Toto

Charlotte Allen is a journalist and public commentator with very little in common with Bill Donahue. She is the author of The Human Christ: the search for the historical Jesus (or via: amazon.co.uk). You could learn a lot from that book.

Of course. There is no need to be insulting.

I think you just made that up. You can always have a theory without evidence - you just don't have a good way of testing it, but your theory might tell you where to look for more evidence.

Actually, they don't. They claim that evolution leads to moral degeneracy.

The historical Jesus theory leaves a lot unexplained, but feel free to demonstrate your claim.

youngalexander

No, the most recent ploy (pre-Dover) was that evolution works macroscopically, but the devil (or spirit - er, ahem, Designer) is in the detail. The most recent fulminations are yet to be divulged ...
Hmm, well, lack of evidence is rather telling...
Ahh, bring on RC and his proposed book!

Gamera

I'll try to help you understand, Amaleq.

The narrative is the narrative and the teachings are the teachings. They are related but not coterminous.

The narrative is pretty simple. I can tell the storylline in 3 minutes. Not only that preachers have been doing so for 2,000. So the facts seem to be against you. You tried to make it appear complex by introducing ambiguities in the teachings, but of course that makes no sense.

So, I think I've established that the narrative is pretty simple, or at least your attempt to mystify the narrative by referencing the teachings doesn't make your point.

Now, to the teachings. The teachings also are pretty simple, if having rather profound implications that have invited vast and complex commentaries. Jesus preaches loving others, mercy, forgiveness, giving. You can try to mystify this by focussing on details out of context, but the vast bulk of the teachings are directly related to these motifs (indeed the vast majority are related directly to helping the poor).

So, I reassert my position: the narrative is pretty simple, as are the teachings. The implications of both obviously are not.

Circling back, Doherty has mystified both by focussing on commentary and out of context details rather than the broad narrative and the broad teachings. I think that is a flaw in his method, such as it is.

Gamera

I have noted that the the first realm of silence in Doherty's position is the silence of the Jesus mythicists of the time. You would expect out of the vast universe of surviving texts from the first century onward some document to memorialize their position. And yet none does, directly or indirectly.

A second category of silences in Doherty's argument is equally damning: the silence of the contemporary or near contemporary opposition to Christianity.

The opposition would have taken two forms: the Jewish opposition and the Graeco-Roman opposition. You would expect one of these to note the mythic position since it is such a rich target for the opposition. But neither does.

First, Jewish scholars had every incentive to glom onto the mythic position as a devasting critique to this upstart and increasingly hostile new offshoot of Judaism. If Christianity were based on a nonhistorical Jesus, you would expect Josephus or Philo or some subsequent Jewish apologist to at least mention the possibility that the entire body of Christian belief is based on a fabrication that has has strayed into historicity. This is all the more expected because if anybody knew the historical/cultural conditions of Judea in Jesus' time, it would be Jewish scholars and historians.

Yet all we get is either silence on that issue, or references to Jesus as a real person (though some of these reference attack his paternity, etc.).

This is a gaping flaw in Doherty's argument.

Second, Graeco-Roman historians also had an incentive to debunk this newfangled and socially dangerous religion by portraying it as nothing but fiction, another mystery religion based on suspiciously eastern (i.e., weak and unRoman) myths. Both Tacitus and Suetonius seem to like taking ocassional pot shots at unfounded historical claims (especially religious ones). Yet again, neither attacks Christianity on the grounds that Jesus wasn't a real person. Rather they emphasize its bizarre and dangerous ideas. To the extent that they do mention Jesus (and let's stipulate that these references are ambiguous and aren't strong evidence of historicity) they seem to assume Jesus was an historical figure, not a mythic creation of the overheated eastern mind.

Again, this all goes to show how weak the mythic case is, and it is all the more dubious for mythicists to refer to the silences surrounding the historical Jesus, given the vast silences that surround their own claims.

Amaleq13

No need as I'm not confused at all. This is just more of the same from you. You start with a preferred conclusion and then work backwards from there by ignoring or redefining anything that doesn't comport with it. Very simple but hardly credible and, ultimately, incorrect.

Again, you are the one who included a reference to what Jesus taught as part of your unambiguous summary. Stop pretending I added this.

Again, so what? You can do that with any story if you ignore enough details.

Your ability to ignore certain details so that you can present an unambiguous summary is not "facts" and does nothing to refute my observation that only one of the points you offered is actually unambiguous.

