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Originally Posted by Toto
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Originally Posted by sweetpea7
... Even for those scholars who are Christians, what are their stated reasons for rejecting a MJ?
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The stated reasons are often along the lines of, that question was settled a long time ago, and we all now believe that Jesus existed. It all seems to go back to Bultmann, who stated at one point that anyone who thought there was no historical Jesus was insane. His prestige (and probably other factors) led most other scholars to fall in line. |
And of course Bultman was standing on the shoulders of the giant intellectual figures of the church itself, which perpetuated itself out of the Middle Ages and ultimately from the Council of Nicaea, where it may be argued that many scholars of antiquity were coerced to fall in line to the Nicaean dogma.
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Even Bart Ehrman, who is not a Christian, and is certainly not shy of boldly rejecting many of the claims of Christianity, rejects the MJ. What are his reasons for doing so? .....
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Ehrman will let us know. Up to now, he has referred to a few Bible verses as if they were obviously historical.
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It's a worry.
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Why have they done that? Psychology, medicine, all are fields that change course frequently about approaches when experts in those fields have reasons for doing so.
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The was a conservative revolution of sorts in Biblical studies. Evangelical scholars became predominant, displacing earlier Deists and rationalists. Robert Price describes it here (you can tell that he was left out in the cold.)
Dr. Craig would have us believe that the extreme skepticism that once held biblical scholarship hostage to (what he calls) the naturalistic presuppositions of Deism has more recently given way to a general return to confidence in the substantial historical accuracy of the gospels, and especially in the historicity of the empty tomb and the physical resurrection of Jesus. ... though Craig indulges in a bit of wishful thinking, playing taps for various critical approaches still quite far from death's door, he may well be correct that New Testament scholarship is more conservative than it once was. This has more than he admits to do with which denominations can afford to train the most students, hire more faculty, and send more members to the Society of Biblical Literature. But basically, it should surprise no one that the great mainstream of biblical scholars hold views friendly to traditional Christianity, for the simple reason that most biblical scholars are and always have been believing Christians, even if not fundamentalists. ...
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Another criteria by which christian scholars appear divided is that concerning the "divine origin of the universal church". Arnaldo Momigliano deals with this in various places:
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The truth is of course that historians of the church are still divided on the
fundamental issue of the divine origin of the church. The number of professional
historians who take the Church as a divine intitution -- and can therefore be
considered to be the followers of Eusebius -- increased rather than decreased
in the years after the FIrst World War. On the other hand the historians who
study the history of the Church as that of a human institution have consolidated
their methods. They have been helped by the general adoption in historiography
of those standards of erudite research which at seems at one time to have been
confined to ecclesiastical historians and controversialists. We sometimes forget
that Eduard Meyer was, at least in Germany, the first non-theologian to write a
scholarly history of the origins of Christianity, and this happened only in 1921.
[...]
"Those who accept the notion of the Church as a divine institution
which is different from the other institutions
have to face the difficulty that the Church history reveals only too obviously
a continuous mixture of political and religious aspects:
hence the distinction frequently made by Church historians of the last two centuries
between internal and external history of the Church,
where internal means (more or less) religious
and external means (more or less) political.
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To continue with the quote ...
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But is this trend to neo-conservatism an enlightenment? Rather, I regard it as a prime example of what H.P. Lovecraft bemoaned as the modern failure of nerve in the face of scientific discovery: "someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such such terrifying vistas of reality , and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
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The ultimate cause of the modern failure I think is the modern topography of multi-disciplinary studies as
alluded to above by Momigliano. The examination of the evidence for the existence of the "Historical Jesus" and the examination of the evidence for the existence of the "Universal Christian Church" before the 4th century have commenced to yield
" such terrifying vistas of reality", that the examination of the case for the Mythical Jesus looks a far more attractive proposition for those committed to the evidence itself, and to illiciting the historical truth from that evidence itself.
Arnaldo Momigliano must be rated among the foremost of ancient historians of the 20th century, and nowhere in his books, essays, lecture notes, and writings can I find any support for the Historical Jesus. In fact, after reading this author's
irony carefully, it may be quite appropriate to claim that Momigliano viewed Christian origins as "miraculous" and "transcendental". From an ancient historian, this claim does not support the historical dogma, rather it detracts substantially from any claims for an historical jesus or an historical "Universal Church". This is not mythicism, this is ancient history.
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Originally Posted by Toto
Real historians are willing to concede that apparently historical figures might be myths, and to just state it as a possibility, without feeling forced to reach a conclusion where the evidence is lacking.
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Other real ancient historians, such as Arnaldo Momigliano and Edward Gibbon, use irony - sometimes very heavily - to state their opinions. We need to be aware that some people are irony impaired, and that as a result, such opinions are not as commonly conceded.
06-30-2011, 05:11 PM
