Vorkosigan

I think, Don, that you've been misled by Tektonics. Holding is a master of rhetoric, really a professional whose verbal skills I admire, and frequently adopts reasonable-sounding but essentially illogical positions that appear to address the point, but actually do not.

In this case we are seeing one of those. Doherty is making two arguments, first, that Paul does not know the historical case, and second, that Paul's letters contain positive evidence of the mythic case. In the first the argument that other letters exist that do not mention the HJ is a valid one. Maybe Paul had his own reasons for not mentioning the HJ -- that's an acceptable response, though pretty weak. However, not only do we see a paucity of HJ mentions, we also see strong evidence indicating pro-HJ interpolations as well as positive evidence that Paul believed in an MJ.

Tektonics' demand that the mythicist case supply as much evidence as the historicist one is a red herring; one such reading is enough to demolish the whole historicist case, yet Paul's letters contain more than one. Recall that the Orthodox were hardly likely to add MJ details to Paul's letters, so any surviving MJ text is hard evidence about what Paul's original beliefs actually were before the corpus was worked over by HJers.

Let's look at Holding's comments

• And if the apostles hadn't taught all the Gospel story details by then, what were they teaching? Even Doherty must "presume" that the apostles had been laying out the details of his nether-Jesus for his theory to work; why is our "assumption" invalid? ...

We know that they WERE in fact laying out the MJ thesis because at several points in the NT writings there are complaints about people doing this. Further, this corpus has been worked over by people very interested in advanced an HJ to support their claims of legitimacy.

• ... Just arguing about "sense" isn't going to do the job - tell us why these items should have been mentioned; don't just insist "it oughta be" without justification! I have called Doherty on the carpet for this sort of ambiguous insistence time and time again, but when the chips are down, it never comes down to hard data ...

This is just rhetoric. For Paul to write seven letters without once mentioning a single detail of the Passion (for example) is not conceivable. Doherty's list of silences where we would expect comparisons and comments on the NT is profound

• ... Finally I made the point that we also lack many details of Paul's life from his own letters.

Ha-ha! What do you think that means, JP?

• Doherty replies that "the distinction should be obvious" because "Jesus was the object-presumably-of universal Christian worship," was God on earth (actually, the Logos, not God proper; Doherty still hasn't grasped this distinction), did great deeds and miracles, etc. etc. -- in other words, it's just a restatement of the same argument that "importance = required to receive attribution." If this argument is true, then we should have equal amounts of personal data about Paul, Peter, James, and John, and correspondingly lesser data as we go down the chain; but the fact is that we do not

This is an error. There's quite a bit out there on James in Acts and in the writings of the early Church fathers, and also in the noncanonical writings. Further, this is a clever bit of rhetoric. Holding actually dares you to make a choice: either you accept Peter as historical, so therefore you must accept James, or else you must reject both. But you see, there is nothing that prevents us from rejecting all of them as unreal based on the paucity of evidence that we have about all of them. In other words, Holding challenges your squeamishness: do you really want to give up all of Church history!? But then you'll be a radical. This is not an argument from logic or evidence. It is an argument that depends on the reader's reluctance to go with the evidence because she has been trained not to by the reflexive belief that these people actually existed as the NT says they did. A very clever bit of rhetoric from a master...

• -- there is no pattern that is established, and no critically-discernible reason why relative importance causes a need to make attributions. The mystery remains unexplained by Doherty or by anyone else. When Doherty says that "truly, there was little or no need for Paul himself or anyone else to give us those things" because they "bore no relevance to what Paul was doing, or to the Christian movement as a whole," he describes, within the epistolary context (not within the context of missionary preaching) the very reason why there was no need to repeat such things concerning Jesus -- as we have shown repeatedly by example.

Holding always claims that "he has shown" which he is hardly capable of, considering that he works from a stable of conservative to extreme conservative neandertal scholars who rarely grapple with tough issues. You just gotta ignore that constant blizzard of rhetoric and insults and find where his misunderstanding lies. The reality is that whenever Paul needs a comparison, he reaches for the OT, not the life of Jesus during which he had lived -- that's a pattern of silence that Holding has no reply to. Paul knew who Pilate was. He was from the Holy Land. He had been up to Jerusalem and talked to the alleged family of Jesus. The silence in Paul is simply not credible (you will note that Holding's argument concedes the existence of that silence).

Vorkosigan

GakuseiDon

Have you looked at it? Doherty has a habit of not thinking through the ramifications of his points. Let's look at each of the 4 he raises in the Feedback section:http://www.humanists.net/jesuspuzzle/rfset22.htm
As the old saying has it, "When your point is weak, SHOUT!"

Doherty says that Paul doesn't use "brother" to mean "sibling brother" all those other times, which goes against using it in "James the brother of the Lord" in Gal. But, as the word "adelphos" does mean brother, how would Paul say "sibling brother" when he DOES mean that? Would he use another word? Can Doherty show that we would expect him to? And how many times does Paul actually specify "X, brother of Y" to mean a non-sibling? Zero, as far as I can tell. Is this convincing, IYO?

