Freethought & Rationalism Archive

thief of fire · 05-06-2012, 06:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vorkosigan

Quote:

We aren't talking about ostensible doubts. According to the mythicist view, non-existence is not a doubt, but is the belief itself. Why do we only have heretical, historicist claims about Jesus. but nothing surviving from the true believers.

The more interesting question is why you keep asking this incredibly stupid, purblind question when you've already been answered 1,000 times. When Earl has written a whole book about it.

Vorkosigan

Its an extremely bright question actually. No good answers have ever been stated.
Usually people react emotionally rather than rationally when confronted with it. They call the question a "stupid" one rather than address it.

Vorkosigan · 05-06-2012, 06:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thief of fire

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vorkosigan

The more interesting question is why you keep asking this incredibly stupid, purblind question when you've already been answered 1,000 times. When Earl has written a whole book about it.

Vorkosigan

Its an extremely bright question actually. No good answers have ever been stated.
Usually people react emotionally rather than rationally when confronted with it. They call the question a "stupid" one rather than address it.

There's a wonderful book that discusses that issue. It's by Earl Doherty.

I reacted the way I did because I personally have answered D of C's question before, and so have others, and there is a whole body of literature and discussion on it. D of C is really a creationist asking "why are there no transitional fossils!" At some point the question becomes mere trolling. Can you tell me the exact number of times we need to respond to it before it becomes trolling?

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan · 05-06-2012, 06:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

I disagree that Earl has answered it convincingly.

Note that I did not say "convincingly."

Thanks for admitting there is an answer and you knew it. In other words, as you have now conceded, you're just trolling. I trust we won't hear it again.

Vorkosigan

aa5874 · 05-06-2012, 06:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

I disagree that Earl has answered it convincingly. Earl is bright and he is careful and he does not make stupid mistakes or deal in reckless invention (like certain authors with certain Sanskrit noms de plume), but I don't think he proves anything or makes a case that no real Jesus could have existed. He makes an intelligent case for how a mythical Jesus could have developed, but it relies on a number of merely possible factors falling his way, and at a certain point it becomes (in my mind) too airy a construction as is. A lot of coin flips need to come up heads for Doherty's hypothesis to work. If one assumption goes wrong, the whole thing collapses. Dohety's thesis is like a model airplane put together without any glue. It's a good model for what an MJ origin for Christianity might look like, but it isn't glued together yet. It lacks hard evidence.

You seem to know what is wrong with the MJ argument but have LEFT yourself exposed.

You LACK evidence for an HJ. You fail to understand that there is an ON-GOING Quest for an HJ.

The evidence for MJ is HARD and SOLID that is why people are looking all over the place and can't find HJ.

If HJ was found it would have been PLASTERED all over the internet years ago.

Ehrman just wrote a book Did Jesus Exist? and it makes NO difference people are still searching.

Jesus and Marcion's Phantom are NO different--they were all MYTHS in Galilee in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius.

Diogenes the Cynic · 05-06-2012, 06:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vorkosigan

I reacted the way I did because I personally have answered D of C's question before, and so have others, and there is a whole body of literature and discussion on it.

I have never asked that particular question before.

Grog · 05-06-2012, 07:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Solo

Quote:

Originally Posted by Grog

Can you cite the best evidence for this case?

Sure I can : gospel of Mark, gospel of Matthew, gospel of Luke, gospel of John.

Someone with a loaded name of Jesus got killed in Jerusalem, and the messianists in the city led by James the Just raised Cain until the temple authorities let those caught with Jesus go. He then sent them on missions to raise money for the "poor saints" and to proclaim Jesus as the prophet of the coming messiah (not himself). I believe, we have a corrupted tale of this in Acts 12.

Ahh...ok. Based on your past posts, i thought you probably had something that better fit the data on hand. Ok. well, there's no evidence of this and I follow Knox and Tyson on Acts that it is a response to Marcionites and not history. It is interesting to me that you cite Detering below, but what does Detering have to say about Acts?