Again, you introduced the teachings of Jesus into it when you claimed they were unambiguously about peace. The facts clearly do not support your assertion. And stop pretending I introduced the teachings of Jesus. It is as tiresome as it is obviously incorrect.

You've established that one can simplify the story if one ignores the details. Congratulations.

Toto

But we have no surviving texts from first century writers, except for Paul.

But, in fact, we have no indication that a mythical founder would have been such a liability - especially for a Platonic-type thinker such as Philo. Was Jesus any more or less mythical than Moses or Abraham? I think that it is only after the Enlightenment that a charge that Jesus never existed would be taken as a devastating blow to Christianity.

The Graeco-Roman historians do not seem to have taken Christianity seriously enough to try to "debunk" it. It was just another mystery-type cult with gullible followers (from Lucian). It's ideas were not bizarre or dangerous except that they led people to refuse to sacrifice to the emperor - and that had nothing to do with whether Jesus was historical or not.

It all depends on what evidence you expect to have been preserved.

Gamera

No you can't, if you mean relevant details. Clearly, the relevant details are the ones that preachers have been preaching, and theologians have been theologizing about since Paul. And Paul could sum up the narrative in a couple sentences in Corinthians.

Every narrative can be infinitively expanded if, like Zeno, you focus on everything it takes to get from A to B. But that's not the narrative.


Yep, I introduced them as the teachings, not the narrative. Both are relatively simple. You tried to use one to complicate the other.

Yep, not only I can do it, but so can Paul and all of historical Christianity, which suggests that the narrative is pretty simple.

Gamera

Since that's obviously not true, I suspect you mean something else. We have plenty of writings from 1st century writers (Philo, Tacitus, Suetonius, arguably John, perhaps Barnabus, just to name a few). If you mean we have no mss from that time, but only copies, sure, but I don't think that's relevant to the topic.

Further we have lots of references to 1st century writers from later writers, but none of this large literature includes any reference to a mythicist school of Christianity.

So if your argument boils down to there is little textual material from the 1t century that survives or is referened to (as a way of explaining the silence from the mythicist school) I think the argument is factually flawed.


Interesting point, but it seems to make my argument not yours. If a mythicist school of Christianity held an affinity for Philo, you would expect him to at least mention it. He doesn't. Later Jewish writers only mention Jesus as a real (all too real) human.

Well, again Tacitus likes taking pot shots at what he deems stupid superstitions not based in reality. You would think that if there were a mythicist school of Christianity, he would allude to this in some explicit fashion, and make unfavorable comparisons with Roman virtues of concreteness and "reason." But again, nothing.

I would expect some documentary evidence from (a) the mythicist school of Christianity, and (b) some evidence from its opponents -- just like we have for the historical school of Christianity.

Since we have lots of the latter, and none of the former, that weakens the mythicist position.

TedM

And Paul's own writings have many silences about this Jesus in the skies in a parallel universe--so much so that no one even thought he MIGHT be talking about that kind of mythical Jesus until Doherty! And further, we have Paul defending his views against those who preached another Jesus NOT by discussing this life he lived or ridiculing those who said he had really lived but just wasn't well-known or some such argument, but rather by talking about how Gentiles could eat meat and don't require circumcision! Those OTHER forms of Christianity were NOT different with regard to something as basic as whether Jesus had lived and died on earth or not. It apparantly wasn't even an issue. Not in the 1st century. Not in the second. Rather, with Paul the issues that opposed him had to do with the details of how Christianity differered between Gentiles and Jews. THAT'S what Paul was writing about--not some mystery about Jesus' origins that only he had discovered, and that his opposers hadn't.

ted

Toto

Typed too fast - I meant that we have no surviving texts from Christian writers, except for Paul, and Paul is arguable. But then I date the gospels much later.

But does any of this very early material clearly reference a historicist school?

Philo doesn't mention any sort of Christianity. He doesn't mention Jesus or Paul. If his silence means anything, it would support a second century origin for Christianity.

What does he actually say about Christians? Later Christians somehow failed to preserve the volume of his Annals that covers the period when Jesus was alleged to have been active in Palestine. This is part of the question that you have to anwer - why would pro-mythicist records be expected to survive?

But you have no documentary evidence from a historicist school before 70 CE, unless you count the ambiguous references in the epistles. And no evidence of heresy hunters in the first century. And we don't actually know what later Christians rewrote or threw out.