Again, that seems weak, esp as Paul starts Gal with "Peace to you from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ". So Paul is distinguishing them just before Gal 1:19. For "Lord" to suddenly be referring to God rather than Jesus seems a very weak objection. Is this convincing, IYO?

Yet wouldn't some kind of marker like that be exactly what we expect if someone was trying to distinguish between shades of meanings? Remember Doherty's objection in (1) - here is a case where indeed Paul is distinguishing between "brother of the Lord" and "brother in the Lord". Wouldn't that be precisely to distinguish between "sibling brother" and "spiritual brother"?

Doherty is trying to have it both ways: both the James and Jude epistles are commonly thought to have been written about 50 years after Paul. If James was known as "brother of the Lord" even in a non-sibling sense in Paul's time, then why don't the epistle writers refer to such? Paul makes a point of singling out James - so why haven't the writers used that? Isn't it Doherty's very point that they want to appeal to the stature and authority of being singled out as "brother of the Lord"?

rlogan

Why do you have a problem with this? It isn't crass speculation. What other manner of argument is there except to take what the Bible says and examine it on the merits?

If the Gospels are true then we expect that man named Jesus was crucified around 30 A.D.

Is there much to be desired in this same example? The date 30 A.D. is found by extracting from the Bible the various birth dates given for Jesus, Pilate's known reign, and counting passovers from the beginning of his ministry.

You seem to be bothered by the presence of the word "If" and "expect". The first word is necessary to establish what premise we are using in the context in question. The "expect" part has to be evaluated on its merits. You can't fault him for using the word - only for whether the expectation is logical or follows the evidence. Is 30 A.D. reasonable, or is 70 A.D. better given what we are told in the N.T.?

Vork, you did a fine job with Holding. He is an expert at the mirage of reason in a sea of absurdity.

Like we should expect that Paul would give an equal amount of detail if Jesus was a myth or if Jesus was historical. How does that follow? The iron law of rhetorical symmetry? G.D., you've demanded an explanation for a lack of copious mythological features in the epistles. But how has anyone established that this follows logically from Doherty's thesis?

I remember this style of deceptive reasoning in the tomb veneration fiasco, G.D. It didn't occur until long after the supposed fact. How did the masters of convolution explain this away? Divide the period of absence into two artificial sub-periods. The first period of absence and the second period of absence. Then pretend that the absence in the second period is somehow unexplained by the same thing that explains it in the first period. Such a clever construction! No matter how long or short a period we are talking about, this deception can be employed.

One falls prey to artful deceptions when one seeks apologetics. They can be baffling when they are stated with such "authority".

GakuseiDon

It isn't so much that the mythicist case must supply as much evidence as the historicist one, but more that many of the same arguments Doherty uses against the historicist case also apply against the mythicist one.

Of Doherty's 2 arguments:

(1) that Paul doesn't show many historical details is clear, but he also doesn't show many mythical ones as well. When this gets pointed out, the response is usually either that Paul didn't know or that it wasn't relevent to his gospel so he doesn't mention it in his letters. Why does this become incredible in the case of a HJ? No hard data is given, only conjecture.

(2) Saying that there is positive evidence of a MJ in Paul is disingenious. The Risen HJ and the Risen MJ are virtually synonymous. Can you point to any passage in Paul that HAS to be referring to a Risen MJ, that can't be applied to a Risen HJ?

On Holding's articles: I think he's done a good job exposing Doherty's use of speculation built on assumptions, and the lack of hard evidence (though that's because there is little evidence either way in the first place, and can't really be blamed on Doherty), though I will agree that Holding's use of rhetoric and insults is annoying at times. Still I think he has addressed the question of the "pattern of silence" quite well here.

Amaleq13

This has already been shown to be a specious argument. Why do you keep bringing it up as though it was still legitimate? There is no basis for your alleged expectation of more details for a Jesus in Doherty's spirit realm.

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities--all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." (1 Cor 1:15-17, NASB)

Does that sound like a reference to a humble carpenter's son from Galilee? Or does it sound more like a spiritual concept i.e. the Logos?

capnkirk

Thank you Dr. X!!

I have been trying to impress the significance of that specific qualification with one of our moderators (off-line). The argument from silence that Doherty makes regarding Paul's eptistles certainly does not preclude an exclusively human Jesus. Further, Maccoby and others benefit greatly from Doherty's argument because it (inadvertantly) supports the contention that Paul "invented" Xtianity by (at his epiphany) conflating a human Jewish messiah candidate (who was allegedly resurrected) with the pagan mystery gods of his childhood Tarsus. I am convinced that there almost certainly was some crucified historical character that Paul recognized in his epiphany as an incarnation of those childhood gods.