Quote:

Paul self-interprets his euphoric phantasms sponsored by bipolar disorder as God's revelations about his son. He goes around the big cities and finds people with similar experiences of high euphoria and grandeur to be followed by psychotic hell and depression. A number of them buy into his theological narrative (there was no psychiatry around), and find a great relief in it. The reason they find relief in it is that it provides an explanation for their suffering (and thereby helps in its management) and restores the dignity that is denied by society to psychotics. Paul is seen as God-sent by them.

Made up stuff.

Quote:

Paul finding psychos milling about synagogues or other places Jews congregated is a no-brainer: this would be one of the places migrants would naturally go in the big cities if their brains started to play tricks on them. They would interpret the uncanny new "reality" sponsored by disordered brain chemistry as many people do today: God is controlling their thoughts; he has selected them to reveal great secrets; their agitated psychosis of annihilation is a revelation of God's plan to destroy everyone. Their recovery from the psychosis is taken as proof they are God's elect; they have been sent to warn those who would listen of mayhem coming onto the world. Very common narrative themes even today. Here is something written by Mark Vonnegut, the son of Kurt Vinnegut Jr., MD (and diagnosed as bi-polar):

The quote is from his book titled Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (or via: amazon.co.uk) .

Again, I don't have to respond to this. Give me some time, but right now it is pretty ridiculous.

Quote:

I believe with Price and Detering that it was not Paul who made that up, but someone who wanted look like Paul

Leaving Price and Detering for a moment, why do YOU believe that this is made up by someone other than Paul? Is this just a convenient interpolation argument? What is methodology for determining an interpolation here in this text?

Quote:

The big difference is how Paul and his churches imagined "resurrection" and how the (later) Judaic belief treated it. To Paulines, the idea of Jesus rising from the grave in "flesh" would have been absurd.

What later Judaic belief thought is irrelevant if we accept Paul as our earliest Christian witness. We don't have to do that, though, but we should make our arguments as to why we do not.

Quote:

The time-frame of Jesus' crucifixion as that of Pilate evidently became a marker only when the immediate hopes for Christ's speedy return were fading, and most of the contemporaries died out.

Paul doesn't say "return."

Quote:

What I believe is that the idea of Jesus rising from the dead was based in the experience of altered mental states, both highly euphoric and grandiose on the one hand, and hugely dysphoric and annihilating on the other, associated commonly with a mental challenge known as bipolar disorder (which I have been diagnosed with). This is my interpretation of Paul's verse in 1 Cr 4:10: 'always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies'. This is how Paul interpreted the bipolar process and this is how he taught it to other sufferers of this fairly common and at times debilitating disorder.

Best,
Jiri

ok. Well, we don't really have much common ground, then. Good luck!

thief of fire · 05-06-2012, 07:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vorkosigan

Quote:

Originally Posted by thief of fire

Its an extremely bright question actually. No good answers have ever been stated.
Usually people react emotionally rather than rationally when confronted with it. They call the question a "stupid" one rather than address it.

I reacted the way I did because I personally have answered D of C's question before, and so have others,

You'll be more credible if you can show where, as he claimed he hasn't asked it.

Quote:

D of C is really a creationist asking "why are there no transitional fossils!"

One can easily point them if a creationist asks. One can't do that in this case.
One certainly can't easily do it with Paul.

Quote:

At some point the question becomes mere trolling.

If it has been asked many many times, but you have no evidence of that from Diogenes.

Quote:

Can you tell me the exact number of times we need to respond to it before it becomes trolling?
Vorkosigan

Can you show me where you or we responded to Diogenes on this before?

James The Least · 05-06-2012, 07:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Quote:

Originally Posted by James The Least

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Acts does contain speeches with an earlier Christology than Paul's or Luke's and which is contrary to the ones that they teach.

Acts imagines what speeches in the 40s and 50s would have been like.

Why would Acts imagine the Apostles to have believed something totally contrary to Paul and to Luke?

Quote:

If Jesus was a purely mythical character, it's very odd that not a single confessed believer, no matter how early the source, had any awareness of that fact. Who were the people who knew it was a myth?

