TedM

The issue is whether people believed or said Jesus was on earth and looked like a person. It doesn't matter if they believed he was a real person or not. If he was believed to have been on earth and looked like a real person from the get-go, then we can reject the claims made on this forum that the people back then believed Jesus was purely divine-never on earth-not historical. We are interested in whether Jesus WAS historical and not whether people believed he was fleshly or magical.

Toto

Yes, that is the orthodox way to try to explain away Docetism. But what if they believed that he was on earth and walked through walls and on water? Is that sort of belief compatible with a historical Jesus?

TedM

It is incompatible with a purely divine-never on earth-not historical interpretation of Paul, which I think is where we started this discussion.

A big question is where these beliefs come from. If Docetism, Marcionism, Valentiniasm, gnosticism all are relying on a 'secret' interpretation of the orthodox gospels to create new philosophies about Jesus, then the original source is the gospels, which we then must interpret on their own merits while dismissing the various philosophies in our search for the historical Jesus (unless of course they can point to other evidences for their source material).

EarlDoherty

Yes, yes, Don, we all know about how you twist and turn the Minucius Felix passage to make it say what it doesn’t say. We’ve been over that in debate many times before, especially on this board a few years ago. Like I said, this is not a legitimate prima facie reading, it is your imposed reading after you’ve subjected it to your contortions, your reading into the text of alleged meanings and totally unstated qualifications and implications behind certain words and phrases. You make my point. For you, “prima facie” is the result produced after your engineering of a passage.

By the way, I like this paragraph in my Appendix “Minucius Felix’s Rejection of the Crucified Man”:

This is part of an Appendix in which I demonstrate through textual criticism the unquestionable conclusion that Felix treats the accusation about worshiping a crucified man exactly as he does all the other abominable accusations against Christians, with the same negative judgment about it. I guess you ignored that.

Laughable is your personal reaction, hardly a counter-argument, and something you’ve never actually demonstrated, including for Tatian. And we know by now who you are referring to in your “similar silences amongst writers who we know from their other writings that they believed in a HJ.” Tertullian (a third century writer) in one particular document, in passages which you have again contorted to claim that he is ‘avoiding’ mentioning Jesus. I have shot this one down I don’t know how many times in debates with you. And since Tertullian does indeed show that he believes in an HJ in other of his documents, to impose this evidenced assumption on writers who do NOT similarly show such a belief elsewhere is the grossest of fallacious manoeuvres. You are apparently not even aware, Don, of your logical sins, no matter how many times I point them out, because you simply keep repeating them.

“No doubt”? “Probably HJers”? No doubt and probably in whose books? Yours, after your engineering feats? Yours, in view of your personal interests? This constitutes a legitimate argument? More blatant fallacy.

And let me take the opportunity to make one comment regarding something that others have said before you. You urge me to “Give Ehrman the treatment!” It seems to be assumed that I will address someone like Bart Ehrman the same way that I have often addressed people like yourself or ApostateAbe or Archie on this board. The context of these discussions with people like yourselves is quite different from responding to a respected mainstream scholar. I’ve put up with years of antics like yours, of refusals like yours to even address rebuttals I’ve put forward to your constantly repeated arguments and fallacies, of closed-minded (and proud of it) ignorance of any decent understanding of the mythicist case by people like Archie and Abe and Judge and several others, years of veiled and not-so-veiled personal attacks on my knowledge and integrity, most totally unjustified, years of rabid hostility by the likes of know-nothings of the Tim O’Neill sort. My “treatment” as you and others call it, has been determined and honed by that experience and has been tailored, both consciously and unconsciously, for this situation.

I can assure you that I am hardly going to bring the same reactions and rebuttal style to any response to a Bart Ehrman, despite the faults and fallacies which I know I am going to find in him as well.

Earl Doherty

Toto

The orthodox claimed that the gnostics and others came later. But do we have any reason to trust that, based on their record? They were the winners who wrote the history books, but I have doubts as to their accuracy.

