No Robots

Ignorance is submission to arbitrary authority. And there can be no more naked demand to free oneself from arbitrary authority than this:

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

You must hate those who imprison you in your ignorance.

bacht

The only man free to hate his own family and society is the man ready to die. But religion is supposed to be about how to live.

The message of Paul and Mark is to submit to Roman authority, which was also the message of the rabbis. What you're talking about is closer to the Cynics or Zealots. Where are they now?

Anarchy and chaos are exciting but unstable. Building a long-term society is boring but necessary.

No Robots

True. But as Christ's great brother, Spinoza, said, the free man finds honour in dying for a noble cause. And what is Christ's cause? It is to establish an alternative family/society, one based on spiritual freedom.

Religion deforms spiritual freedom into a living death of ritual and formalism.

The idea is to establish an alternative to secular authority, not to challenge it. As for religious authority, there is no doubt that the NT is a chronicle of revolt. In our time, religious authority is broken. But the secular authority always needs a meta-narrative to back up its exercise of power. Instead of religion, we now have anti-religion. Both are in conflict with the principle of spiritual freedom. Religion at least acknowledged the reality of spiritual freedom, and merely sought to control it. Anti-religion, on the other hand, denies that any such thing exists. In a sense, that makes anti-religion weaker. How can it adequately fight an enemy that it refuses to admit exists? It can only do so by convincing everyone that the enemy doesn't exist.

Right here.

The operationalization of the Kingdom of Heaven is the one and only Christian task.

Kapyong

Gday,

But you just ASSUMED he was historical.
Yet that's what we are arguing about.

Ah, so you are rational, and we are all irrational?
Great argument, Steve.


K

Kapyong

Gday,

Sadly, you have NO IDEA what the MJ position is.
And you clearly have no intention of ever finding out.

Why is that, Steve?


K

spamandham

I think I'll dogpile on this one too.

Steve, you've been active in this subforum for at least a couple of weeks now, participating extensively in HJ/MJ arguments, and you *still* think this is what mythicism is all about!? It's clear you have an agenda, since anyone with the intellect and English skills you demonstrate could not possibly still think that's the basis of mythicism.

gurugeorge

Only if they've got good independent reason to think there was a historical character - which there isn't in this case. If you have evidence there was an Emperor who was deified, then yes it's perfectly logical to scrape away the mythological crap and you might find some tidbits of fact there, because the historicity is anchored by coins, hostile mentions, etc. But in this case, where is the distinguishing mark between myth all the way down, and man mythified? Where is the independent evidence, or the strong internal evidence that even leads you to so much as think you CAN scrape away the myth and find someone real?

You could scrape away the crap around the Superman story and come up with something that sounds plausible about a newspaper reporter who worked out. But that has no necessary connection to reality at all, no evidentiary quality.

Prior to investigation, we have no idea whether we have here to deal with a myth like the Superman myth, simply an ancient religious comic book character, or a myth like the Popeye story (something vaguely based on a real human being).

But who is this "Jesus" you are talking about? The Jesus in the story walked on water.

So what right have you to arbitrarily invent some ordinary human being whose actual biography got somehow lost and replaced with this walking on water crap (plus a whole load of stuff based on the OT and Greek mythology, etc. etc.)?

The historicity, the purported historicity internal to the meaning of the story, belongs to the walking-on-water demigod.

Now, you may say, ok, well of course there are no such things as real god-men, perhaps there was some ordinary guy at the root of it, perhaps this particular myth has an euhemeristic origin. That's a perfectly legitimate propostion, it does happen like that sometimes.

But in order to give that proposition bite, you have to FIRST FIND A MAN. Like we first find men who we know were emperors, but who were deified, or like we find with the more comparable Apollonius of Tyana, whose "official" biography is even more fantastic than Jesus', but who is mentioned by some independent sources, and even has a tad of archaeology to support him.

Otherwise you've just plucked the poor fellow out of your ass.

