarding the horror and the impropriety of even the mentioning of crucifixion, and what Zeno tells about the absolute irrationality of dying as Jesus was known to have died, this hardly seems likely -- and I really have to wonder where your claim is coming from. It certain is not well grounded in primary evidence.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/15263

Anthony Burglass

Quote:

Tony:
Is it just too simplistic for me to say that Guy makes the mistake of reading the situation through modern "capitalist" eyes (eg marketing symbol) instead of 1st C "honour-shame" eyes? That the cross was so shameful that the earliest Christians used signs such as the fish rather than the cross?

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/15265

Jeffrey Gibson

Quote:

Assuming by success you mean growth and then acceptance in the west and then state sponsorship, no it is not true. In fact, the fact that Jesus was crucified and that Christians proclaimed a Christ crucified was often used as a justification for persecutions against Christians. It was certainly a -- if not the -- main factor in Greco Roman intellectuals line Fronto, Celsus, Porphyry, etc., rejecting Christianity as folly and as scandalous.. See Martin Hengle's

What made Christianity a success and led to its growth was, to some degree, its egalitarianism, and its treatment of the sick and itsrefusal to abandon those struck down by plague.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/15270

Jeffrey Hodges

Quote:

And that's the point. Crucifixion was shameful, and
was intended to be so. Read "The Dream of the Rood" to
see what the Anglo-Saxons had to do to make the cross
palatable to their culture.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/15273

Finally, Joe Weaks again:

Quote:

All the responses to your premise agree that
virtually everything we know about 1 c. Palestine suggests that
inventing a story of crucifixion would NOT have been seen as a
beneficial thing to do for lots of reasons. (The fact that it appears
beneficial to you, 2k years later is immaterial.)

a. We have many examples of stories praising an individual where their deaths are embellished... and crucifixion is not how they made the guy look good.
b. What we know about shame sociologically negates it as a desire of the community.
c. Early Christian kerygma is an apology and rhetorical repositioning regarding crucifixion, doing their best to cast a positive light on an embarassing aspect of their messiah. That's why they said, "Well, yeah, but he rose from the dead, so na na na na." or "He's coming back!" or "He died not cause he had to but cause he wanted to, in your place."
d. etc.

There are very few things regarding HJ studies that virtually all
serious HJ scholars agree on, but the fact of Jesus' crucifixion is at
the top of the list.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/15283

A crucified Jesus is history remembered. That may be one of the very few or possibly the only fact of the passion narratives that is historical----a crucified Jesus. That brute fact alone, as Crossan observes.

I find it staggering that you or anyone would even TRY to question or deny that the cross was embarrassing at this point. Aside from all the extrabiblical evidence attesting to its nature we have Paul calling it a skandalon.

Mythicism and agnosticism is entirely unfounded. The course of events is easy to reconstruct here. Jesus was crucified by Rome. This caused a shitload of apologetics to surface in defense of this embarrassment. End of discussion.

Vinnie

Steven Carr · 03-18-2004, 12:41 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by rlogan
Uh, exactly which disciples were in attendance at the crucifixion?

The ones who fled , and went into hiding, silly.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8449/three.html

'Three other facts which we will not go into are the conversion of Paul, a skeptic and persecutor of the Church by what he claims was an appearance of Christ to him; the conversion of Jesus' skeptical brother James by an appearance of Christ to him; and the disciples' transformation, despite having previously deserted Jesus during the crucifixion.

They deserted Jesus during the crucifixion, while also standing by the cross.

How is this possible?

It's a miracle!

Vorkosigan · 03-18-2004, 01:08 AM

Every one of those is in error. I'll talk about them tonight. You should be able to spot some of the problems right away -- for example, where in the Pauline corpus is a crucifixion under Pilate attested? I have to go teach now.

BTW, I am not on XTALK anymore and haven't looked at it in weeks. Most of the discussions on XTALK quickly evolve into apologetic defenses and then devolve into "Why can't we consider miracles?" whining. I finally got tired of it, and left.

Vorkosigan

Vinnie · 03-18-2004, 01:17 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Vorkosigan
Every one of those is in error. I'll talk about them tonight. You should be able to spot some of the problems right away -- for example, where in the Pauline corpus is a crucifixion under Pilate attested? I have to go teach now.

BTW, I am not on XTALK anymore and haven't looked at it in weeks. Most of the discussions on XTALK quickly evolve into apologetic defenses and then devolve into "Why can't we consider miracles?" whining. I finally got tired of it, and left.

Vorkosigan

The miracle whining on x-talk is absurd. Its actually quite laughable at times.

There was an anti semitism discussion that made me lack respect for some members. They seemed like prudes living in a dream world. I couln't believe what ome were offering as "anti-semitic"! It was astounding

Many kudos to Davies though on miracles. He called it like it is!

Oh yeah, I don't recall anyone saying Pilate occured in the Pauline corpus. I think he occurs in 1 Timothy as I do not find Doherty's arguments convincing but that Pastoral epistle dates to ca. 100 C.E.