TedM

This may be correct, but it is a non-falsifiable position. It belief-based, and not evidence based. Shouldn't we have some evidence that gnostics claimed their own views preceded those of the orthodox? Would the orthodox be any more inclined to hide such a claim as the other claims that perceived heretics were making?

Sheshbazzar

The key thing is understanding that everything in the NT is about peoples BELIEFS, claimed VISIONS, and SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES and their resulting CONVICTIONS.
Not one single writer of any of these texts ever laid eyes upon the flesh and blood 'man' that they thought or believed was the founder of their faith.

They only heard reports from secondary sources and hearsay gossip of a legendary figure, which they then collated, adapted, and published.
Whether the first JC writers themselves believed that what they were writing was factual or history is even open to question.

Certainly some writer would have been aware that he was composing dialog, or would be aware that he was never present to personally hear any of these alleged conversations, or been an eyewitness to situations that he was reporting anywhere from 50 to 200 years after the alleged events.

There is, being religion, of course the strong possibility that these writings were generated from religious visions and dreams brought on by intense obsessive focus on the existence and nature of the imagined cult figure.
At that time men commonly and seriously took their ecstatic religious visions and dreams as being real and direct communications from their particular deity, so it is also well within the realm of possibility that these writers believed that they were 'filled with the Holy Spirit', and thus that whatever they wrote about Jebus had preceded directly from their God, and they were 'called' to be God's mouthpiece.

But in truth no matter what they may have believed, or was their convictions, none of these writers were any better acquainted with, nor had any more of a direct pipeline to any real Jebus or the God of the Jews than that of Oral Robert's, Benny Hind, Pat Robertson, or Charlton Heston.

aa5874

I think the key to understand the Canonised NT is to realize that that the Roman Church FABRICATED the history of the Church using INVENTIONS called Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline writings as historical sources when they were NOT.

In Acts of the Apostles, it was the Holy Ghost that was SENT by the ascended Jesus on the day of Pentecost that was the START of evangelism of the Jesus cult and it was the resurrected Jesus that revealed the Pauline gospel.

The NT appears to be MYTHOLOGY that has been historicised by the Roman Church in Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline writings.

No credible external source of antiquity can corroborate a single event or apostle in Acts of the Apostles or the Pauline writings.

Iskander

You want to return to the purity of early Christianity and I admire your noble religious zeal.

Paul made a mess of it all; Bernard Shaw and Nietzsche thought that too, I think.

Perhaps one day the simple original massage you hanker after will return to illuminate your mind and comfort your heart.:love: :love:

gurugeorge

Not quite without evidential backing. Cf. Walter Bauer's Orthodoxy and Heresy. Bauer (himself a Christian believer whose findings surprised him) found that the "received story" that orthodoxy was first on the scene was contradicted by giveaways in orthodox writing itself. Actually "heresy" seems to have been already established everywhere the "orthodox" writers talk about. Bauer's findings, in summary are that:-

1) In Edessa, orthodoxy wasn't established until the 3rd century CE (even later than Marcionism) and didn't finally win out over heresy until after Constantine.

2) In Egypt, early Christianity seems to have been in fact syncretic (Barnabas, Clement, Origen) and orthodoxy wasn't firmly established until Demetrius (late 2nd century).

3) In Asia Minor, the letters of Ignatius and Polycarp suggest that the orthodox were in a minority, struggling for survival.

4) Rome has a clear and stable orthodox majority by the second century. It gradually built authority and influence by (basically) bribery and ecclesiastical pressure, in Corinth, western Asia Minor, and Antioch.

To my mind, this is an absolutely crucial point, if Bauer is right, then the whole picture we have is turned on its head and completely wrong. Orthodoxy is the upstart, "heresies" (basically proto-Gnosticism and other forms of Christianity) were first. To my mind this "secret window" (orthodoxy inadvertently condemning itself out of its own mouth because it can't help pissing and moaning constantly about already finding "heresy" established wherever it goes) on early Christianity strongly supports the MJ position (although of course it's not conclusive).

Early efflorescence is what you'd expect from something that's not really centred around a dude - i.e. something more like a loose set of ideas that are "in the air", like the "New Age" is today.