Toto

No Robots has his own language, and Christ refers to the historical Jesus.

I am sure that these Jewish scholars can go through the gospels and find Jewish themes and influences, and reconstruct a Jewish rabbi. But I don't think any of them are modern historians, and this is not historical research.

No Robots

It is true that few self-avowed Jews use the title Christ (or Messiah) in place of the name Jesus. Still, it's not unheard of. The original disciples were all Jews, after all.

No Robots

No true scholarly Jew, hey?

No Robots

The Christian religion is now trying to save itself by positing a dichotomy between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith, leaving the former to rational examination and preserving the latter for religion. This is just chucking sand into people's eyes, because both name and title apply to one and the same man. The end result is just obscurantism. Secularists go along with this, spinning out their own brand of obscurantism by playing on the dichotomy of man and myth. The best way to thwart all this is by using the title Christ in place of the name Jesus, just as we use the title Buddha in place of the name Lord Siddharta.

Toto

Truly scholarly and Jewish, just not historians using any sort of historical methodology.

No Robots

Well, this is the boiler-plate charge that mythicists and their fellow-travellers level against any scholar who asserts the historicity of Christ. It ignores the fact that all Bible scholars follow, with greater or lesser fidelity, the naturalistic methodology established by Spinoza.

show_no_mercy

You write that like doing science is a "bad" thing.

No Robots

Doing science is a good thing. Doing shoddy work and calling it science is a bad thing.

Spinoza showed that the methods of the natural sciences could be fruitfully extended to the scientific study not only of the Bible, but of historical texts generally. Spinoza is the founder of scientific hermeneutics.--"Spinoza: Scientist and theorist of scientific method" / David Savan. In Spinoza and the sciences by Marjorie Glicksman Grene and Debra Nails, p.97.

show_no_mercy

The problem with the "science" of anyone looking for a historical Jesus is that people first assume what their historical Jesus was like and then look for evidence that confirms their assumptions.

That's not science at all. That's confirmation bias.

In order to prove a historical Jesus, you have to try to argue in the negative: which is Jesus Mythicism. In order to prove a mythical Jesus you have to argue in the negative: which is a "historical" Jesus.

In other words, to prove some sort of "historical" or "mythical" Jesus, you have to try to falsify your own proposition. The evidence is so scant either way that asserting either as truth is simple folly. But I admire JMs for at least not assuming a historical Jesus to prove a historical Jesus.

lpetrich

I'm not impressed, because they did not have any real evidence for atomism, as far as I know. Furthermore, the modern conception of atoms and elementary particles differs from the ancient atomists' conceptions in some important respects.

Pythagoras would be a better pre-Socratic example; he had lot of mythmaking about him that Leucippus and Democritus did not have. Pythagoras was not only credited with lots and lots of philosophical wisdom, some people described him as the son of a god and a virgin, and he reputedly worked miracles like convincing an ox to stop eating beans.

Looking at Kapyong's examples,

Lao Tzu, Zoroaster, Krishna, Buddha, Pythagoras, Solon, Socrates, Moses, Solomon, Robin Hood, King Arthur, William Tell, Don Juan (Casteneda's.)

I note that some of them score high on Lord Raglan's Mythic-Hero scale: Krishna, the Buddha, Moses, King Arthur

Jesus Christ also scores high on that scale -- go figure.