OK, so we can't find independent evidence of a man answering to the criteria (preacher roundabout that time, caused a bit of a ruckus, was called Joshua, etc.), then the persistent euhemerist will say maybe there's something internal in the writings that gives the game away that there was a man? That's also a legitimate possibility. But the argument for that has to be better than "oh he's mentioned as the son of David" and the like. Any old fricken' myth could be mentioned as the Son of David! With this kind of "evidence" you've done nothing yet to distinguish the potential historicity of a human being from the faux historicity internal to the myth itself.

For that you need something like traces of eyewitnessing, eyeballing. Something like the kind of paradigm example I have mentioned - e.g. Paul saying "James said that Jesus had told him ..."

And I am not saying that this is impossible either - a while back a very clever young HJ scholar called Ben C Smith was on these forums, and he reckoned he could find traces like this, but he admitted it's extremely difficult to dig in this way. It's a really subtle and delicate form of investigation that's required - and nobody's really done it yet.

So historicity is far from obvious. Most of the "historical" characteristics in the Jesus story are evidently mythical. To scrape that away and propose a man is just gratuitious euhemerism, and it's usually not very well supported at all.

The kind of rote stuff that you've come here with (that many "contenders" have come to this board with), and that biblical scholars trot out for public consumption, is simply not good enough.

bacht

That's your opinion, not a self-evident fact. Ritual and formalism can be comforting and connecting.

The kingdom of Heaven according to the New Testament was an unreal place, either a new world coming after God's judgment (apocalyptic), or the abode of resurrected souls (metaphysical), or a new experience of this world after receiving God's spirit (existential).

Contemporary Christian vocation or ethics are beyond the scope of this sub-forum.

Juststeve

Kapy and Spam:

I'm frankly getting a bit sick of the tag team approach of the MJers. In this case what I wrote was in response to something bacht wrote to me, to wit the following:

"It's the old problem: Mark is talking about nonsense, but we expect to find sense behind it. That isn't a probability, it's a wish."

The old problem as this particular MJer describes it is expecting to identity elements of truth in the Gospel of Mark because Mark otherwise talks nonsense. This is precisely what the two of you and the always lurking moderator/combatant Toto claim no MJer argues, specifically I can quarrel with Mark and therefore Mark isn’t evidence.

Other MJers on this very thread have expanded that argument to all of the Gospels, Josephus and Tacitus, they are flawed so their references to an historical Jesus are not evidentiary. Then having excluded all of the evidence they triumphantly proclaim that there is no evidence for an historical Jesus.

You can of course prove me wrong. Set forth you reasons for discounting the Gospels as some evidence for the historic Jesus. If you have reasons that don’t include 1) they are cult documents; or 2) they contain obviously false reports of miracles, we can discuss your reasons one on one. If you claim that none of the MJers hereabouts have made those arguments, just reread this thread.

Steve

gurugeorge

You don't think the people who wrote the texts, or the Church Fathers, etc., believed they were talking about a divine, miracle working god-man walking this earth?

You don't think they thought they were presenting good evidence of such a divine being?

You don't think that's the sort of thing most Christians believed, and were willing to die for, and kill for, for 2,000 years?

Can I please have some of what you are smoking?

Sure, nowadays, with Christianity somewhat tamed by a hard-fought rationalism for several hundred years, the fashion is to view the myth euhemeristically. But as I've pointed out, this is just arbitrary - and largely, it's for fear of facing the possibility that the entity in question was simply a religious comic book character, and 2,000 years of blood, sweat and tears was for nothing. I should think the horror of facing that is simply too much to bear for many Christians.

Well, what should they believe, in your opinion? That some wise guy lived in Palestine at the time, who was important and impressive enough to start a religion, but whose real words and deeds were for some reason not important enough to be preserved, and had to be replaced by a mish-mash of midrash, Stoic wisdom and Cynic sayings, etc., etc.?