How do we know they didn't? 99.9% of these would have been illiterate anyway. Nothing odd about doubts not surviving when they were never written down in the first place.

We aren't talking about ostensible doubts. According to the mythicist view, non-existence is not a doubt, but is the belief itself. Why do we only have heretical, historicist claims about Jesus. but nothing surviving from the true believers.

Quote:

Nobody within the church saw this as a myth. It was a secret that had been embedded in the Scriptures since the beginning of time, but only revealed now (perhaps after the destruction of the Temple). Christos, like Enoch and Seth, were mystical beings prophesied long ago, who could come to earth and put on clothes (a body) any time they wanted. Mark, writing in the late first century, decided that that had happened in the 20s and 30s. And thus legend became "history." It's really not complicated or preposterous.

This is an interesting hypothesis, but merely asserting it to be so doesn't make it so. What is the evidence to support it?

The evidence is right there in the texts themselves. Once you start reading the texts theologically rather than historically they actually start to make a kind of sense.

Diogenes the Cynic · 05-06-2012, 07:18 PM

I've never read them historically in my life.

mountainman · 05-06-2012, 07:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Thomas plainly contains material independent of and more primitive than the Gospels,

How can you tell it is more primitive? And where is the historical Jesus in Thomas, other than an oracular speaker?

Textual criticism has been yoked in service of the primite Thomas. Thomas however is not unambiguously attested before the NHC Coptic mss c.350 CE. It is therefore still possible that may be a post Nicaean compilation by the Gnostics for their wisdom literature, which the earlier authors of the canon pilfered. On this matter see Grant and Edwards.

Grant also points out that Thomas is not necessarily proven to be Christian - a point which Ehrman has conveniently ignored in his rush to gather together a list of seven transcendental exemplars for the historical Bilbo Jesus Baggins.

This is mimicking apologetics in which one just selects the earliest possible mooted-by-textual-criticism arguments for chronology, disregards the upper bounds entirely, and ignores the natural scatter of academic consenses. This is one of the reasons IMHO that Momigliano calls the Biblical historians the "Insiders" as distinct from the ancient historian "outsiders".

Quote:

Two Gnostic Gospels
Robert M. Grant, Journal of Biblical Literature > Vol. 79, No. 1, Mar., 1960

On the Gospel of Thomas:

"... a carefully selected announcement of basic Gnostic doctrines. His monotonous repetition of the phrase "Jesus said", does not prove that his gospel is Christian ....[...]... the environment in which Thomas did his work is almost certainly Gnostic. Indeed, if we make a point-by-point comparison between Thomas and the Naassenes described in the fifth book of Hippolytus's "Refutation", we may well conclude that his gospel not only was used by them but was also composed in support of their doctrines. ......It is important as a witness to the development of Gnostic Christology, not to the teaching of the historical Jesus.

The Naming of the Naassenes: Hippolytus, Refutatio V. 6-10 as Hieros Logos
Mark J. Edwards, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 112, (1996) (pp. 74-80)

"Were Gnostics in antiquity ever pagan? It has generally been assumed that they do not belong to the history of Classical religion, but some at least belong to the history of its explanation. I shall argue here that a text, which in its present form can be treated as the earliest extant document of Gnostic Christianity, began as an exposition of the Eleusinian mysteries. I shall not infer that our author was a pagan; since, indeed, the gnosis he taught was not so much a revelation as an instrument for interpreting all previous revelations, I shall not attempt to show that he worshipped any gods at all.
[Concludes ...]

"The gnosis of the earliest Gnostics, therefore, would appear to be: not a mystery, but a studious collocation of the mysteries; a philological discipline which aims to be the master, not the servant, of philosophy; a parliament of symbols which does not proclaim a new code of belief."

And Q is hypothetical.

Thread Tools	Search this Thread
Show Printable Version	Search this Thread: Advanced Search

05-06-2012, 07:18 PM	#89
Diogenes the Cynic Moderator - Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Twin Cities, Minnesota Posts: 4,639	I've never read them historically in my life.

Freethought & Rationalism Archive

The archives are read only.