IMHO, the most serious argument against Doherty's conclusion that there was no HJ (of any kind) is that it argues against his inclusion in the story at all. If Xtianity had no Judaic roots in the mind(s) of its charter member(s), then why go to such lengths to invent them? The gospels were written, however (and extensively edited ex post facto). If there was no HJ, then who went to the trouble to create and edit the gospels (and Acts)? Why the extracanonical gospels? Why sects like the Ebionites, who not only held that there was a Jesus, but that he was a conventional Jewish Messiah (i.e. non-divine)? There just seems to be too many incidental references to the existence of a human Jesus for all of them to have been retrofitted into the documents where they appear.

So I agree with you Doctor X...and more. I would contend that your qualification (which may be at odds with Doherty's own conclusions) is not only valid, but necessary!

lpetrich

Also, I find it interesting that Paul seemed indifferent to the places where his Lord and Savior had (allegedly) lived and died and risen from the dead. When he visited Jerusalem, he could have attempted to visit Golgotha/Calvary, but he didn't.

And the dates of JC's crucifixion and resurrection are not given, despite the presumably great importance of these events. One might expect something like "the seventeenth year of Tiberius Caesar's reign" or "the fifth year of Pontius Pilate's reign". But though Luke tells us when JC was born, we see no such thing.

Doctor X

capnkirk:

Thank you!

I sometimes think that the writers had to deal with "difficult traditions." Off of my head-cold-antihistimine-merlot addled brain:

Rejection by community
Executed
Claim to destroy the Temple and rebuild it
Disciples failure to consider him divine
Peter's denial
Connection to J the B

I suppose I could think of others . . . if I was not so sedated. . . . Some of them "helped" if we imagine a "rivalry"--traditionally or historically--with whatever was the Jerusalem group--"hey, the clowns never thought he was a god." The slapping of Peter is a bit like the Aaronite priests dissin' Moses in their versions of the Exodus stories--we cannot totally sink him, but we can sure remind everyone that he DENIED JUNIOR!!

Certainly there is some story writting. One of my favorites its Mk repeating the "loave 'n the fishies" stories just to show how thick the disciples are. Judas hang himself--no, that is repentence, Lk has him fall in his field and explode--anticipating the Passion II: Acts.

Of course, did these traditions come because "something" happened or it was a tradition that had to be included. Who knows?

--J.D.

rlogan

The responses I have gotten, Ipetrich, are that Calvary was just too awful to visit, and Paul was too worried about the second coming. (This is the best they can do?)

The crucifiction date wasn't written down because the Bible tracts "are not friggin' history books" (as it was derisively stated to me).

Let me anticipate the "use their argument against them" response: If there was no real crucifixion, we should also expect a date to have been provided. It is incumbent upon the Myth school to explain why no date of crucifixion was provided if it was a myth.

Gregg

I wish, if people choose to argue against Doherty, they would argue against what he ACTUALLY SAYS. The above is nothing but a strawman such as a creationist would invent of evolution. It reveals either a lack of understanding, or considerable ignorance of Doherty's case. Doherty NEVER MAKES ANY CLAIM EVEN VAGUELY RESEMBLING THE ABOVE, i.e. that "Christianity had no Judaic roots in the mind(s) of its charter members." If you can find ANY such claim anywhere on Doherty's site, please, let me know where I can find it.

Doherty argues for a synthesis of Jewish messianic/Son of Man/Suffering Servant, Greek neo-Platonist and Logos, and dying/rising savior god cult beliefs. These beliefs had varying degrees of influence among the various groups worshipping Jesus. Clearly, the Jerusalem group and Paul taught a strongly Jewish version of Christianity. Paul argued against those who did not teach that Jesus had "come in the flesh" or did not preach "Christ crucified." This suggests that there were people who called themselves Christians but prescribed to a predominately Greek version of the faith. It is also a powerful argument against an HJ and for an MJ, because if he'd actually existed and been crucified, then why on Earth would there be Christian sects who claimed otherwise?Doherty writes in depth as to why he thinks the Gospels were written. Perhaps you should actually READ HIS SITE and address his actual arguments?Have you sequenced these various references you refer to? Have you looked at them on a timeline? Or are you just lumping them all together as "ancient?" Beliefs can change and evolve a lot in just a decade or two, so dates do matter. Can you point to any clear reference to a human Jesus within fifty years of his death?

Doherty nowhere argues for the degree of "retrofitting" you seem to be saying he does. He lists a handful of Bible passages and, of course, the two controversial Josephus references. After that, references to an HJ cease to be a problem--by that time, people were starting to think of Jesus as a historical person.

The critical point is that for almost the first 100 years of this movement--when people who knew him still lived, when the memory of the man, of his words and deeds, should have been freshest in the minds of his followers--nobody talks about him like a person, but only as the divine Son in heaven. Many of his supposed followers even go so far as to deny he ever came "in the flesh" or that he was crucified.

This makes sense if Christianity was a widespread and diverse response to the dominant religious themes of the age. But if it all started with a small group of people in Jerusalem heading out to preach the good news, all telling the same basic story of their crucified savior, how is it that so many of those who heard it got it so very wrong? How is it that so many apparently got instant amnesia and failed to write down a single word of Jesus' life story until two or three decades later at minimum?

Heck if the MJ theory doesn't have explanatory power.