GakuseiDon

Whose position is that? It certainly isn't Doherty's. Can you expand on this core mythicist position, please?

spamandham

I have no interest in defending this. Ignore it, or consider this a concession, I don't care either way.

I am curious what you think Doherty's position is though.

S.C.Carlson

Just as crickets are a poor substitute for evidence, so are insults a poor substitute for argumentation.

Stephen

Gooch's dad

Well argued and supported all around, Vinnie. An early gospel like Mark's is definitely strong support for a HJ.

spin

You didn't get it. There was no argumentation and there was no intention to tart the comment you cited up as argumentation. You've been listening to the crickets too long on this and you can't distinguish the sound from the background. (That comment's not argumentation either, just observation.)

Now Gamera has been trying to run an apologetic which says if you don't accept our guys unanalysed then we won't accept the recognized historians. There are no criteria for the treatment of sources. He will not say how he falls on the book of Judith or of Daniel, the Satyricon, Lucian's True History or his Peregrinus, Acts, the gospel of Bartholemew, Paul's Laodiceans, Le Morte d'Arthur, Marco Polo's il Milione, the Travels of Sir John Manderville, the Travels of Lemuel Gulliver, and so on. What about you? I need some honest criteria for how to deal with all literature from the past. You've got to do better than this:

Last time I checked, Thucydides is dead and otherwise unable to speak up. All we have are copies of what he supposedly wrote. Those copies are hearsay.

Here's what I said to Gamera:

You don't use he[ar]say evidence when you can't give the data any chance of being viable.

He rattled off about hearsay and chickened out on the second part of the statement, just as you did. This is what you said:

Historical evidence is, by and large, hearsay evidence. People who can't handle it shouldn't do history.

Now what about giving "the data any chance of being viable"? This is part of the historian's job, a part which you apparently ignore.


spin

Chris Weimer

As a lawyer, you should know better than that.

GakuseiDon

That Christ didn't start off as a "mystical heavenly allegory", but as a god who descended into the world of matter (without reaching earth) where he was crucified, buried and resurrected, and then ascended back to heaven.

According to Doherty, this kind of belief was fairly standard throughout the Roman world. If Papias can be believed - and/or Tacitus as well for that matter -- then it presents a very small window for Paul mythicism to turn to historicism, esp in a world where a Doherty-Pauline belief was supposed to be fairly standard.

S.C.Carlson

Better than what? Any lawyer knows that copies are hearsay.

Stephen

Gregg

I am unclear on how this affects the Jesus Myth thesis at all. Earl Doherty accepts that Ignatius was aware of the basic details and outline of the gospel story at the time of his martyrdom (C.E. 107). He accepts a dating for Mark in the last 2 or 3 decades of the second century. So what difference does it make if Papias was aware of Mark in C.E. 105?

Seems like much ado about nothing.

Gregg

Not really, and I often think Doherty has somewhat overstated the pervasiveness of this belief among the general public in the Roman Empire. Among philosophers and religious mystics it does seem quite common, as evidenced by the persistence of gnostic beliefs into the 2nd and 3rd centuries. But it also seems logical to assume that there were plenty of people who were unschooled in Hellenistic philosophy or came from other belief systems and traditions. You had a vast empire that was far from homogenous, was mostly religiously tolerant, and in which worship of the Greek/Roman pantheon was predominant.

Doherty is aware of Tacitus writing in 115, and since he doesn't consider Ignatius writing in 107 to be a problem for historicism, it's unclear to me why Tacitus should be. He fully accepts that there are apparently some Christians by this time who regard Mark, or what they've heard about Mark, as historical. This hardly means that ALL Christians at this time regarded Mark as a literal, historical account, or were even aware of Mark. That view still seems limited and embryonic at this stage. Near-universal acceptance of Jesus' historicity doesn't seem to occur until late in the 2nd century.

By the early 2nd century you could have many people, relatively unfamiliar with Greek philosophy, Jewish midrash, and so on, receiving their first exposure to Christian ideas through Mark. Reading Doherty's article "The 2nd Century Apologists," many of the high-minded Christian philosophers and apologists of the period seem unaware of, uninterested in, or barely tolerant of, emerging expressions of Christianity holding that Jesus was historical.