I'll wait for you to get around to pointing out the flaws with the comments

Vinnie

Doctor X · 03-18-2004, 01:44 AM

Just to correct Judge's propaganda:

Quote:

It is curious that nothing in Aramaic survives from the early Jesus movement (though the Syriac church claims that its Syriac NT texts are based on earlier Aramaic texts which they judge to be more reliable than what has survived in Greek).

In the past, some scholars argued that the canonical gospels were based on an Aramaic "Urgospel", but few if any scholars hold to this position today.

Given the thorough "hellenization" of Palestine, some scholars have argued that Jesus may have spoken Greek, rather than Aramaic. It's certainly possible that Jesus knew some Greek to ply his trade as a carpenter/artisan (if such he was) in the region of Galilee, but there is no reason to assume that he was fluent in Latin (!) as Gibson makes him out to be in his movie. I think it likely that Jesus spoke Aramaic.

The fact that we only have texts written in Greek indicates how far removed the writers of the NT texts were from the world of Jesus. And as various factions of the Jesus movement entered the wider Greek-speaking world of the eastern Mediterranean (Paul e.g.), common dialect Greek (the so-called "koine") was their only linguistic choice. The separation of Christianity from rabbinic Judaism (which returned to Hebrew as its primary language) and the adoption of Christianity by Greek-speaking "gentiles" (and eventually the emperor himself), virtually assured that only Christian texts written in Greek would survive.

No doubt there were texts written in Aramaic, and these may have circulated in Palestine for some time, but they were all lost. Indeed, there is very little reference to anything written in Hebrew or Aramaic in the early period. Eusebius (c. 325 CE) preserves a quotation of Papias (c. 120 CE) that "Matthew composed his text in Hebrew (or Aramaic)", but this seems unlikely since we know that Matthew relied on the Greek text of "Mark" as one of his sources. Eusebius also mentions the "Gospel of the Hebrews", which may have been written in Hebrew or Aramaic, but this text has not survived.

If you saw the movie "Stigmata", you'll recall that at the end a claim is made that the "Gospel of Thomas" was the original Aramaic gospel of Jesus which the Vatican tried to suppress. But there is little doubt that Thomas was written in Greek originally. One might similarly ask why there was no (early) gospel written in Latin? In fact, we don't get Latin Christian texts until the end of the second century CE. It is interesting, I think, that when Paul wrote his letter to the assembly of believers in Rome, he wrote in Greek. That would seem to suggest that even in the Latin west, there was a considerable number of Greek speakers (probably of the lower classes). I don't know of any good article or book that deals with this subject, and I'm not sure I've answered your question satisfactorily, but these are some of my thoughts on the topic.

From a scholar who wishes to remain annonymous. He sides with the historical Jesus crowd but feel that there is nothing certain that can be said of him. For Vinnie he would agree with "embarrasing" events may indicate actual events that writers had to deal with/address, but they do not prove these events.

So . . . once again . . . we are all back where we started . . . with nothing. . . .

--J.D.

judge · 03-18-2004, 03:11 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Doctor X
Just to correct Judge's propaganda:

From a scholar who wishes to remain annonymous.

Once again this is a bit vague Dr X.
Just what are you referring to here?
Where did you come across this scholar who wishes to remain anonymous?

You have quoted someone but you have not made mention of where the quote came from.

Can you clear up what it is you are trying to say?

Thanks in advance

Doctor X · 03-18-2004, 03:21 AM

{Comment deleted}.

Still waiting for that paper. . . .

. . . waiting. . . .

. . . waiting. . . .

--J.D.

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03-17-2004, 11:57 PM	#31
Doctor X Banned Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: USA Posts: 3,794	. . . and there was St. Bastard. . . . --J.D.

03-18-2004, 12:20 AM	#33
judge Veteran Member Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Bli Bli Posts: 3,135	"With reference to....the originality of the Peshitta text, as the Patriarch and Head of the Holy Apostolic and Catholic Church of the East, we wish to state, that the Church of the East received the scriptures from the hands of the blessed Apostles themselves in the Aramaic original, the language spoken by our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and that the Peshitta is the text of the Church of the East which has come down from the Biblical times without any change or revision." Mar Eshai Shimun by Grace, Catholicos Patriarch of the East The Peshitta is all but ignored by western scholars, however there is much evidence that it is the original from which our greek mss were translated. Signs of the Cross written by Andrew Gabriel Roth outlines much evidence in this regard. You may find some here who disagree but you will not find actual refutations.

03-18-2004, 01:08 AM	#36
Vorkosigan Contributor Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Barrayar Posts: 11,866	Every one of those is in error. I'll talk about them tonight. You should be able to spot some of the problems right away -- for example, where in the Pauline corpus is a crucifixion under Pilate attested? I have to go teach now. BTW, I am not on XTALK anymore and haven't looked at it in weeks. Most of the discussions on XTALK quickly evolve into apologetic defenses and then devolve into "Why can't we consider miracles?" whining. I finally got tired of it, and left. Vorkosigan

03-18-2004, 03:21 AM	#40
Doctor X Banned Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: USA Posts: 3,794	{Comment deleted}. Still waiting for that paper. . . . . . . waiting. . . . . . . waiting. . . . --J.D.

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